Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 is unfailingly interesting. Even sub-par episodes are head and shoulders above most other discussion programmes. This week’s episode, on Malthusianism, was no exception, being full of insights into the background and context of Malthus’ famous Essay on ...

More or Less is one of my favourite programmes on BBC Radio Four. Not for the presentation style, which for me sometimes grates like fingernails on a blackboard, but for what they present, which makes it well worth getting beyond the style to the substance. And last week's episode was particularl...

So, farewell then, Horace Freeland Judson.

“It is as if one were in the classroom with a dozen or so of the world’s greatest biologists, with Mr. Judson acting as the informed student,” he wrote. “We learn as he is learning."

That’s Jeremy Bernstein's appraisal in the NYT obit linked above...

Y’know, seeing this advert at a certain site almost every day is putting me off visiting that site again in future, because the entire premise is so very wrong on so many levels.

Björn over at 5¢ense points to a brief report, that the godlike J Craig Venter was slapped with a cease-and-desist by the estate of James Joyce, for daring to encode a Joyce quote in the DNA of the microbe Venter built.

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

Wha...