What we eat is what we talk about. Red meat v. non-red, all meat v. no meat at all, GM v. organic, long haul v. local, dirty v. ‘environmental’ and so on; how we prepare a dish, how...
The sensation feels like bugs, worms or mites that are biting, crawling over or burrowing into, under or out of your skin. They must be there, because you can feel them and you are even pretty...
All birders were birdwatchers once. At eight I was smitten by a yellowhammer in Surrey; by nine I was hardcore. Since then I have had periods of being a birder and periods of retirement from active service....
Some of the oldest laws in Britain were drafted in defence of the Atlantic salmon; one of the lesser-known clauses of the first Magna Carta in 1215 ordered the removal of all salmon weirs in...
Since the beginning of time – or of poetry – people have imagined the Moon is watching them. When I was a child I thought the Moon was a chum. Every boy had a torch and at night I...
For sale, at auction, opening bids welcome: one used airliner in bad condition. No engines, no avionics, no chance of flying again. Missing doors, missing rafts and emergency chutes, distressed...
They had heard that we were great Philosophers, and expected much from us, one of the first questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’...
It has been history’s biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events...
On 10 September last year, protons – tiny particles ordinarily found deep inside atoms – completed their first lap around the inside of the Large Hadron Collider, the new particle...
In April this year the New York City Housing Authority issued a ban on pit bulls (also identified as Staffordshire terriers), Rottweilers and Doberman pinschers – ‘all of these either...
In 1794 Robert Watt, an Edinburgh wine merchant, together with a few associates, was arrested for allegedly framing a plot to seize the Edinburgh post office, the banks and the castle, and to...
Eight years, billions of dollars and thousands of dead bodies into the ‘global war on terror’ – sorry, Mr President, the ‘overseas contingency operation’ – and...
What I did on my holidays. Twice in the summer I went to France, to La Sauvetat in the South-West and Mourjou in the Auvergne, and once in the spring to Italy, to Santa Cristina in Umbria, not...
I don’t know what it’s like at your end of the global village but I keep coming across extraordinary instances of evolutionary good cheer. The optimism doesn’t involve the...
Insects were recruited into the debate about the reality of evolution through natural selection, a tradition that still continues with the universal use of the fruit fly Drosophila as the model organism...
Our first glimpse of life in the highlands of the Andes was at the end of our last dirt road before ten days of walking. We were descending on Cachora in a van and encountered a girl-woman of 14...
A surprising number of mathematicians, even quite prominent ones, believe in a realm of perfect mathematical entities hovering over the empirical world – a sort of Platonic heaven. Alain...
In early March, while staying at our holiday cottage in Trafalgar on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast, I went swimming, as has been my habit for many years, in the idyllic Mpenjati lagoon. The...