A self-powered waste water treatment plant using microbes has just passed its biggest test, bringing household-level water recycling a step closer. Personal water treatment plants could soon be recycling our waste water and producing energy on the side. Boston-based Cambrian Innovation have began field tests of what’s known as a microbial fuel cell at the Naval Surface Warfare Center …

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Fear of machines taking jobs dates back at least as far as the Luddites. Two centuries on, many of us could face the same predicament. In 2013 Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford looked at 702 types of work and ranked …

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It might be preaching to the converted, but I think one has a duty to publicise the facts about the effects human beings are having on their environment, even if other people couldn’t care less. Young people, hopefully, do care – it is their future at stake. The following appeared recently in the New Scientist: …

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“The vast majority of the so-called research turned out in US universities is essentially worthless”, says Page Smith, a history professor at the University of California. “It does not result in any measurable  benefit to anything or anybody…….It is busywork on a vast, almost incomprehensible scale”.  The number of journal articles published has climbed from …

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