Science
Clear, thorough and gripping: BBC2’s Horizon – The Battle to Beat Malaria
If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of…
Under pressure: what might life look like on another planet?
Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered planets orbiting Sun-like stars throughout the universe. This discovery ended 2,500 years…
An AI visionary looks forward to the best of all possible worlds
Technology unquestionably improves lives, says Ray Kurzwei, and soon we’ll be living to 150. As for 3D-printed guns invisible to scanners – there’ll be a solution to those too
What will we do when all our jobs are done for us?
The philosopher Nick Bostrom speculates imaginatively about the travails of extreme leisure, but we don’t get any guru-like nuggets
Those magnificent men and their stargazing machines
Violet Moller focuses on three 16th-century‘heroes of science’, John Dee, Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and their great libraries and observatories
The endless fascination of volcanoes
Tamsin Mather is the latest highly articulate volcanologist to combine vivid personal experience with thoughtful scientific explanation
A surprising number of scientists believe in little green men
Eminent astronomers have explained cosmic anomalies as alien megastructures and spaceships, while the source of the celebrated Wow! signal remains anyone’s guess
Why won’t Chris Packham have a real debate on climate?
On Sunday, the BBC did something unusual. It invited Luke Johnson, a climate contrarian, to join a panel with Laura…
Are we finally beginning to understand gravity?
Claudia de Rham explores the true nature of this fundamental force as she struggles against received wisdom to get a new theory of ‘massive gravity’ recognised
What we owe to the self-taught genius Carl Linnaeus
Bumptious, uncouth and the despair of his schoolmasters, Linnaeus died almost forgotten. Yet he established a system of taxonomy that we still use two centuries later
Dinosaurs, dogma and the Victorian mind
The ‘monsters’ dug from the cliffs of Lyme Regis did not sit well with the literal reading of Genesis – but many other issues contributed to the famed Victorian crisis of faith
Life is a far richer, more complicated affair than we imagined
Exploring the new biology, Philip Hall explains how genes do not in fact determine our fate, and how cells can be reprogrammed to perform all kinds of new tasks
Now imagine a white hole – a black hole’s time-reversed twin…
Just as you can enter a black hole without leaving it, you can exit a white hole without entering it – but first you must understand what black holes really are
An absolute earful
Singing sands, the dawn chorus and the crackle of the Northern Lights are among the many natural wonders explored in Caspar Henderson’s paean to the act of listening
Why driving above the speed limit is a mug’s game
Imagine you are choosing between two proposed road-improvement plans, but have the budget for only one. Both of the roads…
Science fiction: the crisis in research
The crisis in research
Deus ex machina: the dangers of AI godbots
The rise of the godbots
Circular arguments
Aristotle had long proved that the Earth was spherical, and even the illiterate masses of early medieval Europe were aware of the fact, says James Hannam
The science of horse racing
Everybody in racing is looking for an edge. With 7-4 the field, the punter is looking for a 2-1. The…
How science became politicised
Here’s a paradox. Over the past two-and-a-half years, a cadre of senior politicians and their ‘expert’ advisers across the world…
In search of the peripatetic philosopher Theophrastus
Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…
A tribute to my friend James Lovelock
The scientist James Lovelock died this week at the age of 103. He was best known for his Gaia theory,…
The musical note that can trigger cold sweats and sightings of the dead
Imagine that all the frequencies nature affords were laid out on an extended piano keyboard. Never mind that some waves…
It’s a miracle this exhibition even exists: Audubon’s Birds of America reviewed
In 2014, an exhibition of watercolours by the renowned avian artist, John James Audubon, opened in New York. The reviews,…
