SciDev.Net brings you the most commented on articles in 2012, including news, editorials and opinions, spanning topics as diverse as wind energy, access to weather data and communicating science.
Since 1799, the Royal Institution of Great Britain has occupied a grand building in London’s Mayfair, surrounded today by luxury shops and private art galleries. For many years, the building was a central part of British science. Michael Faraday dazzled crowds there in the nineteenth century with pyrotechnic displays of chemistry. In many respects, its…
Atmospheric volumes of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change hit a new record in 2011, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported. The volume of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, grew at a similar rate to the previous decade and reached 390.9 parts per million (ppm), 40% above the pre-industrial level,…
The problems engineers face are increasing in complexity at an exponential pace, and as one plenary speaker at the recent ASEE conference put it, it’s essential to be able to add continuously to your skill set in order to be a practicing engineer. All the good grades in the world won’t matter if you cannot…
A University of British Columbia and Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics study has revealed that childhood poverty, stress as an adult, and demographics such as age, sex and ethnicity, all leave an imprint on a person’s genes. And, that this imprint could play a role in our immune response. The study was published in…
In order to get a consistent picture of nature we need to use quantum mechanics to describe the geometry of spacetime. In other words, we should construct a quantum theory of gravity.
Until this week climate change was sadly absent from the presidential election discourse, even though scientific reports have linked the increasingly extreme events experienced recently in the US and elsewhere – the drought and heatwaves, deluges and blizzards that some call “weather weirding” – to systemic change rather than coincidental natural fluctuations. Sandy has forced…