How Dickensian childhoods leave genetic scars
Matt Ridley
Epigenetics and childhood maltreatment Latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: Being maltreated as a child can perhaps affect you for life. It now seems the harm might reach into your very DNA. Two recently published studies found evidence of changes to the genetic material in people with experience of maltreatment. […]
The economic defeat of tuberculosis
Matt Ridley
TB was not cured so much as prevented by better housing conditions My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: Peter Pringle’s new book “Experiment Eleven” documents a shocking scandal in the history of medicine, when Albert Schatz, the discoverer of streptomycin, was deprived of the credit and the Nobel Prize by […]
High tech runs through it: the new science of fly fishing
Matt Ridley
Silicon nano matrix fishing rods My latest Wall Street Journal column is on the technology of fly fishing rods Moore’s Law is the leitmotif of the modern age: Incessant improvements in communication and computing are accompanied by incessant drops in price. Yet some quite low-tech devices are also experiencing Moore’s Laws of their own, especially […]
Matt Ridley
People behave just like the apes they are My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about how predictably “primate” we all are in the workplace: Generally, junior professors write long and unsolicited emails to senior professors, who reply with short ones after a delay; the juniors then reply quickly and […]
Is eventual eradication of malaria possible?
Matt Ridley
A new technique for sterilising certain mosquitoes looks promising After a break of two weeks, here is my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: April 25 is World Malaria Day, designed to draw attention to the planet’s biggest infectious killer. The news is generally good. Never has malaria, which is carried […]
Matt Ridley
Emma Marris’s fine new book on ecology Belatedly, here is my Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal on 24 March 2012. In her remarkable new book “The Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris explores a paradox that is increasingly vexing the science of ecology, namely that the only way to have a pristine […]
Rival theories for a global cooling
Matt Ridley
Did a cosmic impact cause the Younger Dryas cooling? My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: Scientists, it’s said, behave more like lawyers than philosophers. They do not so much test their theories as prosecute their cases, seeking supportive evidence and ignoring data that do not fit-a failing known as confirmation […]
Blurring the line between genetic and infectious disease
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is about the possibility that some neurological conditions might be caused by infectious agents — of a sort Might some forms of neurological illness, such as multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia, be caused at least partly by bacteria, viruses or other parasites? A largely Danish […]
When the crowd solves problems
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on citizen science: The more specialized and sophisticated scientific research becomes, the farther it recedes from everyday experience. The clergymen-amateurs who made 19th-century scientific breakthroughs are a distant memory. Or are they? Paradoxically, in an increasing variety of fields, computers are coming to […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is about the exodus from Africa, either 125,000 years ago or 65,000 years ago. Everybody is African in origin. Barring a smattering of genes from Neanderthals and other archaic Asian forms, all our ancestors lived in the continent of Africa until 150,000 years ago. […]
