Q&A

Will Obama's presidency be good for science?

That's more of a political question than a scientific one, but the signs are promising. Seventy-six Nobel laureates in science endorsed Barack Obama on the basis of some of his campaign promises....

If a virus killed half the world, would this prevent climate change?

Whether halving the population would help to reduce the production of man-made CO2 and other greenhouse gases is open to doubt.
We contribute about 20,000 megatonnes per year. Even if 3.5...

How does sat nav know which way I'm facing?

Sat nav takes highly accurate measurements of the time taken for signals to reach it from several GPS satellites. From these, it can determine the relative distances of the satellites and hence...

Blog

Do you know what this is?

12/03/2010 - 09:58

We at Focus towers have been given a mystery to solve. Readers Bill, Bill and Chris Maddison (aged 93, 54 and 12 respectively) have sent us a picture of the object below. They bought it at a...

Stephen Baxter on terraforming

11/03/2010 - 17:05

Ever wondered what we’re going to be up to in a couple of centuries time? Science fiction author extraordinaire, Stephen Baxter, reckons we could have colonised Mars by then. In the April...

Megapixel Extra - Reusable rocket

10/03/2010 - 12:38

Here is a collection of some of the best images that have caught my eye this month. First up is an image of the last test firing of the reusable rocket that will power NASA’s shuttle into...

Features

A storm is coming

12/03/2010

Global warming is going to get worse as weather patterns like El Niño and the North Atlantic Oscillation come into sync. Robert Matthews looks at the cataclysmic changes caused by cyclical weather systems.

Swarm bots

11/03/2010

Why have one robot when you could have a thousand all working together? Ian Taylor checks out the latest buzz...

The science of sin

25/02/2010

We now have the technology to reveal the root of our darkest impulses, deep within our brains. And, says Andy Ridgway, the evidence is clear: nature wants us to be bad

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