News, April 2000

• Snap-sick routine - Premium content

  How do you make a crocodile vomit? Very carefully says David Adam.

  28 April 2000

• And now, the solar weather - Premium content

  Solar flares -- billion-ton bubbles of boiling plasma -- pose a serious threat to the Earth. Jeremy Thomson reports on a new technique that might help us to see them coming.

  28 April 2000

• The end is not nigh - Premium content

  Jeremy Thomson explains how a balloon has saved the universe from a big crunch.

  27 April 2000

• Sweet dreams are made of these - Premium content

  Brain cells that send us to sleep have been identified for the first time, David Adam discovers.

  27 April 2000

• Pretty pigments, safer shades - Premium content

  Pigments used to colour glass and ceramics often contain cadmium, which may be toxic. The first cadmium-free alternatives have arrived, David Adam discovers.

  27 April 2000

• Food vibrations - Premium content

  Jeremy Thomson discovers how honey bees work out their work-mates' dances in the dark.

  26 April 2000

• The Ising on the cake - Premium content

  Philip Ball explains why those trying to solve one of the hardest problems in physics may have been wasting their time. .

  26 April 2000

• Wake up and smell the chocolate - Premium content

  Chocolate melts in the mouth with a rich tempting aroma and an intense creamy bittersweet taste. We see it as a treat, a comfort food, a reward and a romantic gift. This Easter, chocolate aficionado Sara Cross asks why so many of us have fallen under its spell.

  21 April 2000

• Happy Birthday, Hubble - Premium content

  It weighs twelve and a half tonnes, flies at nearly thirty thousand kilometres per hour and it's ten years old this Monday. The Hubble Space Telescope, arguably NASA's most successful mission ever, blasted off on 24 April 1990 and with it a new era in astronomy, explains Jeremy Thomson.

  21 April 2000

• Melting point - Premium content

  Sprinkle salt on ice and it melts. Dissolved gas does the same to organic compounds and could make more chemical reactions green and clean, David Adam discovers.

  20 April 2000