George Dyson asks: Are we learning to manipulate life or is life learning to manipulate us? A plausible scenario for how we arrived at life as we know it is that primitive organisms were infected by self-replicating parasites, learned to adopt those…

Pozzo: (suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall…

Next time you go for the proverbial dump consider the process involved in turning one plate of badly cooked meat and veg into a self perceiving, website reading, procrastinating you . It occurs to me that the chance of atoms, manufactured billions of years…

In past posts I have touched on the idea that we are all the protagonists in our own reality narratives . These realities interrelate in surprising ways which either enrich or contradict our individual, subjective perspectives. In organised religion can be…

In the spirit of maintaining a balanced universe here are some Excruciatingly Small Things - Fractal constellations erupting from the humble Petri-dish... Bacteria , it must be said, are simple, fascinating and make up the vast majority of the Earth's…

Energy is motion. Decrease the amount of motion down to low enough levels and you virtually suspend reality. Thus time, at these low temperatures, begins to lose its meaning. We all perceive ourselves as composite selves projected along a future moving axis…

"Nasa has estimated that an impact from [asteroid] Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be…