Curious Kids: How does the stuff in a fire extinguisher stop a fire?

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Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ , consisting of almost 100 billion cells – known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections. We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red? There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery. For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the my
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Four graphs that suggest we can’t blame climate change on solar activity

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The past decade (2010-2019) was the hottest on record and five of the top 10 warmest single years have all occurred since 2015, according to reports released by the UK Met Office and the World Meteorological Organisation . The current Australian bushfire crisis is also the worst on record , having emerged due to a combination of increased average temperature (roughly 1.5°C above the long term average) and a reduction in rainfall. But can we attribute this to anything more natural than anthropogenic effects? Solar activity, for example, has previously been linked to temperature and is sometimes blamed for climate change. But our new analysis provides evidence for why this isn’t the case. The sun is the dominant source of energy for the Earth’s climate, so quantifying what influence it has had on global temperatures since industrialisation is very important. Like all stars, the sun undergoes variations in solar activity, meaning its energy output varies with time. The visible sur
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We need a full public service internet – state-owned infrastructure is just the start

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The UK Labour Party’s 2019 election manifesto contains plans to bring BT’s internet infrastructure business into public ownership by creating British Broadband and to roll out and provide superfast broadband free to all households and businesses. This would be funded via a digital tax on the profits of internet giants such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. I believe this will help improve Britain’s relatively poor rate of full-fibre internet connection. But we also need to address the wider problems faced by internet users. The consequences of the current model of digital capitalism have been surveillance , privacy violations , digital monopolies , fake news , filter bubbles , post-truth politics , digital authoritarianism , online nationalism , digital tabloids and high-speed flows of superficial content. To change this, we need a full public service internet. The current internet consists of the technological infrastructure, the platforms (websites and apps) that provide digi
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