Redux: Nominative Determinism

Chris Pincher. You may think of him as the man whose singular commitment to nominative determinism provided the final straw that brought down the UK Prime Minister. I think of him as my flimsy excuse to republish my paean to nominative determinism! I’ve also taken the opportunity to top it up with some of the […]

Have you had a zoom reality glitch?

People who compulsively play video games sometimes get strange little twitches and glitches in their reality. Out of the game, back in real life, they are seized by brief snatches of hallucinatory game crosstalk. For example, people who spend hours playing Tetris might see bathroom tiles trembling, or bookshelves lurching rhythmically downward in steady chunks. […]

FAQ

1. Why should I choose an Exo™? Think about the costs imposed by your fragile organic body. Just one single aspect of its care and upkeep – sleep – steals 8 in every 24 hours of your precious life. And that’s just time – what about the money you have to spend on a bed, […]

Waiting for deepfakes

After five years of breathless headlines about the deepfake threat, it finally happened. Earlier this month, a video purporting to show Volodymyr Zelensky surrendering to Russia was broadcast on a news station in Ukraine, from which it swiftly jumped to social media. Well, it kind of happened. An army of researchers was at the ready, […]

What do you call someone who doesn’t drink?

When I was in my 20s and we liked to be out professionally drinking after a day of professionally working, a study made the news – I have no idea which study, by whom, or exactly what it said because I only heard about it through the bitter complaints of my friend. She was a […]

Science Metaphors: Hysteresis

This post originally appeared April 19, 2019 My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit […]

What’s in a (gene) name

Look, no one is trying to get a dick joke into the human genome. If it happens, it won’t be by design. No one even really thought it was a possibility until the late 1990s, when the physical chemistry professor Paul W. May was having a beer with some other science friends and they got […]

Kaolin & Morphine

There are well-known differences between the drugs you can get over the counter in the UK and the ones you can get in any US drugstore. Got period cramps in the UK? How about some Feminax – it’s got codeine! Cough? Codeine linctus. Aches? Pains? Co-codamol (codeine mixed with paracetamol, known to Americans as Tylenol). […]