I once surprised the staff of a Dordogne museum by seeking a copy of a street poster from the Napoleonic era, a hugely entertaining rant against the "vile" British. Those in authority amply confirm that truth is the first casualty of war. The injury is seldom accidental. Concealing bad news to sustain morale at home, deceiving opposing commanders, and encouraging disaffection in enemy troops or resistance in conquered lands, are [...]

In a churchyard near Stoke-on-Trent lies the grave, overgrown with weeds until it was rescued in 1987, of the missionary doctor Henry Faulds. Faulds (1843-1930) died in poverty, his role in the development of fingerprinting largely unrecognised. Colin Beavan places much of the blame for this neglect on the geneticist, eugenicist and biometrician Francis Galton. The missionary doctor's ideas on the scientific and forensic possibilities of fingerprinting had been drawn [...]

The paper-based learned periodical may have been serving science well for more than 300 years, but it is now under heavy fire. George Bernard Shaw had little time for publishers and believed that you need only authors and booksellers. Many of today's scientists agree. However, some go further, arguing that, in this age of the World Wide Web, booksellers, too, are redundant. You need only authors.

Some academic and [...]

I see that a man called Mutke, who became a gynaecologist, is now claimed to have been the first to break the sound barrier, in a Messerschmitt. But, in any quiz show, except perhaps in Germany, the right answer will be the American "Chuck" Yeager, who achieved the feat in 1947. As so often happens in life's competitions, the perception of having been the first is more important than the [...]

Cause of death: "Asphyxia from blocking of bronchi. Misadventure" (official death certificate), or "Poisoning by nerve gas"(Ministry of Supply court of inquiry)? The death of the 20-year-old RAF serviceman Ronald Maddison, a volunteer at the Chemical Defence Research Establishment, in May 1953, has returned to haunt this secretive unit on Porton Down. Today, Porton is part of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, complete with website and mission statement. Whatever [...]

A couple of years ago, at a dinner in Barcelona, I sat next to an American scientist called Stanley Miller. This was a potentially tricky occasion. Had his name been mentioned the day before, I might have assumed that he was dead; the Miller contributions I recalled were in the 1950s and 1960s. Not a bit of it - Miller is alive and well and still thinking hard about the [...]

How should we remember the 1990s? Well, as the decade of the sheep perhaps. Damien Hirst pickles one, prompting the inquiry: "What is art?" A research team outside Edinburgh clones another, and we all start asking: "What is life?" Dolly is a Finn-Dorset ewe that was delivered in 1996 from a Scottish Blackface surrogate and named after a well-endowed American country and western singer. However, though the cultured cells from [...]

It is the privilege of historians, sporting and medical no less than conventionally academic, to choose their period and the spectacles through which to view it. A book on my shelves declares that the "golden age of cricket" ended, as did so much, in 1914, ignoring any era we might construct around the likes of Hammond, Bradman and the three Ws. James Le Fanu's rose-tinted years, containing his 12 definitive [...]

Giorgione painted La Vecchia around 1509, but how old was his model, or indeed Shakespeare's for the seventh rung of decline into "sans everything"? A woman of 40 during the renaissance and an Elizabethan man of 50 might well have looked ready for one of today's residential homes. The greying of the population scares governments, which are daunted by the health and welfare implications and call, too late, for self-help. [...]