SKEPTICISM IS A VIRTUE: That’s the slogan under which Brill’s Content, the media-watchdog magazine, wages war on bias, cant, and sloppiness in the press. The magazine can be tough on journalists whom ...

A gardener friend of ours used to object to calling a plant by its Latin name. She heard it as pretense and obfuscation. But after the sage incident, she conceded that there was some point to it.

The relevance of taxonomy in our genomic era is greater than ever. Correct naming is crucial for developing new foods and medicines, and for understanding our changing environment. Amazingly, we do ...

Carl Linnaeus developed the Latin two-word system for organising the natural world that is still in use today, writes ENDA O'DOHERTY The botanist Carolus Linnaeus was born Carl Nilsson Linnaeus in ...

For two years in the late 1970s I followed in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus: I toiled in the field of taxonomy. The small corner of nature's jigsaw puzzle that I tackled was a group of marine sponges ...

Taxonomy is the science that attempts to categorise the many millions of species on Earth. Find out how to define taxonomy, what taxonomists do and why classifying life is so important. The definition ...

Classification is a natural human propensity—we organize our clothes, our kitchen cupboards, and our toys. This applies to the natural world, too, where animals and plants are grouped based on ...

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