In March 2020, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, presented to the nation a graph showing “the shape of an epidemic”. The red line depicting the number of predicted COVID cases rose to a steep peak before falling again. Vallance explained that delaying and reducing the height ofContinue Reading
Visualising wealth and poverty through AI. Authors, CC BY-SA To most effectively deliver aid to alleviate poverty, you have to know where the people most in need are. In many countries, this is often done with household surveys. But these are usually infrequent and cover limited locations. Recent advances inContinue Reading
SciePro / Shutterstock Alan Turing might be best known for his work helping to crack Germany’s “Enigma” communications code during the second world war. But he also came up with a theory where patterns can form just through chemical compounds spreading out (diffusing) and reacting with one another. This becameContinue Reading
Smit/Shutterstock Honeybees in man-made hives may have been suffering the cold unnecessarily for over a century because commercial hive designs are based on erroneous science, my new research shows. For 119 years, a belief that the way honeybees cluster together gives them a kind of evolutionary insulation has been fundamentalContinue Reading
The padlock icon which appears in most internet browser address bars. Robert Avgustin/Shutterstock Do you know what the padlock symbol in your internet browser’s address bar means? If not, you’re not alone. New research by my colleagues and I shows that only 5% of UK adults understand the padlock’s significance.Continue Reading
DimaBerlin/Shutterstock Whether you’re an influencer, an occasional poster, or just a lurker, you likely spend more time than you’d like on social media. Globally, working-age people with internet access now spend more than 2.5 hours per day on social platforms like Instagram, Facebook or X (Twitter). Social media use canContinue Reading
Rattana/Shutterstock Jurassic Park is arguably the ultimate Hollywood blockbuster. Aside from the appeal of human-chomping dinosaurs, tense action sequences and ground-breaking cinematography, its release in 1993 was a movies-meet-science milestone. As global audiences were soaking up the gory action, the premise of the movie – extracting DNA from fossil insectsContinue Reading
The restored image of Earthrise. A high quality black and white image was coloured using hues from the original colour photos. Image Credit: NASA, Apollo 8 Crew, Bill Anders; Processing and License: Jim Weigang, CC BY-SA The recent death of Frank Borman, commander of Nasa’s Apollo 8 mission in 1968,Continue Reading
cono0430 / Shutterstock There are signs of AI everywhere, it’s behind everything from customer service chatbots to the personalised ads we receive when browsing online. However, we remain largely unaware of the hidden algorithms doing the heavy legwork behind the scenes. We are currently working on a research project focusingContinue Reading
Artstore/Shutterstock The Doomsday Clock, with its hands hovering close to midnight (“doomsday”), is a symbolic device that is designed to warn the world how close it is to catastrophe. Midnight is said to represent the point at which the Earth becomes uninhabitable by humanity. The clock dates back to theContinue Reading
