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Latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: When did you last read an account of how microchips actually work? You know, replete with all that stuff about electrons and holes and “p-doping” and “n-doping” and the delights of gallium arsenide. The golden age of such articles, when you could read about them in […]

Don’t let physicians have a gate-keeping role between you and your genetic information Last week there was an excellent piece by Daniel MacArthur in Wired on how the doctors’ lobby is trying to asert its monopoly on genetic testing (hat tip John Hawks). The American Medical Association has written to the FDA demanding a gate-keeping role […]

The intriguing theory that language evolved for gesture first and speech later My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Three years ago Queen Elizabeth II asked a group of speech therapists if her father’s stutter had been caused by his being forced to write with his right hand despite being a natural […]

    Judith Curry has written two blogs here and here on the significance of the “hide the decline” email in the Climategate affair. They have attracted a torrent of comments, over 1400 so far, many of them interesting. I have left a comment there as follows:   As a science journalist who first wrote about […]

The other day at a talk I was asked, as I often am, whether I agree that only putting the state in control can clean up the environment. I wish I had then read this, from the blog at Cafe Hayek: a letter sent to the Los Angeles Times: Three different readers write today in praise […]

Are the magnetic poles about the flip? Unlikely. My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about the weakening of the magnetic field and, more generally, the question of how we scare ourselves by knowing more:   The earth’s magnetic field is weakening at an accelerating rate. It is 15% weaker than […]

A small increase in downpours would be vastly offset by a huge fall in winter deaths By Matt Ridley and Indur Goklany There is a lot of fuss about two new papers arguing, from mathematical models, that extreme downpours have become and will become more common in the northern hemisphere and specifically in Britain as […]

Ever since opening my own eyes by researching my book, I keep a watching brief for egregious examples of pessimistic bias in the media. Once your eyes adjust, the media’s tendency to spot a cloud in every silver lining is very striking. But just as striking is its ability to ignore anything that reaches optimistic […]

Certain brain lobes are bigger in those with more friends My latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal is on Dunbar’s number.   As far as scientific accolades go, a Nobel Prize is rare, a law named after you is rarer, your own unit of measurement is more elusive still, but the most […]

I was on BBC Radio 4’s programme A Good Read (the link allows you to listen again) this week, where I recommended the book that was my favourite as a child, and probably still is: My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. The others chose A Game of Hide and Seek and Great Expectations.