Table of contents for New Year 2024 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

Welcome to our 400th issue! Don’t worry, I’m not about to bore you with a tedious trip down memory lane. I enjoy nostalgia as much as the next person, but droning on about the past just didn’t seem right for a magazine that’s been navigating the bleeding-edge of science and technology for over three decades. No, it only seemed right to look forward, as we always have, to the future. So, that’s exactly what we’ve done for this issue! Inside, we’ve explored some of the subjects that have been most popular with you - our readers - in the format that’s been most popular: a great, big Q&A. Of course, we haven’t been exhaustive. We need to leave something for the next 400 issues. But we’d like to think we’ve…

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“Our current theories of planet formation have trouble accounting for what we’re seeing” Megan Delamer p24 ASTRONOMY HUGE DISCOVERY A newly detected giant planet seems too big for the star it orbits, shaking up existing theories about how they form p24 MEOIGINE A MATTER OF TASTE Your taste buds could be behind your desire to eat all the doughnuts in one go p26 TECHNOLOGY NEW WORLD VIEW An AI tool that maps environmental changes could also help predict disasters p26 GEOLOGY SHOCK REVELATION Reading seismic signals should enable us to forecast earthquakes years in advance p28 BIOLOGY DISCOVERIES SCRATCH THAT IDEA Got an itch you just can’t scratch? Blame bacteria and the enzyme they secrete p29 MEDICINE HAPPY TALKING Your doctor’s positive spin could increase your chances of losing weight…

SCI-FI SPECTACLES Film in 2024 will be dominated by book adaptations, reboots and sequels, from Spaceman to Ghastbusters: Frozen Empire. It’s the sequels that really caught our eye. Inside Out 2 promises to tackle mental health in teenagers, the first installment having explored kids’ minds. And we’ll be returning to questions of extraterrestrial terraforming in Dune: Part Two. AI EYES Artificial intelligence (Al) will supercharge camera operations during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. Facial recognition is prohibited, but Al surveillance will help detect abandoned items and suspicious activity in large crowds. ARTIFICIAL POLITICS In 2023, OpenAl CEO Sam Altman warned US Congress about the risks Al poses to politics, and with political deepfakes on the rise, concerns about generative Al’s capacity for creating mistruths are growing. Still, several significant elections…

COLUMNISTS COMMENT There’s a flaw in the healthcare system and it’s having dire consequences for women. It’s the fact that pain in women is more poorly understood, compared to pain in men and is thus mistreated. It’s known as the gender pain gap, and it’s widening. A recent report by Nurofen showed that in 2023, 11 per cent more women than men felt their pain had been ignored or dismissed, compared to 7 per cent in 2022. The report surveyed more than 5,000 people, with a near 50:50 split between men and women. It found that it takes UK women longer than men to receive a medical diagnosis for the same types of pain. 47 per cent of women surveyed received a diagnosis within 11 months, compared to 66 per…

On 18 November 2023, SpaceX launched one of the largest rockets ever constructed. Starship marks a step change for humanity’s relationship with space — a reusable rocket so powerful that it could carry the mass of today’s painstakingly built International Space Station in just two to three launches, and likely quite a bit cheaper. Dreams from the days of the Apollo programme, long squashed by the high cost of space access, are returning - and with them, arguments about the value of space to our species. As with many experimental rockets, Starship failed to achieve all of its goals. Its first rocket stage exploded, and the second needed to self-destruct. Reactions are illustrative of the divide between space analysts and much of the media (and the public). To many, it…

Most of us know someone who is perennially late - a person who seems to have a chronic blind spot when it comes to timekeeping. It can become a source of jokey banter among friends, but in another context it can have serious and stressful consequences, from being late for work meetings to missing flights and doctors’ appointments. There could be various reasons why you’re perpetually late. Tardiness tends to correlate with lower scores on conscientiousness and neuroticism in personality tests or, to put a positive spin on it, you could just be really relaxed. This might be linked to the way you were raised - perhaps you inherited your parents’ relaxed attitude to timekeeping. It might have something to do with your cultural heritage, too. For instance, there’s evidence…

Sea cucumbers are relatives of sea urchins and sea stars (starfish). Generally speaking, they lie about on the seabed and are as inactive as their plant namesakes. In the deep, however, sea cucumbers do things rather differently. One species, the ‘Spanish dancer’ - a nod to the twirling skirts of flamenco dancers - is a translucent, ruby-red creature that swims about and drifts on gentle currents in the deep sea, propelled by elegant wafts of its webbed cloak. Another name for it is the ‘remarkable dreamer’ - a translation of its scientific name, Enypniastes eximia. It’s also been given a more grotesque nickname: the headless chicken monster. Admittedly, it does bear a passing resemblance to a plucked fowl carcass that’s been flung into the ocean. It’s roughly the right size,…

Marginal gains are important to cyclists. Riders ranging from Team CB athletes to steely-eyed commuters optimise their nutrition, equipment and positions just to shave a few seconds off their times. So it’s no wonder that some MAMILs (that’s middle-aged men in Lycra) would also be interested in shaving their legs. The theory is simple enough: removing the hairs on your legs reduces drag, the frictional force that applies resistance to any object moving through air. On a bike, air resistance is the number-one factor slowing you down (unless you’re riding uphill, in which case gravity is quite literally pulling you back). As you ride forwards, you displace the air molecules in front of you - that’s the ‘wind’ you feel. Aerodynamic design is all about optimising the flow of that…

Back in September, researchers at CERN managed to create and capture a sample of antihydrogen (the antimatter version of hydrogen). They held the sample in a magnetic field so precarious that any slight misalignment would cause it to annihilate against the walls of its container. And then they dropped it. The ALPHA-g experiment was designed to answer the question of just how ‘anti’ antimatter really is. Since antimatter was first proposed in the 1920s, we’ve learned to produce it in experiments and seen evidence for it in high-energy astrophysical environments in space. And we’ve seen that any contact between a particle of antimatter and its regular-matter counterpart results in annihilation into high-energy radiation. Despite its violent tendencies, antimatter has generally shown itself to be far less outlandish than its reputation…

One in two of us will develop cancer in our lifetime. Thanks to advances in diagnosis and treatment, though, more people are surviving cancer than ever. Will this trend continue — and how close are we to finding a cure? That upward survival trend is likely to continue. But finding a cure? That’s not so easy to answer, for a simple reason: cancer isn’t one single disease but a collection of more than 200, each with unique features. Yet every cancer consists of a mass of abnormal cells, all originating from a single mutated cell that began to divide uncontrollably. Cell division - one cell dividing to produce two new ones - is essential for growing and maintaining our bodies. Cells that have become worn out or damaged must be…

According to reports, on the evening of 3 November 1888, thousands of sheep in hundreds of Oxfordshire farms got spooked and bolted. Next morning they were found miles away, cowering under hedges. Two weeks later, The Times ruled out “malicious mischief” because “a thousand men could not have frightened and released all these sheep”. In 1921, the science journal Nature suggested that lightning might have been a trigger yet sheep regularly endure storms without panicking. The cause remains uncertain, but whatever did happen most likely led to a turbocharged game of Chinese whispersto account for those numbers of sheep!…

Hamsters do it. Horses do it. Humans do it, of course. No surprise, then, that gorillas - among our closest living relatives - also trump. A lot. Farting is the body’s way of ridding the intestines of unnecessary gas produced by gut bacteria. Odourless gases such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane are released, sometimes along with volatile sulphurous components that can taint the offending emissions with a whiff of egg. There are two species of gorilla, eastern and western, both native to the forested regions of equatorial Africa. Weighing up to 190kg (420lbs), the world’s largest living primates mainly eat plants that are fibre-dense and comparatively nutrient-poor - so need to munch about 20kg (44lbs) of nettles, wild celery and other vegetation daily, spending much of their lives foraging.…

Mushroom circles had magical significance in ancient folklore, being attributed to witches, dragons or dancing fairies. But there’s a natural explanation. Commonly known as fairy circles or pixie rings, each comprises a single fungus connected underground by threads called mycelia. When a fungal spore germinates, mycelia radiate out to absorb nutrients from the soil. As nutrients in the centre are exhausted, that part dies, creating an expanding ring. Mushrooms then sprout around the perimeter in late summer or autumn. Some fungi create a central ‘dead zone’ whereas others fertilise the soil, generating a circle of lush vegetation.…

PROF SARAH ALLINSON Sarah studies the effects of DNA damage on cells. She takes us through the latest exciting research that could help us beat cancer. DR HAYLEY WRIGHT As the years go by, most of us end up losing a step or two mentally. Cognitive ageing expert Hayley shares tips on how to keep our minds sharper for longer. PROF HENRY T GREELY Henry, a professor of genetics at Stanford University, explains how babies of the future could be made - and the implications for sex. DR JONATHAN FOLEY Environmental scientist Jonathan advises the world’s governments on ways to reduce emissions. He delves into climate change and the fixes we already have.…

reply@sciencefocus.com BBC Science Focus, Eagle House, Bristol, BS1 4ST @sciencefocus www.facebook.com/sciencefocus @bbcsciencefocus LETTER OF THE MONTH Don’t inhale In your story headlined ‘Scientists plan to melt Moon dustto lay lunar roads’(November, p16), you mention how damaging the dust on the Moon can be - how it eroded the spacesuits worn by the Apollo astronauts and the hazard it might present for future lunar missions. Did the Apollo astronauts suffer any long-term health effects from exposure to the dust they brought back into the lunar module on their suits and boots? Alan Thomas, Middlesex Editor Daniel Bennett replies All the Apollo astronauts that walked on the Moon suffered sore throats, itchy eyes and sneezing in the days after taking their small steps and giant leaps for mankind - symptoms that were christened…

It’s one of life’s great struggles: resisting the temptation to eat the entire box of doughnuts all at once. Well, it turns out that the secret to appetite control could lie in your sense of taste. That’s according to scientists at the University of California San Francisco, who have discovered that brain cells linked to our taste buds, not our guts, are the first line of defence against binge eating. This finding could be used to develop weight-loss treatments that work better than semaglutide (a drug marketed as Ozempic or Wegovy). It’s true that activity in your gut plays a key role in suppressing appetite. Experiments with mice suggest that the stomach and intestines send signals to cerebellar granule cells (CGC) in the brain, which can curb your appetite, but…

Looking up If all goes to plan, 2024 will see humanity return to the Moon for the first time in 50 years. NASA’s Artemis II mission is scheduled to launch in late 2024, carrying a crew of four (left), including the first woman and first person of colour to join a lunar mission. NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite mission should launch at the beginning of the year, collecting data to help scientists measure the health of Earth’s oceans. The long-delayed debut of Ariane 6, ESA’s heavy-lift rocket, is pencilled in for mid-2024. In October, NASA’s Europa Clipper will begin its journey to one of Jupiter’s icy moons to investigate the possibility of life. And, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft, launched by ESA in 2023 with…

BIG QUESTIONS FEATURE Over the past decade, I have made some bold predictions about the future of sex. One that’s been easy is that people will still be having sex for years to come, but for different reasons: they simply won’t do it so much to make babies. That’s not to say that making babies will become obsolete, but, rather, that technology will change the ways we do it. There could be a much safer and easier way to reproduce - and sex as we know it could end. Until about a century ago, humans always created lembryos and babies in the same old, largely random way - through sex. Then some started using [artificial insemination and, 45 years ago, in vitro fertilisation. Important as these technologies have been they…

Cognitive decline refers to the slowing or dulling of our memory, concentration and ability to think. It’s quite common to become more forgetful as we age - failing to remember someone’s name, say, or what we set out to buy at the shops. Increasingly frequent episodes might, though, indicate cognitive impairment - when the rate of decline is faster than we would expect as part of the normal ageing process. This can be scary for the person experiencing symptoms, as well as for family and friends. Some of the most common signs of cognitive impairment include: forgetting important dates or events; losing your train of thought; becoming increasingly overwhelmed by making decisions or planning tasks; having trouble finding your way around familiar places; and becoming more impulsive. We all experience…

Drowsy driving, like drunk driving, can be dangerous because poor sleep affects hand-eye coordination, vigilance and reaction times. Accurately measuring the effect of a poor night’s sleep on road safety is difficult, however. Unlike blood alcohol, tiredness is difficult to quantify. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attributed 1.6 per cent of road deaths (684 fatalities) in 2021 to drowsy driving, though it’s been suggested the true figure could be much higher. A study by the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety estimated that getting between five and six hours of sleep almost doubled the risk of a crash, while those who slept for four to five hours had more than four times the crash rate.…

It seems obvious to say that being on the receiving end of kindness makes you feel good. But, while a kind act can’t provide you with any calories, it’s not simply a throwaway experience. When someone is surprisingly kind to you - a stranger holds open a door for you, or your coffee is ‘on the house’ - the act triggers activity in the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain often referred to as the pleasure centre. In 2021, more than 60,000 participants completed the Kindness Test questionnaire online. The results showed that carrying out kind acts had benefits for wellbeing. Whether you’re giving or receiving kindness, you’re likely to feel better. People who regularly volunteer or donate money to charities talk of the warm glow they feel from…

Odd Radio Circles (ORCs) were discovered by accident in 2019. They are circular regions of faint, edge-brightened radio emissions that are invisible at optical, infrared, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. Some have a galaxy at the centre while others don’t, but they’re all characterised by their large size, many times bigger than a typical galaxy. Some ORCs seem to have a double-ring structure whereas others are single. Some also have internal arc-like structures that appear to be associated with galaxies embedded within the bubble of radio emission. Objects with a high degree of spherical symmetry are common in the Universe, but ORCs appear to be different from all of those, leading astronomers to declare them a new class of object. ORCs may be a form of spherical shock wave created by,…

As COVID-19 case numbers rise during the UK winter, one big question is on many people’s lips: will I be protected if I’ve been infected and have had a full course of COVID-19 jabs? This combination of vaccination and previous infection produces hybrid immunity and appears to generate more lasting protection than either vaccination or infection alone. Protection from severe COVID-19 isn’t the same as preventing infection. If you’ve had COVID-19 and all your jabs within the past 12 months, then you’re probably quite well protected from severe disease. One year after the last infection or booster jab, protection against severe disease wanes, but persists to some degree. Overall protection from infection is less clear-cut. We know that, for most people, hybrid immunity provides good, but not total, protection from…