- 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
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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- 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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- Chris Smith
Swine flu, SARS, Bird Flu, HIV, Dengue, Hepatitis C, Ebola - the human race is awash with new infections - but where did they come from and what else may be waiting to pounce? In this article Cambridge University virologist Chris Smith looks at the origins of emerging viral infections...
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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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- 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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- Charlotte Rusby
What do pop-up books and some of the most fundamental molecules of life have in common? Charlotte Rusby enters a world 100 million times smaller than the bookshelf to find out...
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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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