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Bottled Air Offered To Stressed Workers

Mar 14, 2010 1:20am

“Bottled fresh air from some of the country’s favourite beauty spots is being given out to stressed city workers by the National Trust. The air, which was collected from seaside and rural areas around the UK, comes in several scents, including the seaside smell of Townend, and the lakeside aroma...

Why Surprises Temporarily Blind Us

Mar 13, 2010 5:19am

“Reading this story requires you to willfully pay attention to the sentences and to tune out nearby conversations, the radio and other distractions. But if a fire alarm sounded, your attention would be involuntarily snatched away from the story to the blaring sound. New research from Vanderbilt University reveals for the...

The Octopus: All Brain, No Personality?

Mar 13, 2010 3:45am

“Octopuses make for discerning TV viewers: it seems they prefer high-definition to traditional cathode ray images (CRT). What’s more, the first study using video to trick octopuses, finds that they may be the Jekyll and Hydes of the oceans: aggressive one day, shrinking violets the next. “People have been trying for...

Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity On Display

Mar 13, 2010 3:15am

“JERUSALEM — There are pasted-on half pages, numerous cross-outs and insertions in meticulous penmanship and an open acknowledgment that some of the mathematics was beyond even him. Albert Einstein personally rewrote the laws of physics in a sparsely furnished central Berlin apartment nearly a century ago and the resulting manuscript,...

Hull, first night

Mar 12, 2010 2:30am

Last night was especially fun. A day off (Wednesday had been a travelling day from Eastbourne to Hull) always brings a slight scattiness to the performance, which was all part of the fun created by a terrific audience. Eastbourne crowds are lovely but famously quiet, so it was encouraging to...

Artist travels world fixing crumbling monuments with Lego

Mar 12, 2010 2:25am

“Jan Vormann, 26, has taken his project from its humble beginnings at an art fair in Rome and brightened up thousands of people’s days with his brightly coloured plastic version of Polyfilla. From the old quarter of Tel Aviv in Israel to the grand Bryant Park of New York, Mr...

Stunning Ant Colony

Mar 12, 2010 1:18am

This video is rather surprising – just keep watching you will be amazed....

Einstein’s Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale

Mar 12, 2010 12:22am

“The theory of gravity proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago can explain the dance of galaxies around one another just as well as it can model the motion of planets around the sun, according to a new study. The finding suggests that the invisible substance called dark matter and...

Acts Of Kindness Spread Quickly

Mar 11, 2010 3:12am

“For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts — acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation — spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference. In a study...

Physicists Working On X-Ray Vision

Mar 11, 2010 1:35am

“Materials such as paper, paint, and biological tissue are opaque because the light that passes through them is scattered in complicated and seemingly random ways. A new experiment conducted by researchers at the City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI) has shown that it’s possible to...