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Who will lobby for the poor old taxpayer?
Matt Ridley
It’s what politicians will do unbribed that’s the bigger scandal My Times column here. I have a confession to make. Last week I held a meeting with representatives of three organisations and offered to raise an issue for them in the House of Lords. They claimed they were charities seeking a smidgin of funding to […]
Culture, genes and the human revolution
Matt Ridley
By Simon Fisher and Matt Ridley Simon Fisher and I have published a Perspectives article in Science magazine. From Science magazine: by Simon E. Fisher and Matt Ridley (Simon E. Fisher, Department of Language and Genetics, Max Planck Insti- tute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6525 XD, Netherlands. 2Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud […]
TRIM21 turns immunity upside down
Matt Ridley
Unexpectedly, antibodies work inside cells to defeat pathogens My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on a surprising discovery about antibodies and the immune system: It isn’t often that an entire field of medical science gets turned on its head. But it is becoming clear that immunology is undergoing a […]
The implications of lower climate sensitivity
Matt Ridley
Global warming will probably be a net benefit for several decades Update: I have added a reply to a critic of the article below. I have an article in the Times on the implications of a new estimate of climate sensitivity: There is little doubt that the damage being done by climate-change policies currently exceeds […]
Matt Ridley
Why influenza keeps failing to live up to pessimistic forecasts My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on infleunza: Here we go again. A new bird-flu virus in China, the H7N9 strain, is spreading alarm. It has infected about 130 people and killed more than 30. Every time this […]
Did life arrive on earth as microbes?
Matt Ridley
A speculative idea that we could be the history of life’s second chapter My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on life in space: A provocative calculation by two biologists suggests that life might have arrived on Earth fully formed—at least in microbe form. Alexei Sharov of the National Institute […]
The bitcoin bubble and Birmingham tokens
Matt Ridley
Private innovation in currencies is a good thing I have a column in the Times on bitcoins and their implications for private money Bitcoins — a form of digital private money — shot up in value from $90 to $260 each after Cypriot bank accounts were raided by the State, then plunged last week before […]
Matt Ridley
Two fierce arguments about DNA My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on junk DNA and on the messed up genome of the HeLa cell. The usually placid world of molecular biology has been riven with two fierce disputes recently. Although apparently separate, the two conflagrations are converging. The first […]
Matt Ridley
The cold spring weather and what it means I wrote The Spectator diary column this week: We’ve discovered that we own an island. But dreams of independence and tax-havenry evaporate when we try to picnic there on Easter Sunday: we watch it submerge slowly beneath the incoming tide. It’s a barnacle-encrusted rock, about the size […]
Matt Ridley
Under some conditions co-operation evolves My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: A new study by Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues has modeled the emergence of “nice” behavior in idealized human beings. It’s done by computer, using the famous “prisoner’s dilemma” game, in which a prisoner […]
