My father wanted to call my family dog “Cyclopentanoperhydrophenanthrene”. My mother wouldn’t allow it, and she settled on “Quill” because he picked up a feather once. We — everyone except my mother — now call him “Krill”. Anyway, this article is about a prediction that I’d like to make about…

Biologists think of complexity and interconnectivity inherently. Physicists think of extreme simplicity but do so in order to understand the interconnected whole. Chemists (like myself) learn about simplicity and find that it works in most cases. The legacy of this sort of thinking has so many failings to answer for. …

Have you ever believed a compelling story that turned out not to be true? It’s a problem that we keep referring to “conspiracy theorists” as a distinct group of people. They are not “other” to us; they are a part of our whole. We have evolved to believe compelling stories, and when good stories have been bouncing around the internet, being tweaked, perfected, elaborated upon and developed into ever-more compelling narratives, we are even more likely to believe them.

We like to think that conversations only happen through speaking and listening, but this isn’t true. It’s through this human-centric lens that we dismiss other living things as not being sentient. Conversations can happen on so many levels of subtlety, all the way down to proteins and beyond. How else…

To my mind, the most reasonable explanation for the behaviour of the UK government at present is that the leadership mostly understands the climate and nature crisis, but powerful elements within the government think it will continue, mostly unabated, and that there is little to no point in planning as…

You’re curious and smart and you always seek to understand and learn once you’ve been given a proper chance to be interested. Your school rebuffs curiosity and interest by teaching in a formulaic way that you, understandably, find boring. Your school mostly rewards discipline and those who’ve been lucky to find some interest through same way other than through their lessons. You’re hard working and you’re smart. The fact that your grades aren’t high isn’t a reflection of your intelligence — it’s a consequence of your lack of inspiration.

We’re living through a time of rapid acceleration of solutions to local and global problems. In the words of Will Gibson, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Unregulated, neoliberal capitalism was purported to ensure a perfectly functioning free market, and efficient direction of capital…

There is a remarkable ignorance in the world about the importance of nature in overcoming the global crisis. Rather than the “climate crisis” we ought to be calling it all the “nature crisis”, because destroying our natural home is what we’re doing. …

When our lives have purpose, our lives are a good story. Stories shape and define us. We might like to think otherwise, but most of what we think we know isn’t based on thorough understanding; it’s based on seemingly coherent stories. …