Tom Chivers

Tom Chivers is a science writer. His second book, How to Read Numbers, is out now.

@TomChivers

The danger of convicting with statistics

28 May 2024

Climate science is making you miserable

11 Apr 2024

We wouldn’t want Oppenheimer today

21 Jul 2023

Is it worth vaccinating children?

25 Jan 2022

How long can humans survive?

17 Jan 2022

The progressive way to boost birth rates The UK population is forecast once again to decline — but it needn't happen

14 Jan 2022

It’s time to end mandatory isolation

11 Jan 2022

Repeat after me: Covid doesn’t spread on surfaces Will we ever move beyond outdated advice?

10 Jan 2022

Is the pandemic over?

05 Jan 2022

How not to talk to a science denier

30 Dec 2021

The world’s most powerful space telescope is finally launching After a 30-year wait, the James Webb Space Telescope is heading to space

24 Dec 2021

How many lives has bioethics cost?

23 Dec 2021

Millions of adults can’t be boostered The aim of jabbing everyone by the new year has been doomed from the start

16 Dec 2021

Britain’s booster plan won’t work

14 Dec 2021

New Zealand’s smoking ban will backfire Making it illegal to sell cigarettes to future generations will create a black market

09 Dec 2021

Trans counselling is not conversion therapy

07 Dec 2021

Should Big Pharma be destroyed?

04 Dec 2021

The good news about the Omicron variant

29 Nov 2021

Has the UK reached herd immunity? Professor Neil Ferguson believes we are almost there

25 Nov 2021

Is the WHO inventing diseases?

24 Nov 2021

The genius of John von Neumann

16 Nov 2021

Increasing MPs salaries is a good bet If it stands a chance of increasing the quality of candidates, what is there to lose?

12 Nov 2021

There is no spiking epidemic

09 Nov 2021

The Lib Dems are deluded on the environment Nuclear is the only way they could achieve their ambitious climate goals

04 Nov 2021

The great climate change fallacy

02 Nov 2021

Red tape will cause more Covid deaths Why can't western countries cooperate more on vaccines?

28 Oct 2021

We can escape Christmas lockdown

26 Oct 2021

Why the West should keep buying cheap crap It isn't that bad for the environment and it benefits poorer countries

21 Oct 2021

Why Prevent will never work

19 Oct 2021

Prince William is wrong: let Bezos go to space! The $7 billion invested in Blue Origin is money well spent

14 Oct 2021

The men who failed Britain

13 Oct 2021

PCRs are not as reliable as you might think Government policy on testing is worryingly misleading

07 Oct 2021

There will always be bad men in the police

06 Oct 2021

Robots are teaching us how humans think AI is revealing how our own brains work

30 Sep 2021

How to solve the fuel crisis

28 Sep 2021

If you have a cough, what are the odds it’s Covid? Coronavirus symptoms overlap heavily with those of colds and flu

23 Sep 2021

Are diet pills immoral?

21 Sep 2021

Scrapping SATs will not reduce racial inequality The alternatives are even more biased

16 Sep 2021

Are we heading for another winter lockdown?

14 Sep 2021

At last — a system to make flying guilt free Thanks to new technology climate apocalypse doesn't have to be our future

13 Sep 2021

The Left’s science denial

07 Sep 2021

The right way to look at the Bangladesh mask study The evidence isn't conclusive, but then again it rarely is

03 Sep 2021

How not to talk to a science denier

31 Aug 2021

NICE has created an ‘unholy mess’ Inside sources tell me why the body's new ME guidelines were delayed

26 Aug 2021

What we’re not being told about ME

25 Aug 2021

The beautiful world of heavy metal

18 Aug 2021

Don’t let your beliefs become your identity A clumsy statement by Yanis Varoufakis reveals the dangers of tribalism

17 Aug 2021

Who would kill children to save the planet?

13 Aug 2021

Do racist Euros tweets tell us anything about the UK? The information provided by Twitter is meaningless

11 Aug 2021

Can we trust the climate scientists?

26 Jul 2021

Why did we give up on AstraZeneca?

20 Jul 2021

Is the world finally going to banish malaria? Relatively small investment could save a huge number of lives

14 Jul 2021

What Warhammer taught me about football

13 Jul 2021

Are scientists inching closer to a cure for genetic diseases? A new study offers cause for optimism

08 Jul 2021

Will China invade Taiwan?

06 Jul 2021

How a single meeting in Oxford saved millions of lives The Nuffield Department of Medicine has had an outsized impact

01 Jul 2021

Why is bestiality so disgusting?

29 Jun 2021

Ivermectin: life saver or time waster? Scientific consensus has been wrong in the past, so it's worth exploring

24 Jun 2021

Are Twitter trolls mentally ill?

23 Jun 2021

Hot weather leads to more crime and murder — but why? Observers can't seem to agree

18 Jun 2021

Why third jabs are inevitable

15 Jun 2021

Don’t take university rankings too seriously They're a classic case of Goodhart's law — the metrics are easily gamed

10 Jun 2021

Who will save humanity?

08 Jun 2021

The WHO’s opposition to vaping could cost millions of lives Awarding ministers for banning e-cigarettes is incredibly dangerous

02 Jun 2021

The science of bullshit

01 Jun 2021

Does leaded petrol cause crime? It was a quirky theory for many years — but now the data is in

28 May 2021

Can Dominic Cummings read the room?

25 May 2021

Social psychology nearly ruined my favourite film Fight Club's not the same when you know 'subliminal advertising' doesn't work

21 May 2021

Who isn’t getting vaccinated?

18 May 2021

The digital world won’t harm you A new study suggests the dangers of new technologies are overblown

13 May 2021

Will science survive politics?

11 May 2021

Waiving the vaccine IP is a huge blunder This decision won’t do much good and could actually be harmful

06 May 2021

Have we seen the end of Covid?

05 May 2021

How to be a Young Earth creationist in 2021 The frontrunner for the DUP leadership can learn from past examples

30 Apr 2021

We could end India’s Covid nightmare

27 Apr 2021

Will social psychology ever clean up its act? Too many famous findings in the field have turned out to be rubbish

23 Apr 2021

The joy of magic mushrooms

21 Apr 2021

On the AstraZeneca jab, I may have been wrong about Europe The risk is tiny, but there could be a link between the vaccine and blood clots

08 Apr 2021

Nobody will win the Culture Wars

07 Apr 2021

It’s a techbro’s world now — we just live in it Laugh at them all you like, but the most exciting advances are occurring in Silicon Valley

01 Apr 2021

How racist are Britain’s schools?

01 Apr 2021

The US-AstraZeneca vaccine spat will cost lives What is the point in decreasing public confidence in a safe vaccine?

24 Mar 2021

The cost of vaccine caution

23 Mar 2021

How far are we from World War III? The Government's new defence review contains some startling predictions

17 Mar 2021

How safe is the AstraZeneca jab?

16 Mar 2021

Why don’t women feel safe?

13 Mar 2021

The Fukushima ‘disaster’ was hardly worth the name The reaction to it was the real catastrophe

12 Mar 2021

Will we pass the Boris roadmap tests?

10 Mar 2021

No, social media is not as bad as heroin A wild claim made in the New Statesman doesn't check out

05 Mar 2021

Don’t worry about your sperm count

03 Mar 2021

A second helping of Eat Out to Help Out? Don’t make me sick! It is a backwards, overcomplicated way to subsidise the restaurant industry

25 Feb 2021

Should we vaccinate children?

23 Feb 2021

Let’s face it: Test, Trace and Isolate was an expensive failure £22 billion was made available — so where are the results?

18 Feb 2021

When did we give up on persuasion?

16 Feb 2021

Are we seeing a vaccine effect already? We can look to Israel for clues

12 Feb 2021

How worrying is the South Africa variant?

09 Feb 2021

Should we be vaccinating young people first? Prioritising 'quality-adjusted life years' over lives saved would change everything

04 Feb 2021

Can the vaccine keep up with the Covid variants?

03 Feb 2021

Kate Bingham saved vaccines when Europe couldn’t It's best to avoid criticising someone when they're right

29 Jan 2021