Table of contents for August 2019 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

In the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet, it’s nearly been wiped out five times. On each occasion, the complex web that supports life on Earth has been stretched to breaking point, killing more than 75 per cent of the species present. Now it looks like it’s happening again. In the last few years, a number of reports have sounded the alarm for another extinction event. They point to the global weirding of our climate and an extinction rate that’s 1,000 times faster than we would expect naturally. It’s grim reading. But there is one difference this time. Us. We have the means to make a difference, not just to save our own skins, but the other species around us. The tricky part is knowing which…

Here, the audience at Roncalli Circus Theatre experiences the first holographic circus animals. Roncalli’s founder and director Bernhard Paul, and chief digital officer Markus Strobl, led a team of 15 people to create life-sized elephants, stampeding horses, and a huge, swimming goldfish. Bernhard wanted to include the technology in the circus after he watched a hologram of the late singer Prince during Justin Timberlake’s 2018 Superbowl performance. “I was so impressed by the holographic technique,” says Paul. “As a circus, the audience is our boss, and when you feel the audience does not approve of something then you have to change it.” The 360° holograms are made by projecting 11 different laser beams onto a nylon-based screen that is set up around the ring. The projectors are connected via a…

Old wives’ tales You managed effectively to dismiss the old wives’ tale about cows lying down before rain (July, p82) but when I turned the page, I found you are perpetuating another old wives’ tale: that earwigs have ear-shaped wings. An old wife would never have seen an earwig’s wings, as common earwigs never, if ever, fly. To see the wing, you must dissect the insect. Earwigs do get into ears – as someone who has experienced an insect-infested ear, I feel I can talk with some authority on the subject! I suggest that the ‘wig’ part of the word was not derived from ‘wing’ but is the colloquial verb ‘to wig’. Kim Taylor,Guildford, via email The word ‘earwig’ comes from the Old English ēare wicga, which means ‘ear beetle’.…

BITCOIN MINERS The virtual currency relies on computer processing to record and maintain the Bitcoin network. But a team at the Technical University of Munich have found that the use of Bitcoin generates approximately 22 megatons of CO2 emissions each year – similar to the carbon footprint of Las Vegas. EXTERMINATORS Dystopian writers have long predicted that cockroaches will rule post-apocalyptic Earth, but their invincibility may now be a thing of reality. German cockroaches were found to be resistant to almost every type of insecticide used to treat an infestation, say researchers at Purdue University, US.…

WHAT IS NEURALINK? Elon Musk wants to control machines with just the power of thought. To that end, last month Musk and his team revealed that they had developed ultrafine ‘threads’ that can be woven into your brain to listen in on your neurons. The company has also built a robot that can perform the delicate surgery, under the supervision of a neurosurgeon. When the company was first launched in 2016, Musk said he wanted to help humans compete in a world where artificial intelligence had surpassed them – to give us more ‘bandwidth’. But with this new announcement the researchers have turned their attention to helping those with brain-related disorders. HOW DOES IT WORK? The N1, a 4mm-square chip, is implanted into the skull. Attached to the chip are…

WHAT ARE ‘ELECTROCEUTICALS’? The name’s derived as an alternative to ‘pharmaceuticals’. So, ‘electroceuticals’ is the use of electrical stimulation to treat specific diseases by targeting particular nerves, guiding particular organs. The challenge to date has been to find tools that can communicate with our nervous system with enough resolution or accuracy to target specific nerves. YOU ARE MAKING ‘SUTRODES’. WHAT ARE THEY MADE FROM? “WE HAVE DEMONSTRATED THAT WE CAN TIE THESE ELECTRODES AROUND SMALL NERVE BUNDLES” They’re threads made of graphene. This wonder material keeps turning up in all sorts of areas. Graphene’s just a single sheet of carbon that was discovered not many years ago, for which the Nobel Prize was attributed. There has been an explosion of interest in the material, and the very simple and elegant…

DR ALASTAIR GUNN Astronomer, astrophysicist ALEX FRANKLINCHEUNG Environment/ climate expert DR PETER J BENTLEY Computer scientist, author PROF ALICE GREGORY Psychologist, sleep expert DR HILARY GUITE Former GP, science writer CHARLOTTE CORNEY Zoo director, conservationist DR HELEN SCALES Oceans expert, science writer DR CHRISTIAN JARRETT Neuroscientist, science writer DR EMMA DAVIES Chemistry expert, science writer LUIS VILLAZON Science/tech writer JULES HOWARD Zoologist, science writer PROF ROBERT MATTHEWS Physicist, science writer…

LET YOURSELF DAYDREAM Boredom can be good, as it allows the mind to wander and ‘freestyle’. A 2014 study at the University of Central Lancashire found that people performed better at creative problem-solving tasks if they did something boring first. DIM THE LIGHTS In 2013, researchers in Germany found that dim lighting removes mental constraints and encourages a riskier, more exploratory way of thinking. PUT SOME MUSIC ON It’s hard to concentrate if background noise is too loud. But research in 2012 found that 70 decibels of background noise (the volume of a normal radio or TV) can boost creativity. The background noise seems to promote more abstract reasoning. STAND UP Standing up in meetings creates a sense of excitement and information-sharing, and reduces the ‘territorial’ tendency to push your…

1. By the time it’s been filtered by Earth’s atmosphere, ultraviolet rays make up only 3 per cent of the energy in sunshine. That’s still enough to burn exposed skin, though. 2. Sunburn is primarily caused by the shorter ultraviolet wavelengths (UVB), which disrupt the chemical bonds in the skin cells’ DNA, triggering inflammation and skin peeling. 3. Sunscreens prevent sunburn by either absorbing or reflecting UV radiation. Sunscreens in the UK are given a ‘sun protection factor’ (SPF), which measures their ability to protect against UVB. 4. Hippos sweat a reddish, acidic chemical that acts as a natural sun cream by absorbing UV radiation. Collecting this from live hippos is difficult, but synthetic hippo sweat may be useful for creating sunscreens of the future.…

The world’s first raspberry-picking robot earns its keep at a West Sussex farm. The autonomous machine is a variable-stiffness robot arm that’s able to replicate the movements of a human arm. The tech was developed by Fieldwork Robotics, a team from the University of Plymouth headed by Dr Martin Stoelen. “Currently, manual harvesting represents a large portion of producers’ total costs,” says Stoelen. While human workers can pick around 15,000 raspberries in one eight-hour shift, Fieldwork’s robot can collect more than 25,000 in a day. Stoelen is certain that there will always be jobs for people associated with agriculture. “But it might be that in a decade’s time, instead of spending hours in the cab of a tractor, your role is managing robots such as those we are developing.” VISIT…

Some patients that become unresponsive following a significant brain injury retain a degree of ‘hidden consciousness’ and are more likely to make a recovery, neurologists at Columbia University have found. The team used specially designed computer software to analyse standard electroencephalography (EEG) data collected from 104 unresponsive patients to search for specific patterns of brain activity after asking them multiple times to open and close their hands. The idea being that even though they are unable to respond to verbal commands by speaking or moving, the patients are still in some way conscious and can understand the commands. They found that nearly one in seven brain-injured patients in intensive care units (ICU) shows evidence of hidden consciousness just days after injury. “This study shows that some patients who are unresponsive…

Infants who eat small amounts of peanuts are less likely to develop an allergy, a study found. The research involved 640 children, aged 4 to 10 months, who were at a higher risk of developing a peanut allergy, such as those with eczema or food allergies. Of those that avoided peanuts, 20 per cent developed an allergy after five years, compared to only 3.2 per cent of those who ate peanut butter weekly. Researchers suggest that parents introduce a weekly dose of one teaspoon of peanut butter into their child’s weaning diet. However, allergy testing in babies with severe eczema or other food allergies is recommended beforehand.…

Scientists have found further evidence that breathing in polluted air damages the lungs and reduces life expectancy. Analysis of more than 300,000 people in the UK found that those who were exposed to higher levels of air pollution had reduced lung function (as measured by spirometry tests which involve exhaling in one forced breath). This reduction was equivalent to at least one year of ageing. The researchers, based in Canada, Switzerland and the UK, also found that those who were exposed to more pollutants had a higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).…

Children whose parents discuss maths problems at the dinner table score better on tests in secondary school, new research has found. The study, which involved over 200 German children, saw that having books around the house, reading to pre-school students and doing maths problems together all contributed to an improved performance at ages 12 and 13. Early exposure to books and language skills didn’t just improve students’ reading abilities – their outcomes in numeracy also improved.…

Sound engineers at the University of Salford have created a tiny model of Stonehenge in order to investigate the ancient monument’s acoustic properties. The 157 stones were made by pouring a plaster-polymer mix into individual 3D-printed silicone moulds, which were constructed using highly accurate laser scan data provided by Historic England. The 1:12 scale model is just over 2.5m across and includes representations of many stones that are now missing from the original monument. Prof Trevor Cox and his team created the model to test its acoustic properties, in an attempt to shed light on what Stonehenge may have been used for. “There have been very few studies into the sounds created at Stonehenge,” said Cox. “We know, for example, that reflections from the stones should have helped to reinforce…

Life has had a bumpy ride on planet Earth. On five different occasions over the past 450 million years, at least three-quarters of all species on land and sea have been wiped out. It’s easy to think of these mass extinctions as events in the distant past that bear no relation to what might happen to us in the future – but that couldn’t be further from the truth. New research into what killed off the dinosaurs in the ‘End-Cretaceous’ extinction – probably the best known of all mass extinctions – is giving us a window into our future by helping us to answer some important questions. As are the other mass extinctions. If life on our planet gets progressively harder, which species alive today will survive and which will…

“Improvements in memory coincided with peaks in the volunteers’ ketone levels” Diets come and go, but one that seems to have more sticking power than most is the Keto diet. This is a very low carbohydrate diet, which involves higher consumption of fats and proteins to compensate. In many ways, the Keto diet is simply a reinvention of the Atkins diet, which in turn was a reinvention of the Banting diet. This diet was named after William Banting, an obese Victorian undertaker who in 1863 published his famous Letter On Corpulence, outlining the benefits of cutting down on carbs. The Keto diet has its critics, but there is evidence that, at least in the short term, it can help with weight loss and may be beneficial in treating type 2…

13,131 Spain’s average number of annual forest fires between 2006-2015. More than half are thought to be started by arsonists. 9,500 Distance travelled, in kilometres, by smoke from Russian forest fires in July 2018. The smoke reached Greenland. 14,000 The maximum number of firefighters deployed simultaneously to fight forest fires during peak fire season in California in 2018. 540 Number of people evacuated from their homes in 2018’s Treuenbrietzen forest fire in Germany. 26m A palm oil company’s fine for burning 10 square km of Tripa Forest, where tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutans still coexist. 41,000 The area, in square km, of US forest burned by fire in 2015. This is the greatest annual loss to fire in the US since records began. 39m The amount of methane, in tonnes,…

WALKING PLANTS On other planets the boundaries between plants and animals could be blurred, and you might have trees with beating hearts, or with feet to move to better positions as they compete for light and water. You could also have an animal that spends most of its time staying still, photosynthesising, only running away if threatened. Or a massive dinosaur-like creature that splays itself out on the ground to get nutrients directly from the soil, and obtains extra energy with the help of photosynthesising plants on its back. MEGA CREATURES Cooperation could lead to some fascinating creatures, such as a sea of amoebae acting as single jelly-like mega-creature, thousands of voracious shrimp-like carnivores forming a single organism that devours anything in its way, or a web of intertwined trees…

For generations, parents have cautioned their children against swimming for an hour after eating – the common explanation being that the stomach is unable to cope with digesting food and the exertion of swimming at the same time, leading to stomach cramps that can cause the child to struggle in the water and drown. It sounds vaguely plausible, and back in the 1960s the American Red Cross advised against swimming straight after eating. Yet even at the time, there were suspicions it was nonsense. In the late 1960s, several scientific studies took place in which swimmers were given meals at different times before going for a dip. They found no evidence of cramps. A few reported nausea and regurgitation, but nothing likely to prove life-threatening. In 2005, researchers in Australia…

I’D LIKE TO LEARN A LANGUAGE TO IMPRESS MY NEW PARTNER. WHAT’S THE EASIEST ONE TO PICK UP? According to the US Foreign Service Institute, which trains US diplomats, there are 10 ‘category 1’ languages that share the most similarities with English, and are hence the easiest to learn. These include French, Spanish and Italian, and they all take about 600 hours of study to become reasonably fluent. If you want to really impress, though, why not try Afrikaans? This is also category 1 and is more unusual as a second language. Alternatively, you could impress your partner with your earning potential and learn a programming language. Ruby is one of the easiest languages for novice coders and one of the highest paid. Programmers fluent in Ruby typically earn £79,000.…

BABYLONIAN TABLET FROM 750 BC This ancient tablet is the earliest known reference to features on the Sun and shows the legacy of humankind’s fascination with our star. TOKAMAK REACTOR This is a prototype nuclear fusion generator. It’s just one example of the many attempts around the world at building an artificial Sun here on Earth. BEACH PAVILION As an exhibition about our relationship with the Sun, what better place to reflect on its impact on our lives than at an immersive beach pavilion?…

WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE RASPBERRY PI? The Raspberry Pi Foundation was founded 10 years ago in response to a decline in the amount of interest in studying computer science at universities in the UK. At Cambridge, we had seen the number fall by a factor of three, which is kind of a good measure of enthusiasm. We asked ourselves why that was, and we came to the conclusion it was because we weren’t teaching computing in schools properly in the UK, and also that computing wasn’t as accessible to young people as it once was. The Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Foundation was our attempt at tackling that problem. WHAT WAS THE AIM? I learnt to program on a BBC Micro. The computer was at school, and…

Eye opener VIRTUALLY THERE Roncalli Circus Theatre sadly won’t be visiting the UK any time in the near future, but you can experience the amazing holographic elements of the show online in this YouTube clip. bit.ly/holo_circus BERRY SMART See the fruit-picking robot in action. Filmed by the team at the University of Plymouth, the Fieldwork Robotics arm demonstrates how efficiently and gently it collects ripe raspberries from a farm in West Sussex. bit.ly/robot_picker Primer NEURALINK LAUNCH EVENT Watch the launch event for Elon Musk’s Neuralink technology, which was live-streamed on 16 July. The event doesn’t actually start until 1 hour 30 minutes into the video, so you may want to skip ahead. bit.ly/neuralink_launch Shake a tail feather STRICTLY, SPIDER-STYLE! Be enthralled by a peacock spider’s hypnotic dancing as he attempts…

SALEYHA AHSAN On 9 August almost four million Muslims are set to journey to Mecca for the Hajj – the annual Islamic pilgrimage. Trust Me, I’m A Doctor presenter and Hajj veteran Saleyha gives us the lowdown on getting there safely. p24 BEN HOARE Liberace has nothing on nature’s most flamboyant animals. BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Ben unravels the science of showing off. p40 HAYLEY BENNETT This summer, researchers in Utah deliberately set fire to an area of woodland in an attempt to discover how wildfires spread. Science writer and editor Hayley tells us what they found. p64 MIĆO TATALOVIĆ With the discovery of Earth-like planets and missions gearing up to spot life on other planets, Mićo asks some of the world’s leading biologists what we might expect to find out…

Chick lives matter With regard to the article ‘An eggcellent breakfast’ (July, p63), whether eggs are healthy or not for humans, they are certainly very unhealthy for the hens that lay them and, more immediately, the unwanted male chicks which are macerated soon after birth. Alan Watson, via Twitter There is certainly an ethical case to be made for not eating eggs, or indeed exploiting animals in any way. But unless you are prepared to become a vegan, then I think eating free range eggs is acceptable. Michael Mosley, BBC Science Focus columnist Bran for breakfast I much appreciated Michael Mosley’s myth-busting article on how the cholesterol you eat has almost no effect on your blood cholesterol levels (July, p63). The media and the medical profession have given inconsistent messages…

A plant-based diet reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a new Harvard study. Eating a healthy mix of fruit and veg, as well as nuts, legumes and grains, while avoiding meat, reduces the chance of developing the disease by 23 per cent. People who also avoid potatoes, white flour and sugar reduce their risk even more. The researchers believe this could be because plant foods lower blood pressure and improve the body’s sensitivity to insulin, the hormone that controls the body’s blood sugar levels. These foods also reduce weight gain, another risk factor for type 2 diabetes.…

#AlanTuring The Enigma codebreaker and computing pioneer has been announced as the face of the new £50. MIT CSAIL @MIT_CSAIL The binary on the ribbon that runs across England’s new 50-pound note is 23 06 1912 in decimal – Alan Turing’s birthday. Stephen Fry @stephenfry Well that’s just great news about AlanTuring – I have been pushing for this for years, though I thought it might have been rather good for him to share the £50 note with Ada Lovelace. Both pioneers of computing science, both underappreciated in their lifetimes. #Apollo50 On 16 July 1969, NASA made history by launching humans to the Moon. The crew safely arrived on 20 July. Buzz Aldrin @TheRealBuzz 50 years ago today, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and I launched into space on a mission…

Human brains are uniquely suited to hearing music, a new study suggests. Compared to macaque monkeys, humans respond much more strongly to sounds with a musical pitch, and prefer those to sounds without a pitch. Our use of language and love of music could be behind these differences. “Humans respond more strongly to sounds with a musical pitch” The team, based at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Maryland, US, studied the differences in how humans and macaques hear the world. “We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains,” said senior author Dr Bevil Conway. The area of the brain that processes sounds is called the auditory cortex. By studying the activity of the…

WHY ARE TREES SO VITAL FOR THE EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE? They’re vital because trees, like all plants, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce oxygen. So, given that the problem that we have is the growth in the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, trees are a vital part of it. The loss of trees that we’ve experienced over the past few decades and centuries has been a major contributor to creating the problem we have. So planting new vegetation and new trees is an essential part of the solution, and we certainly have to stop destroying forest areas. The main message is that planting forests is an important contribution to effort against global warming – but we have to be careful not to exaggerate…

What is it? Live facial recognition (LFR), also known as automatic facial recognition, identifies people in a video in real time, using a set of photographs as a reference. When used in public, cameras scan a crowd and the software highlights any matches between members of the public and the people in their database. How does it work? The live video feed is scanned for faces. Each face that is found is then mapped by the software, taking measurements of facial features, such as the distance between the eyes and the length of the jawline, to create a unique set of biometric data. This dataset is then compared to a database of people to be identified; for the police, this database contains people with outstanding warrants. If the system judges…

Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK Obesity is a complex issue, with no single cause or solution. We’re comparing smoking and obesity to show how government-led change can help people form healthier habits – not to compare tobacco with food. The campaign aims to raise awareness of the link between obesity and cancer, and to bring about policies that make healthy options accessible for everyone, including restricting junk food advertising and price promotions on the most unhealthy products. It isn’t meant to make anyone feel bad about their weight, or to think negatively about people who are overweight or obese. We have adopted many of the World Obesity Federation principles and signed up to the Obesity Health Alliance’s position statement on weight stigma, and continue to engage with…

The Universe is unfathomably large and 14 billion years old, which gives plenty of time and space for life to develop on other planets. So why haven’t we found it? One possible explanation is that life has the habit of driving itself into extinction. A look at Earth’s history provides some evidence for this. Take the ‘Great Oxidation Event’ 2.3 billion years ago, when oxygen levels in the atmosphere increased rapidly. “When photosynthesis was first developed by cyanobacteria, the oxygen they released as a waste product was deeply poisonous to other living things,” says astrobiologist Prof Lewis Dartnell. “So anything that couldn’t adapt or find refuge was wiped out.” Palaeontologist Prof Peter Ward at the University of Washington named the idea that life is self-destructive the ‘Medea hypothesis’. He points…

“As teenagers, my grandmother and her friends were all spies in Poland during WWII” There’s a story I have been trying to write since 1994. And yet, I find myself unable to tell it. I think it’s because it’s not my story. It’s because I feel a huge weight of responsibility to tell it right. The elevator pitch is this: my grandmother and her octogenarian friends meet every six weeks at someone’s house in Orange County, California, to celebrate one of their birthdays. They drink wine, exchange cards with dirty jokes on them and boast about their grandchildren. But in the 60 years they’ve known one another, they’ve never talked about the one thing that unites them: as teenagers, they were all spies for the Allies in their native Poland…

Our Universe could turn out to be a pretty wild place. Recent astronomical discoveries suggest that billions of Earth-like planets are dotted throughout our Galaxy, which is just one of billions of galaxies in the Universe. “Our best estimates are that one in four stars have a planet that is the same size and the same temperature as the Earth. That’s very high,” says David Charbonneau, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, US. And many scientists now think there is life on at least some – if not many – of those planets and their moons. One of them is Dr Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, who says that we can assume that life is widespread based on “two simple facts”. First, the chemical elements…

Sixty years ago, researchers found that bus drivers had twice as many heart attacks as bus conductors. The difference was that the conductor was on his feet all day, whereas the driver was sitting down. Nowadays, adults in the UK commonly spend seven or more hours a day sitting down, and this tends to increase as people get older. Long periods of sitting are typically associated with an inactive lifestyle, which is a risk factor for heart disease, dementia and diabetes. It’s a vicious cycle because the collagen around your tendons and ligaments tends to harden when the joints aren’t moving, and the postural muscles around your trunk gradually get weaker. This reduces your  flexibility and makes you more likely to strain your back or shoulders when you bend or…

THE GREAT HACK NETFLIX AND SELECTED CINEMAS Every time we use a piece of tech to help us get fit, find love, talk to our friends or, well, do anything, we leave behind a cookie crumb of data that tells the people in Silicon Valley a little more about us. What’s the harm in that? The answer to that question exploded into the public consciousness last year when The Guardianunravelled how the self-described “behaviour-change agency” Cambridge Analytica (CA) used Facebook profile data to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election. A whistleblower revealed how the company had taken data from Facebook, without permission, and used it to create a campaign that aimed to mobilise apathetic voters in swing states to tip the tables in Trump’s favour. This confusingly named documentary…