- 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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- 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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- Niraj Lal
Fifty years from now, our kids are going to look incredulously at us and ask – "you burnt things to get electricity?" We’ll answer – "yes, but only until we realised how cheap and efficient renewable energy could be." In this article, Niraj Lal looks at a growing part of our electrical future: the solar cell...
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- 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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- 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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- Robinson Fulweiler
Equivalent in land area to 14 Isle of Mans, or Rhode Island State twice over, the Louisiana Wetlands are one of the most important acquatic ecological sites in the world. But now they're disappearing, fast - an area the size of a tennis court slips into the sea every thirteen seconds. But what is this wilderness and what can be done to save it...?
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- Nicola Davis
Lise Meitner’s name is to many an unfamiliar one, occasionally found somewhere amid the pages of a text on nuclear physics and seldom with great acclaim. In truth Lise Meitner was the mother of nuclear fission explaining the process by which atoms may be split to release huge quantities of energy – knowledge which has been harnessed to develop both nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs.
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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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- Paul Trotman
Have you ever wondered what happens to a body when it is donated to a medical school? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a medical student and to take somebody apart to see how they worked? Now is your chance to find out, thanks to a film from New Zealand...
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- Barrie Lancaster
They are found in well-organised groups; they communicate constantly through long ranging connections; there are 100,000,000,000 of them, surrounded by at least 10 times that many supporters, and they are all inside your head – they're brain cells, but how do they work?
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