On Saturday 18 July I'll be at NFT1 on London's South Bank, exploring Kubrick's designs for space travel with Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic, Chris Riley, producer of In the Shadow of the Moon, and Tony Frewin, Kubrick's long-time assistant and author of Are We Alone? The Stanley Kubrick Extraterrestrial Intelligence Interviews.Here's a preview.

Monday 6 July, at 4.30pm, saw the launch of Plushmusic.tv at Wigmore Hall, London.

8 May Lost? Intense historical research bore fruit in Tunnel 228.

4 March Plushmusic.tv's work last year with the Wellcome Collection finally makes it to video. The chap who appears first used to be a cage dancer in Newcastle. No word of a lie.

4-8 February Plushmusic.tv launched in Germany with a five-day music festival in Cologne. I went along to blog the event.

26 November 2008 A round-up of mathematically-minded titles for the Telegraph, from John Barrow's delightfully puzzling 100 Essential Things to Stephen Baker's modish Numerati.

20 November 'To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree...' I collected some wild and wonderful eyes for Nature's Darwin special.

 

13 November I spoke about vision and infinity at Scittorincitta, a science and literature festival held in Cuneo, outside Turin.

8 November On a wet afternoon at the Wellcome Collection, London, I helped wire the cellist Adrian Brendel to the mains. Our live experiment included discussions, films and live performances of music by Bach, Beethoven and Sariaaho.

 

16 October 2008 'In Self’s vision, our livers are more valuable than we are, more able; above all more alive.' The science journal Nature took a punt on this review of Liver, Will Self's staggering new satire.

17 August 2008 Alex Boese is the curator of a splendid on-line museum of hoaxes - museumofhoaxes.com. His compendium of bizarre experiments is funny enough; it's also quite disturbing.

25 July – 1 August Hastings' film festival Shot By The Sea assembled a bizarre fictional audio tour of the town. I got to play in Sidney Little's iconic Thirties car park. Other 'guides' included Chris Petit, Selina Godden and Iain Sinclair.
 

3 July 'What are your children going to be when they grow up? Are they even going to be human?' The Times got me to read the future.

8 June Susan Greenfield knows a lot about prunes and has some unexceptional views about umbrellas, as this review for the Telegraph explains.

18 May How do you write about somebody who isn't there yet? Charles Fernyhough's biography of his daughter covers the first three years of her life. I reviewed it for the Sunday Telegraph, and Fernyhough picked up the discussion on his website.

19 April The Finger Book is John Manning's first stab at an evolutionary history of race. It's vital stuff – but why so poorly expressed?

11 April 'British crime fiction did not grow out of the Saville Kent murder case; it ran away and hid from it.' Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is reviewed in the Telegraph.

'The art of writing popular science is the art of satisfying the curiosity you have piqued.' Michio Kaku's supercilious handwaving really gets my back up in this Times review.

8 April A new series of short avant-garde films which aims to capture the strangeness of seeing reminds us that directors are always playing games with our eyes.

4 April A poem written by the imprisoned Chinese journalist Shi Tao followed the Olympic torch around the globe…

March A consortium led by the University of Plymouth has won a £4.7m grant to teach a humanoid robot named iCub how to speak English. Let's hope it grows into a sociable little thing. The bald fact is, we need him.

February This review of Richard Sennett's The Craftsman appeared in The Times.

When the paperback of The Eye was released, I was interviewed by the Telegraph

My agent Peter Tallack set up the Science Factory: more here

I reviewed Marcus Du Sautoy's book on symmetry for the Independent on Sunday.

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer included an old story of mine, The Braining of Mother Lamprey, in their New Weird anthology.

January A Telegraph review of Natalie Angier's The Canon: the Beautiful Basics of Science.

A Guardian comment piece on iris printing.

2007

September A Telegraph review of two excellent books about numbers: One to Nine by Andrew Hodges and The Tiger that Isn't by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot.

On ABC Radio National's Book Show, Kirsten Garrett talked to me about The Eye: a Natural History.

May Unknown Quantity: a Real and Imagined History of Algebra by John Derbyshire, reviewed for the Telegraph.

March Art and synaesthesia danced around each other in an article for Dazed Digital.

A Guardian comment piece on colour perception.

For the Independent, a short catalogue of visual surprises mentioned in The Eye.