saved articles

Preface There are many books about what life does. This is a book about what life is. I’m fascinated by what makes organisms tick, what enables living matter to do such astounding things – things beyond the reach of non-living matter. Where does the difference come from? Even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so amazing, so dazzling, that no human engineer can match it. Life looks like magic, its secrets cloaked by a shroud of impenetrable complexity. Huge advances in biology over the past decades have served only to deepen the mystery. What gives living things that enigmatic oomph that sets them apart from other physical systems as remarkable and special? And where did all this specialness come from in the first place? That’s a lot of questions – big questions too. I’ve been preoccupied with them for much of my working life. I’m not a biologist, I’m a physicist and cosmologist, so my approach to tackling big questions is to dodge most of the technicalities and home in on the...

Boris Johnson has pledged that the UK will break free of EU state aid rules after Brexit to make it easier to prop up ailing industries, in a move that is aimed at winning over Labour voters but could make it harder to secure a trade deal with Brussels. The prime minister set out proposals yesterday to make it “faster and easier” for a government to intervene in failing industries after the UK leaves the EU, with officials saying it would allow “extremely rapid responses to economic turbulence”. Mr Johnson’s assertion that Brexit would allow Britain to adopt looser state aid rules marks an abrupt change for a politician who has spent most of career — in politics and journalism — fulminating against supposed statist tendencies in Brussels. It also dismayed rightwingers who argue that leaving the EU would allow Britain to move in a more free-market direction. The Institute of Economic Affairs think-tank accused the Tories of paying “lip service” to “free markets and free enterpris...

Last week, Louis Bacon decided to call it quits. After three decades at the top of the hedge fund industry, Mr Bacon’s decision to close Moore Capital Management to outside money is understandable — but nonetheless symbolic of how difficult “global macro” hedge funds such as Moore have found the past decade. Many traders that once profited handsomely from big, bold bets on seismic economic trends have lately struggled to live up to the reputations they forged in the 1990s. As if to hammer the point home, Stone Milliner Asset Management, a $3bn macro hedge fund established by Bacon acolytes, last week also told clients it was winding down, according to Bloomberg. This followed the closure of other prominent macro funds, such as those managed by John Burbank’s Passport Capital and Hugh Hendry’s Eclectica. The hedge fund industry as a whole is facing headwinds with performance stuttering, investor money seeping out and closures on track to outpace new launches for a fifth year in ...