Philip Ball / July 9, 2014
Think science always knows the whole truth? Errors are surprisingly common and many go undiscovered because they just aren’t seen as important enough, or because people take pains to hide them...
Philip Ball / May 10, 2014
Why ask the public to vote reality TV-style on what the biggest challenge we face in science is when we already know the answer?
Philip Ball / April 14, 2014
Is the inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis really such an outsider?
Philip Ball / March 28, 2014
The Abel Prize, awarded annually by the Norwegian Academy of Science and letters for achievements in mathematics, is widely regarded as the “maths Nobel”. Only the Field Medal, which is awarded...
Philip Ball / March 3, 2014
Neuroscience is shaping up to be a fierce battleground for how we should organise our societies, as Prospect has predicted in the past. Gender differences, criminal law, political persuasions—we...
Philip Ball / February 7, 2014
Famous scientists are making their big discoveries ever later in their careers. A study in 2011 found that the average age at which Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and medicine conducted their...
Philip Ball / January 10, 2014
In December, cell biologist Randy Schekman of the University of California at Berkeley, two months after becoming a Nobel laureate for his work on how cells move parcels of molecules around,...
Philip Ball / December 23, 2013
Sometimes there is such an ‘obvious’ way for a science story to be told that it more or less tells itself. Scientists themselves are (allegedly) taught, however, not to believe what they are...
Philip Ball / November 29, 2013
Chances are that every biologist now has an ome to go to. This suffix, first introduced in the genome (the sum total of all an organism’s genes), can now be found attached to just about every...
Philip Ball / November 13, 2013
It may come as a surprise that not all physicists share in the excitement surrounding the Higgs boson, boosted further by the award of the physics Nobel Prize to Peter Higgs and François Englert,...