BLOG

Here's a red-letter date in the history of science: November 5th, 1955. Yes! Of course! November 5th, 1955! That was the day I invented time travel. I remember it vividly. I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the sink, and when I came to I had a revelation, a vision… A picture in my head, a picture of this – this is what makes time travel possible! Doc Brown – Back to the Future (1985) It was seventy years a

The 20th century brought an education revolution. Could the 21st century be on the brink of another? In 1900, only one in three children went to school. By the turn of the millennium, it was four in five – an astonishing leap. The mission to widen access to education was a world-changing success. But in 2025, it’s starting to run out of steam. Schoolchildren have all the world’s information at their fingertips – and AI assistants to help do their homework – yet classrooms, c

One week ago, more than six million of us tuned into The Celebrity Traitors  (UK)  – and haven’t stopped talking about it since! Starring a raft of bona fide household names – a rarity for “celebrity” editions nowadays – the opening episode delivered a feast of mind games, side-eyes, and rising paranoia as 19 hopefuls descended on the Scottish Highlands to root out the traitors among them, all in the name of charity. And it didn’t take long for the accusations to fly. Within

For those of us who revel in the place where science and humour intersect, the Ig Nobel Prizes never disappoint. Now in their 35th year,...

Why are we so bad at predicting the future – and how can we get better at it? Humans have been trying to peer into the future for...

My inbox is overflowing. Every day I get bombarded with promotions, pointless updates, and notifications I never signed up for. Most of...

Zapping brains with electricity has long been the stuff of horror stories. From Frankenstein and Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the...

After months of speculation, two years of development, delays and impatient countdowns from the AI faithful, GPT-5 has finally arrived –...

With enough data and the ability to crunch it, virtually any challenge facing humanity today can be solved – Eric Schmidt, former Google...

Black Mirror’s  “ USS Callister ” first beamed onto screens in late 2017, wrapped in the familiar aesthetics of a Star Trek tribute –...

We’re often told to trust our instincts – but is intuition really the best guide for making big decisions?  It’s the snap judgment in an...

In Netflix’s limited series Zero Day , a political thriller fronted by Robert De Niro, the United States is thrust into a distinctly...

We Brits are known for our obsession with the weather. From polite nods about the rain being "good for the garden" to groaning when it...

A telescope powerful enough to spot a golf ball on the Moon. A camera so detailed you’d need 400 Ultra HD TVs just to view a single image...

How often have you come across a terrible piece of technology and wondered how it ever made it past the drawing board?  Buttons in weird...

More than thirty years ago, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park captivated audiences with its amber-encased DNA, lab-grown dinosaurs, and a...

For a few weeks in the summer of 2023, solid-state physics was one of the hottest trending topics on the internet (yes, really !). Social...

Back in the days of cavemen, motivation was as primal as it gets: eat, drink, mate – and try not to get trampled by a woolly mammoth....

If you ever land a job interview with Peter Thiel – the tech entrepreneur and billionaire investor behind some of Silicon Valley’s...

When football fans hear the word “messy”, their minds might leap to the elegance and effortless brilliance of Argentinian superstar...