Category: Technology

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 […]

A group of scientists, including people from the Royal Society of Chemistry, recently proposed that experiences such as licking an ice lolly should be part of the science curriculum. By licking a lolly and seeing how it melts – the idea goes – children would better learn about melting, and therefore about chemistry and physics. […]

Governments have a duty to protect their citizens. While they won’t go as far as telling us what we can and cannot put in our homes, we do expect them to ensure that the buildings we live in are safe from fire. The final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry confirms that this was not […]