Science & Tech

For Europeans, the known world doubled in the course of the sixteenth century. The Dutch had two possibilities to offer the English Puritan refugees : the tiny, well-protected port on the tip of the island of Manhattan, or Guiana, on…Read more

  The scientific revolution was part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment, which also brought progress in other fields, especially moral and political philosophy, and in the institutions of society. Unfortunately, the term ‘the Enlightenment’ is used by historians…Read more

The Myth of Meritocracy  For most of the twentieth century there were no female musicians in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. There were a couple of blips in the 1950s and 60s, when a woman or two was hired, but…Read more

THIS WILL BE HARD  Please don’t let the title of this chapter depress you. I hope it’s clear by now that I believe we can get to zero, and in the coming chapters I will try to give you a…Read more

  For the bulk of human history, the most learned members of our species have wildly underestimated the human brain’s capabilities. This is understandable, since your brain occupies only about 2 percent of your body mass, and it looks like…Read more

  Gey and his wife, Margaret, had spent the last three decades working to grow malignant cells outside the body, hoping to use them to find cancer’s cause and cure. But most cells died quickly, and the few that survived…Read more

  The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both horses and guns. To the average white American, the word “Indian” conjures up an…Read more

Anomalies  Science is like a detective story. For astrophysicists, this truism comes with a twist. No other field of scientific sleuthing confronts such a diversity of scales and concepts. Our chronological scope of inquiry starts before the Big Bang and…Read more

The Migration  July had been blown out like a candle by a biting wind that ushered in a leaden August sky. A sharp, stinging drizzle fell, billowing into opaque grey sheets when the wind caught it. Along the Bournemouth sea-front…Read more