Is life after death scientifically possible?
When science and religion got divorced in the nineteenth century, they split up the family possessions in a reasonably amicable…
Science
Why my Uncle Bill was Contemptible
When Germany invaded Belgium and France in August 1914, many people on both sides thought it was going to be…
The Wisdom of Crowds
Since the beginning of the “age of the common man” in the nineteenth century, there has been a widely held…
Why SOE gave away Britain’s top war secret to the Nazis
At a crucial stage of World War II, the Special Operations Executive deliberately allowed one of its most closely guarded…
Why Freud is important to the future of science
Most of Freud’s ideas are considered rather old-fashioned today, but I suspect that, before we sent the old boy packing,…
Lies, damned lies, and immigration figures
University College London (UCL) prides itself – rightly – on being “London’s leading multidisciplinary university, with 11000 staff, 35000 students…
The limits of reason?
Everyone educated at a European or American university in the past 50 years has emerged with the tenets of Western…
“Science is not a liberal conspiracy”
The title of this article is an aphorism coined by Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson, the American astrophysicist and populariser…
Perpetual Emotion?
Perpetual motion is scientifically impossible, right? The impossibility of energy for nothing is not merely a matter of habit of…
Facts make weird shit less strange
In more than 40 years of investigating stories too weird for most journos to bother with, I’ve heard and seen…