It is often said that animals behave unusually before an earthquake. In an international cooperation project, researchers investigated whether cows, sheep, and dogs can actually detect early signs of earthquakes. In the experiment, sensors to the animals in an earthquake-prone area in Northern…

Thirty years after the U.S.S.R. collapsed we are still learning about the ramifications of overarching government control of essential services. Though the combined Germany now has nationwide healthcare, some government health care is worse than others. You don't want to be in a South African…

The complex ways in which quarks bind themselves into composite particles such as the protons and neutrons found inside atomic nuclei are not yet understood so the discovery of a four-quark particle, the first of a previously undiscovered class of particles, could provide valuable insight into…

A stark warning about the kind of summer that could become routine in the UK by the end of this century has been issued in a new study by the country’s Met Office. Using temperature data and climate model simulations, the researchers tested the likelihood of UK temperatures exceeding 30°C, 35°C,…

At the LHCP conference this year, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented new results relating to a physics process called vector boson scattering plus the first observation of the so-called “massive triboson production." During proton collisions at the LHC, many particles, including the…

Activity means different things to men and women in Finland, but there is one thing they share in common; television has little impact.  A recent longitudinal study with a ten-year follow-up examined how the television viewing time of Finnish adults was associated with their physical activity level…

Sustainability has become a popular buzzword since the turn of the century, and with it came tools to classify and measure urban performance (rankings, indexes, etc.) across public and private institutions. Those tools were used to create the policies implemented by authorities and are used to…

Mutagenesis is a process where new strains of food and products are created using chemicals and radiation in the lab. It is much faster than the natural mutation process while being more targeted than old techniques like hybrids and grafts. In the 1970s, its successor, transgene science and…

When Charles Dickens died, he had spectacular fame, great wealth and an adoring public. But his personal life was complicated. Separated from his wife and living in a huge country mansion in Kent, the novelist was in the thrall of his young mistress, Ellen Ternan. This is the untold story of…

More than two years have passed since the detection of what is arguably the most damaging tree pest ever to arrive in South Africa: the polyphagous shot hole borer (Euwallacea fornicatus). The beetle kills trees and there are no proven remedies. The beetle is now present in nearly all parts of the…