Sommaire pour June 2020 de BBC Science Focus Magazine

In labs around the world, there’s a tiny revolution taking hold, one that’s powered by bacteria. These microbes are fascinating because they’re nature’s little survivors. Some, known as extremophiles, are found in some of the most hostile environments on Earth, thriving for thousands of years in volcanoes, deep-sea vents and sub-glacial lakes. And others have adapted quickly to flourish in places poisoned by oil, radiation and pollution. Wherever there’s a niche, the chances are some type of bacteria has occupied it. It’s this tenacity and ability to adapt in a short period of time that makes them ideal inspiration for helping humans meet some of the biggest challenges of our time: climate change, famine, pollution and disease. If we can harness just a few of their tricks – like pulling…

ESO’s opticians ATACAMA DESERT, CHILE In the Atacama Desert sits one of the world’s most advanced optical instruments. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) consists of four units, each housing mirrors 8.2 metres in diameter. While they’re protected from the elements, dust particles can damage the mirrors’ surfaces and alter the images the VLT captures. “Here, two engineers are about to clean a mirror by spraying it with carbon dioxide ‘snowflakes’,” says Gerhard Hüdepohl, an engineer at the VLT. The CO2 snow is almost -80°C and is used to wipe dust off the reflective surface. “This is a non-contact way of cleaning a mirror, and can help keep it in good condition for some time.” But, every two years, the mirrors must be recoated, says Hüdepohl. “They’re dismounted…

These colourful maps showing the craggy surface of the Moon in exhaustive detail were put together following a mammoth collaborative effort by researchers from the US Geological Survey (USGS), NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute. It’s the first time the entire lunar surface has been completely mapped and uniformly classified by scientists. The lunar map, dubbed the ‘Unified Geologic Map of the Moon’, will now serve as the definitive blueprint of the Moon’s surface geology for all future human missions. It will also be an invaluable tool for scientists studying the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth’s nearest neighbour. The digital map is available online now at bit.ly/ moon-map and shows the Moon’s geology in minute detail on a 1:5,000,000 scale. “People have always been fascinated by the Moon and when we…

A new technique that could drastically reduce treatment time for reversing sight loss has successfully returned vision in mice, according to a paper published in the journal Nature earlier this year. The treatment would help those with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which is the leading cause of sight loss in the UK. The problems with vision caused by AMD are due to the loss of photoreceptors – the neurons in the retina that respond to light and are responsible for pupil constriction and dilation. Diabetes and some rare genetic diseases can also cause blindness through the photoreceptor degeneration. Current treatment for these conditions uses stem cells to replace damaged photoreceptors. Developed in a lab from adult cells, the stem cells are known as ‘pluripotent’, meaning they can be reprogrammed to…

The impact of rice paddies could be drastically reduced by electricity-conducting bacteria, a team from Aarhus University, Denmark has found. Water in paddy fields prevents oxygen from getting into the soil, which allows microorganisms that produce lots of methane (a powerful greenhouse gas) to thrive. In an experiment carried out by Aarhus scientists, rice plants grown in pots with cable bacteria, known as ‘living electrical wires’, emitted 93 per cent less methane than pots without the bacteria. The cable bacteria recycle sulphur compounds in the soil, which reduces the activity of the microorganisms that produce methane, the study said.…

In the UK, around 10 per cent of people have dyslexia. Dyslexia is entirely subjective to the person who suffers from it. However, for some context, I am pretty much in the middle of the spectrum. When reading, I get rivers of light running through text, along with jumping letters and frequent skipping across words or lines. I have used coloured overlays in the past, and have glasses with coloured lenses that improve my reading experience. A small study published in 2017 in the journal Proceedings Of The Royal Society B found evidence that one cause of dyslexia could be down to a patch of light-sensitive cells in the eye. It said that in non-dyslexics, the cells are differently arranged between the two eyes, with information from one eye overriding…

“Quarantine is maddening because human beings like structure. We develop our lives to follow a certain routine” Lockdown is more of an endurance sport than a sprint, so unless you trained for it, there was a moment when you hit the wall. I was on Week 2.5 when I started wailing like a little kid in front of my kid, lashing out at the doorframe, and was sent to my room by my husband. Not a good look for a grown-up. But emotions, stress and uncertainty are tough things to tackle whatever your age, particularly when the race is already running and the finish line is a moving target. Dr Nathan Smith is an expert in extreme stress. He spends his research time with people who live on the edge…

Unfortunately for impatient mums-to-be, this one’s a myth. It probably has its origins in the fact that curry often has other effects ‘down there’. Spicy food is known to irritate the intestines (hence the post-curry diarrhoea that some people experience), and it might also irritate the uterus and in some cases cause small contractions. But there’s no evidence that this could bring on labour. Castor oil – a vegetable oil from castor beans – is a more powerful laxative, and some small studies have concluded that the oil can help induce labour. In 2012, researchers in Germany suggested a possible mechanism, finding that an acid in castor oil mimics the effects of hormone-like substances in the body called prostaglandins, which can stimulate contractions in the intestines and uterus. However, the…

TREAT BREAD-MAKING LIKE A SCIENCE EXPERIMENT Baking is a science, so don’t guesstimate. Make sure, for example, that the water you add is at the right temperature. Too hot or too cold and the yeast won’t work. If it says to add a certain amount of yeast or salt, ensure you do. STRONG FLOUR IS BEST Strong flour has the highest amount of protein in it. It contains glutenin and gliadin, which combine to make gluten when water is added. If you use flour with a low protein content, the bread is likely to be heavy and dense. KNEADING IS IMPORTANT As the dough is stretched, it helps to line up the messy strands of gluten. It’s a bit like combing the tangles from your hair! This makes the bread…

GAMERS Real-time action strategy computer games can increase the ability to distinguish between important and irrelevant information in real life, according to the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. More experienced League Of Legends players were more efficient in distributing their cognitive resources, the scientists found. CYCLISTS Cycle lanes could boost local businesses, particularly in the retail and food sectors, a study from Portland State’s Transportation Research and Education Center has found.…

The coronavirus pandemic is undoubtedly a tragedy. None of us could have wanted this, and none of us have escaped its impact, between illness, workplace closures and cancelled social events. The world of science is no exception. Cancer Research UK, for example, expects to lose up to £120m in funding – a quarter of its donated income – this year as a result of charity shop closures. However, there are some areas of science where lockdown has offered an unexpected opportunity. As the world shut down, researchers in many fields have been suddenly presented with conditions they’d never have been able to create in the lab. SEISMOLOGY Every car, train and tube journey contributes to ‘anthropogenic’ (human-caused) seismic noise. With fewer of us travelling, these noises have decreased. In fact,…

STEP BY STEP Start playing Borderlands Scienceis housed in an arcade cabinet on Sanctuary, the ship players use to move from world to world. Jump in and be greeted with a tutorial. Match blocks Line up rows of similar colours by shifting columns of blocks. Each block symbolises a nucleotide of bacterial DNA. More matches = bigger score. Get rewards Hit the target score in the arcade game and you will be rewarded with random loot, like guns and shields, that you can use in the game world.…

“MOST FITBIT DEVICES CAN TRACK YOUR HEART RATE 24/7, THANKS TO IMPROVED SENSORS” Fitbit has kick-started a piece of research, involving hundreds of thousands of users, to find out if its heart-rate tracking tech could spot undiagnosed health conditions. In particular, the Fitbit team want to test if they can identify Atrial Fibrillation (AFib), an irregularity in the heart’s rhythm that can be a precursor to stroke. Most Fitbit devices can track your heart rate 24/7, thanks to their long battery lives and improved sensors. Usually this data charts your fitness and sleep quality, but Fitbit hopes that the long-term tracking of heart rhythm, over several days at a time, will provide a window into the wearer’s heart health. To track heart rate, certain Fitbit models use technology called photoplethysmography…

We’re in trouble. Our over-reliance on fossil fuels and our taste for foods with a high carbon footprint is causing disruptive climate change. Our throwaway society has flooded the land and seas with plastic pollution. And we face a growing public health crisis triggered by the rise of disease-causing microbes that we cannot kill with antibiotics. Now for the good news. The last few years have brought promising evidence that we might be able to pull carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere and slow the pace of climate change, that we have the potential to grow high-quality protein without the large carbon footprint, and that we can clean up our pollution and blunt the impact of antibiotic resistance. The common element in all these potential breakthroughs? Bacteria. As unlikely…

YOUR WORK IS CENTRED ON PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS. WHAT DOES THE TERM ‘PSYCHEDELIC’ ACTUALLY MEAN? Psychedelics was a term developed back in the 1950s by people like Aldous Huxley [the author of The Doors Of Perception]. Psychedelic means mind-manifesting. Typically, we talk about psychedelic drugs as drugs that produce altered states of perception and consciousness, such as magic mushrooms, LSD, mescaline, peyote, DMT, ayahuasca. It turns out they all work on a particular receptor in the brain called the serotonin 5HT2A receptor. WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE SEROTONIN 5HT2A RECEPTOR? The human brain is loaded with them, all in the parts of the brain where you do your thinking and your analysis of yourself. They tie together your consciousness with your other senses. They’re really in that circuit that kind…

ERICA REYNOLDS, COVENTRY IS THERE ANY LINK BETWEEN HANDWRITING AND PERSONALITY? I remember as a child being discouraged from allowing my handwriting to slope backwards – I was warned my relaxed letters would be taken as a sign of an idle personality. Handwriting analysis, or ‘graphology’, which has its modern roots in the theories espoused by a group of 19th-Century French Catholic clergy, makes many such claims about what is revealed by a person’s writing style, some more eyebrow-raising than others. If you have low-hanging, bulbous loops on your ‘y’s and ‘g’s, for instance, this is apparently a sign of your sexual prowess. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, contemporary psychology views graphology as a joke – indeed, the claim that our handwriting reveals our personality traits is listed in 50 Great Myths Of…

1 Faroe Islands 1 Nobel laureate(1 per 48,497 people) 2 Saint Lucia 2(1 per 90,945 people) 3 Luxembourg 2(1 per 303,864) 4 Switzerland 28(1 per 304,162) 5 Sweden 32(1 per 318,224) 6 Iceland 1 (1 per 353,574) 7 Austria 22(1 per 402,138) 8 Norway 13(1 per 408,795) 9 Denmark 13(1 per 445,957) 10 United Kingdom 132(1 per 503,704) Note: We’ve included all six Nobel Prizes (Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Economics). Some laureates are counted twice because the official Nobel website mentions them in relation to two countries. Faroe Islands are included as an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Population stats are for 2018 from data.worldbank.org…

(X) = WALKED ON THE MOON APOLLO 11 LAUNCH: 16 Jul 1969 CREW: Neil Armstrong (X); Buzz Aldrin (X); Michael Collins Apollo 11’s crew earned a place in history books when they successfully completed the national goal set by President John F Kennedy eight years prior: to perform the first crewed lunar landing and return back to Earth. APOLLO 12 LAUNCH: 14 Nov 1969 CREW: Charles Conrad (X); Alan Bean (X); Richard Gordon The second Apollo crew built on the work of the first. In addition to continuing Apollo’s exploration tasks, they deployed experiments and recovered portions of a lander that had been on the Moon for two years. APOLLO 14 LAUNCH: 31 Jan 1971 CREW: Alan Shepard (X); Edgar Mitchell (X); Stuart Roosa Apollo 14 was the eighth crewed…

Lemurs, it seems, know that a dab of perfume can make all the difference when wooing a mate. Male ring-tailed lemurs secrete a fruity and floral aroma from scent glands above their wrists, which they rub against their fluffy tails before wafting the sweet scent in front of potential female mates. Now, researchers have identified the ingredients that make this lemur cologne so alluring, and no, it isn’t Lynx Africa. Lemurs are a group of primates that live only on the African island of Madagascar. Both male and female ring-tailed lemurs sport these glands, which secrete a clear liquid that’s used to perform scent markings to advertise social rank or reproductive status, or to mark territory. But the males also use it to attract females – a behaviour known as…

The fashion industry urgently needs to transition to a ‘slow’ fashion model to reduce its heavy environmental toll, according to researchers at Aalto University, Finland. The environmental impact of fashion’s global supply chain continues to rise, they say in a paper published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth And Environment . The industry currently produces over 92 million tonnes of waste and consumes 79 trillion litres of water per year. It causes around 10 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and is also a high source of chemical pollution. Developing countries tend to be most vulnerable to the environmental impacts of the industry, since production often occurs there, even though developed countries largely consume the final products. The fashion industry is also projected to grow significantly in the…

WHAT IS A SPIKE PROTEIN AND WHAT IS ITS FUNCTION? A spike protein is a protein that decorates the surface of a coronavirus. Its jobs is to attach that virus to a host cell by binding to a receptor [on the host cell’s surface]. Once it’s attached, it fuses the viral membrane with the host cell membrane so that the virus can enter into the host cell and begin the process of replication. The spike protein is the main machine that the virus uses to enter into our cells. So, without the spike functioning properly on the surface of a virus, the virus is neutralised and is non-infectious. WHY DID YOU FOCUS ON LLAMAS? Camelids, which is a family that includes camels, llamas, alpacas and a couple of other animals,…

“These so-called ‘RNA vaccines’ are so new that none has yet been approved for medical use” Like many others, I am convinced our best hope of defeating this novel coronavirus is by developing a vaccine. So I was delighted, a few months ago, when the BBC series, Horizon , asked me to make a film about the vaccine work being carried out by a team from Imperial College, led by Prof Robin Shattock. Robin told me that when he first heard about a novel virus causing pneumonia, he assumed that it would be contained. But it soon became clear that this outbreak was not going to be stopped. A critical turning point was the publication by Chinese scientists on 10 January of the virus’s genome – its genetic blueprint. With…

David is the Edmond J Safra Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. He trained as a medic at Cambridge University and went on to study psychiatry at Oxford University. In 1988 he established the Psychopharmacology Unit in Bristol University before joining Imperial College London in 2008. He is currently Chair of DrugScience and President of the European Brain Council. He was a member and then Chair of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (1998-2009) and served as the medical expert on the Independent Inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act. He has published over 400 research paper and 27 books.…

DR ALASTAIR GUNN Astronomer, astrophysicist DR STEVE BRUSATTE Palaeontologist, dinosaur expert RORY GALLOWAY Sciencewriter, radioproducer STEPHANIE ORGAN Science/ healthwriter DR CHRISTIAN JARRETT Neuroscientist, psychologyexpert DR EMMA DAVIES Chemistry expert, sciencewriter LUIS VILLAZON Science/tech writer ALEX FRANKLINCHEUNG Environment/ climateexpert DR JEREMY ROSSMAN Virologist DR HELEN PILCHER Biologist, sciencewriter ABIGAIL BEALL Science/space writer PROF ROBERT MATTHEWS Physicist, sciencewriter…

WHY DO LOCUSTS SWARM? Locusts have caused famine and starvation for as long as humans have been farming. Swarms can appear suddenly, and proceed to decimate crops over huge areas. Since June 2019, one of the worst locust plagues in decades has been devastating parts of East Africa and surrounding regions, consuming up to 1.8 million tonnes of vegetation a day. Locusts are actually a group of short-horned grasshoppers. They are usually solitary, fairly bland-looking insects, but when conditions are right, they can switch into a ‘gregarious’ mode, becoming social, multicoloured eating machines that sweep across the landscape in swarms of up to 80 million locusts per square kilometre. This swarming behaviour is triggered by high rainfall. When there’s plenty of lush vegetation for the wingless nymphs (called 'hoppers') to…

DILEEP BAGNALL, LANCASHIRE WHAT ARE COWS COMMUNICATING WHEN THEY MOO? Old MacDonald had a farm with an ‘oink oink’ here and a ‘moo moo’ there, but we’d be foolish to think that these vocalisations have no significance. Cows are smart, social animals. They have a rich repertoire of communication that includes moos, grunts, bellows and even non-verbal signals such as tail position. In 2014, researchers at the University of Nottingham and Queen Mary University of London decided to delve a little deeper by recording 10 months’ worth of moos and then using computer analysis to look for patterns. Just as our voices differ, the researchers found that each mother and calf have their own individual call. This is thought to help them identify each other in a herd. The researchers…