A new golden age of technological hype seems to be dawning. This January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a small unfurnished booth cost $24,500. Some 2700 companies proved willing...
Our hedge has gone. The new railings are up. Weeds have begun to cover the bare ground. A dandelion is already flowering. Its seeds will soon appear and be carried off by the wind. Very probably...
Universities contain rooms and buildings that academics never enter, such as boiler houses. At my university, Edinburgh, some of the meters in these boiler houses now have two roles: as well as...
‘Where has all the ice gone?’ Joe Immaroitok asked. It was 24 October last year, and he was staring at Foxe Basin. A shallow expanse of ocean the size of England, the basin usually...
If global warming is as much of a threat as we have good reason to think it is, the subject can’t be covered in the same way as church fêtes and county swimming championships. I suspect we’re reluctant...
It is hard to let go of Pythagoras. He has meant so much to so many for so long. I can with confidence say to readers of this essay: most of what you believe, or think you know, about Pythagoras...
Our dogs are metaphors for ourselves, something that many of us may have long suspected, but because the idea had never been articulated, or not fully, perhaps we did not appreciate the fact. Or perhaps...
Most religions suggest that we get at least one other go at being. Christianity offers an afterlife, Judaism suggests an altogether better existence once the Messiah arrives, while Hinduism and...
Big Science took off during the Second World War and justified itself with successful ventures such as the Manhattan Project. Physicists have operated on a grand scale ever since. Lavish public...
Some good news from the airy summits of Davos: ‘Spam,’ Bill Gates told the World Economic Forum, ‘will be solved within two years.’ Great! The problem will be fixed by the...
Perhaps ‘medical anthropology’ has not yet become a household term. Although anthropologists still go to Papua New Guinea, Mayotte, or the headwaters of the Amazon, many now work...
Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart, there have been very few deaths from acute radiation poisoning. Thirty-one firemen, engineers and others at Chernobyl; two physicists who fumbled when handling a...
There were fears of revolutionary violence in Paris in the spring of 1773. The police tried to quell the disturbances and make those responsible account for their actions, but they had no...
Historical progress is back, even if it was only in some genres of academic history that it ever went away. It’s been some time, certainly, since historians of art saw painting as a...
Some flour beetles carry a gene called Medea. Their offspring look normal as larvae but, around the time of hatching, half the females become listless, then paralysed; and then they die. No one...
The best moment of the 2004 US presidential election was the moment when John Kerry had won it. It was on the day itself, in the late evening, GMT. The first poll results data were coming through...
I think it was P.G. Wodehouse who observed that the English strike Americans as funny when they are just being English. Similarly, philosophers strike the laity as funny when they are just being...
Nasa has awarded the contract to build the next generation of human-manned space rocket – called, rather nicely, Orion – to a consortium headed by Lockheed Martin. This announcement...