Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched the first living being—a dog—into orbit on the spacecraft Sputnik 2. A female mongrel, Laika was a stray found on the streets of Moscow. She was...

In 1999, Dick Taverne wrote an article for Prospect in which he passionately denounced the "anti-science" of a public culture indifferent to evidence and research, above all in the case of GM foods,...

Jim Watson seems to be genuinely taken aback by the furore his recent comments on race and IQ have aroused. He looks a little like the teenage delinquent who, after years of being a persistent...

Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched the first human-made satellite, Sputnik, and began the era of space exploration. In Prospect's May 2001 issue, Michael Lind and James Pinkerton...

One of Terry Pratchett's neatest jokes in the Discworld novels concerns the troll (big creatures made of rock) system of counting, which entails only the words "one," "two," "many" and "lots"—a...

In Prospect’s February issue, I reported on John and Alfred Donovan, two men with a combined age of 150 years in a house in Colchester who have been trying relentlessly to prick holes in one of the...

Logically enough, the maximum possible size of ship it is possible to fit through the Panama canal is called a "panamax"—which happens to be 294.1 metres in length, 32.3 metres in width, 12.0...

I find Wikipedia-bashing tedious and somewhat ungentlemanly. For columnists looking to fill space, it is simple sport to find an error—though usually a trivial one—in a Wikipedia entry on a topic...

I thought I'd cross post this from The Great Beyond, which is a blog we recently started at Nature to complement our own news coverage. The blog rounds up the science stories that, for one reason or...

Earlier this year in Prospect, psychologist Judith Rich Harris previewed the BBC1 series Child of our Time, due to be broadcast in May. The article attracted quite a lot of coverage at the time,...