The birds of London There are more than two hundred different species and sub-species of birds in the London area, ranging from the magpie to the greenfinch, but perhaps the most ubiquitous is the pigeon. It has been suggested that the swarms of feral pigeons are all descended from birds which escaped from dovecotes in …
Examining the placebo effect The fact that taking a fake drug can powerfully improve some people’s health – the so-called placebo effect – was long considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology, but now things have changed. Several years ago. Merck, a global pharmaceutical company, was falling behind its rivals in sales. To make matters worse, …
Reading in a whole new way As technology improves, how does the act of reading change? Reading and writing, like all technologies, are constantly changing. In ancient times, authors often dictated their books. Dictation sounded like an uninterrupted series of words, so scribes wrote these down in one long continuous string, justastheyoccurinspeech. For this reason, text was written …
Australia’s biggest daily to find the selection of job ads THE EMPLOYMENT PAGES Saturday Edition Australia’s biggest daily to find the selection of job ads – helpingperfect position for you Saturday Job Guide AGovernment Positions (New South Wales) BHigher Education (Academic staff) CPrimary and Secondary Schools (Academic staff) DHospitals and Medical (Medical staff) EIT and Computing FAccountancy and Finance (Private) GHospitality and …
Persistent bullying is one of the worst experiences a child can face How can it be prevented? Peter Smith, Professor of Psychology at the University of Sheffield, directed the Sheffield Anti-Bullying Intervention Project, funded by the Department for Education Here he reports on his findings. A Bullying can take a variety of forms, from the …
Ants Could Teach Ants The ants are tiny and usually nest between rocks in the south coast of England. Transformed into research subjects at the University of Bristol, they raced along a tabletop foraging for food -and then, remarkably, returned to guide others. Time and again, followers trailed behind leaders, darting this way and that …
Dino discoveries When news breaks of the discovery of a new species of dinosaur, you would be forgiven for thinking that the scientists who set out in search of the fossils are the ones who made die find. The reality tells a different story, as Cavan Scott explains. The BBC series Planet Dinosaur used state-of-the-art …
The politics of pessimism Newspaper headlines and TV or radio news bulletins would have us believe erroneously that a new age has come upon us, the Age of Cassandra. People are being assailed not just with contemporary doom, or past gloom, but with prophecies of disasters about to befall. The dawn of the new millennium …
New Year’s resolution People celebrate the beginning of each year at different times depending on their cultural traditions. But one of the most common times to celebrate the New Year is by the Gregorian calendar. People also call this way of measuring days, months and years the Western or Christian calendar. On this calendar, the …
Three ways to Levitate a Magic Carpet It sounds like a science fiction joke, but it isn’t. What do you get when you turn an invisibility cloak on its side? A mini flying carpet. So say physicists who believe the same exotic materials used to make cloaking devices could also be used to levitate tiny …
