feed info

40,083 articles from Guardian Unlimited Science

Letter: Beyond science

Letters: It is unfortunate that Richard Dawkins, gave the impression he did not consider of value any information not derived from checking ideas by further observations or experiments...


THURSDAY 27. NOVEMBER 2008


Pupils of today struggle with science questions of the 60s

There has been a "catastrophic slippage" in standards of science taught in schools, leaving children with a superficial understanding of chemistry, biology and physics, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry.Declining standards in schools, linked to teachers focusing on test results rather than analytical skills, risks starving the country of vital skills, the RSC said. In a competition run...

Fossil finally shows how turtle got its shell

The unearthing of a 220m-year-old fossil in China has solved the enduring mystery of how the turtle got its shell.The ancient remains are the only evidence fossil hunters have of a turtle that is midway through evolving a shell, revealing for the first time how the process happened.Fossil hunters uncovered the remains of three remarkably intact adult turtles in Guizhou province last year. Each has...

Call to step up deer cull in fight against TB

The government is encouraging landowners to increase the culling of wild deer where there are high levels of TB, to minimise the risk of the disease spreading further in cattle.Just months after the government ruled out a badger cull in England because it could not "meaningfully contribute" to eradicating the disease on farms, it is encouraging targeted measures against deer which its scientific...

Thabo Mbeki Aids policy 'led to 330,000 deaths'

The Aids policies of former president Thabo Mbeki's government were directly responsible for the avoidable deaths of a third of a million people in South Africa, according to research from Harvard University.South Africa has one of the most severe HIV/Aids epidemics in the world. About 5.5 million people, or 18.8% of the adult population, have HIV, according to the UN. In 2005 there were 900...


WEDNESDAY 26. NOVEMBER 2008


Fossils reveal how the turtle got its shell

The unearthing of three 220m-year-old fossils in China has solved the enduring mystery of how the turtle got its shell.The ancient remains are the first evidence palaeontologists have of a species of turtle that is in the process of evolving a shell, revealing for the first time how it happened.Fossil hunters uncovered the remains of three remarkably intact adults in Guizhou province last year....

Worm census to give clearer picture of numbers and species

They are one of the common creatures in our gardens and, according to naturalist Charles Darwin, one of the most important on earth, yet little is still known about the earthworm. But a new census of England's earthworms aims to give scientists a comprehensive picture of their numbers and health.The survey, led by the Natural History Museum, aims to map out which species of earthworms are present...

Girls prefer the arts, boys prefer science

Our new schools minister, Sarah McCarthy Fry, thinks that girls might be more interested in science if there were no boys in class and lessons were 'girl friendly' - related to work that appeals to us girlies, like building incubators to save babies' lives. Well think again, minister, because your problem may be that girls in general just aren't that keen on science. I wasn't when I was fifteen,...

Jonathan Jones: My love-hate relationship with the Science Museum

In Joseph Wright of Derby's paintings, 18th-century Britons gather to witness scientific wonders. Children stand transfixed or terrified, adults just as rapt, as scientists visually display the marvel of nature. Wright's picture An Experiment On a Bird in the Air Pump portrays a cruel and terrifying experiment; his more benign painting The Orrery shows people contemplating a model of the solar...


TUESDAY 25. NOVEMBER 2008


Minister calls for UK space facility

The science minister Lord Drayson called today for a major new space facility to be built in Britain in a speech to the European Space Agency (Esa).Government officials are drawing up plans for a space centre that will focus on observing climate change from space and developing robotics for future missions. The facility would be based at Harwell in Oxfordshire.Speaking at the agency's ministerial...

Lizards attract attention by doing push-ups

Puerto Rican lizards put on elaborate displays of push-ups to grab the attention of others when the forest is noisy, scientists have discovered.Researchers built robotic lizards that mimicked the animals' movements and found that the eye-catching shows made real lizards pay more attention.In the wild, Puerto Rican anole lizards perform push-ups before sending out more complex signals by bobbing...