Why Do Dippers Dip?

One of the most common river birds in Ireland is the dipper. A small bird of fast flowing rivers, it can be seen dipping up and down within a few miles of campus, but it is probably not well known except to anglers and walkers. What is the function, if any, of these body movements?

Never drink hot water from the tap

The claim has the ring of a myth. But environmental scientists say it is real.

The reason is that hot water dissolves contaminants more quickly than cold water, and many pipes in homes contain lead that can leach into water. And lead can damage the brain and nervous system, especially in young children.

How do students percieve science and technology

(This is a link to a pdf document 176KB)

The University of Oslo, Norway, explains how they are investigating young peoples' attitudes towards science and technology.

One for the ages: a prescription that may extend life

In a laboratory at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Matthias is learning about time’s caprice the hard way. At 28, getting on for a rhesus monkey, Matthias is losing his hair, lugging a paunch and getting a face full of wrinkles.

Just an ordinary galaxy (but it's ours)

For those among us who like to think we are something special, things have gone downhill since Ptolemy. First, Copernicus's theories suggested that the Earth was not the center of the universe after all. Then it turned out that the Sun was a run-of-the-mill star. Eventually even the Milky Way was shown to be relatively humdrum.

A pair of wings took evolving insects on a non-stop flight to domination

A little over 400 million years ago, their six-legged ancestors came out of the water onto dry land. They have evolved into an estimated five million living species - dwarfing the diversity of all other animals combined. Even if you throw in all the known species of plants, fungi and protozoans, insects still win.

Explaining ice: the answers are slippery

Here is one question that probably won't cross the minds of Sasha Cohen, Irina Slutskaya and the other Olympic women figure skaters today, even if they fall: Why is ice slippery?

Antibiotics aren't always the answer

It's hard not to wheedle.

Your throat feels as if you've swallowed broken glass, your sinuses have been clogged for a couple of days, you're coughing up green stuff and you're slated to fly in a week.

Bacteria get their day

Mirror, Mirror

Tucson, Arizona - In the cavernous bowels of the University of Arizona's football stadium, Roger Angel's mirror furnace was spinning like a captured flying saucer at a stately five revolutions per minute.

A modern refrain: my genes made me do it

Our theories about human disease are more the product of current fashion than we would like to admit. But just as the moment influences the hemline and the automobile fender, so too does a type of intellectual currency affect our understanding of how illness happens.

Nature's own power launcher

The trebuchet, that terrible weapon of ancient sieges, is thought to have been invented in China in the first half of the first millennium. It reached Europe shortly thereafter, and if you were looking to launch a rotting animal carcass over ramparts from a quarter-mile away, there was nothing better.

The case of the shrinking lotus

Humans are the culprits, it seems.

Over the past 100 years, Saussurea laniceps, a species of Himalayan snow lotus, has lost almost four inches in height, scientists are reporting today.

Dangerous Darwin

Did evolution end with Darwin's famous theory or is there more?

My family and other animals – what it means to share genes

Time to prepare defences against incoming asteroid or comet

The possibility that the earth will collide with an asteroid or comet is unavoidable. Such collisions have happened many times in the past and will occur in the future.

Holy whistling helium! Another quantum trick

In the world of quantum physics, particles leap through impenetrable barriers or exist in two places at once, secret codes can't be broken, electrical currents pass through wires without resistance. Here's another quantum trick: liquid helium that whistles.

A deadly nursery rhyme

Children still sing it during play and there's hardly an adult anywhere in the world who doesn't know it. For all that, the innocent nursery rhyme, "Ring a Ring a Rosie", has a chilling side to it.

Germs, germs everywhere. Are you worried? Get over it.

I saw a television advertisement recently for a new product called an air sanitizer. A woman stood in her kitchen, spraying the empty space in front of her as though using Mace against an imaginary assailant. She appeared very determined.

I drill; therefore, I am. Chimpanzees seem to agree.

Yet another species barrier has been broken. Chimpanzees have been videotaped with tool kits. Not just sticks, mind you, but three different kinds of sticks for different purposes, some modified (by chewing on the end, for instance) to make them more efficient.

Do not adjust focus. Those blobs are atoms

At first glance, the image is blurry and puzzling: pairs of red blobs in a simple rectangular pattern, representing something.

After triumph and disillusionment, wonder re-enters the story - can physics ever scare us or inspire us as much as it did 40 years ago?

By Dennis Overbye of the New York Times

Ernest Walton – Ireland’s only Nobel laureate in science

Ireland is justifiably proud of its writers, musicians and scholars, but this patriotic pride does not always extend to our scientists, writes Cormac Ó Raifeartaigh of the Irish Times.

Making the microscopic loom large in a child's life

Say you have a child in tow, you're in the toy store and you're thinking, there has to be something here that provokes wonder, feeds the intellect, awakens the scientist within. By Thomas Eisner for The New York Times

Beaufort link with ‘the great Maria’

Beaufort was a little younger than Maria Edgeworth, having been born in Navan in 1774. He began his naval career at the age of 14, and in the course of his many voyages was struck by the difficulties caused by the lack of a standard method for assessing wind-speed.

Geckos of the night

In rainforests such as those on the island of New Caledonia, they live at the tops of rainforest trees coming down to lower levels only occasionally at night to feed on insects.

Working together: the biodiversity of forested landscapes

Over the next 30 years Irish foresters aim to increase forestry cover from 9% to 17% of the land cover.

Where do Irish Giant Turtles lay their eggs?

Leather back turtles, dermochelys coriacea, can reach a length of six feet and are common in southern Irish waters in late summer and early autumn

Keeping camera lenses clean in the sea

All man-made surfaces (metals, plastics, wood) placed in sea water rapidly become ‘fouled’.

Kaleidoscopic Cuttlefish

Like their close relatives the squid and octopus, cuttlefish have an amazing ability to change their appearance rapidly - take a look at the sequence of pattern changes.