Jon Evans - Science Writer

Diamond digs

If you want to find diamonds, look for mantle plumes. That is the main message of research published in this week’s Nature.

18 days ago

Chain reaction

You wouldn’t construct a car or a washing machine by carving it out of a huge chunk of metal. But this is exactly how we produce things at the scale of nanometres (a billionth of a metre), including the billions of tiny switches that make up modern computer processors.

24 days ago

Baldness, altitude and old age

In humans, not many genetic traits can be attributed to the action of a just a single gene. Those that can are either fairly unimportant, such as whether you have free or attached earlobes, or fairly rare, in particular genetic diseases such as Huntington’s disease that are caused by a single gene not working properly. The traits that most people are interested in, such as intelligence and whether they are prone to developing heart disease or cancer, are due to interactions between large numbers of different genes.

31 days ago

No sting in this tale

Antibodies are the flashing beacons of the human immune system. By coating foreign invaders, they mark them out for removal by immune system cells such as macrophages and neutrophils. These foreign invaders can be bacteria, viruses, parasites, toxins or, as scientists have now shown, even bee sting proteins.

38 days ago

I'm back

Well, actually, I've never been away, but what I mean is that I'm back writing for this blog after almost 10 months. The lengthy hiatus was down to me being busy writing a book, which I will tell you about nearer the publication date (hopefully some time around Christmas).

38 days ago

What's in a stupid name?

Surely one of the main attractions of becoming a practising scientist is being able to name your discoveries. In the past, these discoveries have tended to come in the form of new planets and species, but in this age of molecular biology they are more likely to be new genes and proteins.

347 days ago

Dawn of the swine flu

The idea of humanity being destroyed by infection is such a potent one that it is perhaps not too surprising that media coverage of the potential swine flu pandemic quickly became apocalyptic. Even those whom you might hope would stay fairly calm seemed to be caught up in it all, with Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization, reportedly warning that ‘it really is all of humanity that is under threat’.

453 days ago

Critically-acclaimed taste

Lately, I’ve found my mind turning to the question of whether a specific cultural artefact can objectively be classed as better or worse than another. Can films, books and pieces of music be ranked according to their greatness, or does it all just come down to personal preference? Is your view that The Shawshank Redemption is the greatest film ever made just as valid as my view that it’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? Or are you simply an idiot?

525 days ago

Moral update

I’m never quite sure how controversial I should make these blog entries. Obviously, I don’t want them to be bland and boring, but equally I don’t really want to offend any visitors to this web site. Not that my views are particularly controversial, being pretty much standard for a reasonably well-educated Englishman, i.e. liberal and secular.

551 days ago

New Year, new blog

Well somehow two weeks has become two months. So my new year’s resolution is to write this blog a lot more regularly. But seeing as I’ve promised that before and it hasn’t happened yet, we’ll have to see whether this resolution falls into the cliché of being quickly forgotten.

573 days ago