There have been enough social media disasters of late to make one thing clear: manipulating sentiment through social networks is next to impossible. The McDonald’s #McDStories campaign in January was supposed…
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Science + Tech – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 6026 - 6050 of 6591 articles
Late last week four men entered a restaurant on the 55th floor of the Rialto tower in Melbourne, had a couple of quiet drinks then leapt from the balcony. Much of the commentary of this event described…
Imagine a material that is just one atom thick, 300 times stronger than steel, harder than diamond, a fantastic conductor of heat and electricity and super-flexible to boot. This might sound like the stuff…
There’s this gene that about half of all people carry. It’s a pretty nasty gene – it massively increases the risk of the carrier being a murderer or a murder victim, going to jail or dying in an accident…
In mid-February, the Swiss Space Centre announced a plan to start removing space debris from orbit. Their proposal involved using a satellite, called CleanSpace One, to approach, grapple and then “de-orbit…
The origin of the human species remains one of the most fascinating and difficult topics of modern science. One of the main reasons for this is a continuing lack of agreement about how we should define…
Predicting the future is a risky business. If it wasn’t, we’d all be very wealthy by now. The Danish physicist Neils Bohr famously opined: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. Despite…
Few of us consider that having sex could result in a violent, instantaneous death. But in nature, where sex and violence are often two sides of the same coin, many animals are routinely subjected to such…
Whenever the press covers a story about hackers, a great deal of the discussion concerns the nature of online identity, the cohesiveness of hacking groups, and the individuals that identify with these…
The magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku-Oki earthquake of March 11 last year was the largest earthquake in Japan’s modern history. In fact, it was the fourth-largest earthquake anywhere in the world since 1900. The earthquake…
A year ago yesterday the Tōhoku-Oki earthquake and resultant tsunami hit the Japanese coastline, triggering the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster. A year on, many questions are being asked about how bad…
For the past hundred-odd years, commercial aviation has relied on a human pilot sitting behind the controls of an aircraft. Today, designers and engineers are beginning to ask: “Is it even necessary to…
When the Obama administration announced its proposed NASA budget in February, astronomers worldwide breathed a sigh of relief. Despite significant cuts in other areas, funding for the James Webb Space…
Ever since the death of Steve Jobs, interested onlookers have been watching for the first missteps in Apple’s seemingly faultless journey to becoming the world’s most valued and valuable company. Because…
Western Australia is world-famous for its vast mineral reserves, but if the astronomy community has its way, the state will soon be equally famous for advancing our understanding of the universe and the…
A major Japanese construction company, Obayashi Corporation, has announced plans to build a space elevator within 40 years, allowing people to be transported to space stations above the earth. The proposed…
Just like rock music in the 1950s, Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s, and death metal in the 1990s, videogaming has been demonised by parent groups. For decades, gamers were portrayed as obese social…
There is much concern that Iran is in the process of developing nuclear weapons. Such a development, we’re told, could induce Israel to launch a unilateral military strike with all types of unpredictable…
A new version of the peer-to-peer sharing application Tribler has created a buzz online following claims by the software’s lead developer that the app is impervious to attack. In a recent interview with…
Sleep matters – and yet many of us know how difficult it can be to get enough unbroken slumber. Research has shown that getting less than seven to eight hours’ sleep daily is associated with increased…
It might surprise you to learn that the idea of a “species” is one of the more ambiguous concepts in science. Originally, “species” (meaning “kind” or “sort” in Latin) was used to refer to organisms that…
Over the past few months, NASA’s Kepler mission has repeatedly made headlines with announcements of new and unusual planetary systems around other stars. To name a few, we’ve had the most densely packed…
In a statement posted online last month, hacker collective Anonymous announced plans to shut down the internet. Yes, you read that right. Operation Global Blackout, planned for March 31, is apparently…
I have spent almost 40 years trying to detect gravity waves. When I started there were just a few of us working away in university labs. Today 1,000 physicists working with billion-dollar observatories…
The humble pigeon has been in the scientific spotlight lately since the discovery that the much-maligned species is far smarter than previously thought. A study by psychologist Damian Scarf and colleagues…