Category Archives: Journalism

Can you ever experience true silence?

THE Big Bang was spectacularly mis- named, having been “the quietest firework of all time”. Sound waves need matter to propagate through, so the explosion that created it can’t have made a din…

Credit: EPPDCSI, N. Breton

This article first appeared online in Nature on 4 February 2025 (and in the following edition in print). To continue reading, click here.

Eleanor Maguire – obituary

IN 2000, the cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire published the study that would bring her worldwide fame. It showed that a brain region called the posterior hippocampus was larger in London taxi drivers who had acquired the Knowledge – a mental map of the British capital complete with streets, routes and landmarks – than in people who lacked those navigational skills. The longer the cabbie’s career, the bigger the posterior hippocampus…

Eleanor Maguire

This article first appeared online in The Guardian on 17 January 2025. To continue reading, click here.

The new revolution in prehistory: DNA from dirt

IT was an otherwise ordinary day in 2015 when Viviane Slon had her eureka moment. As she worked at her computer, the results revealed the sample she was examining contained human DNA. There was nothing so unusual about that in itself: at the time, the ancient DNA (aDNA) revolution was in full swing, and surprising new insights about our ancestors were being gradually unveiled. But Slon’s sample wasn’t from human remains – it was just dirt from a cave floor. That immediately told her she was onto something big…

This article first appeared online in New Scientist on 31 December 2024. To continue reading, click here (paywall).

“Hubris” review: did we really trump the Neanderthals?

IN an institute in Germany, scientists are growing “Neanderthalised” human brain cells in a dish. These cells form synapses and spark as they would have done in a living Neanderthal as she (they are female cells) foraged or breastfed or gazed out of a cave mouth at dusk. That is the spine-tingling opening gambit of a book co-authored by one of the directors of the institute, Johannes Krause, and the information that sets it apart from a host of popular science books that attempt to predict humanity’s future based on our evolutionary past…

This article first appeared online in The Guardian on 27 December 2024. To continue reading, click here.

Dava Sobel takes on Marie Curie

MARIE Curie carried out some of her most pathbreaking work under an actual glass ceiling and the toxic particles that swirled beneath it eventually killed her. What Dava Sobel wants to convey to us in this unabashedly feminist account of the great woman’s life is that the metaphorical glass ceiling was just as toxic to the society over which it was clamped…

Marie Curie circa 1900

This article first appeared in The Observer on Sunday 10 November 2024. To continue reading, click here.