Video
Video
See the full press release and shorter (03:35) film here: http://bit.ly/TbFBqV For Biology Week 2012, Chris Packham is helping scientists to unlock the secrets of soil by unravelling its genetic fingerprint.
Science Journalism
It’s not easy being the new kid on the block. Just ask Christopher Austin who has recently been appointed director of the US National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) newest centre — the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).
A new pan-European project aims to find the determinants of eating behaviour and physical activity of adolescents replaced in the family context.
There's nothing quite like turning 21. It's a universally recognised coming of age. Yet no 21-year-old can claim to have collected 1·5 million biological samples, including DNA from over 11 000 children and 10 000 mothers...
Has a cheap and effective treatment for chronic pain been lying under clinicians' noses for decades? Researchers have found that a very high dose of an opiate drug that uses the same painkilling pathways as morphine can reset the nerve signals associated with continuous pain — at least in rats.
They say it takes two to tango. And when plain-tailed wrens sing a duet, it seems that the songs made by male and female partners are indeed like a dance: each individual reacts to the other’s notes as dancers do to their partner’s footsteps.
On September 19 this year, 12 people gathered in the suburban Hermsdorf district of Berlin for a group psychotherapy session that allegedly involved illegal drugs. A day later, two of the participants were dead and another in a coma. The substances used and exact cause of death have yet to be confirmed. Local newspaper reports have claimed that heroin and MDMA (ecstasy) were taken, but other drugs may have been in circulation.
Conspiracy theorists have used the internet to co-ordinate increasingly slick attacks on the accepted versions of events, but now a group of scientists and sceptics has decided it's time to organise and fight back.
It began, appropriately enough for research into food webs, over lunch. And appropriately for ambitious and interdisciplinary research, that lunch in 2001 was at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, an organization famous for bringing together creative assemblages of scientists from different fields.
IN THE early 1960s, a young Russian neurophysiologist called Yuri Moskalenko travelled from the Soviet Union to the UK on a Royal Society exchange programme. During his stay, he co-authored a paper published in Nature. "Variation in blood volume and oxygen availability in the human brain" may not sound subversive, but it was the start of a radical idea.
LSD — lysergic acid diethylamide — is an evocative acronym: it strikes a rational fear into governments and an irrational one into the media. Those who have taken the drug are in awe of its transformative power; to those who have not, it is a dangerous unknown.
This is the story of a man known online as Flash – a man driven to the brink of suicide by the debilitating effects of cluster headaches. After years of ineffectual treatments, Flash stumbled on what he declared was a new treatment, as controversial as it was, he claimed, effective: hallucinogenic drugs.