Writing about science fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Fredric Jameson, Jenny Turner, Tom Shippey, Colin Burrow, Stephanie Burt, Thomas Jones, Margaret Anne Doody, Nick Richardson, Sherry Turkle and Rachel...
Asbestos fibres break down into smaller and smaller strands, a process that continues long after they become invisible to the human eye. When inhaled, these filaments don’t get caught at the back of the throat, but glide into the lungs where they can pierce any cells they reach. And there they remain.
During the latest lockdown I ate only rice dumplings, wontons and boiled vegetables. After two months of that it’s difficult to remember what your favourite food tastes like. At the end of April, I traded . . .
Functional disorders are conditions in which the body’s normal processes are disrupted, but for which no organic cause can be determined. They do, though, have characteristics evident to a trained . . .
Insects don’t get a great deal of airtime in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The book that exposed the harmful effects of DDT on fish, birds, livestock and people had surprisingly little to say about . . .
Click on a link to an article on a news website. If you have a fast internet connection, you’ll see the article almost immediately, but the slots for adverts will usually remain empty for another . . .
Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.
I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me.
The time-travel story literally depicts the physical conditions of ‘the Place’ where the ‘points’ from which we ‘view’ plots unfolding must be presumed to abide. But modernity has in fact invented such a hyperspace from which to observe the observer: it is called the camera.
It was exciting to think that no novel had ever captured this new kind of history, where military lies on a global scale were revealed by a bunch of sleepy amateurs two foot from an Aga.
The blowout was not only the biggest oil spill in American history by far: it’s a story that touches on everything else – taints everything, like the black glop on sandy beaches, on pelicans, terns, boats, sea turtles, marshlands and dolphins. It’s about climate change, peak oil, the energy future, the American presidency, about corporate power and the corrosive effect of Big Oil on global politics.
The descent to the tunnels through which the deep lines run is a tax on the spirit that is paid willingly because it makes it easier to live in an old, tight-packed city. But when the system fails it is strongly resented.
I don’t know where I heard of her first: a woman whose cells are bred in culture dishes in labs all over the world; a woman whose cells were so prolific that there is more of her now, in...
It is now a century and a third, almost exactly, since the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In this period the view of evolutionary progress introduced by Darwin...
The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech (aphasia) consistently...
Writing about science fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Fredric Jameson, Jenny Turner, Tom Shippey, Colin Burrow, Stephanie Burt, Thomas Jones, Margaret Anne Doody, Nick Richardson, Sherry Turkle and Rachel...
Writing about insect life by Edmund Gordon, James Meek, Miriam Rothschild, Richard Fortey, Hugh Pennington, Inga Clendinnen, Thomas Jones and Ange Mlinko.
Andrew O'Hagan analyses Craig Wright’s failed attempts to prove he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.
Steven Rose explains C.H. Waddington's early experiments and the implications of epigenetics for evolution.
In our first episode, Patricia Lockwood and John Lanchester join Joanna and Tom to assess the state of the internet, covering podcasts, porn, Twitter, Facebook and their first memories of being online.
As antibiotic resistance rises, we are already starting to look back on the 20th century as a golden age of medicine, when infections could be treated effectively and there were plenty of antibiotics to...
Estimated weekly excess deaths in England and Wales in 2021. One of the tactics used over the past few weeks by Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions, and by loyal MPs and...
Telescopes are time machines, bringing ancient light from the universe’s past to be observed in the present, and the James Webb Space Telescope is our most powerful yet.
When the cause of milkmaids’ mysterious invincibility to smallpox was unknown, they were sometimes accused of being witches. What other explanation could there be for their persistent good health?
Since Delta, every variant from Epsilon to Kappa has been downgraded, with Lambda and Mu still designated as merely 'Variants of Interest'. If the mighty Delta could be crushed by the first-generation...
Much of the poorer part of the world is still susceptible to the disease, and as long as it is, many more people will die, and the risk of new and more dangerous variants will remain. In May 2020, the...
If a whistle-blowing report on the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic was needed, I wish I’d written it myself. It would have highlighted the isolation of a group of conscientious...
The Covid-19 pandemic may well have been a ‘normal accident’; it’s equally possible that ‘Disease X’, the WHO’s codename for the next pandemic, will be another. If so, it will be the by-product...
Wherever you look, the earth is in flames. The residue is carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, black carbon, sulphur dioxide, and the particularly toxic grouping of small particulate matter known...
As a young postgraduate in 1942, Peter Medawar was asked to look into the reason skin grafts given to injured airmen were quickly rejected by the body. His work introduced the concept of a...
With the Covid infection rate soaring in spring last year, Naftali Bennett – Israel’s then defence minister, now its prime minister – came up with an original approach to the...
Britain is in a particularly dire place, afflicted by four decades of free market fanaticism that left it up to commercial companies to pay for the storage of natural gas reserves against a supply crunch...
If a brutally competitive environment helped the best work rise to the top, there might be an argument that the misery was justified. You might, for example, think that a system which can deliver several...
Animal-human transgression is the fantastical norm in the dreamworld of myth, and operates still as a powerful symbol of the desire to reach beyond the confines of the possible or the acceptable. And yet,...
Every time you ride a bicycle or freeze a bag of peas or carry out a search on Google, some energy becomes unavailable, and the total amount of entropy in the universe gets ever so slightly larger.
There’s a more general disquiet among the unlanded residents of the areas that are increasingly deemed ‘wild’. For them, beavers or wild cats aren’t the problem. They question why the laird gets...
Perhaps kokumi will put an end to the misery of people who buy low-fat, low-salt food while secretly wishing they were eating the full-fat version that actually has some flavour. It can make something...
Nextdoor works like a neighbourhood watch scheme, but laced with all the toxic gossip once exchanged at the village pump, or by the fireside as women span and their menfolk brooded, puffing on clay pipes....
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