Tabla de contenidos para Issue 176 en How It Works

An explosion on the Sun spewed ‘dark plasma’ into space that resulted in a moderate geomagnetic storm on 15 March. The eruption was detected on 11 March by coronagraphs at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), an Earth-orbiting spacecraft co-operated by NASA and the European Space Agency. SOHO spotted a dark stream of plasma, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), that emerged from the southwestern limb of the Sun. Dark plasma is cooler and less luminous than the background Sun and denser than the gas surrounding it in the Sun’s atmosphere. The data from the coronagraph shows snowy dots and streaks that represent the energetic particles accelerated by shock waves in the CME. They create short-lived luminous speckles when they hit SOHO’s…

A woman known as the ‘New York patient’ received a stem cell transplant to cure her HIV, and now she’s been virus-free and off her HIV medication for about 30 months. “We’re calling this a possible cure rather than a definitive cure, waiting on a longer period of follow up,” said Dr Yvonne Bryson, director of the Los Angeles-Brazil AIDS Consortium at the University of California, Los Angeles. Only a handful of people have been cured of HIV, so at this point there’s no official distinction between being cured and being in long-term remission. Although the New York patient’s prognosis is very good, “I think we’re reluctant to say at this point whether she’s cured,” said Dr Deborah Persaud, the interim director of paediatric infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University…

NASA has selected Firefly Aerospace to land payloads on the Moon and send another into orbit to provide communications with the lunar far side. The mission will use Texas-based Firefly Aerospace’s robotic Blue Ghost lander to safely deliver two payloads to the far side of the Moon, which permanently faces away from Earth. The launch will first send the European Space Agency’s Lunar Pathfinder communications and navigation satellite into an elliptical orbit around the Moon to relay signals between Earth and the payloads on the surface. NASA announced on 14 March that it had awarded Firefly Aerospace an approximately £91 million ($112 million) contract as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The initiative is part of the agency’s Artemis program. “NASA continues to look at ways to…

MIDDLE AGES During medieval times and until 1961, the new monarch had to stay in the Tower of London for two nights before their coronation day. Immediately prior to the coronation, the monarch was paraded through the streets to Westminster. 1300 Following England’s conquest of Scotland, the coronation chair was created. This throne was first used by King Edward I, fitting the Stone of Scone underneath. 1382 The Royal Book, or Liber Regalis, was made as a rule book to guide coronations. This was a way to ensure traditions were kept. 1661 When the original coronation crown was destroyed during the English Civil War, a new crown was commissioned. The new St Edward’s crown was made. 1727 The traditional coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest, was composed by musician George Frideric…

What was the largest herbivore in the time of the dinosaurs? William Borde The largest dinosaur herbivore – and the largest herbivore of all time – was a sauropod named Argentinosaurus. As the name suggests, its remains have been found only in Argentina. No complete skeleton has ever been discovered, but individual backbones from Argentinosaurus are over 1.5 metres tall – taller than many adult humans. It has been estimated that a fully grown Argentinosaurus would have weighed over 70 tonnes, more than ten fully grown African elephants. Several ideas have been proposed to suggest why sauropods got so large, including the need for very large digestive systems to deal with tough, fibrous plant food. WHICH METAL HAS THE HIGHEST MELTING POINT? Lei Smith Tungsten, often referred to as wolfram…

1 GATHER YOUR MATERIALS Collect the materials and equipment listed. You can reuse old containers such as Styrofoam takeaway and aluminium pie dishes. 2 CUT THE STYROFOAM Separate the two halves. Cut one small strip from one of the halves that’s about five centimetres long and a centimetre wide. 3 FOLD A HANDLE Pinch the centre of your Styrofoam cutout and fold it so that it matches the shape in this image. When the two ends of the Styrofoam are flat on a surface, the middle section should stick upwards enough to hold onto comfortably. Tape this onto the centre of the aluminium tray. 4 SECURE TO A SURFACE Take the other half of the Styrofoam container and place it upside down onto a table so that it’s dome-shaped rather than…

Planetary scientists have found evidence of recent volcanic activity on Venus. Archives from NASA’s Magellan mission show telltale signs that Maat Mons, a five-mile-high volcano, was active in 1991. Magellan, launched in May 1989, was the first spacecraft to map the entire surface of Venus. The mission’s radar images revealed that Venus is peppered with volcanoes, but at the time scientists couldn’t tell whether any of them were still active. Now, a new analysis of these 30-year-old archives has detected a volcanic vent swelling with lava in the Atla Regio region, near the planet’s equator. The discovery was inspired by NASA’s next mission to our sister planet, which will launch within a decade. VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy), led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in…

In 2019, a fire broke out inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, severely damaging the iconic building. However, the catastrophic fire gave researchers an opportunity to study the building’s architecture like never before. A few months after the inferno was extinguished, researchers discovered that the stones used to build the Gothic-style cathedral were held together using iron staples, a technique that had never been documented before in a building from this time period. Notre-Dame was constructed in multiple phases starting in the early 12th century and continuing for the next 300 years. “This is the first building of its kind in which we see this,” said Maxime L’Héritier, a professor in the Department of History at Paris 8 University. “This shows [that the builders] at the time were trying to experiment…

The UK Space Agency has decided to continue funding a project by Rolls-Royce to create a small nuclear-powered reactor that could serve as a long-term energy source for future lunar bases. The new boost to Rolls-Royce’s research pot follows a previous ?249,000 ($305,430) study funded by the UK Space Agency in 2022. With the new funds, the company hopes to have a demonstration model for a modular microreactor ready to deliver to the Moon by 2029. The microreactor program will help develop technology that will provide power to people working on the Moon. The continuing research will focus on three critical aspects of the microreactor: generating heat, transferring that heat and converting that heat into usable energy. “This innovative research by Rolls-Royce could lay the groundwork for powering continuous human…

The amount of sea ice surrounding Antarctica has reached its lowest level since modern records began for the second year in a row. Sea ice is frozen seawater that floats on the ocean’s surface around the planet’s polar regions. It forms at much lower sustained temperatures than freshwater ice does, at around-1.8 degrees Celsius. Sea ice builds up during the winter until it reaches its maximum extent and then melts away in the spring and summer until it reaches its minimum extent. In Antarctica, where summer and winter are flipped relative to the Northern Hemisphere, sea ice normally reaches its maximum extent in September, when sea ice covers around 7 million square miles. At its minimum extent, at the end of February, historically only around 1 million square miles remains.…

DASH MINI WAFFLE MAKERS WWW.BYDASH.COM FROM $9.99 (APPROX. £8.20) Turn waffles into Easter eggs, love hearts, flowers, skulls and much more with the Mini Waffle range by Dash. These cute kitchen additions make breakfast or dessert just that little more fun thanks to their playful designs. Dash Mini Waffle Makers are compact and easy to store at only around ten centimetres in diameter. The non-stick surface also means you can pop out your waffle creations with ease. The compact design of this waffle maker also makes it a great travel companion for caravan breaks or student halls. Although great for making the perfect waffle, these machines can also handle different recipes, such as cookie dough, chaffles and homemade hash browns. BANANA LOCA WWW.BANANALOCA.COM $28.99 (APPROX. £23.75) A banana split can…

MOUNT EVEREST Height: 5.5 miles IVY MIKE 1952/US Location: Enewetak Atoll Yield: 10.4 megatonnes Mushroom cloud height: 26 miles This was the first nuclear fusion bomb tested by the United States. Ivy Mike yielded an explosive force around 690 times that of the Hiroshima bomb over Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands. The bomb exploded using liquid deuterium as a fusion fuel, which was superheated by an internal fission bomb. CASTLE BRAVO 1954/US Location: Bikini Atoll Yield: 15 megatonnes Mushroom cloud height: 25 miles The first in a series of US nuclear tests under Operation Castle, the Bravo explosion unleashed around two-and-a-half times the amount of explosive force that was anticipated. The fallout spread 7,000 square miles over the Marshall Islands and across the Pacific. CASTLE ROMEO 1954/US Location:…

The accepted future of air travel today is firmly in the hands of planes, but at the end of the 19th century it was airships that held the keys to the sky. Floating leisurely above the clouds, the story of these craft has often been forgotten and sidelined in favour of fixed-wing aviation achievements, but remains a key part of humanity’s history of flight. BALLOONMANIA STRIKES EUROPE 1784 Jean Pierre Blanchard was a Frenchman who dreamed of flight. The owner of an inquisitive mind, he unsuccessfully attempted to develop manual-powered aeroplanes and helicopters before finding fame with another aviation idea: hot-air balloons. In March 1784, Blanchard first took to the skies in a homemade balloon, a year after the first successful balloon flight by the Montgolfier brothers. In 1785 he…

A 360-million-year-old sea monster that was once thought to be as big as a bus was actually less than half that long, but just as chunky. The bony fish Dunkleosteus terrelli was one of many superpredators that prowled the oceans during the Devonian period. This armoured fish, which prowled the oceans that once covered modern-day Ohio, had blade-like jaws that could snap shut with 3,600 kilograms of force. The first D. terrelli fossils were discovered 150 years ago along the shores of Lake Erie, and the largest known specimen resides in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Unlike modern fish, which either have skeletons of cartilage or bone, D. terrelli had a bony, armoured skull attached to a skeleton of cartilage. Only the skulls of these creatures…

A previously unknown moai statue, one of Easter Island’s massive carved monoliths, has been found buried beneath a dried-up lakebed. Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, sits about 2,200 miles off the western coast of Chile and is home to nearly 8,000 people and about 1,000 moai statues. Unlike the other statues, which were found across the island, including on the slopes around Lake Rano Raraku, a volcanic crater that supplied much of the volcanic stone used to craft the moai statues, this moai was found in an unexpected place: the bottom of Lake Rano Raraku. The crater held fresh water until climate change and other factors – such as human use – caused it to dry up in recent years. In 2018 the lake water had nearly disappeared.…

A popular zero-calorie sweetener is being linked to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Known as erythritol, the sugar substitute occurs naturally at low levels in some plants, like grapes and mushrooms, but is also produced industrially and added to food at higher concentrations. In particular, it’s often used to sweeten low-calorie, low-carbohydrate and ‘keto’ products, which are typically high-fat and low-carbohydrate. Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio evaluated more than 4,000 Americans and Europeans who were undergoing cardiac evaluation and found that those with the highest blood concentration of the artificial sweetener were at an increased risk of experiencing a heart attack or stroke in the following three years. Notably, the majority of the participants already had some form of cardiovascular disease or exhibited risk factors…

An ‘utterly bizarre’ dinosaur had claws so gigantic that they couldn’t use them to fight or fend off attackers because they were too flimsy. The theropod Therizinosaurus lived in the Late Triassic and Cretaceous periods. Its scythe-like claws feature in the latest Jurassic World movie, where the beast can be seen batting away a deer and impaling the ferocious predator Giganotosaurus. However, the new research indicates that this depiction is inaccurate. “Movies and documentaries suggest that they used these claws like long swords to fight each other or predators,” said Zichuan Qin, a doctoral student at the University of Bristol, who led the study. “But our research suggests that they cannot bear any stress, which means these animals couldn’t use their claws to fight or defend themselves. The results surprised…

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NUCLEAR-CAPABLE COUNTRIES UNITED STATES First test: 16 July 1945 Most recent: 23 September 1992 Total tests: 1,054 FRANCE First test: 13 February 1960 Most recent: 27 January 1996 Total tests: 210 UNITED KINGDOM First test: 3 October 1952 Most recent: 26 November 1991 Total tests: 45 USSR First test: 29 August 1949 Most recent: 24 October 1990 Total tests: 727 INDIA First test: 18 May 1974 Most recent: 13 May 1998 Total tests: 3 PAKISTAN First test: 28 May 1998 Most recent: 30 May 1998 Total tests: 2 CHINA First test: 16 October 1964 Most recent: 29 July 1996 Total tests: 47 NORTH KOREA First test: 9 October 2006 Most recent: 3 September 2017 Total tests: 6 100 MILLION DEGREES CELSIUS At its peak, a onemegatonne bomb is hotter than…

When a British monarch changes, two of the most symbolic artefacts to be presented are the sceptre and the orb. The sceptre is a large, staff-like rod which symbolises power, while the orb is a golden sphere with a cross protruding from the top. The two together are meant to represent two forms of power: their own physical power over the people and the power from a spiritual being. The sceptre is mostly symbolic of authority, derived from a shepherd’s crook. Just as a shepherd guides its flock, the new monarch must guide the country. The Sovereign’s Orb was traditionally incorporated to remind the monarch that their power was given to them by god. The orb is made of gold and is separated into three sections by bands of jewels…

234 DAYS A day on Venus is around two-thirds of a year on Earth CASHEW NUTS GROW ON CASHEW ‘APPLES’ 10 QUINTILLION There are a lot of insects on Earth 12 YEARS OLD Cleopatra became queen of Egypt before she was a teenager 37% Over one-third of the world’s population has never used the internet 67 The number of bacteria species in your belly button 1 BILLION HOURS We watch nearly 115,000 years’ worth of YouTube videos every day 125% Drinking alcohol increases your chances of snoring $35 MILLION The world’s most expensive book, a first-edition Book of Mormon, sold in 2017 Some fish cough to clear their gills HAWAIIAN PIZZA WAS INVENTED IN CANADA…