On Saturday, to coincide with the Queen’s official birthday, we learned the names of the hundreds of people newly admitted to the Order of the British Empire. Many of them are already household names, like Prue Leith, now a Dame, and footballers Raheem Sterling and Jordan Henderson, now both MBEs. The past few honours lists […]
The UK government recently announced an £800 million, taxpayer-funded Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria). The brainchild of the British prime minister’s former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings and modelled on the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Darpa, the organisation will focus partly on genomic research. Genome technology is becoming an increasingly important part of […]
Consistency has never been one of Boris Johnson’s biggest strengths. Take Research and Development funding: Johnson wants to double the Government’s science budget over the next few years to some £22 billion a year, committing Britain to spending 2.4% of GDP on science. This will, to quote the newly published Integrated Review, secure our status […]
Back in March 2019 Dominic Cummings wrote in a blog: We KNOW how effective the very unusual funding for computer science was in the 1960s/1970s—ARPA-PARC created the internet and personal computing … Never has Boris Johnson’s former adviser been more wrong. In fact, ARPA was born of US government failure and it begat only […]
George Monbiot demands that we start censoring George Monbiot. That really should be the conclusion of the Guardian columnist’s latest salvo, in which he argues, apropos of Covid, that “spreading only the most dangerous falsehoods…should be prohibited”. The problem for George’s argument is that a little bit of censorship is like a little bit of […]
News of yet another government consultation would ordinarily provoke little more than eye-rolling. When it comes to gene editing, however, it could be the start of something truly exciting. And if, as he has hinted, the Environment Secretary does decide to adopt a more liberal regulatory regime for the UK, that would certainly be no […]
Just two years ago, when the ASI published our report ‘Don’t Have a Cow, Man’ on the potential for lab-grown meat, one reader suggested the authors were portraying “a sci-fi world”. Yesterday, that world became a reality as Singapore approved cultured chicken meat for sale. The importance of this development cannot be overstated. It knocks […]
Another day, another pointless Twitter storm. This time the subject of online ire was a government campaign to encourage people to pursue careers in Cyber Security. Alongside a young woman in a ballet costume, the text of one ad read “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber. (She just doesn’t know it yet)”. It prompted […]
It can be frustrating to watch the non-scientists who run our government being deferential to scientists who seem to have less than a full understanding of statistics. Possible approaches for mitigating the coronavirus are passed by, often it seems as a result of a lack of statistical training, most often a lack of understanding of […]
The Integrated Review – the biggest review of our foreign, defence, security and development policy since the end of the Cold War – will help define the UK’s place in the world for the next decade. It’s an opportunity to prioritise the assets that give Britain a competitive advantage – its global connectivity, its world-class […]
If recent months have shown us anything it is the British state could barely organise a booze up in a brewery. On paper, Britain was the best prepared nation in the world for a pandemic. In practice, Public Health England failed to ramp up testing in time after rebuffing offers from the private sector. The NHS […]
That many scientific fields are rife with error, bias and outright fraud may be unsurprising given the succession of news stories about prominent psychologists faking results and pop-psychology gurus fooling gullible Conservative politicians into ‘power posing’ at party conferences. But Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science, published this month, […]
A few months ago, most people had never heard of the R number. Now, thanks to the novel coronavirus, we all know – or think we know – what it means. R is the reproduction number of an infectious disease – basically how many people one infected person will transmit the disease to. For highly […]
For critics of this government, news that Dominic Cummings attended meetings of a key scientific advisory panel was a smoking gun – proof that coronavirus policy was being guided by vulgar politics, rather than the considered views of the experts. In truth, a senior government advisor attending such a meeting during the greatest crisis in […]
Over 80 COVID-19 vaccine trials are currently underway. If one or more of the vaccines eventually makes it to market, how should it be used to stop or even eradicate the virus? You might think the obvious answer would be to vaccinate everyone, but that is neither practical nor feasible. Vaccination has often been used […]
With coronavirus splashed across the world news, science and its role in policy-making has been thrust into the spotlight. We should use this spotlight to examine the science behind other parts of our life: namely the environment and agriculture regulation. Though it seems like eons ago, there was a time when Brexit and the UK’s […]
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