In his 1879 account of wanderings in the Orient, the travel writer James Hingston describes how, in West Java, he was treated to a bizarre experience: I am taken by my kind host around his garden, and…
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Displaying 4751 - 4775 of 5718 articles
Theft of vehicles is about as old as the notion of transport – from horse thieves to carjackers. No longer merely putting a brick through a window, vehicle thieves have continually adapted to new technology…
The UK government has been ranked first in the world for its transparency and the ease of accessing government information by the World Wide Web Foundation’s OpenData barometer. The report echoes the Open…
Bletchley Park is a name on everyone’s lips at the moment thanks to the generous coverage stemming from a film that rightly celebrates the role played by men like Alan Turing. But what about the women…
It will come as no surprise to anyone that drugs are big business, so when a drone crashed in a car park of a US border town weighed down with several kilos of narcotics, it was just another example of…
Microsoft, once the dominant force in the software industry, has for a few years been on the back foot. Despite its undeniable clout and the world’s largest installed base of users, it has been slow to…
Sexual preferences are not set in stone and can change over time, often depending on the immediate situation the individual is in. This has been described as sexual fluidity. For example, if someone identifies…
The second hand of the Doomsday Clock is now only three minutes to midnight. This is the closest to apocalypse we have come since 1984 – the coldest of Cold War years, just a year after Able Archer, the…
Try putting an ice-cube in your mouth. The insides of your mouth and tongue instantly turn numb. Hold it in still and you will feel pain. Now try sucking on peppermint. The mint itself is at room temperature…
We have spent years promoting the need for change in our approach to internet infrastructure, forcing politicians to recognise it as a serious issue. So it’s great to see Barack Obama tackling the issue…
Evolution allows animals to develop superb adaptations to survive and flourish in environmental niches. The evolution of fish eyes is one such intriguing example. However, tracing how different kinds of…
I am a scientist. I am also white, male and middle-class. There are a lot of scientists like me in the UK, and this lack of diversity within the scientific community is a concern. There are compelling…
A British volcanologist has won one of the most prestigious awards in science – the Vetlesen Prize, which is considered to be the earth sciences equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Stephen Sparks of the University…
Despite the importance of the internet to contemporary society, according to the ITU only 42% of the world’s population are online. That leaves 4.3 billion people without the internet, of which 90% live…
Natural selection has shaped many different animal groups, from V-like formations of bird flocks to circular mills of schooling fish. These shapes are the result of millions of years of evolution. Animals…
The announcement that Google is to halt sales of its Google Glass augmented-reality spectacles has been interpreted by some people as the end of a pilot project and the start of a new phase of product…
At the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society earlier this month, the NASA Kepler Space Telescope team announced its 1,000th discovery of a planet outside our solar system. This brings the…
The financial institutions of the City of London and Wall Street are to take part in a series of “war game” exercises aimed at testing their resilience to cyber attack. The announcement comes as prime…
Google’s announcement that it will not provide security updates for older versions of its Android mobile operating system means that more than a billion users face growing security risks to their phones…
If you forgot your phone at home, you may get a sense of being incomplete in some way, the itch you just can’t scratch each time you reach for your absentee phone. Our phones have become such integral…
From the Domesday Book to modern government papers, the National Archives’ collection of more than 11m historical government and public records is one of the world’s largest. It includes paper and parchment…
If you’ve been following the news it might seem like there’s been a lot of air crashes recently. It might seem that flying has become a risky business. In a society with a free press and a great number…
Ever heard of Campi Flegrei? It is a supervolcano in southern Italy. Literally translating as “fields of fire,” only the Yellowstone caldera in the United States has more potential to devastate. The Naples…
Sometimes less can be more. Carnivorous pitcher plants from the tropical island of Borneo (Brunei) demonstrate this quite impressively. These plants use funnel-shaped pitfall traps, or pitchers, with slippery…
Two of Scotland’s leading politicians illustrate an interesting phenomenon on Twitter. In the wake of the Scottish National Party’s surge in popularity following the independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon…