New research on the treatment of 'hardcore' female Mau Mau prisoners by the British in the late 1950s sheds new light on how ideas about gender, deviancy and mental health shaped colonial practices…

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas that is also responsible for destroying the ozone layer.  INRA researchers in Dijon have shown that the ability of soils to eliminate N2O can…

Until the second half of the nineties, when the LEP collider started to be upgraded to investigate higher centre-of-mass energies of electron-positron collisions than those until then produced at the…

Jack The Ripper is famous - everyone in the Western world has heard of the unsolved case of the Whitechapel serial killer who preyed on prostitutes for a few months in 1888. There were only five (or…

While MOOCs are free, their value lies in providing information about how students. Credit: learnFlickr/Ilonka Talina, CC BY-SA By Gregor Kennedy, University of Melbourne Massive Open Online Courses,…

George Clooney used to copy my haircuts. People who knew me in the 1990s always marveled at my classic, parted-on-the-side, immaculately coiffed style. It was retro, just like the term "marvelous' is…

More than 15 million miles of new roads will be built worldwide by 2050, pushing back the frontiers of progress. Of course, progress may mean a loss of wilderness if it is not managed carefully, and…

Even for experienced readers, mirror-image letters like b/d or p/q can be confusing. Why is it difficult for some to differentiate these letters?  When learning to read, our brain must be able…

Are you in the target market to eat insects? The easiest uptake will be by a young male who claims to care more about the environment, believes they are progressive and adventurous about food,…

High resolution photograph of cracks in thin layer of glass atop a silicon wafer. The colors come from optical interference between the thin wafer and the glass above. Image credit: Joël Marthelot…

Observations made by the Kepler spacecraft have shown that Kepler-413b is a very wobbling exoplanet. The planet's orbit is unusual in that it is tilted 2.5 degrees with respect to the plane of…

Humans transport microbes around their environment. Image: Argonne National Laboratory By Emma Saville, The Conversation and Penny Orbell, The Conversation Microbial communities vary greatly between…

Glass is ideal for applications that require resistance to thermal shock or to chemically harsh environments and manufacturers commonly use additives such as boron oxide to tweak its properties by…

Image: If only neuroscience was that easy. Credit: quixotecr, CC BY-NC-ND By Matt Wall, Imperial College London During World War II, residents on the islands in the southern Pacific Ocean saw heavy…

Bending, stretching, twisting, folding, modern materials that are light, flexible and highly conductive are the future of products like artificial skin or electronic paper.  But these "aerogel…

In a cell's nucleus, chromosomal DNA is tightly bound to structural proteins known as histones, an amalgam biologists call chromatin. Until a few decades ago, histones were regarded as a nuclear…

Many of us care deeply about the possibility of tigers, lemurs and such like becoming extinct in the wild. I'd like to suggest that we care as much about the possibility of microbes on Mars and…

One evening, during the drearily sodden summer of 1816, Lord Byron and his friends read Fantasmagoriana, a French translation of a German book of ghost stories (they were intellectuals after…

Artistic rendering of Philae on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA/ATG, CC BY By Ian Wright, The Open University There is much excitement about Rosetta at the moment. The European Space…

The MERS coronavirus has caused disease outbreaks across the Arabian Peninsula and spread to Europe several times, claiming the lives of several hundred people since its discovery in 2012. How…