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Apart from the Martians, that is My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal If all goes well next month, Curiosity, NASA’s latest mission to Mars, will land in the Gale crater, a 3.5-billion-year-old, 96-mile-wide depression near the planet’s equator. Out will roll a car-size rover to search for signs of life, […]

Top down design is flawed even in finance The Times published my op-ed on banking reform: It is not yet clear whether the current rage against the banks will do more harm than good: whether we are about to throw the baby of banking as a vital utility out with the bathwater of banking as […]

Can rice match maize’s yield? My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Two rival designs of plant biochemistry compete to dominate the globe. One, called C3 after the number of carbon atoms in the initial sugars it makes, is old, but still dominant. Rice is a C3 plant. The other, called […]

The Met Office keeps getting 3-month forecasts wrong on the warm side I wrote the following op-ed in The Times (behind a paywall) on 2 July. As I cowered in my parked car in a street in Newcastle last Thursday, nearly deafened by hail on the roof of the car, thunder from the black sky […]

Microbes and worms that are necessary for the immune system to work My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: One of the delights of science is its capacity for showing us that the world is not as it seems. A good example is the startling statistic that there are at least […]

How twin studies silenced their critics My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: These days the heritability of intelligence is not in doubt: Bright adults are more likely to have bright kids. The debate was not always this calm. In the 1970s, suggesting that IQ could be inherited at all was […]

Technology leads people to live more lightly on the land My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: Part of the preamble to Agenda 21, the action plan that came out of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, reads: “We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a […]

Few people get past 115, though many live to 100 Update: a couple of small corrections inserted in square brackets below. Thanks to Stephen Coles of UCLA.   My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal   After celebrating her 60th year on the throne in style this past week, Britain’s Queen […]

Free sharing on the net is not incompatible with markets My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:   Human beings love sharing. We swap, collaborate, care, support, donate, volunteer and generally work for each other. We tend to admire sharing when it’s done for free but frown upon it-or consider it […]

Novel rare genes and shrinking brains My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal. If you write about genetics and evolution, one of the commonest questions you are likely to be asked at public events is whether human evolution has stopped. It is a surprisingly hard question to answer. I’m tempted to […]