- Natalie Roberts
As more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, the world's oceans become more acidic, affecting the ability of marine organisms to produce shells. So can these species survive?
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- Richard Johnston
CSI has come to Swansea. But rather than solving murders, for a team at the University's Technology Centre (UTC) in Materials it's all about getting young people involved in investigating why materials fail and what makes metals strong. And despite being slightly less sinister than its Miami-based TV counterpart, it can nonetheless exert a powerful pull on prospective undergraduate students, as materials scientist Richard Johnston explains...
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- Smitha Mundasad
First came fire. Cavemen rubbed sticks together and there it was, a source of ‘artificial’ heat and light, giving us freedom from the night and control over our days. Torches, candles, lanterns and kerosene lamps have each played their part in the evolution of human-controlled light over the last two millennia. In some respects though, the problems with the ways in which the world gets its light, haven’t changed since ancient times.
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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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- David Collins
Countless atomic recipes and crystal arrangements mean there are literally trillions of possible materials that could be made. So, without hunting for the equivalent of an atom-sized needle in a galactic-scale haystack, how do we find the ones with the properties we want? Materials scientists David Collins and Bryce Conduit are on the case...
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- Emma Easton
Dating codes are placed on food to indicate the food is safe to eat before this date. But how are these dates decided, and what do they really mean? Emma Easton explains...
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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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- David Nabhan
Is earthquake prediction for California truly a problem beyond the powers of science, or is there something that actually can be done, yet isn’t? David Nabhan, author and former Earthquake Preparedness Coordinator, delivers a hard-hitting case for determining higher-probability windows for seismic activity on the US West Coast.
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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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- 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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