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Variability matters more than trend This is a version of an article I published in The Times on 27 March:   The east wind could cut tungsten; the daffodils are weeks behind; the first chiffchaffs are late. It’s a cold spring and the two things everybody seems to agree upon are that there’s something weird […]

Steam engines and the future of coal   I have published the following article in the Newcastle Journal (paywalled) today:   Three hundred years ago this year, in 1713, some of the very first Newcomen steam engines in the world were being built in the North-east to pump water out of mines. One was at […]

The collapse of the Akkadian empire laid bare by isotopes My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Obsidian was once one of humankind’s most sought-after materials, the “rich man’s flint” of the stone-age world. This black volcanic glass fragments into lethally sharp, tough blades that, even after the invention of bronze, […]

Methane hydrate joins shale gas and deep sea gas I have the following article in the Times on 15 March:   Move over shale gas, here comes methane hydrate. (Perhaps.) On Tuesday the Japanese government’s drilling ship Chikyu started flaring off gas from a hole drilled into a solid deposit of methane and ice, 300 […]

De-extinction is much closer than it was My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on the prospect of de-extinction, especially the passenger pigeon. Extinct species are gone forever. Or are they? For some time now the dream of re-creating something like a mammoth from its DNA has been floating about […]

How North America got its plants and animals back My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about what happened to the cology of North America after the asteroid impact of 66 million years ago:   Last week, just as a meteorite exploded over Russia, I used this space for an email […]

The Chicxulub impact and the dinosaur extinction coincided My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal, published the day after a big asteroid missed the earth by 17,000 miles and a smaller one blew out windows in Russia, is about the huge one that extinguished the dinosaurs just over 66 million years […]

Will Jimmy Carter exterminate Guinea worm soon? It’s not a race, exactly, but there’s an intriguing uncertainty about whether a former U.S. president or a software magnate will cause the next deliberate extinction of a species in the wild. Will Jimmy Carter eradicate Guinea worm before Bill Gates eradicates polio? It is more than a third of […]

Dung beetles, monarch butterflies and the role of cryptochrome My latest Mind and Matter column is on the esoteric topic of insect navigation: A friend who once studied courtship in dung beetles alerted me last week to a discovery. On moonless nights, African scarab beetles, which roll balls of dung, can use the Milky Way […]

Napoleon Chagnon was right about war in small-scale societies Here’s my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:   A war within anthropology over the causes of war itself seems to be reaching resolution. The great ethnographer of the gardener-hunter Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela, Napoleon Chagnon, has long been battling colleagues over […]