Category: 7. SciTech

“If we went on business-as-usual and admitted a normal class size, then we’d have students we couldn’t support in the program,” says Kimberly Cooper, a developmental biologist at UCSD and associate director of the biology PhD program. One of her undergraduate mentees wasn’t admitted to…

The unevenness of the state of each cloud layer is thought to be the reason why the brightness of SIMP 0136 changes as it rotates. It’s easy to understand if you think of Jupiter, which as a gas giant planet likely has a similar structure and chemical composition.

Or for another way to picture…

Children are always asking “Why?” As they experience things for the first time, it’s natural to want to find out more. But as children grow into adults, they often dismiss something new that challenges their experience and understanding.

This is what happened to me when I discovered a source…

It may be famous for its reliable ‘Old Faithful’ geyser, but one should never forget that Yellowstone National Park sits on top of a rumbling, dynamic, active supervolcano.

Changes are always happening, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes less so. But they’re always interesting. Case in…

A powerful combination of two cholesterol-lowering drugs could prevent thousands of deaths each year from heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases, according to the largest analysis of its kind.

Published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the new research examined data from…

The blue-lined octopus (Hapalochlaena fasciata) is only a few centimeters long, yet it may be one of the most dangerous marine animals on Earth.

That’s because, as part of the blue-ringed octopus genus, it’s heavily armed – not just with eight arms, but also with tetrodotoxin (TTX), a…

Predicting the future is considered a fool’s game. Yet we can’t help but wonder what ideas we’ll be talking about in the decades to come… presumably while sitting in a bar on the Moon, sipping anti-ageing, dark matter martinis.

Hundreds of scientific papers cross the BBC Science Focus news…

Plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental challenges of our time, but researchers at Northwestern University may have found a new solution. Their newly developed method can break down plastic using nothing more than moisture from the air, offering a clean, energy-efficient…

But one of Malle’s graduate students was on the case. Britta Späth.

“Our Obsession”

In 2003, Späth arrived at the University of Kassel to start her doctorate with Malle. She was almost perfectly suited for working on the McKay conjecture: Even in high school, she could spend days or weeks…

Is it possible to navigate your way to better brain health? That was the tantalising question raised by a recent study in the British Medical Journal, which found that being a taxi or ambulance driver may offer protection against dementia.

Researchers from Harvard University studied the working…