Category: Technology

Stand in front of Turner’s Sun Rising Over Water (1825-30) and something odd tends to happen. The painting holds you, even though observers might struggle to say why. Maybe it is the colour, the balance, the composition, or the strange stillness the artwork seems to carry. Whatever it is, you feel it long before you […]

A safety driver may become less of an operator and more of a critical supervisor. Scharfsinn / Shutterstock Imagine getting into a London taxi. Someone is sitting in the driver’s seat, but the car is driving itself. If the autonomous system gets into difficulty, they must recognise what is happening, decide whether to intervene and, […]

Illustration of early mammals and dinosaurs. Generated by ChatGPT. About 200 million years ago, furry little egg-laying creatures evolved the ability to feed their offspring with a secretion from some special glands: milk. Their evolutionary journey continued and by about 160 million years ago, the first mammals with a real placenta had come into being. […]

The early bronze age (21st century BC) Ziggurat of Ur in southern Iraq. Abbas Al Yasiri/Shutterstock In recent years, archaeologists from around the world have marked the centenaries of some of Iraq’s most influential archaeological discoveries. The excavation of the ancient city of Ur, for example, transformed understanding of early urban life, long-distance trade, royal […]

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 […]