Anyone who looked at The Guardian’s website this week will have seen a picture of one of the newspaper’s own laptops smashed and in pieces. Why did this Mac have to die? The article accompanying the photo…
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Science + Tech – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 5601 - 5625 of 5718 articles
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010, he argued that unless the device was better at doing everyday tasks than smartphones or netbooks, it wouldn’t deserve to exist. Consumers and corporates embraced…
In 2009 a team of academics from Eindhoven University of Technology dug up a perfectly normal street in the Netherlands. In its place they installed a chemistry experiment cunningly disguised as a concrete…
Tomorrow Kevin Spacey will bring a touch of Oscar-winning glamour to the Edinburgh International Television Festival by delivering this year’s James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture. He will speak about changes…
Our individual, varied personalities are among the traits often cited as those that distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom. However, as we, like the rest of life on Earth, are products of natural…
Robots represent the cutting edge in science. For decades we have been promised a bright future in which these human-like machines will become so advanced that we won’t be able to tell the difference between…
Despite their small size, organisms smaller than thousandth of a metre (1 mm) contribute greatly to biodiversity and ecosystem function. Unfortunately, categorising small organisms, even defining those…
I can only begin to imagine the pain, grief and suffering of the family of Hannah Smith, who committed suicide recently after apparently being bullied online, and Daniel Perry, who appears to have killed…
New research has shown that the Southern Ocean near Antarctica is filled with whale bone-eating worms, but it lacks wood-eating marine fauna, which are found everywhere else in the world’s oceans. This…
Public participation in science is increasing, and citizen science has a central part in this. It is a contribution by the public to research, actively undertaken and requiring thoughtful action. Citizen…
With rapid economic development in the past 20 years, China urgently feels the need to move from a manufacturing-driven to an innovation-driven economy. As a result, the state is supporting many bold research…
Probiotics are something of a new dietary craze. Foods contain healthy “probiotic” bacteria, and these microbes can promote good gastrointestinal (GI) health. But what about your brain? Apparently, bacteria…
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and co-founder of PayPal, has announced his vision for a new high-speed ground transportation system called “Hyperloop”. The system would connect Los Angeles to San Francisco…
In 1859, from August 28 to September 2, we were given an important lesson about how vulnerable we are to the Sun’s power. The Carrington Event, named for the amateur astronomer who recorded it, Richard…
Researchers in Uppsala, Sweden accidentally left a reaction running over the weekend and ended up resolving a century-old chemistry problem. Their work has led to the development of a new material, dubbed…
The Ashes series is already plagued by controversy over technology’s role in cricket. The latest allegations of equipment tampering haven’t helped. Australian TV station Channel Nine has reported some…
When it comes to feats of physiology, bears are among the superstars of the mammalian world. Their endurance is unmatched. During hibernation, bears regularly survive up to six full months without consuming…
The Internet Watch Foundation, an organisation that aims to eliminate access to indecent images of children online, says it has received 227 reports in the past six weeks of business websites being compromised…
One of nature’s most fascinating phenomena is the collective behaviour of animals. A shoal of fish, a swarm of locusts, and a colony of ants can all act as superorganisms, where the group as a whole makes…
The growth of online gaming has spawned a new kind of addiction and it’s time the industry woke up to its responsibilities. Since the first videogame was launched in 1972, the gaming industry has become…
Robots can do a lot for us: they can explore space or cut our toenails. But do advances in robotics and artificial intelligence hold hidden threats? Three leaders in their fields answer questions about…
His eyes brighten and his voice rises as he tells me about his latest results. He is excited. He should be. His lab is unravelling the details of how new memories are formed in the brain. Then I ask him…
Astronomers have been searching for a mysterious substance called “dark matter” since the 1930s. Most scientists still believe it exists, despite many fruitless decades. Now we propose a new theory of…
Many, if not most, of us are now connected to the internet, and we have become familiar with it: we shop, we bank, we socialise online. The Internet of Things is not a different internet but refers to…
Because of their location’s geology, Icelandic volcanoes are known to be directly connected to the Earth’s mantle. New research shows that a volcano in Costa Rica may have a direct connection to the mantle…