Mikhail Leonov/Shutterstock I once restored a 1950s timepiece for a customer who waxed lyrical about the intricacies of my work – all the while refusing to pay. They baulked when I presented them with the bill we’d previously agreed. Then they garbled on about the philosophical nature of time, stillContinue Reading
Nasa It’s going to be a bumper time for space missions in 2024 – especially to the Moon, our nearest neighbour. And that’s following on from an already epic 2023. I’m a laboratory scientist, so I always like to have a “proper” sample to analyse. Rather than peering through telescopesContinue Reading
Nasa/wikipedia During the pandemic, a third of people in the UK reported that their trust in science had increased, we recently discovered. But 7% said that it had decreased. Why is there such variety of responses? For many years, it was thought that the main reason some people reject scienceContinue Reading
Amur tigers are evolved for winter weather Ondrej Prosicky/Shutterstock The temperature has dropped, the nights have drawn in. The winter holidays have started, families are gathered – so where can you go to fuel the imagination and get some fresh air? A zoo might not be your first thought –Continue Reading
Rattana/Shutterstock All human beings age. It is part of our biology and limits our lifespan to slightly over 120 years. Not all animals experience ageing during their lives. Some animals’ bodies do not gradually degenerate as they get older the way our bodies do. But for humans once they reachContinue Reading
Wandering albatrosses can cover huge distances in a single trip. MZPhoto.cz/Shutterstock Animals cover astonishing distances when they are looking for food. While caribou, reindeer and wolves clock up impressive mileage on land, seabirds are unrivalled in their travelling distances. Arctic terns travel from the Arctic to Antarctica and back asContinue Reading
The asteroid 4 vesta, left, and Tatooine, as seen in Star Wars, on the right. Nasa and wikipedia Locals watched in awe as a fireball exploded and hundreds of meteorite fragments rained down on the city of Tatahouine, Tunisia, on June 27, 1931. Fittingly, the city later became a majorContinue Reading
Surprised that cats like to play fetch too? Tzido Sun/Shuttestock Cats have a reputation for being aloof (some may even say lazy) – but our new research has found they interact with their owners in surprising ways. What we discovered also shows how important this kind of interaction can beContinue Reading
one photo/Shutterstock It’s another tragic record. A new report has confirmed yet another rise in drug related deaths in England and Wales. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports that 4,907 “drug poisoning” deaths were recorded in 2022 (84.4 deaths per 1,000,000 of the population), the highest on record. WhileContinue Reading
Sdecoret / Shutterstock A supercomputer scheduled to go online in April 2024 will rival the estimated rate of operations in the human brain, according to researchers in Australia. The machine, called DeepSouth, is capable of performing 228 trillion operations per second. It’s the world’s first supercomputer capable of simulating networksContinue Reading
