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Antarctic Research
Antarctic Research Why the most remote and inhospitable place on Earth has become one of the most scientifically valuable A. Antarctica, which covers approximately 14 mil…
Art and engineering
A. Works of engineering and technology are sometimes viewed as having nothing to do with art and humanity. Think of the connotation of assembly lines, robots and computer…
Artificial Intelligence
In many countries in the West, hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. There seems to be no shortage of sensationalist news about how AI …
Australia's Airborne Dentists
A. Australians living or traveling in rural and remote areas can face particular difficulties when they need medical care. Hundreds of kilometres from major cities and ma…
Australia's Camouflaged Creatures
A. Most species use camouflage to some extent. If they are convincing, they survive to pass their genes on to future generations. After generations of natural selection, …
Australia's Cane Toad Problem
Australia's attempt to control pests has itself become a pest A. In the north of Australia there are many sugar cane plantations, which early in the 20th century were bei…
Australia's Megafauna Controversy
Australia's Megafauna Controversy Who or what killed the giant animals of prehistoric Australia — and why the answer still matters today etween approximately 50,000 and 4…
Australia's Megafauna Controversy
Over the past 50 millennia, Australia has witnessed the extinction of many species of large animals, including a rhinoceros-sized wombat and goannas the size of crocodile…
Australian Parrots and Their Adaptation to
Australian Parrots and Their Adaptation to Habitat Change How Australia's most colourful birds are responding to a continent transformed by human activity A. Australia is…
Australian parrots
and their adaptation to habitat change A. Parrots are found across the tropics and in all southern hemisphere continents except Antarctica, but nowhere do they display su…
BUILDING A CASTLE
A. Guédelon is no ordinary building site. There is no rumble of diggers or shriek of circular saws. All is peaceful and quiet, save for the continual tapping of the small…
Babies Cry in Their Mother Tongue
A. A newborn baby's cry may sound the same to the ears of sleep-deprived parents the world over but, say scientists, comparisons of babies a few days old show that the cr…
Becoming an Expert
A. Expertise is commitment coupled with creativity. Specifically, it is the commitment of time, energy, and resource to a relatively narrow field of study and the creativ…
Bees
A. Some time in the early Cretaceous period of the Earth's history, hunting wasps of a certain type became bees by adopting a vegetarian diet: they began to rely more and…
Biodiversity
A. It seems biodiversity has become a buzzword beloved of politicians, conservationists, protesters and scientists alike. But what exactly is it? The Convention on Biolog…
Blind to Change
A. Picture the following and prepare to be amazed. You're walking across a college campus when a stranger asks you for directions. While you're talking to him, two men pa…
Book Review: The World of Sugar
Ulbe Bosma's The World of Sugar is a genuinely global history. Bosma discusses all the sugar-growing places of the world, beginning with Cuba and Java, the largest export…
Book Review: Triumph of the City
Triumph of the City, by Edward Glaeser, is a thrilling and very readable hymn of praise to an invention so vast and so effective that it is generally taken for granted. M…
Boring buildings
A. A growing body of research in cognitive science illuminates the physical and mental toll bland cityscapes take on residents. Generally, these researchers argue that hu…
Born to trade
A. Humans are born to trade and we don't need shops or money to do it - the heart of commerce is an instinctive ability for what anthropologists call reciprocity. This is…
Bovids
The family of mammals called bovids belongs to the Artiodactyl class, which also includes giraffes. Bovids are a highly diverse group consisting of 137 species, some of w…
Caral: An Ancient South American City
Huge earth and rock mounds rise out of the desert of the Supe Valley near the coast of Peru in South America. These immense mounds appear simply to be part of the geograp…
Carbon Capture and Storage
Carbon Capture and Storage How a promising technology for tackling climate change works — and why its deployment has been so slow A. Carbon capture and storage, commonly …
Changes in the Air: Atmospheric Science and
Changes in the Air: Atmospheric Science and Climate Policy How the discovery of human-caused changes to the atmosphere has shaped global politics — and why acting on the …