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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 […]
Matt Ridley
Opposition to shale gas is a storm in a teacup The Times has published my op-ed on shale gas: It is now official: drilling for shale gas by fracturing rock with water may rattle the odd teacup, but is highly unlikely to cause damaging earthquakes. That much has been obvious to anybody who has followed […]
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
A new study confirms that the threat from CO2 is exaggerated A new study of the Great Barrier Reef will apparently confirm what I argued in The Rational Optimist that local pollution and over-fishing are a much greater threat to coral reefs than either climate change or changing alkalinity (sometimes wrongly called acidification). The actual […]
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 […]
Matt Ridley
Reader’s Digest on rational optimism April’s Reader’s Digest carries an article on rational optimism, based on an interview with me and extracts from my book: “The world has never been a better place to live in,” says science writer Matt Ridley, “and it will keep on getting better.” Today, in a world gripped by global […]
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 […]
Matt Ridley
Maybe I was too pessimistic From the Ideas Market Blog at the wall Street Journal: Last month, the Review columnist Matt Ridley discussed a new book called “Abundance,” by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, which argues that the future will be “better than you think.” (Diamandis is founder of the X Prizes, which reward breakthroughs in technology, […]
