Well, it’s been a long road since I raced the dinosaurs at a New Year’s Day parkrun. I’ve managed various niggles (knee, ...

Dick and Mac are content with their lives: they enjoy making burgers by day and stargazing by night. Ray Kroc is a workaholic chasing success at any cost. When the brothers’ folksy charm ...

Until the 1960s, women couldn’t compete in Olympic events any longer than a sprint – and commentators declared that a marathon would kill them, or leave them unable to have children.

Bobby Bonilla is known to baseball fans of a certain age as one of the best batters in the sport back in the 1980s and 90s. To grumpy fans of the New York Mets, he is known as the man who fooled ...

Among the many steps along the road to high-performance AI, one of the most important was taken in 2007 by Fei-Fei Li, then an assistant professor in Princeton’s computer science department. Using ...

On 26 April, I plan to be on the start line of the London Marathon. I’m in my fifties, I’ve only been running for a few years, and this will be my first marathon. I’m doing it to raise money for the ...

Comrade Lysenko has seized control of Soviet agriculture with his radical ideas about genetics. He disdains traditional scientists who learn everything from books and nothing from the land, and ...

In a column in January about the paradox of work, I recalled the immortal Douglas Adams joke about working conditions: the hours are good, but “most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy”. The joke ...

In November 1979, Flight 901 departs New Zealand on a sightseeing journey over Antarctica, heading directly towards a volcano. When the plane vanishes, investigators are left with a mystery: how could ...

As the Victorian era dawns, modernisation erodes the old ways of life and poverty rises. In the unrest, an unlikely hero emerges, capturing the imagination of the countryside’s working class. He ...

One of the most famous experiments in social psychology took place in the early 1950s. Solomon Asch, a professor at Swarthmore College, gathered together groups of young men for what he told them was ...