By Michelle Spear, Professor of Anatomy, University of Bristol
It’s three in the morning. You’ve woken from a dead sleep because you’ve heard a thud in the darkness or a floorboard creaking downstairs. Or perhaps you’ve woken because you have the unmistakable sensation you’re not alone.
During daylight, these phenomena might be dismissed as the heating, your neighbours or the sounds of an old house settling. But in the middle of the night they can feel a tad more sinister.
Your mind might immediately start reeling, jumping to the worst case scenario – wondering if you’ve been broken into, or if you’re being haunted by some supernatural…
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By Ciro Civile, Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Exeter
Flipping photos upside down usually exposes a bias in how we see women’s bodies. A weak current to the forehead made it disappear.
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By Azwihangwisi Judith Mphidi, Adjunct Academic, University of South Africa
When the South African Police Service tolerates retaliation against ethical officers, it weakens the institutional integrity required to confront corruption.
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By Alex Bertacchi, Engineer in Mass Spectrometry and Stable Isotope Research, University of Kiel
Jessica C. Thompson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale University
The bones of animals at an archaeological site in Malawi show that food was scarce over the last 21,000 years, but people didn’t cooperate far and wide to get it.
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By Alexandre Pellan Cheng, Professeur agrégé, departement de genie des systèmes, École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS)
A simple blood test to detect cancer before symptoms even appear: that’s the promise of liquid biopsy, a rapidly developing technology that could revolutionize the diagnosis, monitoring and personalization of cancer treatments.** –
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By Jared Rivera, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of British Columbia
From the microscopic structure of particles and atoms, to the fate of black holes and the large-scale structure of the universe, the quantum ‘vacuum’ plays a role.
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By Chantal Mancini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Labour Studies, McMaster University
The current stall in negotiations follows the government’s indication that it wants greater control over negotiating issues such as staffing redundancies.
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By Hannah Wakeford, Associate professor, University of Bristol
When scientists study exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, they often lack three-dimensional information. For example, general mathematical relationships are used to estimate a planet’s radius, even though that distance may be different depending on where it is measured.
Similar principles apply to measuring the atmosphere of an exoplanet, which often blurs all the features around the planet into one average spectrum. A spectrum is the record of how starlight filters through the atmosphere.…
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By Alex Dittrich, Senior Lecturer in Zoology, Nottingham Trent University
Kat Hamill, Senior Lecturer in Zoology, Nottingham Trent University
Around this time of year, elaborate decorations featuring ghosts, vampires, zombies, witches and werewolves adorn front doors, gardens and shop windows across the country.
But you may be surprised to hear that in the animal world, there are many real-life creatures with similar tendencies to these fictional characters of our Halloween nightmares.
The southern grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus) howls at the moon to defend its territory and attract mates, a little like werewolves…
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By Carlos Gutiérrez Hita, Profesor titular de Universidad. Economía industrial (transporte, energía, telecomunicaciones), Universidad Miguel Hernández
Shortly after 8am, two high-speed trains set off from Madrid’s Atocha station bound for Seville Santa Justa, but neither reached their destination. A failure in the LZB system – an automatic safety, signalling and protection system that monitors trains’ movement and activates automatic emergency braking – triggered a chain of events that led to a fatal accident, which killed 69 people and left many more injured.
Across the EU’s rail network, which spans almost 227,000km, there are more than 25 different, non-interoperable…
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