This unplugged activity uses a large model of a face, operated by several children working together, to teach how ‘emotion’ can be expressed by robots following simple rules. These rules are expressed as IF, THEN, ELSE, statements which, when...

Published by the Wellcome Trust, the 'Big Picture' explores issues around biology and medicine. Why does Darwinian evolution raise controversy when, say, quantum mechanics scarcely registers on the public consciousness?

This book from the SISCON series looks at attempts to eradicate disease by good sanitation and vaccination. It discusses concerns in the 1980s over the testing of medicines and explores some Third World health issues.

The animal kingdom contains an abundance of exquisite natural patterns from the stripes of an angelfish to the spots of a leopard. But how do these arise during early development? This Catalyst article looks at Turing mechanisms as a way of explaining how patterns develop as an animal grows.

In 1952, Alan...

As the need to find alternative cleaner forms of energy increases, scientists are looking to technologies, such as Hydrogen Fuel Cells (HFCs), as a power source for transportation.

This Catalyst article explains how hydrogen and oxygen gas can be used in a redox reaction to produce electricity, and the...

The Nuffield Advanced Chemistry students’ books were not intended to be conventional textbooks, or background books, or books of data. The books were deliberately left in many ways incomplete. The aim was to provide students with a series of starting points from which to explore the chemistry at advanced level....

This catalyst article looks at how scientists have analysed the isotopes of uranium in rocks in Gabon (W Africa) and shown that, for thousands of years in the distant past, a nuclear fission reaction occurred. 

In this video from the Teachers TV series Demonstrating Chemistry, Professor Hal Sosabowski demonstrates a solid...

Aimed at Key Stage One, this resource looks at activity levels and how, through practice, the body may perform better. Linked to Pe and the topic of animals including humans, it also aims to develop enquiry skills. Meet the character Fizzy and her dog Dizzy, who want to learn more about the human body and set...

Purpose: An important form of investigation that can be difficult to manage in classrooms is ‘observation over time’. Fixed length lessons reduce the number of possibilities for observation to those changes that occur within minutes rather than hours. One solution to this problem is to use time lapse photography to...

This chemistry extension module for the Salters’ Science course deals with the nutrients provided by food and their contribution to the diet. It also deals with methods of food processing and preservation. The module begins with a survey of the chemical composition and...