
on the origins of smell
I am old enough to remember when olfactory receptors were discovered, and have written about them a fair few times since then (heck I even h...

let's celebrate trees
My last feature of the year is a seasonal offering with the radical suggestion that we should celebrate old trees growing in their natural e...

brown algae and blue carbon
There is another COP climate summit coming up this week, and to fend off the evil spirits of fossil fuel dependency I've written another cli...

flapping pterosaurs
Today's issue of Current Biology is a special theme issue on physics and biology, so there's lots of exciting stuff there from this particu...

a whale of a tale
The rise of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) to become the dominating megafauna of the oceans happened remarkably quickly, within only 50 mil...

dodo and company
Here in Oxford we feel a special cultural connection to the dodo ( Raphus cucullatus ) - seeing that an important specimen of the extinct s...