Category: Technology

A quick search on the internet will yield numerous videos showcasing the mishaps of driverless cars, often bringing a smile or laugh. But why do we find these behaviours amusing? It might be because they starkly contrast with how a human driver would handle similar situations. Everyday situations that seem trivial to us can still […]

Participating in the Olympic Games is a rare achievement the pressures and stressors that come with it are unique. Whether an athlete is battling to win the breaststroke or powering their way to gold in the modern pentathlon, psychology will play a vital role in their success or failure in Paris this summer. In recent […]

Nasa has announced the first detection of possible biosignatures in a rock on the surface of Mars. The rock contains the first martian organic matter to be detected by the Perseverance rover, as well as curious discoloured spots that could indicate the past activity of microorganisms. Ken Farley, project scientist on the mission, has called […]

The new romantic comedy Fly me to the Moon tells the story of how, in the run up to the Apollo 11 mission, Nasa hired a high-flying marketing specialist to bolster public support. The history books tell us this isn’t quite what happened, but I believe modern science communicators could still learn from this irreverent […]

An app designed to locate lost travelers without cellular service won first place at The Jerusalem College of Technology’s (JCT) 7th annual women’s hackathon earlier this month. The technology was developed by a group of religious female students who participated in the “Hack.Her.It” competition, organized by JCT’s Schreiber LevTech Entrepreneurship Center. The event aims to […]

Some 67,000 employees were absent from their jobs due to the Israel-Hamas war in June, due to the Israel-Hamas war, in a 10% decrease compared to May, the Finance Ministry reported Sunday. This is a 90% decrease in the amount of absent employees as compared to October 2023. The employment rate since June has remained […]

In 1872 Leland Stanford, the founder of California’s Stanford University, hired an eccentric inventor named Eadweard Muybridge to help resolve a supposed (but undocumented) bet: did a trotting horse’s feet leave the ground with all four feet or not? Muybridge was a skilled photographer and managed to get blurry snapshots of an “airborne” horse in […]

Using radar, a Nasa spacecraft, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), has confirmed the existence of caves beneath the lunar surface. Here’s why such geological features will be key for establishing a base on the Moon, and what they can tell us about Earth and our Moon’s shared cosmological origins. Lunar orbiting satellites first spotted pits on […]

Lesotho is a small, land-locked, mountainous country located in the middle of South Africa. Its Eastern Lesotho Highlands are often referred to as the region’s “water tower” because they receive some of the highest rainfall amounts in southern Africa, providing water to South Africa and electricity to Lesotho through the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. Despite […]

The Madagascar Ridge, in the southwestern Indian Ocean, is a remote, elevated area of seabed south of Madagascar. In 2016, my colleagues and I discovered a new cartilaginous fish species in its deep waters; a catshark that we named Bach’s catshark (Bythaelurus bachi) after German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. (In 2017 we discovered another new […]