Science & Technology

What’s the use of reconstructing past climates if climate change has ‘ruptured’ the connection between past, present and future? The controlled uncertainty of the climate proxies, each...

As biochemical methods became more precise, the eventual identification of the magical substance, insulin, was inevitable. What was far from inevitable was that it would be discovered in the early 1920s...

The harder you look for a disease, the more cases of it you will find. At some point you will find more cases than you should actually treat. This is inevitable when looking for disease in healthy people,...

For Archimedes, the mathematical and physical worlds were as real as each other and mutually reinforcing. To know something about the physical world, you could use maths to model it. But more radically,...

AI’s scale doesn’t matter just to specialists. The rest of us are being taken on a ride along the logarithmic curve too. The graphics chips and data centres on which ‘arbitrary amounts’...

Chemical reactions reflect human dramas, which reflect celestial movements, which reflect the mind of the divine. The alchemist’s lab work and the philosophy were inextricable: working with material...

Over the last fifty years or so, geneticists have gone from asserting that there is no evidence for the heritability of intelligence to claiming that mutations in a single gene can increase or decrease...

I’m starting to feel some pre-emptive nostalgia when I do a Google search. Yes, it’s true, search can sometimes take you to places you don’t want to go. But at least a ‘classical’...

For all the fluency and synthetic friendliness of public-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, it seems important to remember that existing iterations of AI can’t care. The chatbot doesn’t...

The rarity of phosphorus makes it the single most limiting factor for the growth of biomass on Earth. It is, as Isaac Asimov puts it, ‘life’s bottleneck’ – the toll which must...

How and why do proteins, which are produced by our body to build structures (such as skin and muscle) or carry out tasks (like breaking down our food), abandon their set roles and develop a new one? Unlike...

During the 18th century dentures became increasingly popular. George Washington consulted eight dentists over his lifetime and had a mouth like a battlefield. When the dental pathologist Reidar Sognnaes...

I sometimes wonder whether my love of compost is a response to the dispiriting cleanness of modern life – the spray’n’wipe, the no-touch flush, the sanitisers and disinfectants. The...

I can take a home pregnancy test only eight days after ovulation and discover that I have conceived, the wondering whittled down to a few days. But the womb was once a secret, the secret,...

Masayoshi Son seems compulsively driven to invest larger and larger sums so he can call himself the biggest, most significant, most visionary investor in the world. ‘Bill Gates just started Microsoft...

Deepseek was set up as a research initiative unconstrained by commercial imperatives, with the aim of achieving artificial general intelligence – the ability to carry out any intellectual task as...

All fossil fuel projects are politically constituted. Either they are state projects, controlled and administered by state-owned enterprises such as Equinor, Saudi Aramco or Sinopec, or they depend on...

An honest account of energy history would conclude not that energy transitions were a regular feature of the past, but that what we are attempting – the deliberate exit from and suppression of the...