Francis Crick, who died on 28 July at the age of 88, was trained as a physicist but became arguably the most influential biologist of the twentieth century. His great curiosity was coupled to highly original thinking; through force of intellect he obtained answers to many fundamental problems. In...

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About eight years ago you plant a wisteria to scramble up the side of the new extension to the cottage. It is a tiny slip of a thing. People tell you, "But it'll be seven years before it blooms". And you think "Yeah, so what, I'm not going anywhere". Last year it has, what, two or three flowers. The...

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I’ve been spending a little time recently playing with and trying to organize my approach to putting my photos on the web. (Driven purely by ego.) I’ve now got two ways of doing this, three if you count the fact that I sometimes post one here. One is a photoblog, powered by PixelPost. The idea the...

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To the Spallanzani Hospital this morning, for some tests, and my brain is awash with "facts". Wasn't he the guy who put trousers on frogs, thereby proving that the male's contribution to reproduction was important? (But then again, didn't the Greeks think that females provided only a fertile environment?) Or was he the guy who fed dogs meat in a cage and then hoicked up the cage again to prove something about digestion? These facts have been stored invisibly somewhere in my brain for more than 30 years now, and suddenly up they bob. Except that I'm not actually sure whether I know them or not. Well, I know them, but are they true?

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James Boyle, a law professor at Duke University, has an entertaining and useful comment on intellectual property rights (a subject really close to my heart) in the Financial Times.

The closed-mindedness is remarkable. “That man eats only a little salad and looks slim. Clearly to look as good...

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