My new essay 'Injury and inhibition', published today on Aeon.co discusses the life and legacy of Phineas Gage, who survived a brain injury in 1848 and went on to become one of the most frequently-cited neuropsychology case studies of all time.

When I started researching my recent BBC essay , one question in the back of my mind was, how am I going to draw a black hole? There aren't exactly a wealth of images of the real thing - just a handful of blurry telescope images to go by: orange doughnuts floating in darkness . But once I got onto the drawing phase of the project I realised this situation actually gave me a great deal of artistic freedom not available in my last illustrated essay (in which I felt a significa

During the 1980s, when I was something less than ten years old, my brother and I auditioned for roles in a stage adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Junglebook. Despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, I was the better actor, my brother was cast in the lead role of Mowgli while I was given a non-speaking role as one of a chorus of monkeys. I understood that my brother seemed more wild. He had a restless energy that he found hard to disguise, he was more energetic, less self

1948 reconstruction of Louis Slotin’s 1946 criticality accident (with physicist Chris Wright posing as Slotin) Last week, after literally months of research and development, my graphic essay ‘The Blue Flash’ was published by BBC Future . Sitting somewhere between web-comic and illustrated essay, I developed the piece after seeing photographs of a reconstruction of Slotin's accident commissioned in 1948 by Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the 'Project Y' bomb develop