The American science writer Kitty Ferguson wrote a fairly good double biography of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler titled The Nobleman and His Housedog. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler: the Strange Partnership that Revolutionised Science (review, 2002). Tycho is obviously the noble but Kepler as a housedog? Isn’t that rather insulting? It would be if it wasn’t […]

Over the years I have written a series of blog posts about Charles Babbage, but I have never written about who he was and where he came from. What follows is a brief biographical sketch of the boy, the student and the young man finding his way in life. The Babbage family had its roots […]

There is a widespread popular view of Isaac Newton, the man, as an unfriendly cantankerous, argumentative, curmudgeonly nasty piece of work ready to start a slanging match at the drop of a bodkin, self-righteous, possessive, jealous, unable to accept any form of criticism. Summa summarum, not a nice person at all, in fact rather to […]

For those new to the Renaissance Mathematicus, we now enter a special time of the year with the Christmas Trilogy, during which I celebrate three #histsci birthdays, Isaac Newton on the 25 December, Charles Babbage on the 26 December and Johannes Kepler on the 27 December. For more details follow this link, also to link […]

The obligatory Winter Solstice at Stonehenge image In 1965 the LA folk rock band, The Byrds, had a major international hit with a song written by folk singer Pete Seeger. Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season): To everything turn, turn, turnThere is a season turn, turn, turnAnd a time to every purposeUnder heaven […]

Researchers have developed a method for preparing silanols that uses an earth abundant metal centre and generates minimal waste products.1 Silanols are compounds containing an Si–O–H functional group, and have applications as both building blocks in synthetic chemistry and materials science. They are easily prepared from silanes through an oxidation reaction, which involves breaking an […]

In the UK since October, 19 children have died from serious complications of Group A streptococcus (Strep A) infections. In response, the government has advised general practitioners to prescribe prophylactic antibiotics to contacts of the most severe cases. The government has also activated shortage protocols for the liquid penicillin antibiotics normally used to treat such […]

When Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier revealed that the bacterial Crispr–Cas9 antiviral defence system could be reprogrammed to edit genomic DNA they could scarcely have imagined the impact their discovery would have. One Nobel prize and a decade later treatments based on the technique are racing towards the clinic. That impressive speed in developing Crispr […]

As a consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the chemicals industry has seen a year dominated by soaring energy and raw material costs, further bottlenecks in supply chains already stressed by the pandemic, economic uncertainty and political upheaval. As earnings reports began to trickle in this autumn, the severity of these crises became clear. Dow, […]

At a time when lab space is running short in the UK, the British property company Canary Wharf Group and Dutch real estate developer Kadans Science Partner have announced plans to build a state-of-the-art commercial health and life sciences building at Canary Wharf’s North Quay in London. It will be a 23-storey, nearly 76,500m2 tower […]