Sustainability may not be all it’s cracked up to be. That is the message in a recent paper by a hydrogeologist at Reading University . Michael Price argues that most human advances have been non-sustainable in the long term and that when we talk of ‘sustainable use’ we must define the period over which the use is planned or implemented.

Price identifies three major challenges currently facing Britain and the world. The first is that the climate, and with it the supply of water, is becoming

Astronomers use galaxies to reckon a subatomic particle’s mass.

By mapping hundreds of thousands of galaxies, astronomers have estimated the mass of the neutrino. They have also calculated the contribution that this mysterious subatomic particle makes to the total mass of the Universe.

The neutrino weighs no more than one-billionth of the mass of a hydrogen atom, Ofer Lahav of the University of Cambridge told the annual UK National Astronomy Meeting in Bristol today. Yet

Astronomers may have discovered a strange new form of matter.

Astronomers think they might have spotted a quark star, a mass of fundamental particles only a few kilometres across but weighing more than our Sun. If the star’s nature is confirmed, it would be the first example of this state of matter.

Theoreticians hypothesized the existence of quark stars in the 1980s. Today, NASA announced the discovery of such a star, based on results from their space telescope the Chandra

Diseases involving irremediable tissue damage of the musculoskeletal system account today for about 15% of hospital admissions in developed countries. With the ageing of the population, this is believed to gain significantly in importance in the coming years.

The majority of the disorders affecting the musculoskeletal system are the joint diseases, in particular osteoarthritis. The latter disease process is typically initiated and associated with defects of the articular cartilage and the un

Scientists at the University of Plymouth have been developing methods to `close the loop` on waste and pollution, by finding waste products that can be used to improve soil / plant-growth conditions. At the Society for Experimental Biology conference in Swansea Dr Stuart Lane presented ways in which garden and industrial waste could be recycled to benefit the environment.

In collaboration with Ecological Sciences Limited, Dr Lane`s group investigated a horticultural growth substitute for pea

In a laboratory in Nottingham, scientists are now creating the uniquely harsh conditions encountered in interstellar space. In an environment where the pressure is only one ten billion billionth (one part in 10 to the power 13) of atmospheric pressure, and the temperature a mere 10 degrees above absolute zero, Dr Martin McCoustra and his colleagues are able to mimic the surfaces of the ice-coated dust grains in interstellar clouds and to study the complex chemical and physical processes that take pla