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The failure to speedily investigate Covid’s real origins leave us vulnerable to another pandemic   The World Health Organisation, the body charged with finding how a virus from central China killed more than ten million people and upended the world economy, has dropped the ball. An article appeared in Nature magazine this week, headlined “WHO […]

In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll brought the dodo back to life. The extinct, fat, flightless pigeon arranged a famous running race in which “all shall have prizes”.   Now an American tech entrepreneur, Ben Lamm, plans to bring the dodo back to life for real, along with some other extinct species like woolly mammoths, […]

The failure of Britain’s first space launch is coming in for a lot of Schadenfreude. (Given how much we Brits revel in other’s misfortune, it is surprising we have to borrow a German word for it.) While an inquest into what went wrong is clearly warranted, it would be a mistake if we gave up […]

Sweden’s refusal to impose compulsory shutdowns has now, by contrast, been completely vindicated We will never know how many people are dying of covid in China. The regime will probably cook the statistical books. The chief executive of an asset management firm in China shared an image last week of a document at a mortuary […]

Science can thrive after Brexit: there is public support for skilled migration My Times column on skilled versus unskilled migration and Brexit: Michael Kosterlitz, one of the four British-born but American-resident winners of Nobel prizes in science this year, is so incensed by Brexit that he is considering renouncing his British citizenship: “The idea of […]

The Tory party must have a death wish now that it has fallen back in love with onshore wind turbines   The Tory party’s move to fall back in love with wind energy, despite its manifest disadvantages of cost, unreliability and inefficient use of land, is a death wish. They will soon rediscover just how […]

A very strange parliamentary rebellion has been taking place with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and dozens of other Tory MPs demanding an end to the ban on onshore wind farms. Wind power is cheap and getting cheaper, they argue. And surely, if we’re engaged in an energy war with Russia, we need all the power […]

Good news, everybody. The ozone layer is probably going to heal. And that’s not all: by the time my (future) grandchildren grow up in the late 2050s, the world could be greener, healthier, cleaner, kinder, more peaceful and more equal – if we allow it.   Why do I think this, when activists are telling […]

Three years after the pandemic began, we still don’t know the origin of COVID. A strange lack of curiosity has stifled the debate. KEY TAKEAWAYS The “lab leak” hypothesis for the origin of COVID has been fueled by a continuous trickle of new revelations, many of them driven by freedom of information requests or leaks. A […]

If you are a bird, any kind of bird, the current pandemic of avian influenza rampaging through your kind is far more terrifying than anything the hairless apes on the ground below experienced in 2020 and 2021. Britain’s seabirds – guillemots, gannets, gulls, kittiwakes and skuas – have been hardest hit because they breed in […]