Some of the most memorable, appalling statistics in history are those of the accidental genocides wrought by human exploration. After its introduction to Central America by the conquistadors in 1520,...

England have lost on penalties at five of the nine last major international football championships. So here's some interesting news for whoever picks up the poisoned chalice from Steve...

Like many web users, I'm a frequent user of the variously reliable wonders of wikipedia (not least as a topic for blog posts). Or rather, I'm a frequent user of the English version. For there are a...

The latest eco-blockbuster to follow in the wake of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is A Crude Awakening, released in Britain this Friday. The movie is intended to alert its audiences to the...

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...