Talking about talking about history

David Wootton has sent me some responses to the accusations made by some of the reviewers of his book The Invention of

Can science be made to work better?

Here is a longer version of the leader that I wrote for Nature this week. _____________________________________________

The ethics of freelance reporting

There’s a very interesting post (if you’re a science writer) on journalistic ethics from Erik Vance here. I confess tha

Multiverse of Stone

This summer I went to one of the most extraordinary scientific gatherings I’ve ever attended. Where else would you find

When bioethics goes bad

I have just received a copy of the Australian science magazine Cosmos in the post, as I have an article in it on invisi

Nature: the biography

Here is a review of Melinda Baldwin’s basically sound and thoughtful “biography” of Nature. It was destined for the Obs

Not so spooky

The impressive experiments described in a preprint by Ronald Hanson at Delft and colleagues have been widely reported (

Songwriting by numbers

Can a crowd write a song? That’s what an online experiment by computer programmer Brendon Ferris in the Dominican Repub

The cost of faking it

Here, a little belatedly, is my July column for Nature Materials, which considers the issues around bioprinting of fake

Liquid-state particle physics

Here’s my latest column for Nature Materials. _______________________________________________________________________ T

Silence of the geronotologists

I was perhaps a bit cryptic in tweeting about my New Statesman piece on “the immortality business” (which I’m afraid I

Understanding the understanding of science

That the computer scientist Charles Simonyi has endowed a professorial chair at Oxford for the Public Understanding of

Dawkins and the Spotted Dick mystery

I have agreed, with some trepidation, to review volume 2 of Richard Dawkins’ autobiography, this one called Brief Candl