In a fit of creativity the Biology Society, alongside the Centre of Life, have created a giant plasticine dinosaur! The weekend Wallace and Gromit went prehistoric. Checking through my emails one day, I discovered a message from the Centre of Life addressing what to do with a large amount of genuine Aardman plasticine, yes the very same kind that is used in the Wallace & Gromit productions. Ideas were coming in thick and fast from the rest of the students …

5. Vanilla Pats In 2006, Japanese researchers decided it’d be a good idea to see if you could extract vanilla from cow dung. Turns out you can. Through a one hour heating and pressurization process, vanillin is extracted, which is the main component of vanilla. 4. Defacation calculation Exactly what it sounds like. In 2003, a team of researchers thought it’d be interesting to calculate the pressures involved in the defecation of chin strap penguins. Turns out the penguins require …

A 500 million year old bacterial protein has been isolated, and inserted into E. Coli to create an alternative model of evolution. Apparently things are already happening differently, like accidentally creating a super-plague that destroys humanity. To the all scientists’ horror they realised that Dr Muckenfuss had indeed dropped a chicken pasty crumb into the petri-dish as the creature emerged. From then on they called the new born abomination “GREGG”

While many people seem to increasingly see science and religion as two very opposed ends of a single spectrum there are those that disagree. Mark Silversides is one such man

There was a huge amount of protest against the SOPA and PIPA bills in America but a new bill passed in the US Senate has given the American government the ability to monitor people’s online activity to a most dystopian level. An invasion of civil liberty? Have you got anything to hide? You probably don’t, but does that give government security forces the right to freely investigate your personal information stored on the internet. In the US, a bill was …

Elderly drivers are notoriously dangerous on the road. New research is being performed in order to help prevent accidents for elderly drivers. Research to keep older drivers safer and on the road for longer We all know what happens when you hit 75. You buy a flat cap and drive round every Sunday morning as slow as possible. Not for much longer as research from Newcastle University looks at new technology in keeping older drivers on the road for longer, …

The search for potential life on distant planets has been a long one. Have scientists finally found precursors for life on one of Saturn’s moons? Could the conditions on distant worlds give us clues to the origin of life on Earth. The methane clouds on Titan, a moon of Saturn, where the temperature never exceeds -180 °C could provide the basis for life. In a simulation of the atmospheric conditions, chemical reactions occurred to form some of the early precursors …

Right now, a bored billionaire is buying a football team somewhere in the universe. Now it seems they have a new pet project. It may sound a little science fiction, but enterprising technology tycoons are attempting to get a business mining asteroids off the ground. Literally. The company will be called Planetary Resources, and outlined last week in Seattle its plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for precious metals. As company founder Eric Anderson told Wired Science “The resources of Earth …

James Ricketts Isaac Newton’s writings on gravity, the Principia Mathematica which has become one of the most important scientific works was almost never published by the Royal Society after suffering the expensive flop of the lavishly illustrated Historia Piscium.

What makes movies memorable? “We’re going to need a bigger boat…” A classic quote from the film Jaws there. Here’s one from Star Wars “That’s no moon, it’s a space station”. Wasn’t that fun? Memorable lines in movies seem to have a way of ingraining themselves into the mass psyche, but can a computer recognize the thing that makes these quotes memorable? Researcher Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, encountered resistance to his suggestion that the patterns …