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Global warming will probably be a net benefit for several decades Update: I have added a reply to a critic of the article below. I have an article in the Times on the implications of a new estimate of climate sensitivity: There is little doubt that the damage being done by climate-change policies currently exceeds […]

Why influenza keeps failing to live up to pessimistic forecasts My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on infleunza:   Here we go again. A new bird-flu virus in China, the H7N9 strain, is spreading alarm. It has infected about 130 people and killed more than 30. Every time this […]

A speculative idea that we could be the history of life’s second chapter My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on life in space: A provocative calculation by two biologists suggests that life might have arrived on Earth fully formed—at least in microbe form. Alexei Sharov of the National Institute […]

Private innovation in currencies is a good thing I have a column in the Times on bitcoins and their implications for private money Bitcoins — a form of digital private money — shot up in value from $90 to $260 each after Cypriot bank accounts were raided by the State, then plunged last week before […]

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, […]