When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched a broadside at Google, claiming the company abuses its overwhelming market position in Europe, it looked a lot like a clash between web and print – the Information…
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While legal sales of recorded music continue to suffer from widespread music piracy, the popularity of live music appears to be enjoying an unprecedented boom, particularly in the UK where new stadiums…
Theoretical physicists are caricatured in the popular imagination as only involved in abstruse and difficult-to-imagine topics. But some of these theoretical physicists are involved in something closer…
A recent flurry of business mergers and acquisitions and stock market flotations in the US has prompted some financial commentators to predict a new tech bubble. The size of these buyouts and IPOs, and…
“Make sure you play fairly,” often say parents to their kids. In fact, children do not need encouragement to be fair, it is a unique feature of human social life, which emerges in childhood. When given…
It is three years since the final flight of the US space shuttle programme, during which time NASA has had to rely on the Russians, its allies, in space at least, to ferry astronauts and supplies between…
The profits generated by some technology firms are awe-inspiring, serving as beacons for those at less fortunate enterprises. Devices have accounted for a large part of that success, particularly smartphones…
The app market is estimated to generate US$77 billion (£47.2 billion) in revenue each year – and the segment of children’s apps has grown particularly strongly. However, given that developing an app costs…
It is a cruel world out there, particularly for young animals born into social groups where infanticide occurs. This dark side of evolution is revealed when adults – often males – kill offspring to promote…
There are many examples of individuals with different disabilities who excel and accomplish much in their lifetime, rendering physical or mental attributes meaningless – consider Stephen Hawking, Stevie…
Improving wheat is a major challenge for agricultural scientists. The world’s population continues to grow – and so does its appetite. Sanjaya Rajaram, winner of the 2014 World Food Prize, used an innovative…
With the growth of internet-based cloud services, storage, social media and mobile devices, our activities increasingly leave digital shadows in our wake – social media activity, website visits, mobile…
If you stop and think about it for a moment, you will realise what an astonishing feat of precision engineering your colour printer is. It can take the primary colours – cyan, yellow, magenta and black…
Are you being recorded? Thanks to the ubiquity of CCTV and camera phones, the answer is more than ever before likely to be “Yes”. Add to this the growth of wearable technology such as Google Glass and…
There may seem to be no connection between terrorism and cancer. But that is an oversight. If considered closely, it is easy to see that both exhibit loss of control present in “normal” conditions and…
The recent discoveries at Stonehenge, including ritual monuments, burial mounds and a long barrow, are wonderful examples of how archaeological geophysics can be used in areas where excavation is hard…
Take the screen on which you are reading this article. When you look at it, you see one complete scene, but you know that this scene is composed of millions of pixels that only come in three colours: red…
Standing on a stage in San Francisco in early 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that as internet users had become more comfortable sharing their lives online, privacy was no longer a “social…
How can we ensure that someone is who they say they are? How can be sure that the person in our system, both digitally speaking or physically in front of us, is who whom they claim to be? You may think…
Smartphones are designed to be curious. Having already learned about your friendships, your family and the pattern of your daily routine, designers are now interested in your health and fitness. A new…
How the internet is governed is no longer a matter seen fit to be left to mere technical committees. With the extent of online surveillance, so dramatically revealed by the Snowden files, increased content…
Apple has finally released a watch, along with new larger iPhone designs and a payments system. In an eagerly anticipated keynote, Apple has moved into wearables, its first new product category since 2010…
Chickens are not fussy eaters. Any object resembling food is worth an exploratory peck. But give a chicken the choice between sugary sweets and seeds, and they will pick the grains every time. This is…
The past few decades have seen enormous progress being made in synthetic biology – the idea that simple biological parts can be tweaked to do our bidding. One of the main targets has been hacking the biological…
The geography of knowledge has always been uneven. Some people and places have always been more visible and had more voices than others. But the internet seemed to promise something different: a greater…