Instant Genius

From the neatly curated English country garden to the wild jungles of the Amazon, the Earth is host to a staggeringly diverse range of plant life. One of the key reasons for the great evolutionary success of plants is...

Every built environment we spend our time in, our homes, offices, music venues or sports stadiums – is designed and constructed after hours of consideration about form and function. Oftentimes, less consideration is...

A late summer sunset, a peaceful, verdant forest, or a Shakespearean sonnet – these are all things that move us emotionally thanks to what we perceive as their beauty. But why is this so, why do environments, art...

Whenever we buy a new product or use a service, we simply expect it to work as advertised, usually without giving much thought to how it came to being in the first place. However, behind the scenes, every piece of...

Currently, around one in ten of us are living with asthma. For many, the symptoms can be relatively mild, but for others, attacks can be severe, debilitating, and even life-threatening. For the most part, we’ve relied...

These days, supermarket shelves are filled with thousands of different products all vying for our attention; the options are almost endless. However, if we look back in time, we find that our early ancestors simply ate...

Though often thought of as the poor cousin to our other senses, our sense of smell has played a key role in human life since its very beginnings. It helps us to determine whether certain foods are safe to eat, protects...

The possibility that we may be living in a simulation created by a more technologically advanced civilisation has occupied the minds of scientists, philosophers and fiction writers for decades. We may never be able to...

Often in life, we find ourselves being accused of being lazy or accusing others of acting lazily, or maybe even becoming frustrated by what we see as laziness in our own actions. But what do we really mean by the term...

No matter how gently or politely we live our lives, at one point or another, it’s inevitable that we’ll find ourselves in a situation in which we disagree with another person and find ourselves having to defend our...

When we know a certain fact about the world or hold a certain belief how do we know that others also know this, how do we base our thoughts and actions on our knowledge of what we assume others know, and what impact...

When most of us think about time our minds likely turn to thoughts of the second hand that ticks around a clock, or maybe the occasions we’ve been late to catch a bus. But if we stop to think about what time actually is...

Whenever a crime is committed, tiny traces of evidence are left behind at the scene, which, if pieced together correctly, can tell us exactly what happened, when it happened and who was responsible. This is the job of...

Every several years, the surface temperatures of the Pacific Ocean rise, triggering a climate event that has a domino effect on weather patterns across the globe. This is known as El Niño – and this year, meteorologists...

Though we’re often not aware of it, the ground beneath our feet is teeming with an abundance of life and activity – from the complex networks of fungi and tangled roots put down deep into the Earth by the plants that...