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Future technology that could power a city with a device the size of a shipping container may prove a better bet than harnessing the wind My article for Telegraph: In a key milestone on the road to harnessing fusion power, Lawrence Livermore laboratory announced this week that it had extracted energy from an object the […]

The doomsday claims are not backed up by scientific research My article for the Telegraph: On Twitter this week an unfortunate hiker showed a short video of the midges swarming in their tens of thousands over his backpack and his arms in the Scottish Highlands. It was itchy just to watch. It would be silly […]

The ‘great stagnation’ is a myth; wonders are being accomplished. But silly rules still block progress. My article for the Telegraph: Back in the early 1950s scientists were baffled by one aspect of life itself. Our cells were full of proteins whose properties depended on their precise shapes, and the key feature of life was […]

Again and again, worst-case scenarios are presented with absurd precision, and the problem goes further than Britain’s slow reopening My article for The Telegraph: Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation. A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to a profession that has […]

Officialdom’s absurdly cautious approach is now impossible to justify given the success of vaccines My article for the Telegraph: The whole aim of practical politics, said HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” […]

The WHO has now wasted a year failing to investigate properly the origins of Covid-19 My article for The Telegraph: It is a year ago last week since the World Health Organisation conceded, belatedly, that a pandemic was under way. The organisation’s decisions in early 2020 were undoubtedly influenced by the Chinese government. On 14 […]

Like the Ming empire before it, bureaucratic tyranny is immiserating a beautiful and cultured place My article for The Telegraph: There is something rather apt in the coincidence of an Italian ban on vaccine exports to Australia and the negotiation by Liz Truss, the trade secretary, of lower tariffs on trade with the United States. […]

This is a more detailed version of the article co-written with Alina Chan on the origin of the virus causing the Covid pandemic which was published in the Telegraph on 6 February. “Viral” by Matt Ridley is coming later this year. Sign up for his newsletter and follow him on Facebook and Twitter to learn […]

The list of our achievements in biology is extraordinary for a country with just one per cent of the world’s population My latest article, for The Telegraph: Britain probably leads the world in self-criticism. So maybe we don’t always notice when the country leads the world in something a bit more useful. During the pandemic […]

Tough restrictions keep the virus spreading mainly among the very ill, meaning more lethal strains can dominate milder ones My article for The Telegraph: Boris Johnson’s fondness for the metaphor of the US cavalry riding to the rescue is risky: ask General Custer. With the vaccine cavalry in sight, and just when we thought we […]