A Luke Howard had been speaking for nearly an hour, during which time his audience had found itself in a state of gradually mounting excitement. By the time that he reached the concluding words of his address, the Plough Court laboratory was in an uproar. Everyone in the audience had recognized the importance of what they […]

A What would Sir Isaac Newton have made of it? There he was, painted in oils, gazing down at one of the strangest meetings that the Royal Society, Britain’s most august scientific body, has ever held. If Newton had flashed a huge grin, it would have been completely appropriate, for beneath him last week a two-

In 1963, a paper appeared in the journal Nature that radically changed the way we view this planet and its resources. Tts authors, Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews, did for the Earth sciences what Crick and Watson did for biology and Einstein did for physics, and new areas of scientific development are still emerging as

In a show-business career that spanned over seventy years, Groucho Marx successfully conquered every entertainment medium, becoming a star of the vaudeville stage, Broadway, motion pictures, radio and television. But, as the author of seven books, a play, two film screenplays and over one hundred magazine articles and essays, Groucho quietly conquered another medium, one

Fascination is universal for what Aaron Spelling, a prolific producer of American soap operas, once called “rich people having problems that money can’t solve”. The fascinated in star-struck Britain have no equal. The country has a profusion of titles devoted to chronicling even the smallest doings of celebrities. Britons buy almost half as many celebrity

A You know those tales of lost youth that spring from actors who are too successful too soon? You will probably not hear any about Daniel Radcliffe, who conjures up his alter ego Harry Potter for the fourth boy-wizard film saga, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, opening Nov. 18 (after its premiere Saturday in

A Another bad week in a bad month for the food and drink industry. Sunny Delight, formerly the UK’s third largest selling drink, is to be taken off the shelves by Asda after plummeting sales, the supermarket said at the weekend. Yesterday, it was the turn of Northern Foods, makers of biscuits, pies, pizzas and ready

It can be hard to guess someone’s exact age. A range of factors may leave marks on our appearance: how much sleep We’ve had – even the way we dress and our view of ourselves. The good news is that just as these factors can add years on to your appearance, it follows that they

A Put one buccaneering entrepreneur-cum-bioscientist on a luxury yacht. Using some mighty fine nets, let him trawl the world’s oceans for the smallest creatures. Catalogue the genetic diversity of this, the most abundant form of life in the largest habitat on Earth. Then hijack the molecular machinery of these microbes to make clean energy, new drugs

A Once again, southern Africa is facing a severe food crisis. It is a chronic problem – and shouldn’t be. At the Trinity hospital in Malawi’s southern Nsanje district, three-year-old Mboyi is lying listless, his face against the wall. His belly is badly bloated and skin is peeling off his legs. His mother explains that the