A Neuroscientist reveals – How to think differently In the last decade a revolution has occurred in the way that scientists think about the brain. We now know that the decisions humans make can be traced to the firing patterns of neurons in specific parts of the brain. These discoveries have led to the field … more →

Spoken corpus comes to life A  The compiling of dictionaries has been historically the provenance of studious professorial types – usually bespectacled – who love to pore over weighty tomes and make pronouncements on the finer nuances of meaning. They were probably good at crosswords and definitely knew a lot of words, but the image … more →

The Nature and Aims of Archaeology Archaeology is partly the discovery of treasures of the past, partly the work of the scientific analyst, partly the exercise of the creative imagination. It is toiling in the sun on an excavation in the Middle East, it is working with living Inuit in the snows of Alaska, and … more →

Highs and lows Hormone levels – and hence our moods –may be affected by the weather. Gloomy weather can cause depression, but sunshine appears to raise the spirits. In Britain, for example, the dull weather of winter drastically cuts down the amount of sunlight that is experienced which strongly affects some people. They become so … more →

Votes for Women The suffragette movement, which campaigned for votes for women in the early twentieth century, is most commonly associated with the Pankhurst family and militant acts of varying degrees of violence. The Museum of London has drawn on its archive collection to convey a fresh picture with its exhibition. The Purple, White and Green: … more →

Migratory beekeeping Taking wing To eke out a full-time living from their honeybees, about half the nation’s 2,000 commercial beekeepers pull up stakes each spring, migrating north to find more flowers for their bees. Besides turning floral nectar into honey, these hardworking insects also pollinate crops for farmers -for a fee. As autumn approaches, the … more →

Biological control of pests The continuous and reckless use of synthetic chemicals for the control of pests which pose a threat to agricultural crops and human health is proving to be counter-productive. Apart from engendering widespread ecological disorders, pesticides have contributed to the emergence of a new breed of chemical-resistant, highly lethal superbugs. According to … more →

Land of the rising sum A Japan has a significantly better record in terms of average mathematical attainment than England and Wales. Large sample international comparisons of pupils’ attainments since the 1960s have established that not only did Japanese pupils at age 13 have better scores of average attainment, but there was also a larger … more →

Venus in transit June 2004 saw the first passage., known as a ‘transit` of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun in  122 years. Transits have helped shape our view of the whole Universe, as Heather Cooper and Nigel Henbest explain  A On 8 June 2004, more than half the population of the … more →

The history of Tortoise If you go back far enough, everything lived in the sea. At various points in evolutionary history, enterprising individuals within many different animal groups moved out onto the land, sometimes even to the most parched deserts, taking their own private seawater with them in blood and cellular fluids. In addition to … more →