Faking photographs is not a new phenomenon. The Cottingley Fairies seemed convincing to some in 1917, just as the images recently broadcast on Russian television, purporting to be satellite images showing…
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Science + Tech – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 4851 - 4875 of 5718 articles
The thing everyone seems to talk about with the moon landings is the idea of the whole world stopping to watch. It was a mission that overcame nationalism, it wasn’t “America” putting a man on the moon…
Taylor Swift’s announcement that she was removing her music from the Spotify music service started a debate about the future of music. Swift argued that artists were not receiving appropriate compensation…
A British-led consortium has announced an ambitious space mission named Lunar Mission One that plans to land a robotic probe in the southern polar region of the moon in about a decade. The announcement…
I’d like to say that it’s not every day you get asked to try to break a world record with a speed-obsessed truck mechanic from Grimsby, but for us at the Centre for Sports Engineering Research it’s starting…
Cuckoos are notorious cheats. Instead of building a nest, incubating their eggs and raising their chicks, they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and leave the task of raising their offspring to…
The destruction caused by the lava of Kilauea are grabbing the attention of the international media. Last week, footage showed this eruption claiming its first house in Pahoa and people began to question…
We all know engineering is useful, functional, even ingenious. But the engineering photography competition we hold each year provides us a chance to wander outside its merely utilitarian aspects into dimensions…
Norwegian writer Mette Newth once wrote that: “censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history.” As we develop new means to gather and create information…
Dirty Harry once said, “Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one”. Now that the internet has made it easier than ever to share an unsolicited opinion, traditional methods of academic review are beginning…
The drama of Philae’s slow fall, bounce and unfortunate slide into hibernation was one of the most thrilling science stories of a generation. But what in its short 60 hours of life on Comet 67P did it…
The excitement over the potentially transformative effects of the internet in low-income countries is nowhere more evident than in East Africa – the last major populated region of the world to gain a wired…
With the likes of Google Glass, Fitbit, and Emotiv wearables are now a familiar concept. Perhaps less known is that animals have been fitted with wearable technology for decades. For example, in the 1960s…
While there is only one world power on the internet, that situation will not last forever. The internet’s underpinning technologies were mostly created in the US, the initial networks were based there…
The landing of Rosetta’s Philae on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko was a triumph of engineering. Many spectacular scientific firsts will follow now, but small glitches during the landing make it more difficult…
All spiders are predators, but most of them are small and have rudimentary defences against larger animals that in turn prey on them. Spiders have thus evolved a range of predatory behaviours that, at…
This year saw the 43rd anniversary of email. Compared to a human working life, email has after more than four decades on the job now reached retirement age. Is it time for email to step aside to allow…
Imagine launching a robotic spacecraft on a ten-year mission to land on a comet, 600 million kilometres from Earth, knowing that you will not be able to make any physical repairs to the craft during the…
Digitising public services and putting them online to reap the cost and efficiency benefits is something that’s been tried with varying degrees of success. The UK government’s “digital by default” policy…
Exciting as it is (and it is incredibly exciting), the Rosetta mission is the latest in a history of comet exploration that has added to our knowledge of these icy dirtballs. Comets are usually just a…
Rosetta is a first-class mission, because it is a mission of firsts. First to fly-by asteroid Steins, a rare metal-poor asteroid. First to travel past asteroid Lutetia, which might be related to a class…
The first attempted landing on the surface of a comet is a huge landmark in the history of space exploration that will not only uncover further details about comets but could unlock further clues about…
The way in which the internet is governed has shifted from technical debates held in obscure committees to a hotly contested field in which various nations vie for influence. Online surveillance, cybersecurity…
Legendary Dutch computer scientist Edsger W Dijkstra famously remarked that “testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs”. In fact the only definitive way to establish that software is correct…
Whether playing video games has negative effects is something that has been debated for 30 years, in much the same way that rock and roll, television, and even the novel faced much the same criticisms…