In October 2000, the last wild Spix’s macaw, a solitary male, disappeared from its patch of forest in Brazil. The species is not, technically, extinct: a few dozen individual birds survive...
The birth of almost every science has been achieved with the help of a map. Astronomy began by mapping the stars. Anatomy – and modern medicine – is indebted to those flayed bodies...
Big Louis is dead. I found out only yesterday, because the last time I went to the Clinic I didn’t meet any of the people who might have told me, which can happen when you’re down to...
On Guy Fawkes Day 1665, Samuel Pepys paid a visit to John Evelyn, his fellow diarist, administrative colleague and lifelong friend. Evelyn had an astonishing range of interests, from numismatics...
Cass Sunstein seems to believe that exposure to unsought information or divergent opinions is for most people like advertising: they can’t avoid it, as the price of getting what they are really after;...
Eighty-six nations signed the protocol at the UN in New York; Clinton signed for the US at a subsequent, ineffectual meeting in Buenos Aires. Together, the signatories emit 88 per cent of excess global...
What happened last November in Florida diverted attention from Ralph Nader’s part in the outcome of the Presidential election. In Florida itself, where every vote mattered (I won’t...
Last September, the Royal Society organised a conference to discuss Edward Hooper’s book The River, which promoted the theory that HIV was accidentally spread to humans from chimpanzees...
I attended my first post-mortem in the summer holidays between leaving school and matriculating as a medical student. I have been to hundreds since, and am very familiar with the smell of a...
From Peckham Library to the Taj Mahal, the spines of a porcupine to the money bands of City traders, the flailings of a woodlouse emerging from a burning log or the whirlpool generated...
Twenty-five years ago A.L. Rowse, whose memory becomes more blessed in an age of research assessment exercises, made known to the world the riveting personality of the Elizabethan and Jacobean...
A report in Science magazine in 1990 exposed the absurdity of our publish-or-perish academic culture. It focused on citation rates – the frequency with which my article is referred to by my...
For the purposes of plain getting on with things – keeping warm, staying fed, making babies – there is no reason on earth, or off it, why anyone not actively engaged in the world of...
If the balaclava’d guerrilleros of the Animal Liberation Front run short of targets once they’ve seen off the laboratories full of victimised mice, they might consider picketing the...
According to the catalogue for the National Gallery exhibition of Rembrandt self-portraits, the artist’s portrayal of himself is ‘unique in art history, not only in its scale and the...
Human beings have an insatiable appetite for colour, but the everyday gaudiness of our world is modern. We can dress as showily as birds (including crows – 70 to 90 per cent of clothes are...
The remarkable thing about the Phillips Inquiry into BSE is not its cost, £27 million, or its 16 volumes, weighing in at 25 kg, or its overrun – it went on for more than double the...
In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin’s and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called...