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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 […]

Bio-engineered micronutrients may be the most cost-effective way to help the poor Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal   This week saw the announcement of the latest conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, a project founded by Bjørn Lomborg in which expert economists write detailed papers every four years and then gather to […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]