A Portuguese writer named João Magueijo, that’s who. He has lived in the UK for 25 years and says it’s a joke – but a fair joke. But, asks Archie Bland, is it?

New proposals are expected next spring to outlaw dozens of household electrical devices that European officials regard as using too much electricity, as part of plans to meet EU targets on energy efficiency.

Norwegian prodigy's dispute with governing body FIDE over prize money for championship match lays bare fractures in world chess – and the strong influence Russia has on the game

Creating content for your social media profiles needn’t take more than 10 minutes each morning.

Really.

Once you have your favorite content scouters (my word) in place, you’ll find that the content will appear before you almost magically. My scouters are the tools I use to help me pinpoint the content that furthers my brand, keeps me updated, and will provide my followers with the information they want to read.

The film Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete), which opens in select American theaters on Sept. 5, may be the most obscene non-pornographic movie the Germans have ever made—an impressive feat for a country that boasts the oeuvre of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was as famous for full-frontal male nudity (often his own) as he was for his biting characterizations of the Federal Republic. But even the risqué The Marriage of Maria Braun is basically The Sound of Music compared to Wetlands, an adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s mega-bestselling book of the same name, which I like to call Fifty Shades of Gross.

Imagine if all scientists in history could access Twitter. Sounds awful, doesn’t it. 

Dean Burnett: Yet another look at what great moments in science would have looked like if they happened via Twitter

The firm is reported by the Wall Street Journal to be creating a child-friendly YouTube and Gmail as part of the move, which would for the first time allow children under 13 to set up Google accounts.

Artist Neil Harbisson was born completely color blind and sees the world in grayscale. But even though Neil can't see color doesn't mean he can't sense it. That's because Neil Harbisson is a cyborg who can hear color.

No matter how well it begins or ends, every fairy tale has a villain. In my storybook adventure in Sintra, a Portuguese town about 20 miles west of Lisbon, it was the hands of the clock. Roaming the pristine grounds of castles high in the hills, I wished that time would stand still.

Richard III ruled England for just two years and two months before he was killed in battle in 1485 at age 32. And yet, during his short time wearing the crown, Richard certainly ate like a king, a new study finds.

The wine flowed generously at King Richard's table, and plates of game birds and fresh fish were plentiful, according to an analysis of his teeth and bones, published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science on Aug. 16.

[Multi-isotope analysis demonstrates significant lifestyle changes in King Richard III  ☛  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440314002428 ]

Sound travels as vibrations through the air and whatever it hits vibrates too. If this is your ear then specialized hair cells translate these movements into something you can hear but for pretty much anything else these vibrations are simply lost.

Today’s education reformers believe that schools are broken and that business can supply the remedy. Some place their faith in the idea of competition. Others embrace disruptive innovation, mainly through online learning. Both camps share the belief that the solution resides in the impersonal, whether it’s the invisible hand of the market or the transformative power of technology.

Improvements in DNA analysis are helping us rewrite the past and better grasp what it means to be human.

This is a little method that changed how we handled our cultural differences and opinions. Now the tip is out in the wild. Make good use of it!

37m people will pay to stream by the end of 2014 but analyst Mark Mulligan sees more potential. By Stuart Dredge

Streaming music is cannibalising download sales. It’s a phrase anyone connected with the music industry is hearing a lot about in 2014.

It’s a technological shift causing a lot of panicked flapping about, from an industry that counts “panicked flapping about at technological shifts” as one of its core skills.

You cannot look at the sun without special filters, and the naked eye cannot perceive certain wavelengths of sunlight. Solar physicists must consequently rely on spacecraft that can observe this invisible light before the atmosphere absorbs it. Here's how NASA does it.

The discovery of a microbial ecosystem deep beneath the Antarctic ice doesn't necessarily mean that life teems on frigid worlds throughout the solar system, researchers caution: subglacial Lake Whillans is not a closed system like Jupiter's moon Europa.

Contrary to the contrived ignorance of media reporters, the future of the daily newspaper is one of the few certainties in the current landscape: Most of them are going away, in this decade. (If you work at a paper and you don’t know what’s happened to your own circulation or revenue in the last few years, now might be a good time to ask.) We’re late enough in the process that we can even predict the likely circumstance of its demise.

A new study which found that readers using a Kindle were "significantly" worse than paperback readers at recalling when events occurred in a mystery story is part of major new Europe-wide research looking at the impact of digitisation on the reading experience.

Computer scientists have used the latest image processing techniques to analyse hundreds of works of art and unearth previously unconsidered sources of inspiration between artists

ReadaThing is a long-standing group that hosts one of my favorite LT traditions: relay-style read-a-thons. LibraryThing members across the globe volunteer for time slots, such that we've always got someone reading around the clock for the duration of the ReadaThing.

This Labor Day weekend, we'll have a ReadaThing launching at midnight UTC betweenThursday, Aug. 28th and Friday, Aug. 29th (that's 8pm Eastern on Thursday). The read-a-thon will end 96 hours later, at 7pm Eastern on Monday, Sept. 1st.

ReadaThing participants can read whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want.

We spend a lot of time hating on airports. But while the end point may be beautiful, so is the journey that got you there. Such is the mantra of Jeffrey Milstein, a pilot who has spent days hovering over airports for his epic photo series, "Flying."

During the Chess Olympiad potential chess masters of the future met for battle at the banquet hall of the Red Bank in Tromsø. With around 70 participants, there were many small heads and hands in action.