Planning permission has been given for what could become the world’s largest offshore wind farm on the Dogger Bank, off England’s east coast.

If fully constructed, the project will have up to 400 turbines with a total generation capacity of 2.4 GW. That’s enough to power 1.9 million households – more than Manchester and Birmingham combined.

The NASA spacecraft Dawn has spent more than seven years traveling across the Solar System to intercept the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres.

Now in orbit around Ceres, the probe has returned the first images and data from these distant objects.

But inside Dawn itself is another first – the spacecraft is the first exploratory space mission to use an electrically-powered ion engine rather than conventional rockets.

Evaluations of research ethics do not benefit from a tick-box approach. 

Australia’s social science research, like that in most developed countries since the infamous Milgram experiments took place at my alma mater in 1961, occurs under the watchful eye of ethics boards.

New gaps are opening up in educational achievement between teenage boys and girls, according to a comprehensive new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Analysis of its 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science across countries, shows that unfortunately, patterns between the performance of girls and boys have not changed much over time, although some of the gaps have closed a little.

The search for alternative energy sources in the age of climate change has overlooked tidal energy: a vast and unexploited worldwide resource.

For three decades now, tidal lagoon schemes have been recommended as an economically and environmentally attractive alternative to tidal barrages. More recently, two proposals for tidal lagoons in Swansea Bay, Wales have emerged and there have been several reports documenting how such a project there could have the potential to harness significant energy resources.

According to a 2014 National Consumers League poll, 29% of American adults believe that childhood vaccinations can trigger autism. To many, these views are difficult to comprehend. After all, multiple controlled studies conducted on huge international samples have debunked any statistical association between vaccines and autism.