Philip Ball
03 June 2026
Making Pluto Great Again
Jared Isaacman’s bid to restore Pluto’s planetary status looks less like science and more like populism in space
Read the full article27 May 2026
Ebola, USAID and how Musk’s spending cuts will kill millions
Decisions taken by the department he led to reduce aid to Africa have made the current Ebola outbreak worse. The total effect of what he did will be catastrophic
Read the full article22 May 2026
Robotaxis: a solution in search of a problem
Self-driving taxis are already on the streets and close to going into service. But are they simply an expensive gimmick?
Read the full article20 May 2026
Why science needs to talk about failure
Scientific breakthroughs often emerge from experiments that go wrong – but modern research culture rewards only success
Read the full article07 May 2026
Hantavirus: the disease with no vaccine
A fatal outbreak has occurred on a cruise ship after it docked in South America. There will be no new pandemic, but it’s a reminder of the lesson of Covid: that wild animal populations are awash with diseases we do not understand
Read the full article06 May 2026
Talking nonsense about Artemis II
There are a lot of stories circulating about the scientific benefits of space travel and of mining the lunar surface. A huge number of them are complete nonsense.
Read the full article29 April 2026
Could climate change bring malaria back to Britain?
The warming climate is pushing disease-carrying insects as far north as the Arctic – with unsettling implications for Europe
Read the full article22 April 2026
Do we really have a right to science?
The promise that everyone can benefit from science rings hollow in a world of inequality and exclusion
Read the full article15 April 2026
What was the point of the Artemis moon mission?
It’s clear what the Trump administration wanted – but what did anyone else get out of it?
Read the full article01 April 2026
The dangerous myth of ‘neutral’ technology
The notion that innovation is value-free conceals the political and ideological agendas behind it
Read the full article25 March 2026
Meningitis and the dark lessons of Covid
An outbreak of the disease in Kent highlights the importance of challenging the misleading stories that are beginning to emerge about Covid
Read the full article18 March 2026
Henrietta Lacks: Did scientists steal her cancer?
A woman in a US hospital had a sample taken of her cancer cells that went on to become the most important biopsy in all medicine. Is her family due compensation?
Read the full article11 March 2026
Were humans writing 40,000 years ago?
New research suggests that mysterious symbols carved by early humans may have functioned like a primitive writing system
Read the full article04 March 2026
Time to dig up the future
In a terrible irony, the green technologies we need to move away from fossil fuels rely on minerals that can only be extracted with terrible environmental consequences
Read the full article25 February 2026
The death of ‘progress’
The idea emerged at a time very different to our own, and now the Silicon Valley tech bros have revealed what was true all along – that the notion of ‘progress’ is riddled with contradictions
Read the full article20 February 2026
Is this the best lab in the world?
The Wellcome Sanger – half academic research institute, half industrial laboratory – is perfectly positioned to produce socially useful applications for discoveries
Read the full article18 February 2026
Barack Obama is right about aliens
The former president made some comments about extraterrestrial life on a podcast and a lot of people got very excited for all the wrong reasons
Read the full article11 February 2026
Epstein and the moral rot of US public intellectuals
The disgraced sex offender was able to gather a group of scientists and thinkers around him who shared his anti-woke, anti-women and Silicon Valley techno-fascist views. But it doesn’t end with Epstein
Read the full article04 February 2026
The slow death of American science
Trump’s public health appointees are spreading such dangerous disinformation that it’s killing Americans. The world of science has to take a stand
Read the full article28 January 2026
Why human evolution is so hard to pin down
A seven-million-year-old fossil continues to complicate the story of when, and how, humans first walked on two legs
Read the full article21 January 2026
Driverless cars are coming. But can we trust them?
The CEO of Nvidia has announced a breakthrough in AI systems for self-driving vehicles. Is this a cause for excitement or should we regard it as a warning?
Read the full article14 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
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 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 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 article