Category: Technology

For 81-year-old Nira, a retired nurse and community member who lives in the heart of Tel Aviv, “the thought of moving to assisted living really gave me chills. Then I heard about a new Israeli technology that can provide me with the security and assistance that I need to live in a big city with […]

Antibacterial discovery has become a pressing global challenge. Rising antibiotic resistance and difficult-to-treat infections mean we urgently need new antibacterial drugs and infection prevention measures. Food production problems such as bacterial crop disease and food spoilage are driving demand for innovations too. Many antibacterial products in current use come from nature, two examples being the […]

From the swimming habits of dead trout to the revelation that some mammals can breathe through their backsides, a group of leading leftfield scientists have been taking their bows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 34th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Not to be confused with the actual Nobel prizes, the Ig Nobels […]

In spring and summer flowers pop up spontaneously in lawns, playgrounds, fields and even cracks in the pavement. But what do you see: weeds or wildflowers? You might feel a little frustrated when you see wildflowers growing in the street. Why are they thriving while it can be a struggle to get garden flowers to […]

You might think flowers don’t have much choice about who they mate with, given they are rooted to the ground and can’t move. But when scientists from Nagoya, Japan used powerful microscopes to study the fertilisation process, they were surprised to find the female part of a flowering plant (ovules) could repel sperm from pollen […]

Plants can grow with much less light than previously thought, according to a new study on tiny water-based organisms called microalgae that has been published in Nature Communications. The German-led team of researchers lowered light sensors into Arctic water to a depth of 50 metres to test how low light levels must become before plant […]

Scientists have estimated the size of an extinct flying reptile called a pterosaur, based on fragments of a fossil finger bone discovered in southern England in June 2022. These results reveal it to be the largest British pterosaur yet described, and the second-largest Jurassic pterosaur worldwide. This 149 million-year-old fossil, known as EC K2576 and […]

For the past few years, a series of controversies have rocked the well-established field of cosmology. In a nutshell, the predictions of the standard model of the universe appear to be at odds with some recent observations. There are heated debates about whether these observations are biased, or whether the cosmological model, which predicts the […]

With all the fanfare of the Eurovision Song Contest in May this year, it is possible that many missed another European song contest that was taking place at around the same time – the Polifonia Song Contest.  Organised by Polifonia, an EU-funded research initiative aimed at protecting and promoting Europe’s musical heritage, the competition sought to […]

The groans of pain as we get up from the sofa or the sound of crunching cartilage when taking the stairs are all too familiar. Many of us look down at our aching knees and curse them – wondering why they seemingly evolved to hurt so much. But the human knee has a complex evolutionary […]