- 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
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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- Ana Rossi
Ion channels are miniature pores in the membranes of cells. They're the gatekeepers controlling which ions can move into and out of cells, meaning that they control almost every aspect of life itself. This also means they're important drug targets. But to develop effective and selective agents to hit just the right channel means that scientists need to understand the precise structure and workings of each of them. A daunting task, but now new technology has provided a way to do just that...
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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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- Catherine Zentile
The buzz of a bumblebee is one of the quintessential sounds of summer time. But this ‘slender sound’ and ‘faint utterance’ that was so admired by Wordsworth is under threat because bumblebees are in crisis: of the 25 species native to Britain, three have already been declared extinct. But why are they suffering and what can we do to stem the problem...?
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- Catherine Zentile
I.Q. scores have been rising steadily, by about 3 points per decade, ever since they were first administered. This is the Flynn Effect and it means that if we take the average teenager of today with an I.Q. of 100 and project the trend back to the 1900s, the average I.Q. was somewhere between 50 and 70 which usually marks a mental disability! Surely this cannot be correct...?
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- Helen Carter
Every day our bodies are assailed by microbes of all descriptions, but for the most part we successfully fend them off. In this article Helen Carter explores the basis of human immunity...
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- Nick Heath
By now we’re familiar with apocalyptic visions of a scorched and flooded world ravished by global warming. But this gloomy prognosis is now set to take a nosedive beneath the ocean waves.
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- Nick Heath
Mention plastics and most people think of polythenes, perspex and other oil-based nasties that never break down. But now there's a new breed of plastics; they're biodegradable and based on potatoes and other starchy crops...
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- Peter Brennan
We humans don't really appreciate the sense of smell. Mark has a look at this underrated sense, in various parts of the animal kingdom. Peter Brennan describes how smells called pheromones can influence our sexual behaviour and how pheromones work
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