Trillions of microbes live in and on our body. We don’t yet fully understand how these microbial ecosystems develop or the full extent to which they influence our health. Some provide essential nutrients…
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A dutch student has taken the bold decision to sell all his data at auction. It’s a decision that should make us think about the future of our own information. In an auction on April 12, Shawn Buckles…
Stephan Lewandowsky, chair of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol, answered questions posed by the public on Reddit. The Conversation has curated the highlights. Conspiracy theories Under…
A service is soon to launch in the UK that will enable us to transfer money to other people using just their name and mobile number. Paym is being hailed as a revolution in banking because you can pay…
Jet lag is a discomfort many of us will have experienced in the days following a long-haul flight across time zones. Mathematicians in the US may have a jet-lag cure in the form a new app called Entrain…
Last summer the World Economic Forum (WEF) invited its 1,500 council members to identify top trends facing the world, including what should be done about them. The WEF consists of 80 councils covering…
Forget about anti-ageing creams and hair treatments. If you want to stay young, get a fast spaceship. That is what Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicted a century ago, and it is commonly known as “twin…
In 1997, Douglas Rushkoff boldly predicted the emergence a new caste of tech-literate adolescents. He argued that the children of his day would soon blossom into “screenagers”, endowed with effortless…
Science has often come to the rescue when it comes to the world’s big problems, be it the Green Revolution that helped avoid mass starvation or the small pox vaccine that eradicated the disease. There…
People around the world are being invited to learn how to hunt for planets, using two new online apps devised by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and UC Santa Cruz. The apps use data from…
Heartbleed, the bug that has preoccupied thousands of websites and millions of users over the past week, may well have been the biggest security flaw in internet history but it is unlikely to be the last…
People rushing for a bus. Pedestrians sending texts on a busy street. Drivers who pick their noses at traffic lights. Men glancing at Agent Provocateur window displays. Shoppers pretending not to notice…
For more than a billion years, plants have had an internal dialogue, and we are just beginning to learn the words. The unusual dialogue occurs between two compartments within plant cells – the nucleus…
The web is full of scare stories about the Heartbleed security vulnerability but panicking won’t help. Better to use this situation as an opportunity to clean up our acts. Few of us do it but we should…
If you’re struggling to understand the deluge of information about the Heartbleed vulnerability, you’re not alone. Some reports tell us to change all our online passwords immediately, others warn us that…
Since the spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the gigantic particle accelerator outside Geneva, have suffered a bit of a drought when it comes…
Only two decades ago, when I was starting my PhD studies at the University of California in Berkeley, there was talk about the death of anatomy as a research subject. That hasn’t happened. Instead the…
Samsung has had a mixed relationship with wearable technology to date but an announcement this week may put it ahead of the crowd. The South Korean firm made an early bid on the market with smartwatches…
In response to widespread outrage about the National Security Agency’s work monitoring telephone and internet usage metadata, Barack Obama is gearing up to propose a range of (relatively minor) changes…
Many social situations can provoke anxiety. Be it a networking event for work or having unannounced guests, these kind of interactions can cause even the most outgoing among us to feel unsettled. But do…
Search ships may be honing in on the black box from missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 after weeks of searching. But whether they are successful or not, the difficulty they have encountered along…
There is nothing intrinsic to pandas that makes them bad at breeding. It is true that they only have one menstrual cycle each year, but this is true of many creatures. Animals that have multiple cycles…
The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has once again intensified now that search planes and ships may have detected a signal from its black box. Black boxes generally only continue…
Average life expectancy has nearly doubled since 1800, thanks to progress in medicine. Most of that was made by developing drugs and improving public health services. The medical revolution of the 21st…
As the hype around the internet of things grows, we are being presented with dystopian images of a future in which our fridges spy on us and our toothbrushes tattle to our dentists and insurers. But our…