Philip Ball, The Guardian

Philip Ball

The Guardian

United Kingdom

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Recent:
  • Unknown
Past:
  • The Guardian
  • Prospect Magazine
  • Quanta Magazine
  • CCCB Lab
  • Aeon Magazine
  • Quartz

Past articles by Philip:

John Goodenough obituary

American materials chemist who won the Nobel prize for his role in the invention of the rechargeable lithium battery → Read More

Are human embryo models a cause for hope or alarm?

A recent breakthrough in the race to create ‘synthetic’ embryos has sparked criticism. But the findings could be valuable in understanding miscarriages and genetic disorders → Read More

The big idea: will fusion power save us from the climate crisis?

Recent breakthroughs have been wildly hyped – but there’s still reason to hope → Read More

Imagine you could select your future child based on likely intelligence. Would you?

The possibility of screening embryos for complex inherited traits will force society to profoundly rethink its reproductive ethics → Read More

Three years on, Covid lab-leak theories aren’t going away. This is why

Are they just fringe conspiracies—or could they be something more? → Read More

Immunity debt: does it really exist?

Some claim the rise in winter infections has been caused by the reduction of seasonal bugs during lockdowns. But experts are sceptical about these oversimplified explanations → Read More

Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Quantum Weirdness

Physical-collapse theories have long offered a natural solution to the central mystery of the quantum world. But a series of increasingly precise experiments are making them untenable. → Read More

The space of possible minds

If our experience is limited to our own bodies, how can we think about non-human minds? → Read More

DeepMind has predicted the shape of every protein known to science. How excited should we be?

The AI-based breakthrough, like the sequencing of the human genome, may not turbocharge the development of new drugs as some hope. But as a resource for basic biological research it will be valuable → Read More

Are mRNA vaccines really a “miracle cure”?

Injected into countless arms around the world during Covid, mRNA vaccines are now being lined up to fight cancer and heart disease. So how far can this technology go? → Read More

Animal magic: why intelligence isn’t just for humans

Meet the footballing bees, optimistic pigs and alien-like octopuses that are shaking up how we think about minds → Read More

Physicists Trace the Rise in Entropy to Quantum Information

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information. → Read More

Why your messages could soon be impossible to hack

Quantum cryptography will define how we secure our data in the not-so-distant future → Read More

The virus doesn’t care whether you think the pandemic is over

It’s politically convenient for the government to act like we can fully move on from Covid—but it would be disastrous → Read More

How my book on China and water was censored in China

Authors critical of the government find it a struggle to be published in China without restrictions → Read More

Will we get a single, variant-proof vaccine for Covid?

The goal of a universal vaccine would have seemed a fantasy only a few years ago. But not now… → Read More

Is now the right time to remove all Covid restrictions?

It is probable that all protective measures against coronavirus will be scrapped in England next week. It’s a decision that seems driven more by politics than science → Read More

Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid by Thor Hanson review – how nature is adapting to climate change

Global heating has spurred some peculiar changes in plants and animals from the Caribbean to the Rockies → Read More

The big idea: should animals have the same rights as humans?

Debates about the human-like attributes of animals miss the point. Can we respect them regardless? → Read More

Reaching for military metaphors won’t help Britain learn to live with Covid

There will be no ‘victory’ or ‘armistice day’ – the reality of how pandemics end is far more complicated than that, says the science writer Philip Ball → Read More