“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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“Play is the highest form of research”. This succinct and thought-provoking quote from Albert Einstein has heavily influenced our ethos here at Letterbox Lab. We want everyone to play with science and discover something new every day...
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 Platypus venom might help to treat diabetes The Platypus is a weird little creature. It’s like a mammal that wants to be a duck with its egg-laying, webbed feet and bill. It’s so unlike other mammals that when British scientists were first...
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  ​It seems our previous post asking why the sea is salty inspired some further curiosity and we’ve been asked how fish know when it’s time to go to sleep! What a great question, we’ve had a lot of fun pondering the answer. Fish sleep is...
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Ants farm tropical fruits Humans invented agriculture around 10,000 years ago and were probably quite proud of themselves. But for Philidris nagasau, an ant found only in Fiji, agriculture was old news – they’ve been growing their own fruit...
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There is salt everywhere: in the soil, in rocks, in living things. Rivers carry this salt into the seas and it gets stuck there because there’s nowhere else for it to go. Some of the water in the seas gets taken out when the heat of the Sun...
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Neil deGrasse Tyson – astrophysicist extraordinaire, planetarium director, cosmologist, author, radio presenter and all-round cool guy – has much to say of the joy of discovery and importance of scientific literacy. “Question...
Read moreNasa has a poo problem… NASA have a problem and they are looking for help. Space science has achieved a lot and solved many of the problems of getting people and machines into space. But one problem still has a very primitive ¬†solution...
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To celebrate the fantastic supermoon that graced our skies yesterday, we’re tackling a common question about our closest cosmic neighbour. The answer to this question is that the Earth, Moon and Sun are all spinning balls that are moving...
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“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night”. Galileo’s words embody the power of curiosity and inquiry to overcome fear better than ours ever could.
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