Philip Ball
14 January 2026
The ‘super flu’ that wasn’t
An unusually early flu season was mistaken for an unusually severe one – raising questions about how risk is communicated and how unprepared the NHS remains
Read the full article07 January 2026
What the hell is quantum mechanics?
It predicts the universe with eerie precision, yet not even Nobel laureates can agree on how to interpret it
Read the full article07 January 2026
The quest for artificial eggs
Lab-grown gametes could transform fertility treatment – but biology is proving far harder to hack than technology
Read the full article31 December 2025
2026: the year of the American basketcase
In the coming 12 months, one thing is for certain – the American war on science will only get worse
Read the full article17 December 2025
2025 could have been the year of peak AI
Maybe we have decided to restore it to being a mere useful tool for data analysis, and not to let it run and ruin our lives
Read the full article10 December 2025
Dog DNA tests are barking up the wrong tree
Genetic screening of prospective pets to deduce behavioural traits can’t tell you much about your dog’s personality
Read the full article03 December 2025
The lessons we need to learn from the Covid inquiry
It’s time to protect British science from political interference. Just look at who’s leading in the opinion polls
Read the full article26 November 2025
Was analysing Hitler’s DNA worth it?
There is no reason to suppose that we learn anything significant from the genetic data about what made the dictator the man he was
Read the full article19 November 2025
James Watson’s bigoted beliefs can’t be neatly separated from his science
As was often the case before our villains became cartoonish, Watson’s flaws were complex
Read the full article12 November 2025
Why a new discipline of biology is generating interest
Generative biology will be inspired more by embryology than by genetic engineering
Read the full article05 November 2025
The tech lords’ quest for eternal life
Nothing is more transparent than Silicon Valley’s fixation with longevity and, ideally, immortality, revealing a desperate fear of death
Read the full article22 October 2025
AI is a bubble that is going to burst
The industry has fostered a cult of personality that seems to leave the tech press starstruck and unquestioning of nonsensical claims
Read the full article15 October 2025
Was the Turing Test always meaningless?
A meeting to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Alan Turing’s famous paper drew a fairly unanimous judgment from the expert speakers
Read the full article08 October 2025
How did cave artists get a brand new pigment?
The discovery of traces of a blue pigment on a stone shaped into a shallow dish at a Palaeolithic site in Germany is quite a find
Read the full article01 October 2025
Trump, Kennedy and a gross debacle over autism
Trump and Kennedy want a simple answer to this very complex problem. And it must be an answer that fits their scepticism of much mainstream medicine
Read the full article24 September 2025
Was there life on Mars?
Nasa’s Perseverance rover has found organic carbon in Martian rocks – but scientists have warned against jumping to conclusions after previous false alarms
Read the full article17 September 2025
Has the case for fusion gone cold?
New experiments have failed to prove that cold fusion will lead to a practical energy source
Read the full article10 September 2025
This movie is magnificent – and at atomic speed
This film by Chinese physicists lasts just 60 thousandths of a second, and can only be followed by eye when slowed down by a factor of 30 or so
Read the full article03 September 2025
Predicting the traffic jam, not the automobile
Some of the best science fiction is not so much about dreaming up futuristic technologies but imagining the kinds of societies they will engender
Read the full article27 August 2025
Is Nasa’s nuclear moon plan sheer lunacy?
Nuclear power may be essential for a future lunar base, but Nasa’s latest announcement looks more like a flag-planting contest than a serious mission plan
Read the full article23 August 2025
Measles: The return of a killer
Anti-vaccine lies mean the disease is now spreading in Britain, the US and around the world. And this is just the start
Read the full article18 August 2025
Trump’s war on scientific truth
Ideologues don’t like science because it confronts them with truths they can’t dismiss. Donald Trump seems to think he has a workaround
Read the full article13 August 2025
The mystery of the Mpemba effect
How a Tanzanian secondary school student's ice cream making prompted a probe into why hot water can sometimes freeze faster than cold water
Read the full article06 August 2025
Find life on other planets? We can’t even agree what it is
We can’t be sure that, even if life were staring us in the face on Europa, we’d recognise it as such
Read the full article30 July 2025
Why we need to be more chill about language change
It appears that our vocabulary is entrained with the Zeitgeist, whether we like it or not
Read the full article23 July 2025
In physics, sometime it is the size that matters
It seems ironic that the more deeply we want to see into the world, the bigger we have to make our instruments
Read the full article16 July 2025
The deepest view into the universe yet
A new telescope, 2,650 metres up on a mountainside in Chile, is one of the most ambitious astronomical projects of our times
Read the full article09 July 2025
The danger of fetishising genome sequencing
The worry is that this becomes a technology that we use because we can rather than because we know it can make a difference
Read the full article02 July 2025
The mystery of the so-called double-slit experiment
It seems that, in the quantum world, making a measurement doesn’t tell us how things are but actually determines how they are: it creates our observable reality
Read the full article25 June 2025
We still don’t know the state of Iran’s nuclear programme
Donald Trump’s claim to have taken nuclear arms out of Iran’s hands is probably little more than bravado
Read the full article18 June 2025
Why there is still no consensus on what quantum mechanics means
Surveys indicate that there’s no sign of convergence, even after 100 years, about the various interpretations of the theory that have been put forward
Read the full article11 June 2025
Can we save the planet by geo-engineering the sea?
Experiments to combat climate change using ‘iron fertilisation’ to boost plankton growth, first proposed in the 1980s, remain unproven and contentious
Read the full article