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‘Phantom limb’ is a common side-effect of amputation where patients feel like the limb is still there. File image: Brenda Fitzsimons

Robotic skin gives back sense of touch to arm amputee

Xavi Bertran

‘After many years, I felt my hand, as if a hollow shell got filled with life again’

Can we change materials from being ‘less bad’ to ‘good’ for biosphere?

“Nearly 300 grams of gold can be recovered from about one tonne of recycled mobile phones.”

Sylvia Thompson

Chemist Michael Braungart suggests products could end their life as biological nutrients

Optical refinements at the Parthenon

The Parthenon: the observer sees the eight columns of the façade as a perfectly regular array, but this is achieved by deliberately introducing subtle distortions.

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: This Greek masterpiece is an enduring paean to the power of geometry

Gene activity offers a window into kidney transplants

Prof Barbara Murphy: ensuring better outcomes for kidney transplant patients. Photograph: Claudia Paul

Claire O'Connell

Research Lives: Prof Barbara Murphy’s work aims to improve patient outcomes

Schrödinger’s grandson in Dublin to mark DNA letter going on display for first time

Ruairí Ó Cuív, grandson of Éamon de Valera with Prof Terence Rudolph, grandson of Erwin Schrödinger at an event to remember Prof Rudolph’s grandfather, Nobel prizewinner Erwin Schrödinger, at the Little Museum of Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw

Kevin O'Sullivan

Francis Crick’s letter summed up critical role played by Nobel prizewinner Erwin Schrödinger

The scientist David Goodall (104) at a press conference a day before his assisted suicide in Switzerland, last month. Photograph: Georgios Kefalas/Keystone via AP

Next big debate in Ireland will be about assisted suicide

William Reville

Do you agree that all lucid adults should have the legal right to end their own lives?

The Parthenon: the observer sees the eight columns of the façade as a perfectly regular array, but this is achieved by deliberately introducing subtle distortions.

Optical refinements at the Parthenon

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: This Greek masterpiece is an enduring paean to the power of geometry

The Joyce tower in Sandycove, Co Dublin, from which Stephen Dedalus began his odyssey in ‘Ulysses’.

Leopold Bloom’s arithmetical adventures

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: James Joyce included oblique mathematical references in ‘Ulysses’

Research indicates about 60% of premature deaths can be attributed to unhealthy lifestyles and are therefore preventable.

How to live 10 years longer

William Reville

Five lifestyle practices can dramatically lower mortality rates, research shows

Winton Gallery exhibition’s first World War biplane, surrounded by a stretched canopy of synthetic fabric, curved in the form of the gyrating airflow.

Maths, aesthetics and culture

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: London’s Winton Gallery reveals how numbers shape our world

Other well-regarded studies have reported that drinking one to two units of alcohol a day markedly protects against death from cardiovascular disease. Photograph: Johnny Green/PA Wire

First drinking ‘protects your heart’. Then it ‘shortens your life’. Who to believe?

William Reville

Health researchers should tread carefully to avoid the alcohol-guidelines morass

Prof Richard Dawkins and physicist Stephen Hawking are dismissive of philosophy. Photograph: Alan Betson

The power and the limits of science

William Reville

Science’s success in understanding the natural world motivates some scientists to claim that it is all-powerful and will eventually explain absolutely everything

Ulam played a seminal role in the development of the H-bomb

Stan Ulam, a mathematician who figured how to initiate fusion

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: from the Manhattan Project to the Monte Carlo method

Flight plan: the geodesic arcs – one northerly, one southerly – show the shortest routes between Singapore and Quito. They are shorter than the line of the equator between the two points as Earth is not a perfect sphere

Imagine two cities on the equator. What’s the quickest route between them?

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Flight planners, astronomers and satnav all rely on geodesics and the effect of Earth’s bulge

Paul Kammerer: Future investigation may conclusively exonerate him which would make a nice end to his story

Paul Kammerer may have been an honest scientist

William Reville

Recent re-examination of his work suggests that he may have discovered epigenetic inheritance, a phenomenon not recognised until long after his death

The Ministers for Health and Children respectively, Simon Harris, TD, and Katherine Zappone, TD, at the launch of ‘A Healthy Weight for Ireland - Obesity Policy and Action Plan 2016-2025’. Pictured with the ministers are Bisi Atelade (11), from St Audoen’s NS and Charlie McCormack (10) Talbot SNS. Photograph: Dave Meehan

Hopes for successful obesity treatment flicker at last

William Reville

‘Quite simply, we have found support for the existence of internal bathroom scales’

Joseph Fourier helped solve many of the equations of physics.

Fourier’s wonderful idea: Breaking complex signals into simple pieces

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: The Fast Fourier Transform dramatically reduced the way computation scales with problem size, making it practicable to solve many problems that could not otherwise be tackled

Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano, the founder of probability.

Cubic skulduggery and intrigue

Peter Lynch

16th century battles on the frontier of mathematics

When government is the biggest funder of scientific endeavour

William Reville

The formula for optimum distribution of funding between basic and applied research is not being applied at present

Pollination is necessary for plants to reproduce and the honey bee is a pollinator

To bee or not to bee

William Reville

‘Much more attention must be paid to how beehives are deployed and account must be taken of the effect on local pollinators’

The flu vaccine: Vaccination strategies are pursued with a view to ensuring cases do not increase exponentially

Stemming the spread of epidemics

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Widespread vaccination can prevent epidemics by replacing the exponential rate of spread by a linear growth rate

Head of US EPA Scott Pruitt fails ‘the BS test’.

Why producing bulls**t requires few convictions

William Reville

Science is not immune to allure of BS, and we’re not as good at detecting it as we think

Galileo: One of the “giants” upon whose shoulders Newton and others stood.

The Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Perhaps Galileo’s greatest contribution was ‘mathematisation’ of science

Irish philosopher George Berkeley, the Bishop of Cloyne and a noted metaphysician who declared: ‘To be is to be perceived’. Image: Hulton Archive

Explaining consciousness: the mind-matter connection

William Reville

The old answer to the problem of how the world existed before the advent of conscious observers was that God was watching it

Stormy weather: Ophelia pictured as the storm was about to hit Ireland last year

Staying put or going with the flow

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Ireland was the first of many countries to use a so-called semi-Lagrangian advection scheme in an operational setting

Photograph: iStock

The mathematics of the heart really keep the blood pumping

Peter Lynch

Maths can help to improve our understanding of cardiac malfunction

Flowers pictured where people store their relatives ashes after cremation in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin. Photograph: Aidan Crawley

Which to choose, burial or cremation?

William Reville

We should not allow cremation to drive cemeteries out of existence and to hide death from us

‘Starry Night’: it seems probable that Van Gogh was gifted with a profound intuitive feeling for turbulence and that this is reflected in his paintings.

Energy cascades in Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: It can be argued that there is a close relationship between his turbulent state of mind and the turbulent atmosphere evident in his work

‘Judgement’ by Rowan Gillespie, at Sutherland School of Law in UCD. Photograph: David Sleator

The problem with mollycoddling university students

William Reville

Higher education is to broaden horizons, not to simply embrace a homogenous view of the world

Sunrise on the morning of the winter solstice, at Coliemore Harbour, Dalkey, Co Dublin. Photograph: Eric Luke

That’s Maths: Darkening mornings and brightening evenings around Christmas

Peter Lynch

The unsteady path of the earth around the sun means we see a stretch in the evenings weeks before the mornings start to become noticeably brighter

’Environmental activists are particularly prone to such emotionally driven thinking.’ Photograph: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images

Why we believe what we want to believe

William Reville

Many people have a deep-seated and powerful emotional need to support their favourite ideology or worldview

Young scientists engage in participative science at the launch of this year’s Galway Science and Technology Festival. Photo: Andrew Downes

Dedicated followers of fission

William Reville

National Children’s Science Centre is aimed at stimulating children’s natural curiosity and encouraging them to explore and discover

A photograph of a supernova explosion: after the star blows off the lighter material outside it packs down into a neutron star that becomes a pulsar.

The Star of Bethlehem . . . or was it a planet?

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: And lo, the supernova theory

Nasa scientists have used Earth’s gravity to slingshot ‘OSIRIS-REx’ to an asteroid called Bennu. Illustration: Nasa

That’s Maths: How to slingshot a spaceship on to an asteroid

Peter Lynch

‘Gravity assists’ seem to provide free energy but it depends on your point of view

Scott Pruitt, administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency should not be condemned as a climate change ‘denier’. Photograph: Bloomberg

How best to persuade people who do not accept scientific consensus

William Reville

Since emotion plays a large part in motivating those who reject the consensus, then science communicators should also use emotion in making their case

Columnists

Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd -

‘She’s so inauthentic’: the unmasking of Ivanka Trump

David McWilliams

David McWilliams -

David McWilliams: Why immigrants live in Navan, not Stillorgan

Cliff Taylor

Cliff Taylor -

Cliff Taylor: Jailing Drumm will not prevent another crash – vigilance might

Diarmaid Ferriter

Diarmaid Ferriter -

Diarmaid Ferriter: We can’t let dark past define Irish social history

Citizen Science The Irish Times and citizen science researchers have teamed up. See the results here

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Features & Opinion

Bee part of the solution to the pollination problem

Zurich startup offers each one of us the chance to help ensure the survival of the bees

Cervical cancer screening has always been imperfect

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State has rich history in particle physics but will not cough up €1m Cern membership fee

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