Table of contents for Issue 197 in How It Works

Isaac Newton’s view of the world – space, time and gravity – was unquestionable scientific fact for around 250 years before Einstein’s special relativity came along and shook things up. And similar shock waves have since been sent through academia with the emergence of the quantum sciences, with laws that defy common sense and phenomena that seem like they’ve been lifted from science fiction. Perhaps the maddest thing about the theories of quantum physics is that they’re so well established today that a lot of consumer electronics depends upon them, yet we don’t really know why the theories work. Read more about crazy experiments, theories and everyday quantum technology on page 20. Enjoy! FOR EXCLUSIVE HIW NEWS AND OFFERS, SIGN UP TO OUR MAILING LIST HOWITWORKSDAILY.COM/NEWSLETTER WHAT WE’RE ANTICIPATING HIGHLIGHTS…

F22 RAPTOR WITH POWERUP 4.0 £72 / $91.97 POWERUPTOYS.COM Known for its upgraded paper aeroplanes, PowerUp Toys has created a replica of the F22 Raptor fighter jet to add to its fleet. Unlike its other paper planes, the F22 is self assembled using panels of laser-cut foam. By attaching the PowerUp 4.0 flying module, including motors and propellers, pilots can hand launch the plane and use their smartphones to control the path of the aircraft through the air. LG CINEBEAM Q £1,299.99 / $1,299.99 LG.COM The LG CineBeam Q lets you watch your favourite Christmas movies in cinematic quality anywhere around your home. This compact and portable projector delivers 4K ultra-high definition and comes with a 360-degree rotating handle so that you can position its projection in the perfect spot.…

Helium is the second most abundant element in the known universe. However, on Earth it’s rare, only found deep beneath the surface. Natural helium comes from the radioactive decay of other elements, such as uranium and thorium, over millions of years. As they decay, the particles of radiation they release can gather electrons to form new elements, including helium. This radioactive decay occurs in rock deep beneath the surface, releasing the gas into gaseous reservoirs. Once extracted, the gas is put through cryogenic distillation under high pressures and extremely low temperatures to extract the atoms from other natural gases to make over 99 per cent pure helium. Along with inflating party balloons, helium is one of the most handy elements on Earth, especially when it comes to cooling stuff down.…

Aonce-busy town in Pennsylvania has been left to ruin in the wake of a raging mine fire beneath its surface. Over 100 years ago, Centralia was a bustling mining town with around 1,200 residents. The town’s miners excavated vast amounts of coal and created networks of mines at the edge of Centralia. However, in 1962 the mine was set alight, and fire began to spread through the once-coveted coal within it. Over 90 metres below the surface, the fire burns at over 480 degrees Celsius. It’s estimated that the fire will rage on for up to 250 more years, ripping through around 3,700 acres of underground coal. Around 2,000 boreholes have been installed throughout Centralia to monitor its progress and vent the harmful smoke and poisonous gases. There have been…

In which direction do we look to see almost as far back as the Big Bang? One of the strange things about our expanding universe is that we can look in any direction and see light from the Big Bang. If you think of the Big Bang as happening at a single point in space, this is pretty confusing, but it makes more sense if you understand that the Big Bang happened everywhere in space at the same time, and it’s space itself that has expanded ever since. The light we can detect from the Big Bang emerged out of an expanding ‘foggy’ fireball when the universe became transparent about 13.8 billion years ago, just 380,000 years after the explosion itself. Thanks to its long journey across the ever-growing cosmos,…

2.7 MILLION MILES PER HOUR Standing still, you’re travelling through the universe at 750 miles a second 16 Two more Neptunian moons were discovered this year, bringing its total closer to 20 UNDER EXTREME PRESSURE AND TEMPERATURE, PEANUT BUTTER CAN BE TURNED INTO DIAMOND 8 MILES PER HOUR China’s STAR1 robot could run a marathon in 3 hours and 16 minutes 1,000 CE Vikings discovered the New World 500 years before Christopher Columbus A LIGHTNING BOLT CONTAINS ENOUGH ENERGY TO TOAST 20,000 PIECES OF BREAD 70% Nearly three-quarters of the world’s freshwater is in Antarctica 1976 Almost half a century ago, NASA’s Viking 1 became the first craft to land on Mars 2,500 MILES Australia is wider than the Moon’s diameter of 2,160 miles Feet can produce over half a litre…

In Buenavista, Mexico City, you can catch a glimpse of a ‘megalibrary’ called the Biblioteca Vasconcelos. Surrounded by foliage, this 38,000-square-metre library was opened in 2006 and holds 600,000 volumes, but is designed to hold up to 2 million books. The ink-and-paper residents of the library are watched over by an enormous whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling. Mud-slinging wasps The female black-and-yellow mud dauber is a master of animal architecture. Using her jaws, the wasp drags the mud to the site that will become her home. Then the wasp uses her saliva to mould it. Mud dauber wasps typically hunt spiders and lay eggs in their bodies. The wasp then stuffs the spiders into individual holes for the larvae to feast on when they hatch, capping the holes with…

It’s a hackneyed science-fiction image. For the first time in history, a human and an alien meet. They go to shake hands – or tentacles – and detonate in an explosion so violent it could blast apart a planet. The alien is of course made of antimatter, and when matter and antimatter meet, as every physicist knows, they detonate in an explosion to end all explosions. The trouble is, this is just about the only thing physicists know about antimatter. To find out more, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, are fighting a heroic battle to make and store a tiny speck of antimatter. This pioneering research hopes to address fundamental questions about the properties of antimatter, such as whether it falls down or…

DID YOU KNOW? Watches measured to the quarter hour until minutes were introduced in 1577 TIMEPIECES 1 A TIME BEFORE CLOCKS An easy one to start with: these devices were a natural way of telling time, with the movements of the Sun throughout the day casting shadows on different parts of the equipment. Their use can be traced back to ancient Egypt, and they were commonplace on church walls across the UK during medieval times. At the centre of its circular plate was a protruding style, called a gnomon. This is what blocked the sunlight to cast a shadow. Some of the earlier versions had marked lines dividing a curved plate into 12 segments. This signified the 12 hours of the day. The line that the point of the shadow reached…

Alack of wings and inability to fly hasn’t stopped people from finding ways of soaring through the sky. The bravest have fought the forces of gravity by using a ‘wingsuit’ to glide down from planes and jump from cliffs. Commercially used since the late 1990s, a wingsuit is a full-body suit incorporating aerodynamic fabrics between the arms and legs. Following an airborne jump or BASE jump – Building, Antennae, Span (bridge) and Earth (typically a cliff top) – gliders extend their arms and legs outwards, stretching the adjoining material. Transforming skydivers into human flying squirrels, the wingsuit exploits a force called lift to control their descent through the air to glide horizontally rather than fall vertically. A wingsuit does this by increasing the surface area of the body, along with…

MAKE A CANDLE SEESAW This candle balancing act combines heat, melting wax and mass distribution 1 GATHER YOUR MATERIALS Get all your materials together. Make sure there is an adult present for this experiment, as it involves fire. 2 TAPE UP THE BASES Line up the candles end to end at their bases, and secure them together with strong tape. 3 PLACE A PIN Where the ends of the candles meet, push a pin through the tape perpendicular to the candles. You will need a pin longer than the candles’ diameter. 4 LAY THE TABLE Cover the workspace with a large piece of aluminium foil. This will catch any dripping wax. 5 PIN BRIDGE Place the two glasses next to each other on the foil and balance the pin across…

SPACE Astronauts are set to grow livers in space WORDS STEPHANIE PAPPAS Miniature livers will fly aboard the International Space Station in an upcoming study on whether microgravity can encourage the growth of healthy tissue with an ample blood supply. It’s an effort that could potentially lead to personalised, space-grown tissues and organs for use in transplant surgeries, scientists say. In two upcoming experiments, researchers plan to test how well the liver tissue grows in microgravity, as well as trial new technology designed to keep this tissue alive but supercooled for its journey back to Earth. “My ultimate goal for these tissues, if they are doing what we imagine and hope they are able to become with the help of microgravity, is to use these tissues for therapy,” said Dr…

How do you react to that early morning alarm clock? Is one wake-up call enough to get you jumping out of bed, or do you need several to provide a forceful nudge? All of our bodies are programmed to internal biological clocks, which are largely dictated by genes. Although you can control when you wake up by setting alarms and planning your sleeping schedule, ‘morning people’ have no trouble getting up feeling energised. In fact, trying to change your body’s natural circadian rhythm can be detrimental to your health. Studies show that living out of sync with your body clock can increase your risk of heart disease, depression and obesity. Most people naturally sleep between the hours of 23:00 and 07:00, but 0.2 per cent of us have a delayed…

Since the first settlers arrived in The Netherlands around the 5th century CE, its people have been finding ways to protect themselves from the thrashing waves of the neighbouring North Sea. From building villages on top of earthy mounds to barricading walls called dykes, the early history of the nation was governed by water management. However, in 1287, no amount of earth mounds could keep the North Sea out when a mighty flood surged inland during the Christian holiday of Saint Lucia’s Day on 13 December. The flood swept through the country, killing up to 80,000 people in the process. The deluge also created a new body of water around 60 miles inland called the Zuiderzee, meaning the Southern Sea. To reclaim the land lost in the flood, the people…

Modern-day cars are packed full of sensors, microprocessors and different electronic control units (ECUs), which take care of different aspects of the car, including locking systems, automatic braking and monitoring engine efficiency. If you’ve ever seen the check-engine light flash on your dashboard, that’s the result of small sensors in the engine’s ECU alerting you to a change in one of the qualities it monitors, such as temperature or oxygen levels. Together, the ECUs create the car’s computer ‘brain’, all connected through a communication ‘nervous system’ called a controller area network (CAN). The CAN relays information gathered from up to 100 different sensors around the vehicle to each ECU so that the vehicle works in harmony. One of the first ECUs emerged in the 1960s from German car manufacturer Volkswagen…

Sudoku Complete the grid so that each row, column and 3x3 box contains the numbers 1 to 9 EASY MEDIUM HARD Word search Find the following words QUANTUM MEDIEVAL AIRPOD RABBIT ALGAL LIFE CRANE CHIP WING NEWTONIAN DUTCH HELIUM What is it? Hint: These blooms can smother aquatic life A Spot the difference See if you can find all six changes between the images below Answers Find the solutions to last issue’s puzzle pages Q1 GREENLAND SHARK Q2 MAUNA KEA Q3 LUNGS Q4 500 MILLION YEARS OLD Q5 3,260,257 MILES Q6 CHINA What is it? TEETH Spot the difference QUICKFIRE QUESTIONS Q1 Amino acids are the building blocks of which of these nutrients? • Proteins • Fats • Carbohydrates • Vitamins Q2 Where was the fossil of ‘Lucy’ found? •…