Eleanor Hayes, Holger Maul and Nele Freerksen investigate why folic acid is an essential component of your students’ diet – now and for a future healthy family.

Peter Douglas and Mike Garley investigate how chemistry and light interact in many aspects of our everyday life.

Climate change is nothing new. Caitlin Sedwick describes how a computer model is helping scientists to explain the extinction of the woolly mammoth.

Because of its low alcohol content, ginger ‘beer’ is a popular drink with British children. Dean Madden from the National Centre for Biotechnology Education, University of Reading, UK, gives his recipe for introducing younger students to the principles of fermentation, food hygiene and the biochemistry of respiration.

Frode Skjold tells Sai Pathmanathan about some of his favourite activities to teach science in primary school.

Halyna Yagenska tells Sai Pathmanathan about teaching in the Ukraine.

Did witches once soar through the night sky on broomsticks? Or were they hallucinating after eating or touching certain plants? Angelika Börsch-Haubold explains how modern pharmacology helps us to understand the action of many toxic plants – some of which are still used in medicine.

Dean Madden from the National Centre for Biotechnology Education (NCBE), University of Reading, UK, suggests an experiment to make lactose-free milk – useful both for cats and for the 75% of the world’s human population that are intolerant to this type of sugar.

What inspires someone to be a spacecraft designer? And how can you become one? Russ Hodge from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, interviews Adam Baker and reveals all.

Graham Gardner from the Inter-Community School in Zürich, Switzerland, describes how an attempt to interest his students in chemical separation techniques developed into a full-scale interdisciplinary detective mystery.

Do you have more than the average number of ears? Is your salary lower than average? When will the next bus arrive? Ben Parker attempts to convince us of the value of statistics – when used correctly.

In the second of two articles, Rolf Landua from CERN takes us deep below the ground to visit the largest scientific endeavour on Earth – the Large Hadron Collider and its experiments.

Péter Székely from the University of Szeged, Hungary, and Örs Benedekfi from the European Fusion Development Agreement in Garching, Germany, investigate how a star dies and what a nearby supernova explosion would mean for us on Earth.

Karen Bultitude introduces a set of simple, fun and memorable demonstrations using everyday ingredients to explain meteorological phenomena.

Comics have generally been considered as nothing more than a cheap pastime. However, Mico Tatalovic suggests some useful comics to help promote and explain science to students.

Herbi Dreiner and Tobias Strehlau describe how a university physics show inspired a secondary-school teacher and his students to perform their own school physics show. Why not try it in your school?