Why you *really* hate Twitter

• If you’re not on Twitter, you don’t really need to read this. Read this instead, about why Twitter matters even if you’re not on it, or just leave a comment at the bottom of this one telling me that you’re not on Twitter and therefore don’t care. Matt Lewis, a writer for The Daily…

Breaking news: Richard Dawkins doesn’t like religion or ‘Islamic barbarians’. Well, he kept that one quiet

Why are we still surprised that Richard Dawkins doesn’t like religion? Also, will people now stop saying about the good professor that “he wouldn’t dare say that about Islam”? Please? I should explain. The latest furore comes after Islamist extremists burned down a sacred library in Timbuktu, Mali, during the ongoing conflict there. Prof Dawkins…

Why the fight against cancer is no blitzkrieg

[ooyala id=”huNWN1ODrgBqqQfnVj4i0WIuVnB1gnTO” ] From Wednesday’s paper: The battle against this stubborn disease is like trench warfare, but progress is being made Cancer is a success story. On one level, that’s obvious: thanks to advancements in treatment, many common cancers are no longer the death sentence they were even a few decades ago. Eighty-five per cent…

People are awesome

Watch this immediately. Hat-tip Vaughan Bell.

Is this the start of a ‘mini ice age’? A physicist writes

A few people asked me to respond to Boris Johnson’s column on Monday about whether the snowy weather is “the start of a mini ice age”. I didn’t, but Prof Joanna Haigh of Imperial College did on our letters page, so I thought it was worth publicising more widely: I’m delighted that the Mayor maintains…

Chief Medical Officer states medical facts; Government continues to ignore them

Today it’s very easy to be me, because the Chief Medical Officer, Prof Dame Sally Davies, has taken the two subjects that I can talk about on autopilot and combined them into one family-sized bundle of spectacular good sense. If I could find a way of crowbarring Nate Silver and gay marriage in, you’d be…

Dave: ‘Forwards, not backwards! Upwards, not forwards! And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!’

I think I must suffer from political deafness. I put these big speeches or PMQs or whatever on my headphones, and I listen, full of excitement, but I drift off in a few minutes and start reading the sports section. Then I start awake again as people around me start going on about how Miliband…

If Beyoncé had to lip-sync over Star Spangled Banner, she could at least have used this version

It has been alleged that Beyoncé was miming the US national anthem during Obama’s inauguration yesterday. Which is all fine, I suppose, but if you’re going to mime, why not use a really good version? The late Whitney Houston shows us all how it’s done: Or I suppose Carcass’s Blood Spattered Banner, but it might…

Sir David Attenborough needn’t worry: the future of humanity isn’t as bleak as all that

It’s hard to write something criticising Sir David Attenborough. It feels like slapping your grandfather in the face. But I’m going to have to, today. Sir David, returning to one of his favourite themes, has said that human population growth is threatening the species and the planet, describing us as a “plague on the Earth”….

Spare Neanderthals this modern freak show

From Tuesday’s paper: Twenty thousand years separate us from our prehistoric relations – let’s keep it that way Our late cousins, the Neanderthals, continue to fascinate us, 20 millennia after the last ones died out. It is unsettling to think that another species of human, another sapient being, like us and yet not us, shared…

Enough of the false nostalgia: we don’t really miss HMV. If we’d cared, it wouldn’t have died

The internet is engaged in one of its periodic paroxysms of nostalgia. This time it’s HMV shutting down, and everyone is reminiscing sadly about how they bought their first CD (Pearl Jam’s Vs., HMV Cornmarket Street, Oxford, 1994, since you ask) or stood in the headphone booth after school listening to Tupac, or met a…

In defence of Jared Diamond, ‘Western’ science, and the reality of human progress

Jared Diamond, the author of the fantastic Guns, Germs and Steel – notable not only for its hugely sensible discussions of race, empire and civilisation, but also for its clear-eyed and important look at the relative sizes of great ape genitals – has written a new book. Called The World Until Yesterday, it’s about what the…