Category: Technology

The garden office from the inside. Lorna Jackson, CC BY-NC-ND When we moved into our house, there was a shed in the garden. Its timbers were rotten, the floor had long since disappeared into the ground, there was no door, the window had fallen out and various creatures had moved in. I decided to rebuild […]

In April 2007, the Baltic nation of Estonia woke up to one of the world’s first major cyber-attacks on civil society carried out by a state. A series of massive “distributed denial of service” assaults – floods of fake traffic from networked computers – targeted government websites, banks, media outlets and online services for weeks, […]

Andy Burns As soon as you drive over the top of the Peak District and down into Sheffield you can see the light pollution – and it’s horrible, said a participant in a research project into darkness and light pollution. In the last 100 years, the places where people can experience darkness have reduced dramatically. […]

Blue tits sniff out herbs to line their nests with. taviphoto/Shutterstock When we think about birds, we often picture their colourful plumage: the iridescence of a peacock’s tail or the electric blue flash of a kingfisher. Or we might consider how they use voices, from the song of the nightingale to the coo of a […]

In October 1945, George Orwell responded to a letter from Mr J. Stewart Cook in the leftwing weekly newspaper Tribune calling for more science education. The call can hardly have come as a surprise. War had brought science and engineering to the fore – from the Spitfire fighter plane and radar to Bletchley Park’s codebreakers […]

For decades, astronomers have been watching WOH G64, an enormous heavyweight star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. This star is more than 1,500 times larger than the Sun and emitting over 100,000 times more energy. For a long time, red supergiant WOH G64 looked […]

Test crew for the Jato prototype solid rocket booster including a dapper-looking Frank Malina (centre), August 1941. Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Wikimedia Frank Malina was a lot of things. The Texas-born aeronautical engineer co-designed the first jet-assisted take-off (Jato) rocket and the US’s first operational high-altitude rocket. He co-founded and became director of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion […]

Kyrylo Glivin/Shutterstock While we have sent probes billions of kilometres into interstellar space, humans have barely scratched the surface of our own planet, not even making it through the thin crust. Information about Earth’s deep interior comes mainly from geophysics and is at a premium. We know it consists of a solid crust, a rocky […]

New policing proposals include raising the number of live facial recognition vans in England and Wales from ten to 50. Mounir Taha/Shutterstock The UK government’s proposed reforms to policing in England and Wales signal an increase in the use of facial recognition technology. The number of live facial recognition vans is set to rise from […]

Southern Africa is world renowned for its fossil record of creatures that lived in the very distant past, including dinosaurs. But, about 182 million years ago, a huge eruption of lava covered much of the landscape (the inland Karoo Basin) where most of the dinosaurs roamed. After that, the dinosaur fossil record in the region […]