Category: Technology

When asked why Jean-Olivier Irisson, a scientist at Sorbonne Université in Paris, decided to dedicate his life to studying microscopic creatures in the sea, his answer was simple: “They are beautiful.” Beauty may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of plankton – organisms that drift in water and come […]

Universities and biodiversity institutes have hidden treasures: their collections of pressed plant specimens. These are plants that have been flattened, dried and mounted on special cardboard sheets. Some of them were collected centuries ago. They hold information about where species occur and how ecosystems changed over time. Yet for many researchers and policymakers, that information […]

It’s 50 years since the intense heat of the 1976 drought hit the UK. The country’s worst drought for 200 years, and one of the most severe ever, left reservoirs dry, cracked land, and melted tarmac on roads. For 15 consecutive days, temperatures hit 32°C in parts of the country. The record temperature for a […]

Productivity guilt is the uneasy sense that time saved through technology has to be justified. Drazen Zigic / Shutterstock We have built tools that save us hours in work. So why do so many people feel worse for using them? The answer has less to do with AI and more to do with what we […]

In the intricate biology of the human body, organs such as the breast, the colon and the lungs are lined with a defensive barrier known as the epithelium. At the heart of this barrier sits a remarkable protein called Mucin-1 (MUC1). In a healthy body, MUC1 is like a sentinel. It stands on the cell […]

Many sea lions died in previous super El Niño. wildestanimal/Shutterstock There is a more than 60% chance that a “super” El Niño will develop by the end of this year. This is defined as the strongest El Niño event you can get, and happens when sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean rise by […]

Ferrari’s new sportscar, the Luce (pronounced Loo-che), raises some interesting questions about the future of hi-tech, high-cost supercars in the electric era. The Italian sportscar maker’s first move into the electric vehicle (EV) segment – with an eye on the Chinese luxury market – signals strategic pragmatism rather than ideological continuity. Compounding this is the […]

Frame Stock Footage/Shutterstock Earlier this year in Beijing, a humanoid robot crossed a half-marathon finish line in a blistering 50 minutes, 26 seconds. The feat immediately lit up global headlines for shattering the human world record by almost seven minutes. This performance came with many asterisks. The robot followed a pre-mapped track, stayed in its […]

Illegal dumping of waste is costing the UK government over a £1 billion per year. malaha/Shutterstock Illegal waste dumping in the UK is no longer a marginal nuisance. It is increasingly operating at an industrial scale, with serious consequences. The reported dumping of around 30,000 tonnes of waste at a protected site of special scientific […]

The effective collapse of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) fighter jet programme is a major setback for European defence cooperation. France, Germany and Spain have spent nearly a decade trying to develop what was intended to become Europe’s premier next-generation combat aircraft, only for the programme to succumb to disputes over leadership, the distribution […]