Probably the most exciting paper I’ve ever handled at Your Favourite Weekly Professional Science Magazine Beginning With N was this one – on Homo floresiensis, a diminutive and very peculiar hominin from the island of Flores in Indonesia. The creature was very primitive – in many ways, a throwback to hominins that lived more than Continue reading
In which I take stock, and decide to move on…
The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.
…Though that last smell could be me, of course.
Continue readingI am extraordinarily lucky in being able to work some of the time at home. Today, after a drizzly start, the sun came out so that I could spend my lunch hour on the beach
and, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, barefoot.
Now, slap me round the gob with a dead fish if that isn’t infinitely preferable to spending one’s lunchtimes in an Continue reading
Further to my recent musings about Walter Morley Fletcher, I was interested to see a couple of exhibitions advertised, both in London.
The Royal Society have mounted an exhibition Frederick Gowland Hopkins and the Chemistry of Life, to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. Hopkins worked with Fletcher and I have seen his name crop up a lot whe Continue reading
It passed pretty much unnoticed amongst the other projects going on around here, but I wrote a short story the other week, and it’s up on LabLit: Silence is Golden.
Gratifyingly, Tania Hershman asked me on Twitter whether there were any more in the tank. I explained I was trying to write a novel–and maybe writing it as a series of shor Continue reading
A short film about flying. And about the wing on the plane that I was in. Yes – the wing.
I flew this morning and enjoyed a little bit of engineering magic. Continue reading
This is a fantastic way to kick off a general election:
Checking the CBC website for the latest campaign news this morning, I noticed that sport (and hockey in particular) is apparently less important than potential nuclear meltdowns, but much more important than the election. In fact, the website has separate sections for hockey and for sportR Continue reading
Wishing something will not make it real. But its opposite is a very powerful force: if you decide something is out of your reach, it’s never going to happen. I am not ascribing some New-Age prophecy or supernatural barrier here: I simply believe that once you surrender, you start disregarding all the small opportunities that collectively could help Continue reading
