Nothing travels faster than light – it only takes 8 minutes for it to reach the Earth from the nearest star, the Sun, which is 150 million kilometres away. Now anyone can measure this speed – with chocolate stars and a microwave oven! The experiment is described on a new Institute of Physics web resource for teachers about fun physics demonstrations, inspired by the Physics on Stage 2 event.

The only equipment you need for this experiment is a microwave, a ruler and chocolate, cheese or any

Somewhere in the distant, old Universe, a population of stars hide undetected. They were the first to form after the birth of the Universe and are supposed to be far bigger in mass than any star visible today.

Astronomers know they must have been out there: only in this way could they solve the riddle of the origin and composition of stars in today’s Universe. A couple of ESA missions will help astronomers search for this elusive population.

When the Universe formed, there was

Fear of the dark is a common complaint in children and is often attributed to attention seeking behaviour. Yet researchers in this week’s BMJ suggest that it may be due to night blindness – a diagnosis which can be easily missed.

They describe two children with an inherited form of stationary night blindness. Both were very frightened of the dark, had a history of bumping into things at night, and insisted that curtains were drawn much earlier than others would choose. One child had fear of

Authors of a fast-track study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET propose an alternative to antibiotics to treat infection associated with the use of chemotherapy for patients with blood cancer.

The toxic effects of chemotherapy cause organisms in the gut to migrate to the bloodstream, frequently resulting in bacterial infection. Michael Ellis and colleagues from the United Arab Emirates investigated whether interleukin 11 (IL-11)-an agent involved in the immune response and thought to prote

Findings Show The Force of Blood Flow Has Anti-Inflammatory Effect

Scientists have found a new way in which exercise may protect against heart disease. Increased blood flow can mimic the powerful anti-inflammatory actions of certain glucocorticoid steroid drugs, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Medicine and Engineering. The researchers discovered that an increase in shear stress – the drag force exerted by blood flowing over endothelial

Analysis of Martian volcanoes will help determine when Hesperian epoch began

Research by a University at Buffalo planetary geologist suggests that generally accepted estimates about the geologic age of surfaces on Mars — which influence theories about its history and whether or not it once sustained life — could be way off.

Funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the research eventually could overturn principles about the relative ages of different are