I have been persuaded of the rightness of the moral position advocated in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for the past twenty years. There is, in my view, no moral justification whatever...
When I was somewhere between one and nine I brooded over the possibility of finding a new number, an integer between one and nine that had somehow been overlooked. Their names and shapes seemed...
In Europe the health-seeker may still go barefoot in dew-treading meadows, as enjoined by Father Kneipp, or sniff the gentle mist from rows of brine-soaked hedges, as at Bad Kreuznach, or wallow...
Weather has become irreversibly damaged, infected with rust. It suffers from our plagues. It is out there, restless, migratory, evolving towards some dim conclusion we do not want to predict. We are barely...
‘See Naples and die,’ the old saying has it. But a better motto would be: ‘See Naples and go underground.’ Tourists since the 18th century have enthused over the...
When one considers that these insects are apparently impervious to hard radiation, that colonies exposed to caesium-based irradiation seem unaffected, and that some species survive when exposed to industrial...
This book betrays two very different Sakharovs who hardly seem to have communicated with each other. The first was the cold-blooded inventor of the Russian hydrogen bombs; the second was the...
Jean Taylor met Peter Medawar when they were students. When she married him she therefore knew that he was an extremely able biologist, but she cannot have foreseen what an energetic polymath she...
Much Green writing implies that in addition to a change of heart, the remedy would require strong political and economic controls. Herein lies the dilemma, for the idea of moving to a command economy is...
The ecosystems of shallow marine waters – coral reefs, for example – are the most diverse in the modern oceans, and they have probably been so throughout the history of life. And yet...
A kind of revelation came to the anthropologist Marcel Mauss when he was in hospital in New York. He wondered where previously he had seen girls walking the way his nurses walked. At last he...
It was only a 75 cent deficit, but Clifford Stoll knew it was important that he figure out its origin. Stoll was on his second day on the job. He had just been hired as computer systems manager...
When is a disease not a disease? No quibbling academic riddle this, but a problem increasingly pressing upon medical practice and ethics alike. So many questions crowd in. Is it valid to talk of...
This must be the first popular attempt in decades to prove that the sexes are inherently unequal. According to the authors of Brain Sex, the male and female brains are differently structured...
Are your teeth false? The uranium in each of them may brighten your smile with about ten times the radiation you get from the natural background, from cosmic rays attacking from above and radon...
What would you do if you had toothache, in a world of pre-modern dentistry? Those of us who have suffered a weekend of it can probably imagine (in the end) getting a friend to pull the tooth out...
In the Cathedral at Christ Church in Oxford, between the recumbent knight with the false nose and the tomb of Saint Frideswide, who eluded her too amorous suitor by hiding among pigs, stands the...
In the last few years of the 19th century the world of the physicist began to undergo a revolution that ultimately affected much else beside physics. The discovery of the electron by Thomson, and...