Could God travel faster than the speed of light? robert_s/Shutterstock I still believed in God (I am now an atheist) when I heard the following question at a seminar, first posed by Einstein, and was stunned by its elegance and depth: ‘If there is a God who created the entireContinue Reading
How the brains of people with extreme views work. Aexandros Michailidis The characteristics of peoples’ brains might offer clues about the political beliefs they hold dear. In a study of around 350 US citizens, we examined the relationship between individuals’ cognitive traits – the unconscious ways in which their brainsContinue Reading
mundissima/Alamy Stock Photo, CC BY-NC Facebook’s recent decision to block its Australian users from sharing or viewing news content has provoked a worldwide backlash and accusations of hubris and bullying. The row has also exposed the fragility of Facebook’s founding myth: that Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild is a force for good,Continue Reading
Rost9/Shutterstock When President Bill Clinton took to a White House lectern 20 years ago to announce that the human genome sequence had been completed, he hailed the breakthrough as “the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind”. The scientific achievement was placed on par with the moon landings.Continue Reading
Shutterstock/Chendongshan There’s an old stereotype about the difference between cats and dogs. Dogs are loving and fiercely loyal, they say, while cats are aloof and indifferent. Most cat people probably disagree – I certainly find it hard to believe, with my cat purring away in my lap, that she doesn’tContinue Reading
A prototype of our novel plasma-based particle accelerator EuPRAXIA Conceptual Design Report In 2010, when scientists were preparing to smash the first particles together within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), sections of the media fantasised that the EU-wide experiment might create a black hole that could swallow and destroy ourContinue Reading
Artist's impression of 'Oumuamua. ESO/M. Kornmesser , CC BY-SA A highly unusual object was spotted travelling through the solar system in 2017. Given a Hawaiian name,ʻOumuamua, it was small and elongated – a few hundred metres by a few tens of meters, travelling at a speed fast enough to escapeContinue Reading
Inna Bigun/Shutterstock Once, holograms were just a scientific curiosity. But thanks to the rapid development of lasers, they have gradually moved centre stage, appearing on the security imagery for credit cards and bank notes, in science fiction movies – most memorably Star Wars – and even “live” on stage whenContinue Reading
Current view of the steppe mammoth, an ancestor to the woolly mammoth. Beth Zaiken/Centre for Palaeogenetics, Author provided Most people think of mammoths as the iconic woolly species from the last Ice Age, which ended around 12,000 years ago. But mammoths originated in Africa around 5 million years ago, thenContinue Reading
Future astronauts will visit Mars. Shutterstock/Vadim Sadovski For the first time in 11 years, the European Space Agency (Esa) is recruiting new astronauts. Applications will open on the 31 March 2021 for eight weeks, followed by a six-stage selection process to identify the next generation of European astronauts. By 2030,Continue Reading
