Category: Technology

amarw92/Shutterstock When people think about climate change and animals, they might picture melting sea ice, drought-stricken landscapes or species struggling in the wild. Far less attention is given to the animals living in our care. Yet as heatwaves become more frequent, intense and unpredictable, zoos may be facing one of the biggest animal welfare challenges […]

The Cosmoramic Room in P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, New York. Illustration from the museum’s official guidebook. If you’re thinking about moving house or just feeling nosy about your neighbours, your first port of call may be an online property marketing site: Rightmove and Zoopla in the UK, Zillow in the US or Magic Bricks in […]

The intersex symbol nito/Shutterstock I teach a university course called Hormones and Behaviour. What surprises students is that biological sex is not produced by a single switch. What surprises me is that many students have never been taught this before. It is basic biology, but it helps explain life. Sex emerges through a sequence of […]

A 2025 study by South Korean researchers caught the attention of the astronomy community when it suggested that the evidence behind dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy makes up about 70% of the universe but nobody knows what it is. This makes it a frequent target for scepticism. Scientists had long known that the […]

A 2025 study by South Korean researchers caught the attention of the astronomy community when it suggested that the evidence behind dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy makes up about 70% of the universe but nobody knows what it is. This makes it a frequent target for scepticism. Scientists had long known that the […]

Flock Safety, the embattled vendor of mass surveillance technology, has rolled out a handful of new reforms intended to appease the justified nationwide anger that has seen scores of towns cancel or suspend their contracts with the company for automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The reforms are a combination of long overdue changes along with […]

For centuries, useful metals have been developed by starting with one core element and adding small amounts of other elements. Steel, for example, is composed primarily of iron; carbon is added in varied amounts to produce different grades of steel. Bronze is made up of copper and tin. These mixtures are known as alloys. Africa […]

metamorworks/Shutterstocl Jodie Foster tearing up a dirt road, yelling stellar coordinates into a walkie-talkie à la the 1997 sci-fi film Contact. Control rooms alive with a cacophony of “enhance that signal”. Real-time discovery. That’s what I pictured when my PhD supervisor told me I’d be going observing at a telescope. Cut to 2am on top […]

In the animal kingdom, any hunt for a meal or encounter with a predator is a matter of life and death. To survive both, animals have evolved a multitude of weapons, of which venoms may be one of the most widespread and effective. But building a chemical weapon presents an evolutionary dilemma. Should venom be […]

The first moment you look inside a newly discovered ancient tomb is at once exciting and terrifying. I was fortunate to experience this recently as director of an international research team carrying out fieldwork in the Theban necropolis, a Unesco world heritage site near the modern Egyptian city of Luxor. Our project’s primary aim is […]