Can a Mission to Mars in 4 years time bounce back from President Barack Obama’s budget announcement in February that the joint U.S.-European robotic  missions to Mars in 2016 had been cancelled? The US National Aeronautical and Space Agency says that it doesn’t want to give up on Mars, but will have to be scaled [...]

How about the possibility of combining your Random Access Memory (RAM) and your hard-drive onto a single storage unit without losing memory when the power is switched off or is interrupted? That would mean that virtually no delay in accessing start-up files when powering up as everything you need would be in your RAM. Would [...]

  The image of the spacehip landing in the eye of the man in the moon, from the 1902 revolutionary film Le Voyage dans La Lune, is one familiar to most of us. But why is it that all man has ever seen of the Moon, until space travel,  was the one familiar face? Why [...]

It’s been widely reported in the last few days that a new study suggests free mobile apps which use third-party services to display advertising consume considerably more handset battery life. So “free” Angry Birds can quickly make you spit feathers, and turn a smart phone into a dead phone. In one case reserachers found that [...]

Déjà vu is a tricky one for students of the brain to analyse, because it doesn’t happen to everyone, and it cannot be “engineered” or triggered. It occurs briefly, without warning, and has no witnesses or physical manifestations.   Because of this, there is little empirical research and no definitive explanations that everyone agrees upon. Inevitably, [...]

Forget Killer Bunnies from Outer Space, Killer Clowns, and even rabies-carrying bats flying over the channel from the continent, there is a real threat to be faced. Killer shrimps.  According to the UK Environment Agency this evil shrimp,  known as Dikerogammarus villosus is now top of the list of our most deadly aquatic invaders.Here are [...]

As anyone knows, it’s notoriously hard to remove zombies from society once they’ve taken hold.  That holds true in the movie industry as well. Once a zombie film is a hit, bring on the sequels! So why is there no 28 Months Later, after 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later? The fans of the [...]

There you are with your friends hosting a dinner party. You joke and josh about sex, politics, religion- the usual easy-going trivial stuff. But then the frivolity and the opinionated, yet good-natured verbal cut and thrust dissipate. The mood gets dark,  as thick clouds of ignorance threaten to enshroud you.  Why?  Someone has asked the [...]

  The year is 1947. The conflict is now totally global. From Antartactica to the jungles of the Congo. The three major superpowers, Axis, Allies and the Soviets continue the fight. And technology has developed further. A new ore has been found capable of lifting tanks from tracks onto two legs in the form of [...]