Kit Yates's Blog

Every six weeks or so I am invited along to appear up on Radio 4’s Inside Science as the “presenter’s friend”, bringing along a couple of stories that have caught my eye and reacting to some of the other science news of the week. I’ve decided to write up some of this week’s stories into a substack post so you can enjoy them even if you missed the show. This week’s appearance turned into something of a mathematical extravaganza, featuring monkeys that can do maths and machines that can do maths t...

The greatest cycle race in the world completed its 113th edition yesterday in Paris. Even people who do not follow the Tour will be familiar with the iconic and much coveted maillot jaune (yellow jersey), the prize for the cyclist who finishes the three-week race quickest. And yesterday Slovenian Tadej Pogačar wrote his name into the history books by winning his ffith Tour de France to equal the all-time record, wearing yellow from day three all the way to the Champs-Élysées.

But from a mathemati...

It has been called the most extraordinary game of football ever played. Yet there was no global audience that comes with the World Cup Finals, there was no league title or famous trophy on the line and there was no fierce local rivalry to add an edge to the game. Instead, this extraordinary match was a round-robin game between Barbados and Grenada in qualifying for 1994’s Caribbean Cup.

Barbados looked to be cruising to a 2-0 until the 83rd minute when Grenada pulled one back. Upon the restart Ba...

It’s the World Cup. I’ve come back home to Manchester to visit my dad and to watch an England World Cup game with him one more time. Despite all the bullshit surrounding pricing, location, climate, exploitation – all the things that have tarnished the veneer of what should be one of the greatest sporting spectacles on Earth, the young boy in me can’t help but get excited. Every four years, the tournament brings back memories of the very first World Cup I was e...

Whether it’s football stickers in the UK or baseball stickers in the US, kids have been buying, coveting, trading, swapping and sharing collectibles of their favourite sports icons for decades. With the arrival of the World Cup comes the excitement of a new sticker book to complete and the expectation that every new packet of stickers purchased will fill in gaps in the album, taking you one step closer to completion.

But as the tournament progresses and your collection grows, it seems harder and ...

The last ten days have been a bit of a busy/surreal for me, so I thought I’d write a summary of everything I’ve been up to.

The main thing that’s been going on is that my new book, You don’t Know What You’re Missing, came out last Thursday (04/06). On Wednesday I went down to Old Broadcasting House in London to record an episode of BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind (with the excellent Claudia Hammond), about the more psychological aspects of the book. That episode comes out in a couple of weeks, so i...

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Ahead of the men’s Football World Cup in a few days, former England captain Kevin Keegan shared the news that he had been diagnosed with cancer. While much of the focus on the reporting of the news has rightly been on how the footballing world has rallied around the former Liverpool and Newcastle great, there is an interesting lesson to be learned from the way in which Keegan’s cancer was discovered.

Keegan was in a ...

It’s publication day, and this is the final post in this short series summarising the chapters of my new book, You Don’t Know What You’re M ss ng. The aim has been to give you a sense of the shape of the argument, the kinds of stories I use in the book, and the ideas I hope will stay with you after you’ve finished it.

In this post I’m going to summarise Chapter 7, The silence that speaks.

Buy the book

“Shape clay into a vessel. It is the space within that makes it useful.” - Lao Tzu

This final chapt...

Today is the penultimate of the short series of posts I’m writing for this Substack summarising the chapters of my new book, You Don’t Know What You’re M ss ng, ahead of publication later this week (4th June). If you’ve been enjoying them, then take heart because the book is almost here. If not then take heart because this series of posts is almost over! Either way the aim is to give you a feel for the shape of the argument, the kinds of stories I use in the book to get the message across, and t...

In May 1845, two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, set sail from England under the command of Sir John Franklin, carrying 129 officers and crew on a mission to chart the last unknown stretch of the Northwest Passage. Instead, it became one of the great disasters in the history of polar travel. Within little more than a year, the ships were locked fast in Arctic ice in the vicinity of King William Island, where they remained trapped through successive winters. Franklin himself died in 184...