I’ve just returned from sandbagging near the swollen River Parrett at Langport, a town next to the flooded Somerset Levels. There, local people are using new media to take action in the midst of a disaster…
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Displaying 5401 - 5425 of 5718 articles
The Bitcoin craze has hit Iceland, where an entrepreneur has set up his own cryptocurrency and announced plans to give every citizen a handful for free. Baldur Odinsson says he is setting up a new cryptocurrency…
The use of “GIFs” has exploded in recent years. They are used for news, views and entertainment but are most commonly seen as a light-hearted medium. Now scientists are beginning to see how GIFs can be…
After a long investigation, Google has finally reached a settlement with the European Commission about how it presents search results. The Commission had started investigating Google in the first place…
Metastasis, the spread of cancer cells from a primary tumour to different organs, is responsible for more than 90% of deaths due to cancer. Current treatments such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy are effective…
UNESCO has declared 2014 as the International Year of Crystallography. But why? Quite simply because the science of crystallography has revolutionised how we live – and yet few people know about it. Crystallography…
Although it might sometimes seem that your Facebook feed is overrun with chatter about babies, research from Microsoft has suggested that mums actually spend less time on the site after they have had children…
Emoticons, punctuation and creative spelling have been debated, condemned, and regulated since the very beginning of online text-based communication. We’ve all seen “netiquettes” on how not to use ALL…
Twitter has decided to woo the music industry with a promise to share data on up-and-coming artists in a deal that would whet the appetite of most music lovers. It makes sense for one of the largest social…
Planetary science is beginning to catch up with science fiction. Since the launch of the Kepler space telescope in 2009, a deluge of planets outside of our solar system has been found, with many oddball…
You can be forgiven for assuming that gender is not an issue any more in higher education. There are more young women entering universities than ever before and they are graduating each year in their hundreds…
Despite lack of evidence or logic, some people would like kids to be taught as fact that the Earth was created by a supernatural being some 6,000 years ago. That is the case put forth by Christian Schools…
According to Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, establishing a permanent presence beyond Earth is the first step humans will take towards the “divergence into a new species”. Plans to visit and even colonise…
Around 100 years ago a father and his son in north England conducted an experiment that would revolutionise the way scientists study molecules. A refined version of their method still remains one of the…
Last October, scientists in California sequenced the DNA for the “type H” botulinum toxin. One gram of this toxin would be sufficient to kill half a billion people, making it the deadliest substance yet…
Meet a parasite that can create its own mobile nursery for its young, a parasite that is thought to be the inspiration behind the chest-bursting xenomorph in the film Alien. Meet Phronima, the pram-pushing…
The UK government has revealed that it is considering ditching Microsoft software for open source alternatives. Cabinet minister Frances Maude has said he wants to see a range of software being adopted…
Since the birth of space flight in 1957, the number of man-made objects orbiting the Earth has grown every year. There are now more than 15,000 such objects larger than 10cm, at least those that we know…
Technology is under development to enable advertisers to target products not just at a broad group of people that might be watching a certain type of programme but at specific households and even individuals…
Mercury has long been a mystery to scientists. Until recently, knowledge of the planet was limited to the grey, patchy landscape revealed by the Mariner 10 probe, NASA’s first mission to Mercury in the…
All eyes turned to London this week, as Google announced its latest acquisition in the form of DeepMind, a company that specialises in artificial intelligence technologies. The £400m pricetag paid by Google…
Take a set of chess pieces and throw them all away except for one knight. Place the knight on any one of the 64 squares of a chess board. Can you make 63 legal moves so that you visit every square on the…
It was reported this week that the NSA and British intelligence agency GCHQ have been gathering information from popular apps including David Cameron’s favourite game, Angry Birds. According to the Guardian…
If Google chairman Eric Schmidt is to be believed, the automation of jobs will be the “defining” problem of the next two to three decades. At a debate at Davos 2014, he warned that the constant development…
The “like” is the predominant gesture on social media, whether you’re sticking to Facebook or shifting to Instagram. It may even be the most common gesture among humans nowadays. Some of us probably “like…