Contrary to popular legend, it turns out the Fountain of Youth is a sewage outlet behind the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. “Strangely, the water quality’s actually very good,” says Aziz Aboobaker of the University of Nottingham in the video below as he scrabbles around under stones, looking for planarian worms. [more]

Profile of I, Science written with Nicky Guttridge for Scientific American’s Incubator blog. This student-run science magazine of Imperial College London has been a successful springboard for new science writers since its launch seven years ago. [more]

Written for Reporter magazine’s Science from Scratch column. An algorithm is a recipe. When following a recipe for a chocolate fudge cake, for example, we carry out an ordered series of actions that takes a set of ingredients – flour, sugar, eggs, chocolate – and produces a cake. [more]

“Oh, God,” Dawkins could be heard to mutter as he fumbled for the full title of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In promoting the discovery-by-Ipsos-MORI that most Christians in this country are not in fact Christian, is the Dawkins road-show is out of touch with its positivist roots? [more]

Book review: Blindsight by Peter Watts. In February 2082, 70 years from now, 65,536 objects enter our atmosphere simultaneously, blanket the Earth in a precise latitudinal / longitudinal grid, emit radio signals for just over a minute, then burn up. This is first contact, this is Firefall. [more]

For Tom Ellis of Imperial College London, biological science and biotechnology are turning into an information science. “Think of the human genome as a vast amount of data”, he says. “Now we’re sequencing the genome of a new organism almost every day.” [more]

“There will be no ghettos here: just amazing, unexpected conversations.” An interview with TEDxImperialCollege host Gareth Mitchell. [more]

Not all cats are created equal. Polydactyly is an anatomical anomaly in which a hand or foot (or paw) has more than the usual number of digits – which is of course five for humans, but five on the front feet, including the dewclaw, and only four on the back for cats. Occasionally, the extra digits can form an entire sub-paw. [more]

Feature written for Develop magazine. I spoke to Mike Cook, from the Computational Creativity group at Imperial College London – which “investigates processes we call creative when we see humans do them and tries to simulate them in AI” – about a future he’s bringing about in which games are designed by machines. [more]

Jaron Lanier is a technological visionary who witnessed the web explode from being the bespoke tool of a niche community into the multi-purpose platform on which everybody does everything. But he believes that “the internet has gone sour”. His book is a manifesto for engineering. [more]

In 2006, two Indian fishermen were killed by indigenous tribesmen when their boat drifted too close to North Sentinel Island. Keen to know more about these isolated islanders, I contacted Michael Stewart, an anthropologist at UCL. “It’s all fantasy, the idea of an uncontacted tribe!” he interrupts, when I broach the subject. [more]

The speed of light is as much a part of popular culture as Chewbacca and Mr Spock. The scandalous suggestion last September that neutrinos had exceeded the universal speed limit captured the popular imagination. But how on earth do you measure the speed of light in the first place? (Written for the excellent Guru magazine.) [more]

From 15 October-8 December 2011 I wrote a weekly column called Punk Planet. I wanted to focus on the do-it-yourself ethic integral to punk scenes worldwide. The common theme is that these are bands of ordinary people who wanted to make music and understood there was nothing to stop them. Read, listen, and then start a band. [more]

Are the tabloids more keen to vilify video games than other papers? Many scare stories originate in science stories reporting findings about the social effects of video games. To get a rough idea how science stories about video games are reported in the UK, I looked at the content of nine UK newspapers over the last year. [more]

New programming languages could lead to advances in synthetic biology. There’s a lot of speculation about where the future of computing lies. But perhaps strangest of all is the future envisioned by the fledgling field of computational biology, which aims to make computational devices out of living cells. [more]

There’s undoubtedly a debate to be had about alcohol, but the Social Issues Research Centre ignores basic chemistry to push a click-bait message. According to Kate Fox, “The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol”. [more]

Cloaking with carbon nanotubes is the latest way to achieve invisibility. By recreating the naturally-occurring effect of a mirage in the lab, researchers have hit upon a way to create cloaking devices that work for visible light, effectively making cloaked objects invisible when viewed from certain angles. [more]

The world lost two giants of technology in as many weeks. News that Dennis Ritchie died on 12 October, after enduring cancer and heart disease for several years, elicited a quiet response. Ritchie was the creator of the C programming language and one of the co-inventors of the Unix OS, which means we live in a world Ritchie helped to invent. [more]

By taking advantage of recent advances in rat genetics, scientists have identified the gene responsible for cardiac hypertrophy – a heavy heart. Endonuclease G, or Endog, is a gene also known to be connected to apoptosis, a form of generally benign cell death that plays a part in processes such as the differentiation of fingers and toes in embryos. [more]

Is published science still skewed a decade after leading medical journals put in place safeguards against sponsorship bias? In the competition for funding, sponsors are often in a position to influence the terms of a trial, “terms that are not always in the best interests of academic investigators, the study participants, or the advancement of science generally”. [more]

Findit players crack the structure of an enzyme that could lead to a breakthrough in AIDS medication. Protein folding is one of the most difficult problems in molecular biology. Nevertheless, puzzle-savvy gamers produced an accurate model of the structure of the enzyme in 10 days, solving a problem that had been taxing researchers for 10 years. [more]

An imagined exchange between four inestimable physicists and one estimable poet, and consisting entirely of found quotations. NIELS: Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real – LOUIS: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think. [more]

Feature written for The Escapist. When I ask Michael Mrozek, aka EvilDragon, what he likes best about the Pandora, the open-source gaming handheld he helped create, he says, “The community.” Not the unit’s 10+ hours of battery life or its beautiful hi-res screen or the amazing amount of homegrown software sprouting up by the day, but the community. [more]

While some of us await free wifi, decade-old technology changes lives in wifi-free parts of the world. In 2001 wireless internet was “still a geek thing, requiring fiddling, configuring and tolerance for imperfections”. But in those days of early adoption, idealistic collectives around the world had a wonderful vision of a shared, openly-available wireless internet. [more]

The trouble started when two labs were unable to replicate the findings. But synthesising an unstable element is no simple endeavour, requiring rare expertise, vastly expensive machinery, and luck. Perhaps these other labs were just being unlucky. [more]

Street lights, traffic lights, and even car headlights could all be co-opted for our many wireless needs. The key importance of Haas’s alternative to Wi-Fi is that it offers a way around the potential bottleneck created by those many millions of laptops, phones and smart-pads all currently clogging up the radio airwaves. [more]

Feature commissioned by The Escapist. Mark Ashelford, a partner at London law firm Lee & Thompson who specializes in rights issues for digital media, likens the current state of the industry to the Wild West. But what happens when a sheriff enforces rules that are self-serving or too stringent, or unfairly refuses the right of reply? [more]

Powerful terms in the system software license agreement for the Sony PlayStation 3 are being brought into play. In the US Sony continues to fight two lawsuits with potentially far-reaching consequences for consumer rights and our intuitions about ownership and private property. [more]