Turning down the heating just 1C in a room can produce significant savings, our energy expert says. Syda Productions/Shutterstock The price of gas and electricity has been increasing sharply on the back of energy shortages. This is mainly due to a squeeze on gas supplies at a time when manufacturing,Continue Reading
Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory When the Nobel Prize-winning US physicist Robert Hofstadter and his team fired highly energetic electrons at a small vial of hydrogen at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1956, they opened the door to a new era of physics. UntilContinue Reading
taffpixture/Shutterstock Lava was still flowing on the surface of the Moon 1.97 billion years ago – and now we have the rocks to prove it. This is the result of new work from an international collaboration of planetary scientists, of which we’re a part, published in the journal Science. TogetherContinue Reading
Courtship behaviour of a male and female hippopotamus in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, showing the larger head and tusk sizes of the adult male on left. Graeme Shannon, Author provided Male hippopotamuses are an unusual size. Among mammals, males are usually much larger than females, but in hippos the sexesContinue Reading
When I recently explained why teaching grammar in primary school still matters, Radio 4’s Today programme invited me to debate the importance of standard English. My opponent was Nevile Gwynne, a British private tutor, author and, as presenter Nick Robinson put it, a “stickler for the right sort of grammar”.Continue Reading
Scientists are still puzzling over the mystery of what makes us conscious. Lidiia/Shutterstock What’s happening in our brains to create consciousness? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we hear from two scientists uncovering clues to this mystery that could help people with severe brain injuries to recover. AndContinue Reading
Giorgio Parisi's work has helped us tease predictable patterns from complexity. Sapienza Università di Roma/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2021 has been jointly awarded to Italy’s Giorgio Parisi, Japan’s Syukuro Manabe and Germany’s Klaus Hasselmann for their “groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems”. WhenContinue Reading
A protest movement founded in Uganda in 2016 has exploded into a 7,000-strong force of eco-feminists to be reckoned withContinue Reading
Kosciech/Shutterstock Sitting by the edge of a river on a lazy summer’s day, the sky is a beautiful blue overhead. Lush greenery crowds the bank. The river is alive: minnows, coots and water voles fuss at the water’s edge. Amid this truly delightful scene, most eye-catching of all are theContinue Reading
For decades, scientists have unsuccessfully tried to prove that zapping the brain can treat depression. The results of an ongoing deep brain stimulation trial hint that it could workContinue Reading
