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Johnny Berliner made this charming little calypso account of genes and what they are made of. It’s concise and precise as well as nice. (Calypso rhyming is catching) h/t Mark Stevenson.

My latest  Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal:   I spent part of last week in Iceland, where the fragility of civilization’s veneer is all too evident in a violently volcanic landscape. Whereas in most countries geology amazes you with its age, in Iceland it stuns you with its youth. The country […]

Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal “It’s strange that I could become a professional athlete,” said the Australian winner of this summer’s Tour de France, Cadel Evans. “Physically, I was completely unsuitable for almost all Australian school sports. Nearly all Australian school sports require speed and/or size.” Sounds like a triumph of […]

The new Siberian hominids and the family tree Belatedly, here is last week’s Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal. I once had a soft spot for the yeti, known in my youth as the “abominable snowman.” As a teenager I avidly devoured stories of hairy bipeds glimpsed through snowstorms, strange cries echoing […]

The not so good old days I heartily recommend a new book called “And the Band Played On” by Christopher Ward, a friend of mine. It’s a best-seller already in the UK. It’s about his grandfather, who was the violinist in the band that played as the Titanic sank. But it’s not about the sinking, […]

After 13 years, everybody sensible now knows the GM crops were good for human beings and the environment too. But admitting it is hard. The Scientific Alliance newsletter has an interesting update on GM food. The public no longer feels the visceral fear of these crops that they did 13 years ago, even in Europe. But […]

Two environmental trends headed in a good direction Update: I failed to make clear that negative numbers in the drought severity index implies worse droughts. The two findings below contradict each other. Here is another “greening”, of the Sahel:     On the day that a famine is declared in Africa — thanks as much […]

A fetish with carbon is driving up the price of electricity and destroying jobs Here’s (belatedly) a piece I published in the Times last week.   British Gas is putting up the cost of heating and lighting the average home by up to 18 per cent, or about £200 a year. Indignation at its profiteering is […]

3D printing may one day work for stem-cell-derived kidneys and concrete building parts My l atest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on 3D printing: Serendipity works in curious ways. Earlier this month, on the day before I read news of the successful implanting of a synthetic windpipe grown with a […]

Mark Lynas engages me on several issues Mark Lynas’s new book The God Species contains a few pages that dispute my account of ocean acidification in particular. Mark kindly alerted me to this and asked for my reaction. The result was an exchange, which Mark has put up on his blog here, which I mirror here. I […]