The trouble with treating cancer is that each type has its own quirks. The quirks of pancreatic cancer make it one of the most lethal. The survival period after diagnosis is only four to six months. The…
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Another story about how some food holds the cure for cancer is making headlines in the Daily Express. This time the saviour is the humble carrot. But it isn’t its first time in the limelight. In March…
Mobile phone providers should introduce national roaming, Britain’s Culture Secretary, Sajid Javid, has announced. The purpose: to enable full mobile phone coverage across the UK, bringing signal to those…
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is holding its 50th public meeting in London from June 22. An international crowd spanning business, politics and civil society will be meeting across…
We are used to the idea that modern technological inventions can have unforeseen consequences on health. Infamous examples include the anti-nausea drug thalidomide, which caused limb defects in unborn…
There are many tales in literature over millennia about people selling their soul to a malevolent deity for the right price. But at least it’s usually a good price. Recent research has discovered that…
Twitter made hay this week as Facebook suffered what has been described, perhaps a tad hyperbollically, as “the longest outage in recent memory”. That’s if your memory doesn’t stretch back much further…
In their latest book, Think Like a Freak, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner urge readers to think about the world differently by training readers’ brains to approach problems in unique ways. In the final…
Last week, David Taylor of Trinity College Dublin argued that simply copying nature is no way to succeed at inventing. His main point is valid – there are indeed not many chances for engineers to make…
It’s irritating when you try to talk to someone playing a videogame. You tell them dinner is ready and they completely ignore you. Their eyes are glued to the screen, their fingers frantically pushing…
For more than 100 years, scientists have “peered” at atoms in a crystal by analysing the way they scatter X-rays. This process, known as crystallography, reveals the chemical structure of compounds in…
If it seems as if everyone you know is online dating, you’re not alone. According to recent surveys, more than 40m single people out of 54m singles in the US have signed up to an online dating site such…
The US government has lifted restrictions on the use of high-quality satellite images in a move that will be welcomed by industry but could have serious privacy implications for the man or woman on the…
There is an up-and-coming set of technologies that uses the strange properties of atomic particles predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, which is the physics of the very small stuff. This technology…
Every year malaria kills more than 600,000, which is a little less than the population of Bhutan. There are some simple solutions to control the disease, but keeping the numbers of mosquitoes with malarial…
Videogames have a had a particularly bad rap lately, not least after a UK coroner suggested a link between Call of Duty and teenage suicide. But recent evidence suggests that gaming can be good for us…
Softbank, a Japanese telecommunications giant, is selling what it is calling “the world’s first personal robot that reads emotions”. Pepper is designed to be a highly interactive household companion and…
The challenge for the documentary filmmaker is to persuade the viewer to take the images and sounds with which they are presented for the world itself. The documentary viewer willingly collaborates in…
TweetDeck, a Twitter app with millions of users, is back online after a rather surprising security scare. For several hours, the service was taken down all because a 19-year-old user tried to add a cute…
The devastating Taliban attack at Karachi’s Jinnah airport this week was shocking not just for the loss of life, but for the sheer brazenness of the assault. Pakistan is no stranger to terrorist attacks…
Thousands of developers descended on San Fransisco recently to hear about Apple’s big plans for the future. One of the highlights was confirmation, after long speculation, that the company would indeed…
Scientists, like other professionals, need ways to evaluate themselves and their colleagues. These evaluations are necessary for better everyday management: hiring, promotions, awarding grants and so on…
After years of trying, it looks like a chatbot has finally passed the Turing Test. Eugene Goostman, a computer program posing as a 13-year old Ukrainian boy, managed to convince 33% of judges that he was…
Where do inventions come from? There’s no magic formula, but there are ways to improve your creativity. One method is to look at nature. Some call this activity bionics, others call it biomimetics. Whatever…
Enrico Fermi, when asked about intelligent life on other planets, famously replied, “Where are they?” Any civilisation advanced enough to undertake interstellar travel would, he argued, in a brief period…