When yachts set sail with the tide, or people gather to witness a total eclipse of the Sun, they are trusting in Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. For more than three hundred years his...
Fortitude Cottage in Old Portsmouth, so the publicity tells me, is named after HMS Fortitude, a 74-gun ‘ship of the line’ that was part of the fleet which took on the French in the...
Are you enjoying your morning coffee as you read this? Or your evening glass of wine? Did you enjoy watching the match last night? Have you read any good books lately? Oh and by the way, how is...
Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands is Volume 100 of the New Naturalist series, started by Collins after the Second World War with the aim of making ecology accessible to the increasing numbers of...
Who was Max Perutz? There are plenty of good answers. He was an X-ray crystallographer, someone who uses X-rays as a tool to discover the three-dimensional structure of molecules. He was an...
Diarrhoea diminishes dignity. In the Western world most people don’t bother to seek medical advice for it, because they are embarrassed and because they expect it to go away soon. They are often right:...
The loss of more than 90 per cent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real...
The new financial trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade is a striking sight, and Caitlin Zaloom describes it well. Opened in 1997, it occupies a ‘huge stone block’; the trading...
On his way to the shore, the patriarch mounted a rock, a flat-topped outcrop of Greenland granite. The people of Ilulissat, who had been standing silently along the skyline above us, made their...
The word ‘resources’ sets my spine tingling. My old hippy-but-curmudgeonly soul had high hopes of the World Wide Web. The future, in some respects, was living up to expectations,...
Die Meistersinger is, by Wagner’s standards, quite a cheerful opera. The action turns on comedy’s staple, the marriage plot: get the hero and the heroine safely and truly wed with at...
In the days before office life was subverted by the cult of personality, your average working stiff was always looking for ways to be out of contact. Phones were left off the hook, smokers popped...
The best scene in the new Bourne movie – a chase and a killing at Waterloo Station, with jolting cameras and real-life commuters – comes about because a journalist has failed to see...
Some forty years ago I found myself on an operating table. Looking up I could watch the dark line of a catheter as it was pushed along a blood vessel to deliver dye to the veiled, grey, globular...
The word ‘radioactive’ was first used in public on 18 July 1898, when Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, reported to the French Academy of Sciences on the progress of their work on...
On 16 July, Cadbury was fined £1 million, having pleaded guilty to charges that they had put unsafe chocolate on sale, had failed to alert the authorities that salmonella was in the...
‘Manhunt 2’ has just become the first video game to be banned in the UK in a decade. The decision by the British Board of Film Classification singled out the game’s...
Men are so exercised by the thought of impotence that they will believe virtually anything. During the 1920s and 1930s various medicines and contraptions were patented that promised to fill...