Science (Page 205)

As you can imagine, a human intelligence test doesn’t really cut it for birds. It isn’t that easy to assess how an animal perceives information from the environment, processes it and decides to act. But researchers have developed a range of clever experiments to find out more about their cognitiveContinue Reading

bang ridus/Shutterstock More than 40% of the world’s population play video games. But besides being entertaining, digital games are a product. The need to bring in money from players is integral to game design. A popular method of monetising games is through microtransactions. These are repeated, uncapped in-game purchases: forContinue Reading

Hubble: NASA, ESA, and Q.D. Wang (University of Massachusetts, Amherst); Spitzer: NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and S. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/Caltech) The forthcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope offers unprecedented new opportunities for astronomers. It’s also a timely opportunity to reflect on what previous generations of telescopes haveContinue Reading

Glaciers like Antarctica's Byrd Glacier are showing cracks and movement. United States Geological Survey , CC BY-SA The massive Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 65cm if it were to completely collapse. And, worryingly, recent research suggests that its long-term stability isContinue Reading

Julius Csotonyi, Author provided Dinosaur embryos are key to our understanding of how dinosaurs developed. But they’re also very rare. While remains of dinosaur embryos have been discovered occasionally over recent decades, most of them have been incomplete, with the bones dislocated. So the discovery of an almost intact dinosaurContinue Reading

The expedition team will experience physical hardship and the dangers of cold exposure and crevasse falls to obtain rare data. Research stations on the shores of the western Antarctic Peninsula and islands minimise the risk to researchers by focusing on survey sites that can be reached with relatively safe availableContinue Reading

Anton_Ivanov/Shutterstock The legendary German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer once said: “You can plan, but what happens on a football field cannot be predicted.” This sentiment goes a long way to explaining why football is the most popular sport worldwide. Anything can happen on the field, and the more surprising the outcomeContinue Reading

Alexander Limbach/shutterstock Masks have been a common sight all over the world since SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, invaded our lives. We set out to investigate if they work. Our goal was to find out how the virus travels through the air in buildings so we could understand more about theContinue Reading

Pixabay, CC BY-SA Does a lobster feel pain when you pop it in a pot? The UK government asked us to find out. We were commissioned to find out the likelihood of sentience – the capacity to have feelings, such as pain and pleasure – in two groups of invertebrateContinue Reading