- Douglas Richards
Sure, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and has received a number of other honours, but has Sir Tim Berners-Lee yet received his due? Douglas Richards argues that for a man who brought into being a tool - the hypertext language around which the Internet is based - that will have as profound an impact on human civilization as the wheel or electricity, the answer is an emphatic no...
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- Reto Schneider
What happens when a human child grows up with a chimpanzee brother? Does a dog think that a robot dog belongs to the same species? If three men meet who all think they are Jesus, how do they decide who is right? The answers to these questions you can find in by peer reviewed scientific research. Swiss science writer Reto U. Schneider collected them for years and published them in the “The Mad Science Book”. Now he is wondering: which one is the weirdest of them all?
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- Philip Strange
In 1943 a chemist working in Basel became the first person to experience the effects of LSD, albeit by accident. But how did he made the drug, where did it originate and how does it work? Philip Strange explains...
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- John Gamel
Is urine bad? Yes, when it ends up on the bathroom floor. What can be done to avoid these unaesthetic accidents? As with many of the challenges confronted by humanity over the millennia, scientific insight might save the day, but the solution will demand a paradigm shift in our excretory habits, as John Gamel explains...
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- Frank Witte
Physics is full of surprises, but none so great as the discovery that 95% of the mass of the Universe is invisible to us. This is the so-called "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy", but what are they, and how can we find out...?
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- Harriet Dickinson
What will the vaccines of tomorrow look like? Recent advances in crop technology mean that we are able to produce vaccines in plants. But would you eat a vaccine? Harriet Dickinson looks at the pros and cons of this novel method of drug delivery and asks whether this technology will be turning up on the menu any time soon...
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- Philip Strange
Surprising as it sounds, one of the world's top tipples a century ago was laced with cocaine. And although the manufacturers have changed the recipe in recent years, Coca Cola is still a market leader, but why was the cocaine there in the first place, and where does the drug come from?
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- Bjoern Brembs
Flies are creatures of habit - at least that's what the latest research on the fruit fly Drosophila has found. In this article Bjoern Brembs explains how a marine snail started him on the road to uncover the brain basis of learning...
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- Chris Smith
The feasibility of a female oestrus amongst humans had been dismissed by the masses. But now a study of tipping amongst lap-dancers has confirmed that oestrus appears to be alive and kicking...
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- Catherine Zentile
Scientists have brought the world one step closer to the creation of the first artificial organism with the recent announcement of the creation of an artificial genome for the bacterium mycoplasma genitalium. The breakthrough is a major landmark in history, the switch "from reading the genetic code to writing it" but this new synthetic biology could be dangerous: is the world ready for this new technology and will it ever be?
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