Modern publishing history abounds with "adult" writers who try their hand at books for younger readers, right across the spectrum from Salman Rushdie to Katie Price. Traffic in the other direction is far more risky and irregular.

Who invented the computer? This turns out to be a far more complicated question than you might imagine. There is no doubt that it was mathematicians who first conceived of a universally programmable machine, but which mathematicians?

Where are you now and what can you see?

An interview Stephen Hawking gave to the New Scientist magazine this week might have focused on the physicist's work, but it was his response to the question "What do you think most about during the day?" that intrigued most observers. "Women," said Hawking. "They are a complete mystery." Hawking's two divorces have attracted much public attention, but when it comes to love and the laboratory, his life is far from the most intriguing.

Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark was once called "the impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature". That's a good description of the search for the Higgs boson, now in its fifth decade. The object of the quest, an infinitesimal particle, may not even exist, but the hunt goes on.

Researchers hunting for an elusive sub-atomic particle believed to be a basic building block of the universe announced today that they have narrowed down the search thanks to the latest data.

No one goes as far to bring distant lands closer than David Attenborough. As his latest series draws to a close, Ben Ross meets the king of natural history

David Attenborough has shown us the fragile beauty of the earth's polar regions up close. As his latest series draws to a close, Ben Ross talks to him about filming there and what it has revealed for our future

Fevered speculation about the discovery of the so-called "God particle" by physicists at Europe's underground atom-smasher experiment is premature, according to the director general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) near Geneva.

You wait millions of years for a God particle to come along, and then two clusters turn up at once.

A device that exists in two different states at the same time, and coincidentally proves that Albert Einstein was right when he thought he was wrong, has been named as the scientific breakthrough of the year.