Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read is an engaging account of a harmless obsession. For thirty years he has been ferreting out every copy of Nicholas Copernicus’s De revolutionibus...
If, like me, you are young enough to have been immunised against diphtheria and polio in the mass public health campaigns of the postwar period, but old enough to have known victims of these...
In Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The...
A professor of surgery in Edinburgh in the 1850s confided that patients entering hospital for surgery were ‘exposed to more chances of death than was the English soldier on the field of...
Steven Rose is a well-known public scientist who has dedicated his career to the study of brains. He has lived through the early days of the technical revolution that has involved increasingly...
When is a planet not a planet? When it’s a warrior princess. On 29 July, astronomers at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory announced the discovery of an object larger than Pluto in the...
In an increasingly remote region of cyberspace called USENET, a highly committed group of volunteers works to help people they’ve never met with computer problems. These problems might be...
A lycée in Lyon, 1944. A young Polish refugee is hiding in the school. His identity papers are forged, and deportation to the death camps may await him if he is caught. His attention,...
Where is the internet? At the most metaphorical level, which is also the way that most of us think about it most of the time, it exists in a parallel universe called cyberspace. We peer into this...
The first time I took blood from someone it came as a surprise to both of us. All medical students must learn to take blood at some time during their course, but phlebotomy – like other...
On the last day of January 1919, the Soviet New Year, the poet Alexander Blok smashed up his father-in-law’s desk. ‘Symbolic action’, Blok recorded pithily in his diary. Michael...
Should you win the Nobel Prize in physics, a lot of people will get in touch. Some of them will be former students (wishing you well); some will be colleagues (saying they wish you well)....
I worked on bird flu in a laboratory in London in the 1960s. We called it KP, short for klassische Geflügelpest. The boss was an ardent Germanophile, but this wasn’t the only reason....
A new wave of forest clearance is now spreading across eastern Amazonia, driven partly by the European preference for non-GM soya. Siberian forests, meanwhile, are being released from Russian...
Only by accessing the very earliest state of the Universe can we hope to find an explanation for the asymmetry, fundamental to our experience, according to which we only ever perceive time as moving forwards....
Well over three hundred years have gone by since the plague died out as an indigenous disease in Britain. It lingers on only as a rare rural infection in Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya, Zaire,...
For three days – les trois glorieuses – at the end of July 1830, Paris was in turmoil. The attempt by Charles X and his ultra-royalist first minister, the Prince de Polignac, to stamp...
Daphne and I told her parents that she was pregnant at Thanksgiving 2003, when we were visiting them in Florida. There was a lot of toasting and crying, and then we all went to bed. The next...