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EU Contest for Young Scientists winners: Anna and Adrian Fleck (both from Germany), Brendan Matusch from Canada and Nicolas Fedrigo also from Canada. Photograph: Cyril Byrne

EU Contest for Young Scientists features starch, spinal fusion and autonomous driving

Kevin O'Sullivan

Elon Musk names Japanese billionaire as first private space tourist

Elon Musk, ceo SpaceX, left, shakes hands with Yusaku Maezawa, who will be the first private passenger on a rocket around the moon. Photograph: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

Sam Levin

Yusaku Maezawa will travel around the moon with Space X in 2023

New deep sea research project to monitor Ireland’s earthquake activity

One of the boldest deep-ocean research projects ever undertaken in Europe was launched in Cobh, Co Cork today. Scientists (from left) Mick Smyth, Raffaele Bonadio, Janneke De Laat, lead researcher Dr Sergei Lebedev, DIAS, Clara Gomez Garcia and Laura Berdi. Photograph: Cathal Noonan

Lorna Siggins

Listening devices will monitor links between ocean wave activity, landslides and tsunamis

Sister and brother create a new material to protect athletes from injury

Anna Fleck and her brother Adrian Fleck, from Germany, with their project at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists, at the RDS, Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

Kevin O'Sullivan

EU Contest for Young Scientists: How a liquid starch material can give tough results

From upsetting the balance to setting the world on fire

Deepwater Horizon’s devasting spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 is still fresh in the memory of some 60 environmental groups who are also united in opposition.

Lorna Siggins

Offshore oil and gas extraction poses a huge threat to the health of marine ecosystems

There has been a recent explosion of “predatory” science journals that aggressively solicit research papers from scientists who pay to have the papers published.

The dodgy science of wiping your backside

William Reville

William Reville: Predatory journals can contaminate scientific literature

Tom Lehrer: a comical, musical, mathematical genius

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Famous for his ballads, Lehrer was also one of the great satirists of his time

The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 paved the way for the development of sophisticated gene-editing techniques. Photograph: Getty Images

Biological elitism: the result of tinkering with human genomes?

William Reville

Despite ethical unease, germ-line modification will surely find mainstream acceptance

You have probably noticed the little rectangles in the camera of your smartphone; this is face detection in action.

Automatic face recognition: how it works

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: We are photographed numerous times every day and have little idea who is collecting the information

A spiral has appeared over the past decade or so on the beach between Booterstown station and the Merrion Gates, southeast of Dublin. A sandbank (pictured) has gradually built up, driven by the action of the sea waves, and has assumed a form close to a logarithmic spiral.

What’s behind the miraculous spiral on Booterstown Strand?

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Something must have altered to trigger this development

Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that can renew themselves through cell division and, under certain circumstances, can develop into differentiated organ-specific cells. Photograph: Getty Images

How human cells can be reprogrammed to renew our bodies

William Reville

Scientists hope to use pluripotent stem cells to replace organs that have failed

Kelvin’s tide machine. Belfast-born William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) developed the science by constructing the harmonic theory of tides.

That’s Maths: tides are a tug-of-war between Earth, moon and sun

Peter Lynch

Software packages (and apps) now analyse tidal records and use the results to make predictions

Senator David Norris, then Green Party leader Trevor Sargent and Marian Harkin MEP at the GM-free Ireland Network protest rally outside Leinster House, Dublin, in 2006. Photograph: Matt Kavanagh

Are genetically modified organisms safe?

William Reville

Green criticism has undermined public and political confidence in GMOs but science proves they are no riskier than more traditional methods

Ireland recorded 392 suicides last year. Photograph: iStock

Suicide: the best strategies attempting to counter this major problem

William Reville

We have been surprisingly passive in Ireland in responding to issue

Piet Hein: “The Universe may / Be as great as they say / But it wouldn’t be missed / If it didn’t exist”

The Empty Set: this article is about nothing at all

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Many philosophers regard ‘nothing’ with anxiety, nausea or panic

The first exoplanet transit was detected in 1999 and within 10 years more than 100 exoplanets had been detected. Photograph: Stocktrek RF/Getty

Searching for planets beyond our solar system

William Reville

The discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence would be truly transcending

Measurement of the Lough Foyle baseline in 1828-29.

Trigonometric comfort blankets on the top of mountains

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: angles can be measured very precisely by taking theodolite sightings to distant peaks

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

Columnists

Janan Ganesh

Janan Ganesh -

America can no longer carry the world on its shoulders

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson -

Newton Emerson: Next stop, an electronic solution to language issue

Una Mullally

Una Mullally -

Una Mullally: Why youth won’t play along with the ‘recovery’

Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd -

Maureen Dowd: Trump finally makes a friend

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

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Features & Opinion

The Irish engineer who broke new ground in study of earthquakes

In 1846 Robert Mallet delivered a paper on a machine to register seismic motion

Are we worried about the wrong plastic?

Microplastics from terrestrial environments could comprise up to 30% of ocean plastics

The history of the kettle

From ‘booby trap for old ladies’ to efficient maker of heatwave-defying pot of tea

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