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Take one science curriculum, some cameras and a couple of thousand school-kids, and what do you get? Over two hundred short films about science, entered into the Planet SciCast competition, the winners of which were announced last Friday in the hallowed halls of the Royal Institution in London. Photo by Laura Mtungwazi / SciCast SciCast…

If we could eliminate mosquitoes, those suckers that give you the itchy bites, and carry malaria (which kills just shy of a million people every year), should we? An article in today’s Nature considers the possibility of a world without mosquitoes. Tell us what you think using the poll up there on the right, and…

You are what you eat. Or maybe, the way you behave depends on what’s happening in your gut. These goes beyond chocolate, or bananas, making you feel happy: chronic gastric inflammation makes mice anxious, through measurable biochemical changes. An interesting implication is that clinical treatment of intestinal disorders could improve behavioural abnormalities (Bercik et al.…

Over on the main site, we have an Immunology Top 7. To accompany this, here’s the immunologist Avrion Mitchison talking about the ‘World Holiday Organization’, and ‘the best scientists I’ve ever known’. Avrion Mitchison, the British zoologist, is currently Professor Emeritus at University College London and is best known for his work demonstrating the role…

Stanford Prof Stephen Schneider, one of the world’s top climate scientists, died of a heart attack on a flight from a science meeting in Sweden at the age of 65. Schneider often took the time to speak with our reporters about his passion, so he was no stranger to our pages — we wrote about…

NIH: It’s all about significance, approach Under the revised peer review system, significance and approach are the two most important core review factors used to determine the overall impact score of a NIH grant application, according to an analysis by National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) director Jeremy Berg at the Institute’s blog on…

Here too are the dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses, tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters who lay down their lives for a song. Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear the murmuring, the revolt of immense estates.

You’d think that one might have the right not to know the result of a genetic test for a disease, right? But suppose one wanted to know the risk of one’s children developing, say, Huntington’s Disease? And would one retain that right if it meant that, instead, a potentially harmful test would instead have to…

It all started with a little tweet, asking you to tell me your favourite science joke. Dozens of comments later, I’m going to have to ask you to stop… please. There were a lot of jokes, some funnier than others, some apparently from a site on the internet (yes, I recognize them) and a few…