Mount Etna erupting. Tomarchio Francesco/Shutterstock How can we tell when a volcano is going to erupt? – Lena, aged eight, Frankfurt, Germany Predicting when a volcano might erupt is very difficult. Some volcanoes erupt almost constantly, such as Kīlauea on Hawaii, but others may have gaps of hundreds of thousandsContinue Reading
This year’s Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded for a genuine revolution in modern science. The Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing tool allows scientists to precisely alter DNA by cutting and pasting sections of it. It has led to many discoveries in medicine, particularly in the development of new cancer therapies, and hasContinue Reading
Emmanuelle Charpentier, director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany, and Jennifer Doudna, professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, US, are the joint winners of the Nobel prize in chemistry 2020 for the development of a precise method of editing genomes. This is theContinue Reading
Emmanuelle Charpentier, director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany, and Jennifer Doudna, professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, US, are the joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 for the development of a precise method of editing genomes. This is theContinue Reading
Basakk/Shutterstock.com People around the globe have been watching the build up to the US election with disbelief. Particularly confusing to many is the furore over postal ballots, which the US president, Donald Trump is insisting will lead to large-scale voter fraud – despite a complete lack of evidence to backContinue Reading
NASA/JPL-Caltech The award of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez will be greeted with enormous pleasure by physicists and astronomers worldwide. It recognises the central importance of black holes in modern astrophysics, and the unique contributions of these three scientists in establishingContinue Reading
TeodorLazarev/Shutterstock When the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, first said the country would develop a £12 billion “world-beating” system for testing and tracing cases of COVID-19, few people probably imagined that it would be based around a £120 generic spreadsheet program. Yet the news that the details of 16,000 positiveContinue Reading
The ice-covered Grímsvötn volcano on Iceland produced an unusually large and powerful eruption in 2011, sending ash 20km into the atmosphere, causing the cancellation of about 900 passenger flights. In comparison, the much smaller 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull led to the cancellation of about 100,000 flights. Understandably, any mention ofContinue Reading
XiXinXing/Shutterstock Depending on what you read, speaking more than one language may or may not make your smarter. These mixed messages are understandably confusing, and they’re due to the fact that nothing is quite as simple as it’s typically portrayed when it comes to neuroscience. We can’t give a simpleContinue Reading
EPSRC prize winning photograph by Alexander James Spence, Author provided Artificial intelligence seems to be making enormous advances. It has become the key technology behind self-driving cars, automatic translation systems, speech and textual analysis, image processing and all kinds of diagnosis and recognition systems. In many cases, AI can surpassContinue Reading
