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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 […]

The heritability of having many friends My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:   Not only is the capacity for forming large social networks in monkeys partly genetic, but some of the genes that affect this ability may now be known. So suggests a new study of an isolated population of […]

Changing one letter in the genetic code at a precise location now possible Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rockefeller and Harvard universities have found a new method of editing DNA with great precision. This and another new technique mean that scientists can now go into a cell, find a particular sequence in […]

Satellites confirm that green vegetation is increasing My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on the greening of the planet:   Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three […]

Electrochemical echoes of life’s membranes at alkaline vents What better subject for the origin of a new year than the origin of life itself? A new paper claims to have nailed down at last the conditions, location and path by which life started, slicing through two Gordian knots. Knot No. 1 is the chick-and-egg problem […]

New data on aerosols and ocean heat suggest slow, mild warming I published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of climate sensitivity. Here are: 1. The article 2. An essay by Nic Lewis expanding on many of the points in the article. 3. My response to one of the critiques of […]

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 […]