Firefox's open-source evangelists take up arms in a battle of the browsers Wired, May 2010 Between now and late may, 100 million citizens across Europe will boot up their Windows XP and Vista PCs to confront an unfamiliar screen. The "choice screen", as it's officially known, will achieve
The founder of Wired and a former Space Shuttle coder are reverse-engineering chocolate to make the perfect bar Wired, February 2010 It's 4am, and in a silent warehouse on San Francisco's dockside a light goes on and a wall-mounted webcam casts its eye around a cluttered room. To the right there's a desk with
The inventor of the Corpus Clock is in a hurry to get on with other projects Wired, October 2009 By the time you read this, the time-eating grasshopper on top of John Taylor’s Corpus Clock in Cambridge will have notched up 31,536,000 shuffles of its Grade 316 stainless-steel feet. Now celebrating its
A new library lets readers borrow people for a chat. David Baker is a book for a day The Times, 22 April 2008 It was like the school disco all over again. As some unexpected spring sunshine brightened up the Finchley Road last Sunday lunchtime, 15 of us were waiting nervously in a room in
Critics say that male circumcision is unnecessary and barbaric. Advocates claim it has many benefits The Times, 24 March 2008 Barbaric, mutilation, child abuse, freaks, nutters, obsessives. The language on both sides of the debate about infant male circumcision is not always temperate. Put together new-born boys, their penises, knives and two of
In the 1960s they shared Marxism, meals and love. Today's communards are more likely to be sharing profits Financial Times, 7 July 2007 They were the perfect homes for the hippy movement. Loosely structured and easy-going, communes in the late 1960s and early 1970s offered young people shelter, warmth, food and company without any of
David Baker is taught an unexpected lesson at the easternmost point of the Americas Financial Times, 25 November 2006 It was, I guess, with typical laidbackness that Brazil seemed to have lost the Easternmost Point of the Americas. We were driving north from Olinda, just inland from the spectacular north-east Brazilian
Despite a dispiriting experience as a nun, Karen Armstrong is happy to think deeply about God Financial Times, 7 October 2006 Karen Armstrong is on a quest. Not that Britain's most popular writer about religion and spirituality wants everyone to find God. But she is worried that our western, secular world is
Police sirens, thumping music, loud neighbours – noise is no longer 'the forgotten pollutant' Financial Times, 19 August 2006 What noise can you hear right now? Birdsong? The buzzing of an insect against the windowpane? Wind rustling through leaves? Or is it a loud mobile-phone conversation in the street? A police
It took David Baker 40 years to get to Israel, but there he finally found peace Financial Times, 1 April 2006 When I was growing up in the north-east of England in the 1960s, we had a little blue and white collecting tin on the shelf in our hallway. Printed on one side was
