St Mary’s church Totnes will be hosting a Come and Do Science event at 6.00 pm on Thursday November 16th in conjunction with the regular ‘Unity in Diversity’ inter-faith gathering. In this hands-on experience, attendees will get to see for themselves the kinds of scientific experiments which show that churchContinue Reading
There are very few wildcats like this one left in their natural habitat in Scotland. Mark Bridger You are unlikely to have seen one, but wildcats are still clinging on by a claw in Scotland. Most of the cats living in the wild in Scotland are hybrid cats with aContinue Reading
Sergey Mironov/Shutterstock Since their inception in the 1940s, the so-called forever chemicals have woven themselves into the fabric of our modern world. But recently, they’ve been appearing in alarming news headlines about their damaging effects on our health. PFAS have, in fact, come under intense scrutiny due to new researchContinue Reading
Deemerwha studio / Shutterstock The significant risks that AI poses to global security are becoming clearer. That’s partly why UK prime minister Rishi Sunak is hosting other world leaders at the AI Safety summit on November 1-2 at the famous second world war code-breaking site Bletchley Park. Yet while theContinue Reading
R. Classen / Shutterstock AI chatbots are already widely used by businesses to greet customers and answer their questions – either over the phone or on websites. Some companies have found that they can, to some extent, replace humans with machines in call centre roles. However, the available evidence suggestsContinue Reading
fizkes/Shutterstock If you’ve read much about psychology or evolution, it’s easy to get the idea that humans are hardwired to act as if the world revolves around themselves. But my team’s new study joins a growing body of research showing that humans are highly attuned to other people and whatContinue Reading
Social media platforms have been implicated in conflicts of all scales, from urban gun violence to the storming of the US Capitol building on January 6 and civil war in South Sudan. Scientifically, it is difficult to tell how much social media can be blamed for one-off incidents. But inContinue Reading
Visitors to a Ukrainian news website on the evening of February 18 2022, were greeted by a familiar sight, a video of their president giving a speech. While the resemblance was there, the face seemed slightly out of sync with the head of the Ukrainian president. In the video, VolodymyrContinue Reading
Sleep tight… Dr Richard Naylor, CC BY-SA Bed bugs have recently exploded into the limelight amid widespread reports of a major outbreak in Paris. The more people share photos of bed bug bites on social media, the more concerned we feel. That’s understandable, but the really worrying thing is theContinue Reading
Juan Gaertner/Shutterstock The first-line pharmacological treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD) are antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs). But a significant proportion of people don’t respond to these drugs. Given that major depression is a global mental health problem that is on the increase, it is importantContinue Reading
