Angelos Tsiaras, Research Associate of Physics and Astronomy, UCL 12 September 2019 With more than 4,000 exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our sun – discovered so far, it may seem like we are on the cusp of finding out whether we are alone in the universe. Sadly though, we don’t know much about […]

Michael J. I. Brown, Associate professor in astronomy, Monash University Dark matter, by its very nature, is unseen. We cannot observe it with telescopes, and nor have particle physicists had any luck detecting it via experiments. So why do I and thousands of my colleagues believe most of the universe’s mass is made up of […]

by Will Dunham, WASHINGTON, REUTERS – 28 August 2019 Scientists on Wednesday announced the landmark discovery in Ethiopia of a nearly complete skull of an early human ancestor that lived 3.8 million years ago, a species boasting an intriguing mixture of apelike and humanlike characteristics. The fossil dubbed MRD, which provides insight into a pivotal […]

The idea that some regions have a protective layer below the ground, stopping heat from the Earth’s interior rising to the surface, isn’t as strange as it may sound. After all, the ozone layer in Earth’s atmosphere protects against ultraviolet radiation, but it was only discovered in the 19th century. Astounding new findings about the […]

Franca Nneka Alaribe, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Biomedical Science Department, Tshwane University of Technology and Keolebogile Shirley Motaung, Professor of Tissue Engineering, Tshwane University of Technology There’s been a rise in recent years of biomedical engineering techniques that can restore lost tissue and bone. If you’ve been in a car crash, for instance, there are […]

Mark O. Cuthbert, Research Fellow & Lecturer in Groundwater Science, Cardiff University and Richard Taylor, Professor of Hydrogeology, UCL – August 7, 2019  Groundwater reserves in Africa are estimated to be 20 times larger than the water stored in lakes and reservoirs above ground. These are the freshwater stores that flow in rocks and sediment […]

Changes will not only be made to the baby but all their descendants James Davies, Clinician Scientist and Consultant Haematologist, University of Oxford We are entering a new era as a species. For the first time, we are not only able to read our genetic code but also edit it. This will revolutionise our ability […]

Martyn Dade-Robertson, Professor of Emerging Technology, Co-director of the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment, Newcastle University What if our homes were alive? I don’t mean smart homes with the disembodied voice of Alexa deciding the setting for your living room spotlights. I mean actually alive – growing, living, breathing and even reproducing. The […]

To many, ancient Egypt is synonymous with the pharaohs and pyramids of the Dynastic period starting about 3,100BC. Yet long before that, about 9,300-4,000BC, enigmatic Neolithic peoples flourished. Indeed, it was the lifestyles and cultural innovations of these peoples that provided the very foundation for the advanced civilisations to come. But who were they? As […]

Because ADVANCE included a diverse African population and was much more representative of the demographics of the HIV epidemic, its results are important both to people living with HIV in South Africa, as well as globally. Michelle Moorhouse, Senior Research Clinician, University of the Witwatersrand and Willem Daniel Francois Venter, Deputy Executive Director, Wits Reproductive […]