Category: Technology

When the hot summer weather kicks in you may find yourself feeling concerned about furry pets and other animals we live close by to. But fur and hair are ancient adaptations that allowed human ancestors to develop more active lifestyles and varied diets. All mammals have some kind of fur. It’s part of what sets […]

How much do we really know about what else is out there in the universe? Let’s take an outlandish example. If there were aliens flying around our galaxy with the sort of warp drive technology we often see in sci-fi shows, what would the signal from their ships look like? Perhaps, surprisingly, our research shows […]

Slugs. They eat your lettuces, chew your cabbages, defoliate your dahlias and assassinate your asters. Even the name “slug” is unpleasant. It comes from the Middle English “slugge”, from a Norwegian word for a heavy, slow-moving or sluggish person. Slugs clearly have a PR problem, so let’s try and put things right. First, they have […]

Deep beneath our feet, at a staggering depth of over 5,100km, lies Earth’s inner core — a solid ball of iron and nickel that plays a crucial role in shaping the conditions we experience on the surface. In fact, without it we’d be unlikely to even exist. But despite its significance, it’s a bit of […]

You never have to look hard to find recent reports of fatal vehicle crashes on UK roads. After devastating events such as a crash in West Yorkshire in July 2024, where four adults and two children were killed, media reports often focus on the need for better law enforcement and driver education. Safety campaigns can […]

More than 700 million years ago, the Earth was plunged into a state that geologists call “snowball Earth”, when our planet was entirely encased in ice. This happened when the polar ice caps expanded so far that they joined up around the equator. Several lines of evidence show that the snowball Earth happened, but we […]

Volcanoes were erupting on the Moon as recently as 120 million years ago, evidence collected by a Chinese spacecraft suggests. Until the last few years, scientists had thought volcanic activity ended on the Moon around 2 billion years ago. The findings, published in Science, come from analysis of lunar rock and soil delivered to Earth […]

Against the background of climate change, there’s a push to make offshore wind a much bigger part of the UK’s energy supply in coming years. But offshore wind farms are already being affected by cyberattacks, according to a recent report. And unless the vulnerabilities are addressed, cyberattacks could cause power outages, leading to critical services […]

On a Sunday morning in late August 2024 a nine-year-old girl named Eli-zé du Toit was sitting on her grandparents’ porch near a small town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, when she heard a long rumble, then heard a rustling in a nearby fig tree. As she watched, a rock fell out of the […]

Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle and Science Minister, Lord Patrick Vallance have appointed Professor Michele Dougherty as the new Executive Chair of STFC. Professor Dougherty is a Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College London. She leads unmanned exploratory space missions to Saturn and Jupiter and was the Principal Investigator […]