Writing
Star Specimen: A Book On The Evolution Of The Book On Evolution
Behind the Scenes at the Natural History Museum The topic of this blog post is quite possibly the newest specimen in the Museum's collection, as it was just a matter of hours ago that it was catalogued. It's also the first specimen I've played a part in acquiring. The...
Goodbye Gary Arber
By the time you read this, Arber’s will be gone. WF Arber and Co Ltd printing works, run by three generations of Arber men over 117 years, shut its doors for the last time this month, marking the end of one of the oldest surviving businesses on Roman Road. I met Gary,...
The Rossendale Fairies: A Scientific Tale Of Small Proportions
Behind the Scenes at the Natural History Museum, London This week I came across links to several versions of a story out of Manchester claiming a university professor had photographed fairies. Before you ask, no, the articles weren't published on the 1st, so I could...
Star Specimen: The Cursed Amethyst
Behind the Scenes at the Natural History Museum, London Anyone who has met me in person can vouch for the fact that I am a fan of amethyst. Almost all my jewellery contains a purple stone of some size or shade. So I was particularly interested when I heard the...
3D Print-On-Demand Pizza, In Space
It's a little bit Star Trek replicator and a little bit soylent green, but the concept of downloadable synthetic food is now a little bit closer to science fact than fiction. NASA has awarded a grant to an American manufacturer to develop 3D food printing technology...
Oh Coffee, How We Do Love Thee
Britain is in love with a little brown bean called coffee. It's an affair that dates back more than 350 years to the edge of a churchyard in St Michael's Alley, off Cornhill, in east central London. It was there, in 1652, that Pasqua Rosee (servant to a businessman...
‘On The Road’ Unfurled Before Me
I've read the book, I've read the books about the book, I've seen the movie adaptation, and now I have had the pleasure of seeing the holiest of holies of the Beat Generation - the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac's novel, 'On The Road'. Written over a period of...
A Super Scientific Coincidence
There’s kryptonite in that thar… Natural History Museum. A mineral with the same composition as Superman’s only natural weakness is on display in the Earth’s Treasury gallery at the London museum. Jadarite, discovered in Serbia in 2006, is composed of sodium, lithium,...
The Interrobang Turns 50
It is 50 years this month since the typographic symbol, the interrobang, was debuted to the world. The first new punctuation mark for 300 years, it enjoyed a short but dazzling period of success in the 1960s. An interrobang is a combination of a question mark and...
Were Australia’s Aboriginal People The World’s First Astronomers?
It is acknowledged that Australian Aboriginal culture is heavily spiritual and symbolic, but a growing body of evidence suggests that the indigenous belief system represents a deep knowledge of the sky and the motion of the bodies within it. This knowledge was used...