What is it like doing science in India? Let me make the operating rules clear before I answer. Every question about India has two ‘correct’ answers which say exactly opposite things. Furthermore, each of the one billion Indians will disagree with one another and with what any outsider has to say about India. Being a scientist in India is wonderful. Really. Every good grant proposal gets funded....

One hundred years ago this Sunday, on November th, , Bertrand Russell delivered the Inaugural Address to the Aristotelian Society’s thirty-fourth session – it was Russell’s second year as President. His lecture was entitled ‘On the Notion of Cause’, and as the Proceedings here note, a discussion followed in which a number of members took part. Outside the Aristotelian Society, the discussion co...

Catalan is part of a small but serious cadre of would-be clonees, people who have studied the science, considered the issues and concluded that their pursuit of happiness might best be fulfilled by having themselves or a loved one cloned. Their perspective is not countenanced on Capitol Hill, where Congress -though vigorously debating whether to allow the cloning of human embryos for research -...

A blind former British Home Secretary, drafter of progressive disability laws and international advocate of equal rights for the disabled, David Blunkett, wants to champion a South African cell phone initiative giving disabled people internet access. However, while most South Africans now carry cell phones, the two leading networks, MTN and Vodacom, say the cost of phones sophisticated enough t...

A recent study has shown that respiratory structures are disproportionately oversized in larger insects, and that oxygen supply to leg muscles may be physically constrained in the largest modern insects. High oxygen concentrations during the Carboniferous may have alleviated these physical constraints allowing the evolution of gigantic arthropods.