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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]