Indice dei contenuti per December 2017 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

In 2000, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair took to the international stage to announce the completion of the most “wondrous map ever produced by humankind”, after an international team of scientists had completed the first draft of the human genome. The message was clear: we had learned to read our own ‘instruction book’, encoded within our DNA, and this would deliver us into a new era of humanity. Clinton and Blair said that a medical revolution was around the corner – one that would surpass the discovery of antibiotics. “In coming years doctors increasingly will be able to cure diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes and cancer by attacking their genetic roots,” said Clinton. But a decade later, the world was still waiting for direct treatments based on this incredible piece…

“I EXPECT THAT THIS DETECTION WILL BE REMEMBERED AS ONE OF THE MOST STUDIED ASTROPHYSICAL EVENTS IN HISTORY” For the first time in history, researchers at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in the US have used gravitational waves to observe a pair of neutron stars slamming into each other in the far reaches of space. The huge explosion, known as a kilonova, wobbled the fabric of space itself, sending gravitational waves and vast plumes of gamma rays and gold spraying out into the Universe. The two LIGO detectors, based in Louisiana and Washington, and its sister facility, Virgo, near Pisa, Italy, recorded the remnant cores of two massive stars, around 1.1 to 1.6 times the mass of the Sun, spiralling toward and then smashing into each other some 130 million…

Now this really could come in handy. A flexible, sensor-laden ‘skin’ that can be stretched over just about anything will give robotic devices a much more useful sense of touch. The new technology could be used both in prosthetics for amputees, and in factory-line and other working robots. At the moment, pressure and other sensors enable a robot to ‘know’ whether it’s holding an object or not, but it won’t be able to tell if the object is slipping out of its grasp. This becomes a problem when, for instance, a robot surgeon doesn’t realise it’s dropping the scalpel – or when a Paralympian drops scalding hot coffee in their lap. The new ‘skin’ developed by researchers at the University of Washington and UCLA in the US gets around this…

SHARKS Watch your back, Jaws! A researcher at Kansas State University has found the remains of sharks in the stomachs of alligators on the Florida coast. This is thought to be due to alligators venturing out into salt water following heavy rain. LAZY SHOPPERS Ordering groceries for home delivery rather than carrying them home from the shops is causing our muscles to waste away, a study by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists has found. Such lack of activity can increase the risk of falls and other health issues, they say.…

Someone liked this dwarf planet so much they put a ring on it. Researchers in Spain have found that Haumea, one of the four dwarf planets located beyond the orbit of Neptune, is encircled by a planetary ring system. It is the first time a ring has been discovered around a trans-Neptunian object, and it shows that the presence of rings could be much more common than was previously thought, in our Solar System as well as in other planetary systems. “Until a few years ago we only knew of the existence of rings around the giant planets; then, recently, our team discovered that two small bodies situated between Jupiter and Neptune, belonging to a group called centaurs, have dense rings around them, which came as a big surprise. Now…

The most interesting thing about Google’s recent Pixel 2 smartphone launch was actually one of the accessories. These Pixel Buds work with Google Assistant and Google Translate and claim to offer real-time translation of 40 different languages. They’re available from November, and you don’t necessarily need a Pixel 2 to use them – any phone running Android 6.0 or above will do. No units have been made available for testing, so how well they’ll work remains to be seen. Translating spoken language – with all its umms and errs, rough-and-ready syntax and idiomatic expressions – is harder than translating written text, and reliance on automated systems has led to some famous blunders in the past. So will Google’s Pixel Buds be a real-life version of the iconic Babel Fish from…

The Nuraphones are something to be cherished: a genuinely new take on a piece of technology that’s been around for over a century. Nura’s pitch is that our ears are all different, but headphones are all the same. They’re not talking about the shape of our ears, but about our sensitivity to sound frequencies. Traditional headphones ignore this, but the Nuraphones test your hearing and configure your audio output to remedy any nuances in the way your auditory system perceives sound. For example, I might be more sensitive to low pitch, bassy sounds, meaning that they tend to drown out anything in the treble spectrum. On an equaliser you might find me sliding up the treble. But my partner could be more attuned to treble, finding my changes tinny and…

“With Artemis, I hope it feels like a real place. Whether the main character lives or dies, the city will go on” WhatisArtemisabout? Artemistakes place in a city on the Moon. The main character is a woman called Jazz, who’s a small-time criminal that gets in way over her head. Where did the idea come from? I’d had the idea for quite a while. I actually built the whole setting – the lunar base – before I came up with the characters or story. One of the biggest challenges in sci-fi for me is lowering the stakes. People tend to expect planets to be cracking in half, but for me, the lower the stakes, the more realistic the setting. Metropolis in Supermandoesn’t feel like a real city to me, because…

1896 While investigating X-rays, the French scientist Henri Becquerel observes radiation coming from uranium ore that turns photographic plates dark. 1898-1902 In Paris, Marie and Pierre Curie conclude that these unusual emissions are a new kind of energetic ‘ray’ – an effect they call ‘radioactivity’. 1904 Working in Canada, Ernest Rutherford shows that some radioactive ‘rays’ are really particles: fragments, it turns out, of the decaying atomic nuclei. 1933 Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard realises that if the emissions from radioactively decaying atoms can trigger decay in other atoms, the result could be a chain reaction. 1938 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann see fission of uranium, but cannot interpret their results. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch conclude that the uranium atoms are splitting in half and releasing a great deal of…

1. Explosions In 1992 a series of 10 explosions in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, killed more than 250 people. The explosions burst from directly under the downtown streets and left 15,000 people homeless. 2.Fumes It was caused by petrol leaking into the sewers, creating explosive fumes. This happened after new water pipes were laid underground, alongside a petrol pipeline that crossed the city. 3. Pipes The water pipes were made of galvanised iron to protect against corrosion but petrol isn’t corrosive so the fuel pipeline, owned by the Pemex company, was made from ordinary steel. 4. Zinc The zinc coating on the galvanised pipes caused an electrolytic reaction that turned the damp soil into a battery. The steel pipe acted as the anode and was eroded away, causing the…

JO CARLOWE Our brains are flawed. If we accept that, then we can overcome our own defects. Jo reveals the promising research hoping to help correct our biases. p63 TIMANDRA HARKNESS BBC Focus has turned 25! We asked Timandra, of BBC Radio 4’s FutureProofing, to look back at some of the predictions we’ve made over the last 25 years. p54 PROF TIM SPECTOR Tim spent three days living with the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, to see if rewilding his diet would make him healthier. p76…

“This is a very exciting discovery for two reasons. First, it confirms yet again that Einstein’s General Relativity, published 101 years ago, is a supremely precise description of space and time, gravity and the evolution of the Universe. This result is a highly non-trivial prediction, and it is a triumph of high-precision experimental physics that such subtle shifts in space-time at the level of a millionth of the size of an atom have been detected. Second, and even more excitingly, this opens up an entirely new way of observing the Universe. We can now observe collisions between black holes, probing gravity in ever more exotic and extreme situations, and look back in time far closer to the Big Bang than ever before. Gravitational wave astronomy opens up an entirely new…

“Sleep paralysis is more common than one might expect. In one of our studies, roughly a third of our participants reported experiencing sleep paralysis at least once” We want to find out more about two fascinating sleep phenomena: exploding head syndrome and sleep paralysis. So we’ve designed a study that will investigate both. This is a unique opportunity to take part in in a piece of scientific research. This means you can choose to be one of the participants, or you can simply follow us online to learn about how scientists will analyse the data, find out what we’ve uncovered when the results are published and finally read the report in BBC Focus . If you enter there’s a chance to win one of five Amazon vouchers, worth £100 each.…

DEUS EX MACHINA Anthony Levandowski, who used to head Google’s self-driving car project, has set up his own religion. Way Of The Future’s stated aim is “to develop and promote the realisation of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence.” Er, okay… PIRACY RULES, OK? An EU study, completed in 2013 but only just published, found no evidence that online piracy actually harms sales of music, movies and games – except in the specific case of ‘blockbuster’ movies. WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAMME… Late September saw TV broadcasts in California interrupted by strange apocalyptic messages about aliens and “extremely violent times [to] come”, in a move reminiscent of the cult film They Live. No explanation has yet emerged. USB SNIFFER DOGS Devon & Cornwall Police have trained two sniffer dogs to locate…

Chances are you’re a bit racist. But don’t blame yourself, blame your brain. We all have subconscious biases that are beyond our conscious control. Whenever we meet a new person our brains will quickly ascertain whether they are ‘like us’ or ‘different’, or ‘for us’ or ‘against us’, which will inform how we perceive them. Indeed, psychologists argue that our survival depends on this, as it was group affiliation that enabled us to harvest, hunt, build and thrive in the first place. But having an ‘in crowd’, means creating an ‘out crowd’, and therefore your brain does not view all people as equal. At this point, you’re probably shouting “Nonsense! I treat everyone the same!” Yet our biases are subtle, and are so deeply rooted in our unconscious that we…

“PADDLING INTO A HEADWIND MIGHT BE HARD, BUT COMMUNICATION IS NICE AND EASY!” My Saturday mornings are often spent paddling along the Thames in a six-man outrigger canoe. These canoes are common in the Pacific but almost unheard of over here, and they’re generally designed for exploring sunny coastlines rather than paddling past British pubs in the drizzle. Last Saturday was a grim, windy day. My friend Maria was two seats in front of me, making the call “hut”, which was the signal for us all to change sides with our paddles, but I could barely hear her. At the turning point, she agreed to shout louder, but also said it would be easier for me to hear her coming home because I would be downwind of her instead of…

One day in July 1938, a car pulls up at the train station in Berlin. A woman climbs out. She shows her travel documents to the armed guards in Nazi uniform. The woman is small and slight, and she seems nervous. On the train she greets a man and they travel together, heading for Groningen in the Netherlands. Are they lovers, perhaps? No, this is not a tryst but a rescue mission. The woman is an Austrian named Lise Meitner, and is one of the most brilliant nuclear scientists working in Germany. She is of Jewish descent and is fleeing Adolf Hitler’s regime when it is almost too late. The Nazi leaders have introduced a policy prohibiting all scientists from leaving Germany, and they have forbidden Meitner from gaining the…

On average, the cells in your body are replaced every 7 to 10 years. But those numbers hide a huge variability in lifespan across the different organs of the body. Neutrophil cells (a type of white blood cell) might only last two days, while the cells in the middle of your eye lenses will last your entire life. And it’s even possible that your brain cells might have longer maximum lifespans than you do. In 2013, researchers transplanted neurons from old mice into the brains of longer-lived rats and found that the cells were still healthy after living for two whole mouse lifespans!…

Caused by magnetic storms breaking through the Sun’s surface, these relatively cool patches appear as black spots that seem to move across the Sun’s disc. They are sometimes so large they can be seen with the naked eye through thin cloud or at sunset. As such, their existence has probably been known about since prehistoric times, and Chinese astronomers kept records of them over 2,000 years ago. However, the true nature of sunspots only became clear with the advent of modern astronomy in the early 17th Century. Belief in the Ancient Greek model of a perfect Universe was still widespread, making the very existence of ‘blemishes’ on the Sun deeply controversial. In 1611, the Jesuit scholar Christoph Scheiner insisted they were moons in orbit around the otherwise pristine Sun. Galileo…

WHAT ARE GRAVITATIONAL WAVES? Gravitational waves were originally theorised to exist by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago. The waves are created when massive objects moving at high speeds send invisible ripples through the fabric of space, like ripples in a pond when a stone is tossed in. They travel at the speed of light and squeeze and stretch anything in their path as they pass by. They were first detected in 2015 when LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) picked up ripples created by a pair of black holes that collided 1.3 billion years ago. The team behind the observation were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. WHAT IS A NEUTRON STAR? A neutron star is the remnant core left behind after a massive star around 10 to…

‘BROMANCE’ TRUMPS ROMANCE A team in Los Angeles has found that straight male university undergrads find their friendships with their male friends more satisfying than their romantic relationships with their girlfriends. TROPICAL FORESTS ARE EMITTING MORE CARBON THAN OXYGEN Thanks to continuing deforestation, the Earth’s tropical forests are now emitting almost twice as much carbon as they consume, researchers at Boston University have found. DOGS REALLY CAN SMELL FEAR A team from Naples collected sweat from human test subjects who were shown videos designed to elicit fear or happiness. They then presented the samples to a group of dogs and monitored their heart rates and behaviour. The dogs exposed to the ‘fear’ samples showed higher heart rates and more unsettled behaviour. A HUGE SOLAR FLARE COULD STRIKE THE EARTH WITHIN…

“REALITY IS FAR MORE COMPLEX THAN ANYONE THOUGHT EVEN 20 YEARS AGO” When I started writing this column, back in the mid-1990s, science seemed on the brink of a new age of discovery. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope looked set to give astronomers unprecedented insights into the nature of the cosmos. Theorists were claiming to have seen glimpses of the ultimate Theory of Everything, describing all the particles and forces in the Universe. The Human Genome Project was homing in on our genetic blueprint. So, 20-plus years on, how did it all pan out? Not as expected, that’s for sure. The Hubble Space Telescope gave astronomers the cosmic data they craved – along with evidence that our Universe is controlled by dark energy, a kind of anti-gravitational force of unknown origin.…

A new technique using images from NASA satellites may offer hope in the battle against malaria, allowing scientists to predict where outbreaks are likely to occur months before they actually happen. Malaria remains a serious threat in the 21st Century. In 2015 there were 296 million cases worldwide, resulting in 730,500 deaths. Around 90 per cent of cases occur in Africa, where the disease is estimated to cost local economies around $12bn each year. The new technique has been developed by a team led by William Pan, an assistant professor of environmental health at Duke University in the US, working in association with NASA’s own Applied Sciences Program and the government of Peru. It involves using images from NASA satellites to monitor precipitation patterns worldwide, then combining this information with…

Participants must speedily tap a computer key when they see faces or specific words and pair these with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ labels, selected by tapping a key with the other hand. The words and images are then switched. For example, you may be asked to match black faces to words such as ‘glorious’ or ‘beautiful’, and white faces to words like ‘hatred’ or ‘nasty’. The task is then switched with white faces matched to ‘good’ words and black to ‘bad’ ones. The results are compiled by comparing how quickly we correctly pair each picture group (say a set of black faces) to each label group (say a set of ‘good’ words). The longer the time it takes to accept a pairing, the greater our bias. So, if for example a…

Many of Lise Meitner’s colleagues remained in Germany, but their reaction to living under the Third Reich covered the full spectrum, from staunch pacifist to affirmed Nazi FRITZ STRASSMANN (1902-1980) One of the few German physicists whose opposition to the Nazis looks genuinely heroic was Fritz Strassmann, who worked with Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Strassmann despised the Nazis and refused to join any Nazi organisations, becoming blacklisted from jobs, and ending up poor and malnourished. He considered himself lucky when Hahn and Meitner found him an assistantship for half-pay in 1935. During the war, he and his wife hid a Jewish friend in their flat. MAX VON LAUE (1879-1960) Today the scientific reputation of Max von Laue rests largely on his discovery…

Do blind people see in their dreams? LORELY MASKELL, HIGH WYCOMBE People who are born blind, or become blind early in life (before around five or seven years of age), do not experience visual imagery when they dream. People who became blind later typically do retain some visual imagery when they dream – but less so than in sighted individuals. A study by Danish researchers found that the longer someone has been blind, the less likely they are to dream visually. And while those who were born blind may not see in their sleep, they are more likely than those with sight to experience auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile components to their dreams. AGr How do squirrels find the nuts they buried? STEPHEN CARTER, PRESTON It was once thought that…

IBUPROFEN The active ingredient only makes up 200mg of a standard tablet. LACTOSE This is used in many tablets, including aspirin and paracetamol, to bulk them out. SILICON DIOXIDE This is added during the manufacturing process to help the various powders that make the tablet flow nicely together. SODIUM LAURYL SULPHATE A detergent that crops up in many household products, including shampoo and toothpaste. In tablets it is used as a lubricant to stop the various ingredients sticking to manufacturing equipment. TITANIUM DIOXIDE This turns up in a lot of products, from tablets to sunscreen to paint. It is used as a white pigment.…

“It all started when I got stabbed. It made me think about the knife and what it was made from” What do you do? I have been described as a professor of the mundane. I like that. Materials science is about noticing how the world works, then trying to make it work differently. Everything is made of something and that stuff is what I study. How did you get interested in all this? It all started when I got stabbed. I was 15 and this guy at the tube station said he would stab me if I didn’t give him money. I didn’t believe him, so when the train arrived I pushed past him and got on. But he did stab me. It made me think about the knife and…