The practical ways to reduce your carbon footprint (that actually work)
Want to know how to reduce your carbon footprint? It’s more complicated than you may imagineContinue Reading
2021-09-20
Road pricing could help drive down UK emissions – here’s how to make it work
Road pricing could be introduced to reduce congestion. Shutterstock Within the next two decades the UK is set for a total switch from petrol and diesel cars to electric cars, which pay virtually no tax. To recoup the around £34bn a year currently collected through fuel and vehicle excise duty,Continue Reading
2021-09-19
Sir Clive Sinclair: even his failures were prescient inventions
Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the UK’s first mass-market home computer, has died at the age of 81. Pioneer of tiny portable devices, truly affordable computers and novel, electric forms of transportation, he leaves behind what some see as a checkered history of hit-and-miss inventions. But Sir Clive’s contribution toContinue Reading
2021-09-18
Do the northern lights make sounds that you can hear?
John A Davis/Shutterstock It’s a question that has puzzled observers for centuries: do the fantastic green and crimson light displays of the aurora borealis produce any discernible sound? Conjured by the interaction of solar particles with gas molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, the aurora generally occurs near Earth’s poles, where theContinue Reading
2021-09-16
We discovered the earliest prehistoric art is hand prints made by children
One of the hand prints discovered in Tibet that is believed to have been made by children. Matthew Bennett, Author provided Fossilised footprints, and more rarely, hand prints, can be found around the world; left as people went about their daily business, preserved by freak acts of geological preservation. InContinue Reading
2021-09-15
It’s still not fully understood how placebos work – but an alternative theory of consciousness could hold some clues
Shutterstock If you’ve had both of your COVID vaccinations, you may have suffered some side-effects – perhaps headaches, fatigue, fever or a sore arm. These effects are mainly caused by your immune system’s reaction to the vaccine. But most scientists agree that there is another cause: the human mind. TheContinue Reading
2021-09-13
Exposure of faked dishonesty study makes me proud to be a behavioural scientist
Lucky Raccoon/Shutterstock The story has a lot to recommend it: psychologist Dan Ariely, the author of a bestselling book on the behavioural science of dishonesty, retracts his study because the data was faked. No wonder it’s been picked up by the world’s media. Buzzfeed declared this “the latest blow toContinue Reading
2021-09-12
Why has the UK’s wet summer been bad for bees?
Bumblebees are better at flying in wet conditions than other bees Simona Chira/Shutterstock This year will be remembered in the UK for its extremely heavy downpours. Intense summer storms resulted in some places exceeding twice their average rainfall. These wet summers make life even harder for bees, who are alreadyContinue Reading
2021-09-08
Spyware: why the booming surveillance tech industry is vulnerable to corruption and abuse
Zoomik/Shutterstock The world’s most sophisticated commercially available spyware may be being abused, according to an investigation by 17 media organisations in ten countries. Intelligence leaks and forensic phone analysis suggests the surveillance software, called Pegasus, has been used to target and spy on the phones of human rights activists, investigativeContinue Reading
2021-09-06
‘Cyborg soil’ reveals the secret microbial metropolis beneath our feet
8H/Shutterstock Dig a teaspoon into your nearest clump of soil, and what you’ll emerge with will contain more microorganisms than there are people on Earth. We know this from lab studies that analyse samples of earth scooped from the microbial wild to determine which forms of microscopic life exist inContinue Reading
2021-09-04