by Aaliah Dhorat, Year 10, Batley Grammar School, West Yorkshire. “Making one person smile changes the world… maybe not the entire world, but their world.” Smiling is infectious, you can catch it like the flu; someone smiled at me today, and I started smiling too. Smiling is like a virus; it’s contagious like other viruses,…
Complexity science explains why efforts to reject the mainstream merely result in a new conformity. Despise anything that is “too mainstream”? Want to make a countercultural statement with an alternative style? Your one-of-a-kind look often ironically ends up pretty much the same as your counterculture peers. Intrigued by this counterintuitive phenomena, mathematician Jonathan Touboul at…
Water filtration for human consumption and industrial wastewater purification accounts for huge electricity consumption and CO2 emissions. Passing water through a porous membrane to filter out particles larger than water molecules is a common water processing method. A problem with this filtration method is that membranes are susceptible to fouling (clogging by the filtrates). To…
In the ideal world, recycling plastics should break the polymers back to monomers, its original building blocks. Monomers could then be made into new plastics over and over. The team from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California brought us one step closer to the dream of closed-loop, zero-waste plastics. Researchers utilised a family of…
Sitting in your room, typing wikipedia.org/wiki/…/, you are actually helping scientists to monitor species outside the window. Recently in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, the University of Oxford, the University of Birmingham and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev collectively published their investigation on how Wikipedia pageview records correlates to seasonal patterns in nature. We had…
Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images By Abigail Pavey Temperatures plummet across North America but the United States federal government has been suffering from a more chilling type of freeze – federal paralysis. In pursuit of his wall, President Donald Trump started the longest government shutdown in modern US history and as a result, science across…
Photograph: @Juansharks/Juan Oliphant/AFP/Getty Images By Laura Perry Images of Deep Blue – the largest great white shark in the world – took the internet by storm in January. But is touching a 6-metre apex predator ever a good idea? And what is being done to help protect these real-life sea monsters? The film ‘Deep Blue…
by Arushika Aggarwal, Year 12, The Tiffin Girls’ School, Surrey. Being born and brought up in an Indian household, chillies have always been an essential ingredient in our daily meals. It just so happens that the chilli pepper has a fascinating evolution behind it, and the way it reacts with our bodies to allow us…
by Tamilore Awosile, Year 13, The Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School, Hertfordshire. I was born with sickle cell anaemia, a genetically inherited blood disorder which affects approximately 4.4 million people worldwide. In the UK, it is particularly prevalent in people of African or Caribbean heritage. Sickle cell is caused by a mutation in the DNA of…
by Ashley Kabue, Year 12, Bablake School, West Midlands. Often viewed as a mundane writing utensil used primarily by young children and artists, pencils are a highly underappreciated tool. For hundreds of years, they have enabled students and scientists alike to record discoveries, quickly note their observations, and most importantly, erase their mistakes. However, they…
