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Less land will be needed to feed the world My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on peak farmland, a more plausible prediction than peak oil.   It’s a brave scientist who dares to announce the turning point of a trend, the top of a graph. A paper published this […]

A hydro dam created the largest man-made earthquake The Times published the following article by me last week. I have inserted updates to clarify one issue. On 1 June this year a Mr Andrew Noakes was having lunch in Shropshire when “I thought I heard something. The sound only went on for a few seconds […]

He took the two key X-ray photographs My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Last week saw a 50th-anniversary celebration in Stockholm of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA’s structure. That structure instantly revealed a key secret of life: that an infinitely recombinable sequence of four chemical bases, pairing […]

Stem cells from blood could be used to test drugs My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on stem cells: The chief medical ambition of those who study stem cells has always been that the cells would be used to repair and regenerate damaged tissue. That’s still a long way […]

Countries that turn their backs on cheap energy lose out I have an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph on the economics of shale gas in Britain: As part of today’s Autumn Statement, George Osborne is expected to approve the building of 30 gas-fired power stations, simplify the regulatory process for fracking and provide tax breaks […]

It’s contagious and seems to serve no physiological purpose My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on yawning: Even as scientists get better at finding explanations for animal behavior-at the genetic, physiological, evolutionary and neural level-certain habits remain implacably mysterious. And this is true even when we’re the species in […]

Taleb on emergence and trial and error My review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book in the Wall Street Journal:   You don’t need a physics degree to ride a bicycle. Nor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb realized one day, do traders need to understand the mathematical theorems of options trading to trade options. Instead traders discover […]

Ray Kurzweil’s new book My latest Mind and Matter column is on Ray Kurzweil’s new book: When an IBM computer program called Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, wise folk opined that since chess was just a game of logic, this was neither significant nor surprising. Mastering the subtleties of human language, including […]

It is not the peacock with big-enough tail that gets to mate, but the one with the biggest tail My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on the connection between our interest in relative inequality and the theory of sexual selection: Evolution by sexual selection is an idea that goes […]

Burning wood is the worst thing you can do for carbon dioxide emissions I have an opinion article in The Times today: Never has an undercover video sting delighted its victims more. A Greenpeace investigation has caught some Tory MPs scheming to save the countryside from wind farms and cut ordinary people’s energy bills while […]