The last year of the workhouse was 1929. The old-age pension, introduced twenty years earlier, was still only ten shillings a week. George Orwell hadn’t imagined that anyone could live on...
A decade ago, digging through a physicist’s archive, I stumbled on a document that has haunted me ever since: a hand-typed table of integrals seemingly little different from the ones...
Two decades ago a container ship travelling from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington, hit a winter storm and several shipping containers were washed overboard into the North Pacific. Among the lost cargo...
Many scientists don’t like to talk about shark sex, because they worry it will only reinforce the perception that these creatures are brutish and unrelenting.
Message boards are online forums typically concerned with a single subject, whose users can post public messages in ‘threads’ to do with a particular aspect of that subject, or...
How can opium be so ancient, and addiction so modern? The drug has not changed, nor has the human metabolism. In the earliest written records – Sumerian tablets and Egyptian papyri –...
Climate ethics is not morality applied but morality discovered, a new chapter in the moral education of mankind. It may tell us things we do not wish to know (about democracy, perhaps), but the future...
Until last summer, hi-tech riots – broadcast on YouTube and organised by BlackBerry – were mostly the preserve of enterprising dissidents in Iran and China. But in June hordes of ice...
Habit, Samuel Beckett says in his essay on Proust, substitutes the ‘boredom of living’ for the ‘suffering of being’, and he has a point. Human existence is an acquired...
Alone Together is a work of atonement for the things Sherry Turkle missed or got wrong in her earlier work on computers and people.
I was in my late thirties before it struck me that there was something odd about the tableau I have in my mind of a familiar living-room, armchair, my father in it, silvery hair, moustache, brown...
A scientist who believes he has something important to tell us about human nature tends to say things like this: ‘If there is any hope of changing the world for the better, from reducing...
‘A ladder’, the master whispered, ‘of nucleic acid.’ This was the first we’d heard of it. Rain nosed the glass; wind lashed the trees outside. ‘Four...
If you want to be loved in America, get rich and make it seem that you got rich doing exactly what you wanted to do and being exactly who you wanted to be. Invent a machine – or better, a...
Lucky Chris Stringer, to have spent the last forty years immersed in new discoveries about the origin of our species. I don’t suppose that when he began his PhD research in 1970, setting...
The 17th-century church of St Michan’s in Dublin is a dull enough building, known for the curious human remains preserved in the exceptional dryness of its ancient crypt. When I was taken...
We think of aliens and immediately cut them down or up (or some other inconceivable dimension) to our size. They can be bigger or smaller, their heads huge, their eyes bulbous; they are usually humanoid,...
This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been...