- Harry Cliff
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland is now back in operation. By smashing particles together at close to the speed of light, it promises to deliver dramatic new insights into the fundamental nature of the matter. Here, Harry Cliff explains how the LHC works and what scientists hope to reveal as they unpick the fabric of the Universe we live in...
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- Chris Smith
“Love is the drug and I need to score,” sang Bryan Ferry in the seventies, earning him a smash hit and a small fortune. But apart from being a catchy song lyric, this line is also looking like a scientifically-accurate fact of life. So what is the real chemistry that happens when two people click? Chris Smith finds out...
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- Harriet Dickinson
For anyone fresh out of frogs and tempted to kiss a toad instead, this article has a word of warning. Although certain species of toads do make hallucinogenic chemicals linked to a lively "trip", many produce a lethal cocktail of cardiotoxic compounds that could turn such a trip into a once in a lifetime experience, en-route to the mortuary. So which toads should you watch out for...?
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- Andrew Caines
Noam Chomsky, a rookie professor at MIT, published a ground-breaking book called Syntactic Structures, which set out a theory of Generative Grammar. He suggested that a Universal Grammar (UG) of basic linguistic principles and a Transformational Grammar of rules responsible for putting sentences together was hard wired into all of us. Some don't agree including one Linguist who lived in the Amazon to learn more, as Andrew Caines explains...
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- Douglas Richards
We’re all searching for happiness, but do we really know what this is or where to find it? Douglas E. Richards gives an introduction to the science of happiness and argues that this is a vitally important topic that we, as a society, should be teaching our children...
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- Harriet Dickinson
It is the stuff of nightmares - a society so wound up in the legal system that no-one is allowed to tell you the truth, or that those with money control state censorship. However, this isn’t some John Grisham novel, this is the unfortunate state of the UK libel system today. Here, Harriet Dickinson finds out how it's impacting on the ability of scientists to state the facts...
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- Stuart Clark
When the clipper ship Southern Cross sailed into a living hell off Chile during the night of 2 September 1859, little did the sailors know that they were witnessing the aftermath of a gigantic solar explosion that had engulfed the Earth. Today, astronomers are still unpicking the consequences of this tremendous event.
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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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- Chris Smith
There was a time when almost every action movie seemed to involve the hero or villain becoming swamped in quicksand, sinking away until only their hat remains on the surface. But contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, although it’s almost impossible to escape from quicksand, it's even more difficult to drown...
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- Frank Witte
Recent Mars missions have produced compelling evidence for what was once a wet world, where life could well have flourished. Now scientists are about to embark on a mission with the best chances yet of finding it. Touching down near the Martian north pole, the Phoenix lander will begin looking for the chemical hallmarks of life past and present. But what do we already know about our near planetary neighbour? Frank Witte finds out...
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