When and why does biology go quantum?

Here is my latest Crucible column for Chemistry World. Do look out for Jim and Johnjoe’s book Life of the Edge, which v

Calvino's culturomics

Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller is one of the finest and funniest meditations on writing that I’ve e

On the side of the angels

Here’s my take on Dürer’s Melencolia I on its 500th anniversary, published in Nature this week. _______________________

All hail the man who makes the bangs

The nerd with the safety specs who is always cropping up on TV doing crazy experiments for Jim Al-Khalili or Mark Miodo

Dreams of invisibility

Here’s my Point of View piece from the Guardian Review a week ago. It’s fair to say that my new book Invisible is now o

Cutting-edge metallurgy

This is my Materials Witness column for the August issue of Nature Materials. I normally figure these columns are a bit