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My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:

A new study by Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues has modeled the emergence of “nice” behavior in idealized human beings. It’s done by computer, using the famous “prisoner’s dilemma” game, in which a prisoner has to decide between cooperating with a comrade to get a mutual reward or avoiding a punishment by being the first of the two to defect to the other side. The Zurich team found that so long as players in the game stay near their (modeled) parents, the birth of a nice guy predisposed to cooperate can trigger “a cascade” of generous acts.

This is a version of an article I published in The Times on 27 March:

The east wind could cut tungsten; the daffodils are weeks behind; the first chiffchaffs are late. It’s a cold spring and the two things everybody seems to agree upon are that there’s something weird about the weather, and it’s our fault. Both are almost certainly wrong.

I have published the following article in the Newcastle Journal (paywalled) today:

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:

Obsidian was once one of humankind's most sought-after materials, the "rich man's flint" of the stone-age world. This black volcanic glass fragments into lethally sharp, tough blades that, even after the invention of bronze, made it literally a cutting-edge technology.

Because sources of obsidian are few and far between, obsidian artifacts are considered some of the earliest evidence of commerce: Long-distance movement of obsidian, even hundreds of thousands of years ago, suggests the early stirring of true trade.

I have the following article in the Times on 15 March:

Move over shale gas, here comes methane hydrate. (Perhaps.) On Tuesday the Japanese government’s drilling ship Chikyu started flaring off gas from a hole drilled into a solid deposit of methane and ice, 300 metres beneath the seabed under 1000 metres of water, 30 miles off the Japanese coast.

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on the prospect of de-extinction, especially the passenger pigeon.

Extinct species are gone forever. Or are they? For some time now the dream of re-creating something like a mammoth from its DNA has been floating about on the fringes of the scientific world (and in movies like "Jurassic Park") without being taken seriously.