“What is now proved was once only imagined” – William Blake. ¬† William Blake was a visionary – a poet and artist little appreciated during his lifetime but now seen as one of the greatest artists of the Romantic period...
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This is one that lots of people get wrong, even people who know quite a bit about science. I used to train planetarium presenters at a science centre and am sad to say I often gave people the wrong answer to this question. It’s taught wrong in...
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“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe” – Carl Sagan Everything we see and touch is made up of atoms, and those atoms had to come from somewhere. The smallest – hydrogen and...
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Nope, not one little bit. There is a popular myth that daddy longlegs are incredibly venomous but their fangs are too small to break human skin. This is actually an American myth which has been misunderstood ever since it was imported to the UK...
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On Christmas day the world lost another hero of science. Vera Rubin smashed the boundaries presented to her by her gender to a pioneer of astronomy. She observed distant galaxies and uncovered a very strange problem – they were spinning...
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 ​31 million seconds is a pretty good time for a 940 million kilometre journey, so sit back and feel good about another successful orbit of our nearest star. While 2016 hasn’t always been great for everyone, let us look backwards upon it...
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¬†”All sorts of things can happen when you’re open to new ideas and playing around with things.” Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar, tells us that science is much more than maths, graphs and goggles (although we are fond...
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Instead of our regular Saturday Science Snippets blog I thought that this week I’d give you some of our own news. Santa has come early and brought something extra special: boxes. Not just any boxes but these boxes: Don’t they look lovely?...
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Kids hear about black holes on science fiction shows and films in which they are shown to be incredibly complex, near-mystical objects with the power to transport you through time, space and into other dimensions. This, of course, piques...
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“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers which can’t be questioned” Richard Feynman was a Nobel prizewinning physicist who also happened to be an accomplished artist, bongo player, entomologist...
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Chimpanzees recognise bottoms as well as faces Being able to tell friend from foe by their face has been so important to us that we have evolved an incredible ability to recognise faces. The way we recognise faces involves dedicated brain...
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For over 150 million years there were giant reptiles running around the Earth and in a very short space of time they all disappeared. That’s pretty crazy! We have a fairly good idea of why it happened. A meteor collided with the Earth near what...
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