Rowan Hooper

“Farming is the most destructive human activity ever to have blighted the Earth.”
Review of George Monbiot's book

I interview primatologist Frans de Waal on his views on gender identity and role in the great apes

Financially speaking, Tesla is a massive success. The question is what will it do with all that money. Rowan Hooper reports on an encounter with Elon Musk

WHAT is it about Sweden and climate campaigners? It has produced Greta Thunberg, of course, but also Andreas Malm, a writer and human ecologist at Lund University and a long-time climate activist. You might think of him as Greta turned up to 11. His controversial new book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to fight in a world on fire, has a deliberately provocative title

Sharing dreams may serve a purpose. A study finds that describing the content of our dreams or nightmares – whether boring or truly bizarre – may function to bond people and groups together, and that listening and responding to the strange content of dreams can increase empathy.

Suzanne Simard was raised in the Monashee mountains in British Columbia, Canada. Her research, beginning with the discovery of the wood wide web, has transformed our understanding of forests. She is now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia.

MOST of us have had that conversation: what would you do if you won the lottery? Pay off the mortgage, quit your job, maybe start a small business doing something you have always dreamed of. But what if you acquired a truly vast fortune – not just a few million but a trillion dollars? And what if you had to spend it on making the world a better place?

The world’s most famous molecule – the DNA double helix – sometimes doubles up again. Researchers have now found this quadruple-stranded form in healthy human cells for the first time

Interview with Christiana Figueres, who led the 2015 Paris Agreement, and her stategist Tom Rivett-Carnac. They tell me why they’re hopeful for the future, and explain how fighting climate change is “the most exciting experiment in history”

Sleep and dreams in the time of covid

My review of Alex Garland’s beautiful and intelligent quantum drama

Two pieces by me: (1) What is consciousness, and (2) Are smarter people’s brains different?

What – one vast, ancient and mysterious universe isn’t enough for you?

Startling and chilling discovery from the beaches around Hiroshima

Japan has a reputation for modernity, but in whaling, it is desperately out of date