St Andrews is Scotland’s first university and the third oldest in the English-speaking world, founded in 1413. Over six centuries it has established a reputation as one of Europe’s leading and most distinctive centres for teaching and research.
A large majority of independent professional economists believe Scotland would not be better off if it were independent, according to a recent survey. A smaller majority believe the rest of the UK would…
Crickets are nothing if not noisy, but populations on two Hawaiian islands have embraced silence by rapidly losing sound-producing wing structures to avoid infestation by deadly fly larvae. In Current…
In Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf, the boy warns farmers of imaginary wolves threatening their flocks just to laugh at the sight of them running to the rescue for no reason. Of course, when the…
A collaboration between historians, text mining, and information visualisation researchers has thrown up new insight into the hunger for sugar, coffee and rubber in the 19th century, as well as how fat…
The triple bottom line is a term coined in the late 1990s by the influential business thinker and consultant, John Elkington. It captures a very neat idea, namely that a modern organisation has three broad…
It is an enduring mystery how juvenile salmon, at 12cm long and weighing perhaps only 20g, can leave a Scottish river in springtime, undertake a sojourn of thousands of kilometres around the North Atlantic…
As humans, we point all the time. It’s an action we do almost without thinking: even one-year-old infants use pointing and understand what pointing means when an adult does it for them. It’s a really simple…
How do you get to know one of Earth’s most mysterious creatures? By looking at its earwax, according to a group of US researchers. Analysing the contents of blue whales’ ears, through a process similar…
When the leaders of the world’s most powerful economies gather in Northern Ireland on Monday, one issue will overshadow all others: tax. For years the matter of how global corporations engage with offshore…
Social psychology addresses many of the important questions that concern us as human beings. It’s also the subject of newspaper editorials on most days: why is there conflict between groups? How can it…
Many young people in Europe think violent protest can be a legitimate response to the political system they feel no connection to. They believe government pays very little attention to them and have very…
The powers that be describe the street violence and social upheaval which took place in England’s major cities last week as “mindless”. Yet it was anything but. Prime Minister David Cameron, among others…