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Oh, starboard your helm! This time it could be the big one. Fire on the Amazon, fire in Siberia, a dome of heat above the American west and wildfire surging below – too often we close our minds to events that seem far away. But something may be stirring much closer to home. Scottish winters are warmer than they

Time, the deer is in the Wood of Hallaig. Hallaig by Sorley MacLean is on one level about the clearance of people from the land of which they were a part. At another level it is a poem about the nature of Time. ‘Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig’ ‘Time, the deer is in

There are two fundamentally different ways of picturing the world around us. One is as a collection of objects – and we learn from our earliest moments that we are surrounded by things that we pick up or bump into. But an alternative approach is to see the world as formed out of processes – actions and experiences. We switch focus from the

Whenever the poet George Mackay Brown reorganised his library, getting rid of some of the overspill, some books from younger years would always remain. There was the first Penguin book from 1935, a biography of Shelley by André Maurois; and Penguin number 3, Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater. And there was also a book on cosmology, published in Pelican

New DNA results on Scots ancestry reopen a century-old theory about a North African language connection. The Scotland’s DNA project has found that no less than 1% of the Scots tested carry a genetic marker which originated in North Africa. The researchers say that the gene, common today amongst the Berber and Tuareg people, is estimated to have originated

Erik Demaine never went to school very often: his longest stint there was a month in Miami Beach. He spent his young years travelling throughout the United States with his father, an artist from Halifax in Nova Scotia, who sold work at craft shows and taught his son for one hour a day from home-school instruction manuals. When Erik