Science & Society

People are sometimes surprised to hear that I am both a research scientist and an artist, but I see them as quite similar in purpose, only different medium. They both involve imagination,…

Mnookin's siteOffit's site    Vaccine Epidemic's site All three of these books came out on the heels of each other. Two, as most readers familiar with the…

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CLICK HERE for some pictures showing how giant African pouched rats are being used to detect land mines and tuberculosis in Tanzania and Mozambique. Their noses are very sensitive to TNT, and they…

We all do it: we define things from our own perspective. One example I see over and over again is the idea that autism is whatever it looks like in our own kids, or own experience of it, not someone…

One of the fairly common things out of the "pro-safe" vaccine crowd insists is that there's inadequate research on vaccines. What better way to look at how information has grown over time than to…

“Yesterday night I was in my office in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge packing my stuff, resolved to not go back to research again …” This sad story is another warning to…

Yesterday I wrote about journalist and science blogger Ed Yong's unfortunate run-in with the kind of anachronistic journalism dinosaur that will be extinct one day soon - a PIO who resents blogging.…

This a double whammy, a two-for-the-price-of-one, a joint review (for some value of the word review) of two books with the same title: Kraken. China Miéville's Kraken is a New Weird novel that…

I'll tell you flat out, I love Public Information Officers - PIOs in journalism parlance.  Without them, I would never get anywhere near the good stuff I get to write about.   I would much…