Join leading science journalist Philip Ball in this this exclusive studio interview that challenges some of biology’s most entrenched ideas. Ball argues that familiar ideas - the genome as a blueprint...

Human Rights Day offers the opportunity to reflect on what an enormous human achievement ‘human rights’ are and on the commitments they entail, from the empathy which underpins them, to the rule of…

I'm reading "Going Nuclear" by Tim Gregory on the recommendation of my brother having seen him give a talk on it. To be clear it's written for not just a general science audience, but a completely general lay audience - even explaining units of measure and metric prefixes of scales of measure, as well as the basic physics. So, as an engineer in the capital facilities industry, including power of all kinds - as well as non-power nuclear applications - I'm not really his audience.

I'm reading "Going Nuclear" by Tim Gregory on the recommendation of my brother having seen him give a talk on it. To be clear it's written for not just a general science audience, but a completely general lay audience - even explaining units of measure and metric prefixes of scales of measure, as well as the basic physics. So, as an engineer in the capital facilities industry, including power of all kinds - as well as non-power nuclear applications - I'm not really his audience.

Funnily enough it was hearing Mark Solms talk some years ago that led me to acquire his "Hidden Spring" on the strength of it, with no prior knowledge, even though it was some time before I actually had the bandwidth to read him. Like Iain McGilchrist, his work is now an embedded part of my own research. I'm a fan.

Moving into the second week of being without a functioning laptop capable of my research and writing needs. Amazing how dependent you get on switching between sources, channels, tools and apps, that just can't be done with a one-screen phone and two thumbs. Nothing lost content-wise hopefully - all in the cloud and backed-up - just the loss of working configurations.

Three small modular reactors will be built by Rolls-Royce at Wylfa, the site of a previous nuclear power station

I suspect when the dust settles on the current BBC crisis things will be worse for the Gender Critical (GC) vs Trans Rights Activism (TRA) agenda. It’s apparent from my social media timelines…

I suspect when the dust settles on the current BBC crisis things will be worse for the Gender Critical (GC) vs Trans Rights Activism (TRA) agenda. It's apparent from my social media timelines that after all the opportunistic left<>right political agendas, the Trump & Palestine, Antisemitism & Islamophobia "bias" agendas - extremist / activist driven "campaigning against" the BBC generally without needing to be any actual conspiracy - that the people still screaming passionately…

We are pleased to announce that the RPA have made a commitment to hold a symposium on the work of Robert Pirsig in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 14-16 April 2026. The event is being hosted in association …

All roads here lead to better democracy - better "self-governance", (the original point of Cybernetics itself, not to mention the ancient Greeks) - even though I'm keeping my personal focus at its higher levels of abstraction, to the point of being metaphysical. And "self" governance is many layered from the individual (where actions actually happen) to the cosmos via all collective levels of "state" where ideas can achieve shared understanding.

Strange triangle of conversations last night with humans and Chat-GPT. Emily Thomas, who I know only from her Bergson interview of Emily Herring at Durham Uni, shared a scanned extract from "an old philosophy book" on X/Twitter. My interest was piqued by the fact that a lot of recent scientific history of left-right (human) brain hemispheric behaviour started with…

This is just a stub / holding post for future elaboration. I have an agenda item to address Antisemitism and Islamophobia in mostly-secular Western "Christian culture" (like ours) or ex-colonies elsewhere - where in fact they are pretty much examples of the same issue. We tend to have them as live discussion topics only in reaction to some extreme or violent "terrorism" event or series of events - which polarises the language too quickly to get to any shared understanding.

Heard Jimmy Wales giving a plug to his new book "The Seven Rules of Trust -Why It Is Today's Most Essential Superpower" on BBC Radio 4 Today this morning. Trust has been the explicit subject of many posts here up to about 2012, since then it has been subsumed into my "Rules of Engagement" under Respect (Good-Faith / Honest-intentions & Trust).

The government is standing by safeguarding minister Jess Phillips as the grooming gang row deepens.

Homeward-bound having been offline for a whole week on a trip to Bilbao via the Brittany Ferries service from Portsmouth. Overall a slower pace of life travelling this way and visiting the sights a…