‘Nothing’ is a tricky concept to think about and it is as much a philosophical problem as it is a scientific problem. The question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has been tackled by different philosophers in different ways. Parmenides, the ancient Greek philosopher, stated that “nothing comes from nothing” which means for something…
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The UK is leading the way in designing babies. There is currently government plans to create babies with the DNA of three separate ‘parents’. There is also talk that this procedure, achieved through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), could actually be offered by the NHS by next year. Parents who are at a risk of having children…
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Max Tegmark is a Swedish-American cosmologist. He has made important contributions to physics, such as measuring dark matter and increasing of understanding of how light in the early universe informs the Big Bang model. He currently teaches at MIT and has proposed his own Theory of Everything (TOE). This Theory of Everything is also known…
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The Planck telescope, or usually referred to simply as Planck, was launched in 2009. It is a space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA) and its purpose is to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation – the radiation that has been left over from the Big Bang. More specifically, Planck has been designed to…
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The hygiene hypothesis is the idea that allergies, such as hay fever and asthma, are the result of a lack of early childhood exposure to germs and parasites. Looking at this idea from another angle, we can say that allergies are the result of living in a highly sanitised and clean environment (since sanitation involves…
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