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Dogs chase cats – it’s one of the facts of life. However, what seems to be true in the backyard might not be the case in the Australian bush.

Brain freeze Written by Tom Dullemond We’d only lived on Terminus for a week and seen nothing but blizzards. Finally, it was a clear cold day, and mum’s company had just delivered the latest snow tractor.

Citizen science is on the rise. More and more, amateurs, or ‘citizen scientists’ are given opportunities to help scientists.

If you read scientific reports closely, you will come across words such as error and uncertainty. What do they mean? If a teacher tells you that you made an error on a test, then you got something wrong. In everyday language, that’s what error often means – a mistake.

Say cheese and flash that beautiful smile. You should be proud of those choppers; after all, teeth have been around for nearly half a billion years.

Written by Emma Bastian How do you weigh a dinosaur? It’s a simple question with a very complex answer.

It’s a small molecule, made of oxygen and hydrogen atoms in a V-shape. It’s colourless, odourless and expands when it freezes into a solid. It’s water, and without it, we wouldn’t be here.

You’re at home, sitting on the couch. Outside, there is thunder and lightning. You notice something at the window: a strange, glowing ball of light. As you watch, it appears to pass through the glass. It wanders through the air before abruptly disappearing.

These mimic activities are about memory. To do them well, you need to remember exactly what you saw. Your brain makes memories in a few stages. Sensory memory describes what happens when you briefly see an object. It lasts just a split second, however.

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been jointly awarded to Sir John B. Gurdon and Professor Shinya Yamanaka. They received the award ‘for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent’. What does that mean?