Ubiquitous social media giant Facebook announced has launched a mobile app called Instant Articles. The app allows news stories provided by a number of partners to be read in their entirety by iPhone users.

Those who download the app will spared the inconvenience of clicking on a link in their usual newsfeed, which may take up to ten seconds to direct to another page.

Historian Mark Griffiths claims to have cracked a code in an Elizabethan book on botany to discover a true portrait of Shakespeare made within the bard’s own lifetime.

The find has been hailed as “the literary discovery of the century” by the editor of Country Life – the magazine in which the details of Griffiths' process will be revealed. Yet other scholars, including the Director of the Shakespeare Institute, professor Michael Dobson, remain skeptical.

Vancouver-based architect Michael Green was unequivocal at a conference at which I heard him speak a while ago: “We grow trees in British Columbia that are 35 storeys tall, so why do our building codes restrict timber buildings to only five stories?”

Nuclear power is sometimes described as being free of greenhouse gas emissions, and that’s true of the nuclear fission reactions themselves. But here is a list of all the stages of the nuclear power cycle at which greenhouse gases are emitted: uranium mining, uranium milling, conversion of uranium ore to uranium hexafluoride, uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, reactor construction, reactor decommissioning, fuel reprocessing, nuclear waste disposal, mine site rehabilitation, and transport throughout all stages.

Does the world really need men?

It has been suggested that, in the age of cloning – and with enough sperm banks around to populate several future generations – the question is legitimate.

However, new research suggests that the reason that we need two sexes is because it improves the overall genetic quality of a species and reduces the risk of population extinction.

The benefits of music education are widely reported. Playing an instrument has been shown to have significant cognitive benefits.

Creative thinking, social and emotional intelligence, coordination, memorization and auditory processing are all thought to improve in school-age children who learn music.

This makes it hard to argue with the fact that learning music is a good thing. But, when it comes to the type of music to teach, things get less agreeable.