UK research: building bridges, building prosperity
World leading in quality and impact, UK research is helping us to identify new sources of energy for a more sustainable future and to seek cures for deadly and delibitating diseases. New and profound insights allow us to unearth the secrets of our ....
More details | Watch nowShakespeare the metallurgist, Eliot the spectroscopist: the cultural journey of the chemical elements
From the moment of their discovery, each of the chemical elements has embarked on a journey into our culture. Over millennia and decades, they have gained meaning through encounter and manipulation. Those long known, such as gold, silver, iron and su....
More details | Watch nowThe nature of collective intelligence
Digital data stem from our own personal and social cognitive processes and thus express them in one way or another. But we still don?t have any scientific tools to make sense of the data flows produced by online creative conversations at the scale of....
More details | Watch nowA natural history of scientists
For most of his life, Richard Fortey, has worked with collections in London's Natural History Museum, so curation has become a kind of unbreakable habit for him. In his Michael Faraday Prize lecture he will present another collection: his own persona....
More details | Watch nowBenjamin Franklin in Europe: electrician, academician etc.
Benjamin Franklin, American patriot and natural philosopher, was born 300 years ago. Apart from a brief stay in England as a young man, he spent the first fifty years of his life transforming himself from a nobody into the leading citizen of Philadel....
More details | Watch nowRisk: food, fact and fantasy
We all take risks, but most of the time we don't notice it. Eating, like everything else in life, isn't risk free. Is that next mouthful pure pleasure or will it give you food poisoning? Will it clog up your arteries as well as filling your stomach?
More details | Watch nowWashing dirty lab coats on the page and the stage
The drive to publish first, even the order of the authors and the choice of the journal; the collegiality and the brutal competition; grantsmanship; the still existing glass ceiling for women; Schadenfreude, even Nobel lust - these are the soul and b....
More details | Watch nowThe social function of history: policy, history and twentieth-century science
Historians bring to thinking about science policy a very particular understanding which should be central to policy: historians are trained to know in their bones that the future is unknown and to understand the power of the cheap futurism which char....
More details | Watch nowThe House of Wisdom and the legacy of Arabic Science
In a way that never took place with early Christianity, the spread of Islam heralded a remarkable period of scientific advances, particularly during the golden age of the Abbasids of Baghdad between the 8th and 11th centuries AD.
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