Tim Radford (science writer)

"Between 1980 and 2005, I commissioned working scientists to write for The Guardian newspaper — from astronomers royal to impoverished doctoral students — and almost all of them delivered high-standard, well-focused newspaper prose and many of them went on to live by the pen. I also encountered distinguished scientists who had already become literary stars. One was the astronomer Carl Sagan, who told me that his literary hero was Thomas Henry Huxley. Another was the industrial chemist, poet and writer Primo Levi, who when I tried to ask him about the Two Cultures debate — the apparent divide between the humanities and sciences — gently reminded me that Dante Alighieri (himself the subject of at least one paper in Nature), was a member of the Florentine guild of physicians and apothecaries. And a third was the Czech poet and dissident , who wrote his occasional Guardian column in English, and asked that at the end of each I describe him as the author of Immunology of Nude Mice (1989). All three were better writers than most writers: two will still be famous as writers a century from now."

"Modern European and Asian people may owe more than skin or hair colour to ancestry. 50,000 years ago between two species of human may also have bequeathed a sunburn hazard called , to , and a greater risk of . That the forebears of modern ‘’’’ and the long-extinct Neanderthals lived side by side is well known: that they interbred, and that up to 4% of modern human DNA is inherited from the first Europeans, was confirmed only in 2010."

"Far below the , between Israel, Jordan and , researchers have found evidence of a that has no precedent in human experience. From depths of 300 metres below the landlocked basin, drillers brought to the surface a core that contained 30 metres of thick, crystalline salt: evidence that 120,000 years ago, and again about 10,000 years ago, had been only about one fifth of modern levels. The cause in each case would have been entirely natural. But in the region where human civilisation began, already in the grip of its worst drought for 900 years, it is a reminder of how bad things could get and a guide to how much worse human-induced climate change could become."