CRISPR is a mechanism that arose in bacteria millions of years ago to fight off disease Sheetal Soni, Researcher, Lecturer, Attorney, University of KwaZulu-Natal Researchers are racing against time to find ways to treat and prevent COVID-19. There is currently no treatment for the disease, and the World Health Organisation has created Solidarity, a global […]

April 2020 The human evolutionary path is complicated. It’s almost impossible to say exactly when we modern humans became “us”. This quandary is best articulated by the famous naturalist Charles Darwin in his book The Descent of Man: In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some apelike creature to man as he now exists, […]

Christian Schroeder, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science and Planetary Exploration, University of Stirling – March 2020 How the Earth got its moon is a long debated question. The giant impact theory – which states that the Moon formed from the a collision between the early Earth and a rocky body called Theia – has become […]

Antoine Koen, PhD Candidate in Pumped Thermal Energy Storage, University of Cambridge and Pau Farres Antunez, Postdoctoral researcher in Energy Storage, University of Cambridge The effect that fossil fuels are having on the climate emergency is driving an international push to use low-carbon sources of energy. At the moment, the best options for producing low-carbon […]

David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University 26 February 2020 Most space missions investigate the surface or atmosphere of a body. But NASA’s InSight probe, which landed on Mars in November 2018, is different – it is the first mission dedicated to studying the interior structure of the planet and whether it gives […]

The end-Permian mass extinction is considered to be the most devastating biotic event in the history of life on Earth – it caused dramatic losses in global biodiversity, both in water and on land. About 90% of marine and 70% of terrestrial (land) species went extinct. This event may have been responsible for opening up […]

With colleagues at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand, we have found a new way to estimate the intelligence of our ancestors. Roger S. Seymour, Professor Emeritus of Physiology, University of Adelaide How did human intelligence evolve? Anthropologists have studied this question for decades by looking at tools found in archaeological […]

Mauro Vallati, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Huddersfield Will artificial intelligence one day surpass human thinking? The rapid progress of AI, coupled with our standard fear of machines, has raised concerns that its abilities will one day start to grow uncontrollably, eventually leading it to take over the world and wipe out humanity […]

We suspect that this might be some sort of exotic system that we have never seen before involving a radio-flaring giant star orbiting a neutron star (the dense remnant of a supernova star explosion) or a black hole. Laura Nicole Driessen, PhD Student in Radio Astronomy, University of Manchester 25 November 2019 After observing a […]

Synthetic biology researchers are harnessing the power of nature to solve problems in medicine, manufacturing and agriculture, in other words, engineering biology to do things it wouldn’t normally do. Claudia Vickers, Director, Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform, CSIRO We need to revolutionise agriculture in the next 30 years. In 2050 we may have almost 10 […]