Reforming the 'China Initiative'

With this year’s Oscars on the horizon, and vampire film Sinners nominated for a record-breaking 16 awards, the Unexpected Elements team sinks their teeth into some blood-sucking science.First, we discover that Vlad the Impaler, the Romanian prince who inspired Dracula, may have ...  Afficher plus

The Hindu festival of Holi has the Unexpected Elements team delving into the science of colour. First up, forget chicken and egg, we bring you a whole new controversy of which came first: colour or colour vision? Then, we learn how a new development in infrared contact lenses cou ...  Afficher plus

President Xi Jinping is investing seriously into his strategic vision of turning China into a nation of scientific pace-setters. China’s past contributions to modern science have been proportionally lacklustre, but with a reinvigorated focus over the past two decades, China is fa ...  Afficher plus

Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui caused international outrage when in 2018 when he used the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR Cas-9 to edit the genomes of two human embryos. That experiment, described by the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology described as ‘abominable’, resu ...  Afficher plus

President Xi Jinping is investing seriously into his strategic vision of turning China into a nation of scientific pace-setters. China’s past contributions to modern-science have been proportionally lacklustre, but with a reinvigorated focus over the past two decades, China is fa ...  Afficher plus

Marnie Chesterton and guests mull over the saga of an AI engineer who believes his chatbot is sentient. Also, climate scientists propose a major leap in earth system modelling, that might cost £250m a year but would bring our predictive power from 100 km to 1km. And the story of ...  Afficher plus