The Conversation

The Standard Model. What dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings.

Psychologists obediently follow the same rules as other scientists. But their efforts haven’t yielded equivalent progress. In fact, in the last decade, psychologists have realised that some of their most intriguing findings are not reliable – when other researchers try to repeat the same study, they don’t find the same results.

The space race between the USA and Russia started with a beep from the Sputnik satellite exactly 60 years ago (October 4, 1957) and ended with a handshake in space just 18 years later. The handshake was the start of many decades of international collaboration in space. But over the past decade there has been…

The Cassini space probe not only visited Saturn as part of its mission, it also revealed many of the planet’s moons in stunning detail and showed them to be interesting and unique worlds.

In 2010, Kasimir Popkonstantinov discovered what he believes are the bones of one of the most famous of all saints: John the Baptist. I was interested in what DNA analysis could tell us about these bones, and other ones. Together with biblical scholar Joe Basile, I was travelling around the world filming a documentary about…

No one could have expected what was to hit New Zealand in 2016. The country is certainly no stranger to being shaken up by moving tectonic plates. Yet on November 14 2016, it was struck by what may be the most complex rupture ever recorded, overshadowing even the highly destructive sequence of earthquakes that hit…

Over 200 years after steamships first began crossing the ocean, wind power is finding its way back into seafaring. Global shipping firm Maersk is planning to fit spinning “rotor sails” to one of its oil tankers as a way of reducing its fuel costs and carbon emissions. The company behind the technology, Finnish firm Norsepower,…

What do we need to learn today about the jobs of tomorrow? Two things are clear. The robots and computers of the future will be based on a degree of complexity that will be impossible to teach to the general population in a few short years of compulsory education. And some of the most important…

People with coeliac disease need to avoid gluten, but a gluten-free diet is otherwise best avoided. It raises the risk of type 2 diabetes.