To Most People, the inner workings of a car engine or a computer are a mystery. It might as well be a black box: never mind what goes on inside, as long as it works.
11/07/2024
Bleeding Through a tampon or pad never makes for a good time. The risk of leaks is annoying and stressful for all women who bleed, and especially for the 20% to 30% whose menstrual flow is so heavy that they sometimes must change their tampons or…
Aristotle TAUGHT his students the importance of managing their emotions. John Dewey, an early 20th-century reformer, sparked the idea that teachers must educate the “whole child”. For decades wealthy parents in Britain (and a few other places) sent…
07/07/2024
On paper, Mercia School in the north of England is a forbidding and unfashionable place. Teachers focus unrelentingly on “the acquisition of knowledge”, if its intimidating website is any guide. Lessons are “didactic”, delivered to pupils sitting in…
Even after a century of research, a tropical rainforest in Panama continues to shed valuable light on the world’s abundance of natural life
03/07/2024
The tall grey buildings covering an industrial complex at Nysa, in south-west Poland, look like a modern car factory has been teleported into the surrounding farmland. The plant, though, does not make cars, but it is a new and vital part of the…
28/02/2024
In what used to be a fish-processing plant in Akranes, a small port in Iceland, fragments of seaweed rise and fall in glass columns lit by leds. Running Tide, the Maine-based company which runs the facility, is trying to work out how best to get…
20/11/2023
Lord Rutherford, the discoverer of the atomic nucleus, divided science into physics and stamp collecting. (He was, after all, a physicist.) But he had a point.
12/10/2023
Tuberculosis (TB), which kills one person every 20 seconds, is a forgotten pandemic. About a quarter of the world’s population has been infected with the bacterium . Most will never know, as they are asymptomatic. But these latent infections go on…
28/06/2023
There is a global race to build the tallest wooden skyscraper. The record was held by Mjostarnet, an 85-metre tower on the shore of Lake Mjosa in Norway, which hosts flats, a hotel and a swimming pool—until Ascent, an 87-metre structure, was…
21/06/2023
Just three industries—chemicals, steel and cement—account for around a fifth of all man-made carbon-dioxide emissions (see chart). Not only are those industries big polluters, they are also hard to clean up.
07/06/2023
Steelmakers around the world hope to decarbonise by changing the way they pluck oxygen from iron-oxide ores. This is done using either carbon monoxide (CO) derived indirectly from coke in a blast furnace, or by “direct reduction” with syngas, a…
31/05/2023
