Light is important to organisms for two different reasons. Firstly it Is used as a cue for the timing of daily and seasonal rhythms in both plants and animals, and secondly it is used to assist growth in plants. Breeding in most organisms occurs during… Read More »The effects of light on plant and animal species
On 2nd August 1999, a particularly hot day in the town of Cirencester in the UK, a large pane of toughened glass in the roof of a shopping centre at Bishops Walk shattered without warning and fell from its frame. When fragments were analysed by… Read More »Flawed Beauty: the problem with toughened glass
A The market for tourism in remote areas is booming as never before. Countries ail across the world are actively promoting their ‘wilderness’ regions – such as mountains, Arctic lands, deserts, small islands and wetlands – to high-spending tourists. The attraction of these areas is obvious.-… Read More »The Impact of Wilderness Tourism
It is becoming acceptable again to talk of computers performing human tasks such as problem-solving and pattern-recognition. A After years in the wilderness, the term ‘artificial intelligence’ (Al) seems poised to make a comeback. Al was big in the 1980s but vanished in the 1990s. It… Read More »The Return of Artificial Intelligence
A The fertile land of the Nile delta is being eroded along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast at an astounding rate, in some parts estimated at 100 metres per year. In the past, land scoured away from the coastline by the currents of the Mediterranean Sea used… Read More »Disappearing Delta
New Zealand’s National Party spokesman on education, Dr Lockwood Smith, recently visited the US and Britain. Here he reports on the findings of his trip and what they could mean for New Zealand’s education policy A ‘Education To Be More’ was published last August. It… Read More »Early Childhood Education
World science is dominated today by a small number of languages, including Japanese, German and French, but it is English which is probably the most popular global language of science. This is not just because of the importance of English- speaking countries such as the… Read More »The Birth of Scientific English
John McCrone reviews recent research on humour The joke comes over the headphones: ‘Which side of a dog has the most hair? The left.’ No, not funny. Try again. Which side of a dog has the most hair? The outside.’ Hah! The punchline is silly… Read More »What’s so funny?
In 1907, Leo Hendrick Baekeland, a Belgian scientist working in New York, discovered and patented a revolutionary new synthetic material. His invention, which he named ‘Bakelite’, was of enormous technological importance, and effectively launched the modern plastics industry. The term ‘plastic’ comes from the Greek… Read More »BAKELITE – The birth of modem plastics
For many environmentalists, the world seems to be getting worse. They have developed a hit-list of our main fears: that natural resources are running out; that the population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat; that species are becoming extinct in vast numbers, and… Read More »The Truth about the Environment
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