Virtual reality continues to make people sick
Nov 23rd 2019THE WHOLE history of fiction shows that alternative realities are an attractive and profitable idea. So back in the…
Male nightingales spend the winter practising
Nov 30th 2019DESPITE THE ideas of Julia Monk and her colleagues on the frequency and normality of same-sex mating behaviour among…
Slowly, HIV is being beaten
Nov 28th 2019ON THE PRINCIPLE that no news is good news, the fact that AIDS has dropped out of the headlines is surely a good…
How ear bones evolved
Nov 28th 2019EVOLUTION HAS NO foresight. But occasionally it flukes something ideally suited to develop into something else. Biologists…
An emergency landing system that passengers can activate
Nov 28th 2019ON NOVEMBER 9TH 2018 a Piper Dakota light aircraft flying over Iowa broadcast a distress call. The pilot seemed to…
Some planks from ancient Rome started life in eastern France
Dec 5th 2019THESE OAKplanks, once part of the portico of a property just outside Imperial Rome, travelled a long way before the…
Electrical energy can be captured as liquid air
Nov 30th 2019IN THE PAST few decades wind and solar power have gone from being exotic technologies to quotidian pieces of engineering…
America seeks faster ways to launch military satellites
Dec 5th 2019BY SHOOTING A missile into one of its own satellites in March, India upped the ante. The immediate intention, suggests…
Malaria infections have stopped falling
Dec 5th 2019AFEW YEARS ago it looked as if malaria might be on the way out. From 2000 to 2014 the number of cases and deaths fell….