The recently published Information Economy Strategy is a welcome recognition of the increasing importance of digital in all aspects of the economy and a call to action to bolster skills and infrastructure…
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The use of silver in medicine is as old as western medicine itself. Hippocrates is known to have used it to treat ulcers and wounds, the Romans almost certainly knew of its healing properties, its use…
Over the past 20 years, research has revealed large populations of creatures living many miles below the Earth’s surface. Now, a new study published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports conducted by…
More and more scientists are communicating via social media to find, publicise and discuss current research. This trend has been highlighted in two recent papers that look at the influence of social media…
Researchers have found that dishwashers are particularly conducive to the growth and spread of disease-causing fungi. These fungi have been implicated in causing lung diseases and sometimes fatal infections…
Accusations of scientific bias are the new catch-all weapon for anti-science commentators and climate deniers. Why are they effective? New research shows they may exploit part of our psychology. Climate…
The front-page of The Times carried a story today that William could be “Britain’s first king to have proven Indian ancestry”. The story continues inside, along with an advert for the personal DNA testing…
An ancestor of Prince William’s from the 19th century was half Indian, according to The Times. This claim is based on analysis of his distant cousins’ DNA. We have such technology today, but how comfortable…
Scientific infrastructure is big news. The Large Hadron Collider, based at CERN, has been a success not just in the field of particle physics, but as a scientific cultural icon. The UK wants a piece of…
So the US National Security Agency (NSA) and possibly GCHQ could have access to our emails. This should not have come as a surprise. It should be seen as a sign of things to come. We already send close…
The rate of extinction of species today is many thousand times the natural rate. There are even examples that such loss can have serious impact on humans. So a critical question is: what is the role species…
After almost a decade of exploring the surface of Mars, American space agency’s rover has found the strongest evidence yet for the presence of water on the red planet. The data comes from the rock “Esperance…
The past week has seen some extraordinary allegations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting all online communications. It is also alleged that the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters…
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has direct access to information on the servers of major American internet companies, according to reports published in the Guardian and the Washington Post. The NSA…
“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value.” If this statement came from a politician, the profound lack of understanding of the socioeconomic role of scientific research might…
Plato said true philosophers are “those who love to see the truth” – a desire to seek and expose fundamental knowledge. For most scientists, the search for truth, otherwise known as fundamental or basic…
US President Barack Obama hopes to lay the foundations for a long-term relationship when he meets Xi Jinping, China’s new president, for a two-day summit in Southern California on Friday. Obama has a difficult…
Many therapeutic drugs and toxins affect us without us knowing exactly how. We know, for example, that Epilim, or sodium valproate, one of the most highly prescribed medicines for epilepsy can prevent…
Scientists are rarely happy in UK’s libel courts. The threat to science from the UK defamation law is not so much that scientific publications have regularly been held to be libellous, but the distraction…
You must have heard that spider silk is stronger than steel. We all want to believe that there are wonder materials in nature that are far superior to human-made ones. But the problem with statements that…
In May, the US Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records from reporters of the Associated Press (AP), a multinational non-profit news agency. AP’s chief executive Gary Pruitt…
In rich countries, more than 80% of the population today will survive past the age of 70. About 150 years ago, only 20% did. In all this while, though, only one person lived beyond the age of 120. This…
Wikipedia, the collection of 37 million articles that anyone can edit, is defined by conflict. The ability for anyone to shape this global repository of knowledge inevitably means that we are presented…
There can be few words as poignant as “endling”, the name given to the last surviving individual of a species. The picture (below) of Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, is heartbreaking…
There are many qualities that have been suggested that separate human beings from other living species. These include tool making, an ability to dream and especially the development of highly sophisticated…