Love them or hate them, smartphones have become ubiquitous in everyday life. And while they have many positive uses, people remain concerned about the potential negative harms of excessively using them – especially in children and teens. 

The fear that digital distractions are ruining our lives and friendships is widespread.

It’s hard to imagine a holiday table without bread, meat, vegetables, wine, beer or a board of French cheeses for those with more adventurous palates.

The question of whether it is genes or environment that largely shapes human behaviour has been debated for centuries.

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time.

Alternative facts are spreading like a virus across society. Now it seems they have even infected science – at least the quantum realm.

The UK government plans to ban the sale of new conventional petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Clearly the plan is for all citizens to be driving electric or hybrid-electric cars, or – better still – riding bicycles.

Personalised medicine is the ability to tailor therapy to an individual patient so that, as it’s often put, the right treatment is given to the right patient at the right time.

Try to remember that last dinner you went out for. Perhaps you can remember the taste of that delicious pasta, the sounds of the jazz pianist in the corner, or that boisterous laugh from the portly gentleman three tables over.

Today’s students see themselves as digital natives, the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology like smartphones, tablets and e-readers.

Cities are fast becoming “smart”, and the impact on people’s lives can be immense. Singapore’s smart traffic cameras restrict traffic depending on volume, and ease the commute of thousands of passengers every day.

Young people hooked on their smartphones may have an increased risk for depression and loneliness, researchers report.

Australia’s first commercial installation of printed solar cells, made using specialised semiconducting inks and printed using a conventional reel-to-reel printer, has been installed on a factory roof in Newcastle.

You might already have what’s often called a “smart home”, with your lights or music connected to voice-controlled technology such as Alexa or Siri.

The short film Slaughterbots depicts a near future in which swarms of micro drones assassinate thousands of people for their political beliefs. 

The human brain sends hundreds of billions of neural signals each second. It’s an extraordinarily complex feat.

By the time he drew his self-portrait at age 45, Humboldt had tutored himself in every branch of science, spent more than five years on a 6,000-mile scientific trek through South America

The field of brain-machine interfaces (BMI) – which use electrodes, often implanted into the brain, to translate neuronal information into commands capable of controlling external systems

What do nuclear submarines, top secret military bases and private businesses have in common?

It is 1950 and a group of scientists are walking to lunch against the majestic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.

If you ever find yourself looking forward to a holiday because you’ll be able to switch off your smartphone then perhaps you’re suffering from social media “technostress”.

Since scientists first figured out how to edit genes with precision using a technology called CRISPR, they’ve been grappling with when and how to do it ethically.

A new technique grows live bone to repair craniofacial injuries by attaching a 3D-printed bioreactor—basically, a mold—to a rib.

Coral reefs are critically important to the world but despite the ongoing efforts of scientists and campaigners, these stunningly beautiful ecosystems still face a variety of threats.

Young people are now fully ensconced in the digital age as it whirls around and within them.

|A general election in India, the world’s most populous democracy, seems a theoretical impossibility. 

The meat you eat, if you’re a carnivore, comes from animal muscles. But animals are composed of a lot more than just muscle. They have organs and bones that most Americans do not consume. They require food, water, space and social connections. They produce waste.

An abandoned mine shaft beneath the town of Mansfield, England is an unlikely place to shape the future of cities.

Wirelessly charging your phone, while highly convenient, risks depleting the life of devices using typical lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), report researchers.

Bill Kaysing was a former US Navy officer who worked as a technical writer for one of the rocket manufacturers for NASA’s Apollo moon missions. He claimed that he had inside knowledge of a government conspiracy to fake the moon landings, and many conspiracy theories about the Apollo moon landings which persist to this day can be traced back to his 1976 book...

How could a small internet service provider (ISP) in Pennsylvania cause millions of websites worldwide to go offline?

Getting out into nature may seem a world away from a maths classroom. But the beauty that surrounds us has order – and one of the world’s best codebreakers was the key to unlocking it.

The speed at which digital device usage has spread is phenomenal. Many of us are spending hours of our time each day using these devices – usually looking at screens. I’m referring to things like phones, computers, tablets, TVs, virtual reality headsets and smart watches.

The summer solstice marks the official start of summer. It brings the longest day and shortest night of the year for the 88 percent of Earth’s people who live in the Northern Hemisphere.

According to those in the industry, and researchers too, driverless cars will totally revolutionise the way we think about individual transport.

As driverless cars become more capable and more common, they will change people’s travel habits not only around their own communities but across much larger distances.

We measure stuff all the time – how long, how heavy, how hot, and so on – because we need to for things such as trade, health and knowledge.

It is unlikely that Australopithecus sediba, a nearly two-million-year-old, apelike fossil from South Africa, is the direct ancestor of Homo, the genus to which modern-day humans belong, according to new research.

What does the word “nanotechnology” conjure up for you? I’ve spent the best part of a week talking about the term “nanotechnology” and whether it’s a real field, a real term or not.

Children in the study described creepy technology as something that is unpredictable or poses an ambiguous threat that might cause physical harm or threaten an important relationship.

While the look and feel of our cars has changed in the past 100 years, the way we drive them hasn’t.

You might not be able to stomach soybeans for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but the animals you eat do.

Your own voice will likely become the most significant focus for food retailers and restaurants over the next little while. 

You may remember the cute Google self-driving car. In 2014, the tech giant announced their brand-new prototype of what the future of transportation might one day look like.

There’s a lot of talk about digital technology and smartcities, but what about smart farms?

Wildlife populations are declining globally, but it’s not all doom and gloom. We’re in the midst of an exciting time for UK mammals.

When artificial intelligence systems start getting creative, they can create great things – and scary ones. 

An almost invisible electronic device used all over the world – best known to much of the public for helping reunite lost pets and their owners...

The ancestors of modern birds were the sole survivors of one of the most severe mass extinction events in the history of the world. Today, 10,000 known bird species exist, all of them the descendants of dinosaurs.

Do human beings have a magnetic sense? Biologists know other animals do. They think it helps creatures including bees, turtles and birds navigate through the world.

One of the most attractive things about driverless cars is their potential to free up the time spent driving from A to B. People travelling by driverless cars will be able to spend their time by working or reading, instead of focused on the road, driving.

Bioethicist Matthew Liao is open to genetic engineering in theory, but he says he was rather horrified to learn that twin girls had been born in China after a researcher genetically modified their embryos to resist HIV infection.

The Fabrication City concept puts manufacturing back in the hands of communities — using 3D printers.

The part of the brain that processes visual information, the visual cortex, evolved over the course of millions of years in a world where reading and writing didn’t exist.

In most of the trillion cells that make up our bodies, 23 pairs of chromosomes store the vital strands of DNA needed to make our bodies grow and function properly. But if the amount of genetic material within our cells is a bit too much or too little, then this can potentially interfere with normal development.

“An evil suicide game” was how one newspaper described the “Momo challenge”, a so-called game that supposedly involved children receiving a series of threatening and increasingly dangerous instructions from an anonymous contact on their smartphone.

The gambler, the quantum physicist and the juror all reason about probabilities: the probability of winning, of a radioactive atom decaying, of a defendant’s guilt.

Is your face long? Wide? Big nose? Small ears? High forehead? It’s our faces that characterise how the world sees us, and how we recognise our close friends and family

A colleague of mine, a roboticist, recently proclaimed that if one could teleoperate the robot he developed in his lab, it could hold down a desk job.

Official figures are produced to serve particular ends. Their names are mere labels, with no connection to infallible underlying stable properties. Most of the time, the statistics that politicians and the media quote do not reveal scientific facts.

Mismatch between biological sex and gender identity, culminating in its severest form as gender dysphoria, has been ascribed to mental disease, family dysfunction and childhood trauma.

Never in the history of the mobile phone has there been so much hype about a new technology ahead of its launch than there is with 5G.

Suppose you toss a coin and get four heads in a row – what do you think will come up on the fifth toss? Many of us have a gut feeling that a tails is due. This feeling is called the Gambler’s Fallacy.

Has there ever been an invention so integral to our lives, and so intimate, as the smartphone? Yet they are slippery things.

I teach measurement – the quantification of things. Some people think this is the most objective of the sciences; just numbers and observations, or what many people call objective facts.

For thousands of years humans turned to nature to cure and soothe their ills. Modern science built on these ancient foundations and the “natural product discovery” programmes established by pharmaceutical companies provided us with medicines that could treat cancer, infections and more.

The Internet of Things is a popular vision of objects with internet connections sending information back and forth to make our lives easier and more comfortable.

Many Americans find themselves bombarded by expert advice to limit their screen time and break their addictions to digital devices – including enforcing and modeling this restraint for the children in their lives.

When we consider interspecies communication we usually think in terms of human-creature exchanges or interactions in which some kind of relationship has been established. But it is not uncommon for us to experience an interaction with members of the plant kingdom...

Today, the scientific community is aghast at the prospect of gene editing to create “designer” humans.

What the internet looks like to users in the U.S. can be quite different from the online experience of people in other countries.

We’re squandering increasing amounts of time distracted by our phones. And that’s taking a serious toll on our mental and physical well-being.

Many of us have had the experience of arriving in an unfamiliar city and needing to get to a specific destination – whether it’s checking in at a hotel, meeting a friend at a local brewery, or navigating to a meeting on time.

One reason women tend to be absent from narratives of science is because it’s not as easy to find female scientists on the public record.

The media is buzzing with the surprise news that a Chinese researcher, Jainkui He, has created the world’s first genome-edited twins.

For most people today, robots and smart systems are servants that work in the background, vacuuming carpets or turning lights on and off. Or they’re machines that have taken over repetitive human jobs from assembly-line workers and bank tellers.

We connect to people around us in mysterious ways but science has proven that the heart is the biggest source of electromagnetic energy in the human body. They found there is an electromagnetic (energetic communication) between people.

The deepest dive recorded by the free-diving Bajau Laut people of Southeast Asia was to an impressive 79 metres, and the longest time spent underwater by them was just over three minutes.

Augmented reality systems show virtual objects in the real world – like cat ears and whiskers on a Snapchat selfie, or how well a particular chair might fit in a room.

Time travel to the UK in 2025: Harry is a teenager with a smartphone and Pauline is a senior citizen with Alzheimer’s who relies on smart glasses for independent living. Harry is frustrated his favorite online game is slow, and Pauline is anxious since her healthcare app is unresponsive.

Many parents want to know how much time their kids should be spending in front of screens, whether it’s their smartphones, tablets or TV. For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics had suggested a limit of two hours a day of TV for children and teens.

Smartphones, computers and social media platforms have become indispensable parts of modern life, but the technology companies that make them and write their software are under siege. In any given week, Facebook or Google or Amazon does something to erode public trust in them. Now could be a moment for the industry to make good on...

For those readers, who’ve ever had an operation – whether it was planned or an emergency – things in the real world probably felt very different to those familiar TV drama medical emergency scenes.

If you dread a day of rest from the digital world, then you probably need one. A secular sabbath is time away from your devices. It can be any day of the week, just whatever works for you.

The future won’t be made by either humans or machines alone – but by both, working together. Technologies modeled on how human brains work are already augmenting people’s abilities, and will only get more influential as society gets used to these increasingly capable machines.

It’s been a good year for apples. Across Europe the apple harvest is the biggest it has been for a decade. But the handful of apple types you see on supermarket shelves only tells part of the story.

Watching a 50th anniversary screening of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” I found myself, a mathematician and computer scientist whose research includes work related to artificial intelligence, comparing the story’s vision of the future with the world today.

It’s stunning but true that we know more about the surface of the moon than about the Earth’s ocean floor. Much of what we do know has come from scientific ocean drilling – the systematic collection of core samples from the deep seabed.

They’re made of carbon – but there’s something almost supernatural about diamonds. Just the word diamond invokes luxury, desirability and toughness. Yet when we think of the element carbon we are more likely to think of charcoal; soft, black, opaque, earthy, light-weight.

Hundreds of thousands of people with severe hearing loss depend on surgically implanted electronic devices to recover some of their hearing. These devices, known as auditory or cochlear implants, aren’t perfect. In particular, implant users find it difficult to understand speech when there is background noise. We have a new approach to solve this problem that involves playing sound through the skin.

Your tongue is a salt detector – it dissolves the solid salt crystals sprinkled on your chips to create an intense flavour sensation. But salt is way more important than just being a food additive. Salt water is literally the most common substance on the surface of Earth, and it’s really important – for life and for the planet.

A new form of misinformation is poised to spread through online communities as the 2018 midterm election campaigns heat up. Called “deepfakes” after the pseudonymous online account that popularized the technique – which may have chosen its name because the process uses a technical method called “deep learning” – these fake videos look very realistic.

Now that school is back in session, many high schoolers have new phones, new computers and new privileges for using their devices – and new responsibilities too. High schoolers today are more technology-savvy than average adults. While many people think that young people use their devices primarily for video games and social networking, the reality today is that high schoolers use technology for learning as much as for entertainment.

Australia’s first commercial installation of printed solar cells, made using specialised semiconducting inks and printed using a conventional reel-to-reel printer, has been installed on a factory roof in Newcastle. The 200 square meter array was installed in just one day by a team of five people. No other energy solution is as lightweight, as quick to manufacture, or as easy to install on this scale.

The energy-generating potential of solar panels – and a key limitation on their use – is a result of what they’re made of. Panels made of silicon are declining in price such that in some locations they can provide electricity that costs about the same as power from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. But silicon solar panels are also bulky, rigid and brittle, so they can’t be used just anywhere.

Science is like Michelangelo. The young Michelangelo demonstrated his skill as a sculptor by carving the ravishing Pietà in the Vatican; the mature Michelangelo, having acquired and demonstrated his skill, broke free of the conventions and created his extraordinary later quasi-abstractions. Science has trod a similar path.

A newly discovered processor vulnerability could potentially put secure information at risk in any Intel-based PC manufactured since 2008. It could affect users who rely on a digital lockbox feature known as Intel Software Guard Extensions, or SGX, as well as those who use common cloud-based services.

Comets and meteors have fascinated the human race since they were first spotted in the night sky. But without science and space exploration to aid understanding of what these chunks of rock and ice are, ancient cultures often turned to myth and legend to explain them.

Sales of George Orwell’s utopian novel 1984 (1949) have spiked twice recently, both times in response to political events. In early 2017, the idea of ‘alternative facts’ called to mind Winston Smith, the book’s protagonist and, as a clerk in the Ministry of Truth, a professional alternator of facts.

Why do batteries die? And, why can they only be recharged so many times before they won’t hold a useful amount of charge? This same question has probably crossed the mind of every cellphone user trying to send one last text before the screen blinks off.