Tributes paid to journalist remembered for infectious enthusiasm for science and talent for turning a phrase

Tim Radford, the Guardian’s former science editor and mentor to a generation of writers who followed in his footsteps, has died aged 84.

His reporting covered a breadth of topics from genetically modified crops and the environmental impact of greenhouse gases to the arrival of cloned animals and the discovery of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein a century earlier.