Philip Ball
03 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 article05 June 2025
Is there really another planet out there?
2017 OF201 is the largest object to have been found in our solar system for more than a decade
Read the full article05 June 2025
The rise of bombs: how physics lost its innocence
How did an inquiry into the laws of nature produce a form of technology capable of annihilating civilisation?
Read the full article28 May 2025
Is science failing, or are we failing science?
Truly groundbreaking scientific discoveries may be on the decline – but it’s not because we’ve run out of big ideas
Read the full article21 May 2025
Why is Trump's America anti-science?
The US has long led the science world but now, researchers are moving abroad to continue their work
Read the full article14 May 2025
Is there a colour we’ve never seen before?
Scientists at the University of California claim to have created a new colour, called ‘olo’, which is outside the human visual spectrum
Read the full article07 May 2025
The dire truth about ‘de-extinction’
The creation of a genetically modified Ice Age wolf has sparked a scientific backlash over the politicisation of ‘de-extinction’
Read the full article