Smell Test for Old Books

There’s the old saying, ‘never judge a book by its cover’ and indeed you shouldn’t – now chemists are saying you should judge them by their smell, instead. Publishing in the Journal Analytical Chemistry the authors have come up with a test that can measure how fast an old book is degrading, accordin...

Lithium shows scientists where to find far-off planets

A European team of scientists may have discovered a shortcut to finding distant planets orbiting far-off stars - you look for lithium, or rather a lack of it. Lithium is the third lightest element in the Universe and small amounts were produced, alongside hydrogen and helium, by the Big Bang. Conse...

Deleting old memories to make room for new ones...

I’m sure most of you out there will have run out of disk space on a computer and had to overwrite a few files. And it looks like the short-term memory of animals isn’t all that far-removed. Publishing in the journal Cell, neuroscientists reported that, in mice and rats, newly formed neurons seem to ...

Monitoring the Greenland Ice Sheets

The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheets is accelerating and Jonathan Bamber discusses the evidence...

TWiSH - The death of Daniel Nathans

This week in science history saw, in 1999, the death of Daniel Nathans, microbiologist and co-winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for his work on restriction enzymes, essential tools in the world of genetics...