Iain Roberts' Blog

I usually avoid so-called wellness bloggers; but I must admit, the stereotype of joyless vegans obsessed with kale is not entirely accurate...

The film director Werner Herzog explained his philosophy of life last week, on Mark Kermode's film review podcast. It resonated with me...

I've got a guest post on Digital Link , inspired by reports of Facebook chatbots creating their own language. As holder of a PhD in arti...

A Vanity Fair piece by Nick Bilton asks, Will Mark Zuckerberg Be Our Next President? According to Betteridge's Law of Headlines , the ...

Jeremy Corbyn, frontrunner to become the next leader of the Labour party, claims to believe in the efficacy of magic sugar pills . This not ...

Last week, the SNP government in Edinburgh announced it would ban genetically modified crops in Scotland. The European Union already has st...

A couple of weeks ago, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt made some highly sexist remarks  in a speech to the World Conference o...

Valentine's Day is this Saturday. Apropos of this, I recently ran across an article by the science writer Hannah Fry; she discusses the...

Today, the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were attacked by masked gunmen , apparently Islamist radicals. The attack...

I did an online programming course recently; in one assignment, the students could choose their own graphics, and someone thought it was a g...

I am beginning to think NASA had the right idea, when they expected Mission Control engineers to dress like this: Ed Harris in Apollo ...

This week, the Rosetta mission landed a probe on a comet; but instead of a richly deserved celebration of their achievement, a lot of discu...

An old schoolmate recently asked an interesting question: Most people don't really understand science. They are only repeating what ...

Mind uploading is a common idea in modern science fiction. The concept is simple enough. The human brain is a physical system, made up of...