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Written by Alice Ryder Being asked to read a few pages for homework may sound like a chore, but imagine reading more than five million books. That’s what Slovenian physicist Matjaz Perc did to investigate how the use of words in the English language has changed over time.

Written by Jarrod Green If Lawrence Bragg was still alive he really could be boastful. This November marks the centenary of crystallography. It’s a powerful technique Bragg helped to develop for studying the structure of chemicals.

Chemical formulas, such as H2O (water) and CO2 (carbon dioxide), are handy as they identify which atoms are present in a chemical compound. This can in turn help to make predictions about their properties. But only knowing which atoms make up a compound sometimes isn’t enough. It helps to know how the atoms are arranged.

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.

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.

Take a sheet of A4 paper and measure its sides. A4 is 210 millimetres wide and 297 millimetres long. It’s probably the most common size of paper and it’s used in most countries. However, A4 side lengths aren’t simple numbers like 200 or 300 millimetres. So why don’t we use something easier to measure?