We like to think of sea otters as cute but they can be aggressive. rbrown10/Shutterstock Surfers often talk about how the sport helps them reconnect with nature, but a recent episode involving an otter with a love for surfboards shows just how brittle our love for wildlife really is. TheContinue Reading
Es sarawuth/Shutterstock Something has to change. Politicians and environmental organisations have invested millions trying to influence people’s behaviour and tackle the climate crisis. But it’s not working. No G20 country is on track to meet their climate goals. So instead, researchers are turning their attention to the link between people’sContinue Reading
calzone.photography/Shutterstock Can our brains sense electromagnetic waves? – Taye, aged 10, London Electromagnetic waves are packets of energy travelling all around us. Some of these waves have lots of energy, and some have less. We call the lowest energy electromagnetic waves radio waves. There’s a good chance radio waves areContinue Reading
We've all been there… Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock Have you ever tried to build IKEA furniture with your partner only for it to go horribly wrong? How about planning a wedding or other big party and realising you have wildly different visions of the event? In my research, I investigate whatContinue Reading
AI has major potential in medical diagnostics. Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock Since the AI chatbot ChatGPT was released in 2020, we’ve been hearing about the threat posed by artificial intelligence. A statement signed by academic experts and tech industry figures even branded AI an “extinction risk”. But whatever you think ofContinue Reading
Michael Vi / Shutterstock Elon Musk is no stranger to highly competitive markets in which you take advantage of a competitor’s weakness. For once, he is on the receiving end as Meta launches its microblogging platform Threads to take advantage of his difficulties at Twitter. Twitter, in effect, has beenContinue Reading
Ascannio / Shutterstock Mark Zuckerberg’s new social media platform, Threads, has been released in smartphone app stores (although not in the EU). Zuckerberg, who is chief executive of Threads’ parent company Meta, says that at least 30 million users signed up in the app’s first day. According to some speculativeContinue Reading
Anybody out there? Triff/Shutterstock, CC BY-SA Avi Loeb, a physicist from Harvard University in the US, has recovered 50 tiny spherical iron fragments from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that he claims may be material from an interstellar alien spaceship. Loeb is linking his finding with the passage ofContinue Reading
Jeanette Virginia Goh/Shutterstock Early childhood is a critical period for brain development, which is important for boosting cognition and mental wellbeing. Good brain health at this age is directly linked to better mental heath, cognition and educational attainment in adolescence and adulthood. It can also provide resilience in times ofContinue Reading
Flies which feast on blood – such as tsetse and horse flies – inflict painful bites and spread debilitating diseases among people and animals alike. So a lot of work has gone into designing the most efficient traps to control the populations of these flies. Biting fly traps tend toContinue Reading
