杏吧原创

The junkyard in the sky: Space is full of rubbish. From tiny flecks of paint to the broken remains of old satellites and rockets, the debris orbiting the Earth could mean the end of spaceflight within decades

New directions for science on TV: Three out of Britain’s five regular television programmes about science have new editors. Their programmes are watched by about 15 million people. What are their views on TV’s contribution to the public understanding of

New life for old forest: As loggers and environmentalists battle over North America’s ancient forests, a new philosophy is emerging. Canadian scientists are rewriting the ecological rules, with far-reaching consequences for the forestry of the future

Getting around by common design: You can’t pedal a deck chair, but its design is based on the tried and tested shape of the bicycle. Or so says the curator of London’s latest transport museum

On the trail of the Piltdown fraudsters: An eclectic and restless mind led Frank Spencer to unearth new evidence that the hoax was a plot involving one of the eminent anatomists of the time

The rise of the dinosaur dynasty: The age of the dinosaurs ended with mass extinctions. But this is also how it began. Did the dinosaurs take over because of climate change, ecology or cosmic collisions?

Chaos frees the Universe

A new science of insanity: Neuropsychologists have gained great insights into the mind by treating their brain-damaged subjects as co-investigators. It is time for psychiatrists to do the same

Industry turns to buried ions: Mineralogists, material scientists and electronics engineers are proving that a technique for building chemical structures atom by atom could produce a new generation of microchips, improve superconductors and make rare min

The takeover of East German science: One Germany, one scientific community – at least, that’s the theory. In practice, science in the East is to be rebuilt in West Germany’s image

Earth

Rise and fall of life at sea

Chaos, entropy and the arrow of time: The theory of chaos uncovers a new ‘uncertainty principle’ which governs how the real world behaves. It also explains why time goes in only one direction

Rights and wrongs of software

Thirty years of the new astronomy: The past three decades have revealed that our history and our destiny are bound up with the stars in a way undreamt of by astrologers of the Middle Ages