Indice dei contenuti per September 2016 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

Just over 150 years ago, the monk Gregor Mendel presented his findings on how traits could be passed down from parents to their offspring, following his research on pea plants in his monastery garden. He seeded the idea of genes – a coded set of biological instructions passed on from one generation to the next. But it would be 135 years before scientists could fully decipher this code, with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton announcing to the world that we had unravelled the blueprint of human life at the turn of the millennium. Today, in an emergency, labs can sequence a patient’s genome in just 26 hours. You can even get your own genetics (partially) transcribed for under £125. The proliferation and speed of genome-sequencing technology has created an ever-growing…

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a vast raging storm three times the size of Earth, is heating the planet’s atmosphere like a giant radiator, researchers from Boston University have found. When the team measured temperatures across Jupiter’s surface by mapping the distribution of the infrared light it emits, they found peaks as high as 1,500°C in the upper atmosphere surrounding the Great Red Spot. The heating is thought to be due to the action of sound waves and gravity waves produced by the turbulent flows within the storm crashing together like waves on a beach. The finding could explain why gas giants such as Jupiter have upper atmospheric temperatures much higher than would be possible by solar heating alone – something scientists have dubbed an ‘energy crisis’. “With solar heating from…

This might take a while to upload into your sat-nav: a team led by researchers at the University of St Andrews has pieced together a 3D map of the Universe detailing 1.2 million galaxies. The map is the end product of a decade-long project dubbed the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), involving hundreds of scientists from across the globe. “Over the last decade we have prepared and conducted the largest survey of the Universe yet,” said researcher Dr Rita Tojeiro. “By measuring the positions of 1.2 million galaxies over one-quarter of the sky, we mapped the three-dimensional structure of the Universe over a volume of 650 cubic billion light-years.” Researchers hope the vast map will help to further our understanding of the nature of the Universe. It has already…

Oooh, what’s that? A new Italian restaurant chain? Nope. It’s the ‘last universal common ancestor’, essentially the granddaddy of all life on Earth. Cool. What exactly is it? We can’t be sure, as it didn’t leave any fossils behind. But all evidence points to it being some kind of single-celled organism. Hang on. If we don’t know what it is, why are we talking about it? Well, a team at the University of Düsseldorf has combed through more than six million genes in samples of bacteria and archaea, the two oldest forms of life, to tease out 355 genes that they think originated in LUCA. So, have they figured out exactly what LUCA was? Yep, they think it was similar to the thermophiles that still exist today. These organisms live…

These are the drones you’re looking for. Later this year, the first official Star Wars drones, made by Propel, go on sale. There’s a speeder bike (pictured), an X-wing, a TIE Fighter and the Millennium Falcon. While they won’t make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs (and this is actually a unit of distance, not time), they do have a ‘battle mode’ which lets pilots play aerial laser tag. Christmas sorted.…

Dirty dancing After reading your article by James Witts about professional vs casual cycling gear (July, p88), I was intrigued by the use of bicarbonate of soda as a fatigue buster. I am a dancer in training, so naturally the idea of getting through an intense exercise session with less lactic acid build-up appealed to me. Though the teaspoon or so I consumed appeared at first to have the desired effect, it also had another, less pleasant one. Halfway through my class, I experienced what can only be described as the worst case of the runs I’ve ever had. I thought I had food poisoning! My advice to anyone wanting to try this is to do it at home BEFORE using it to boost training. That way any nasty side…

We inherit two copies of every gene, one from mum, the other from dad, and they are not necessarily the same. Scientists have discovered hundreds of diseases that are caused by inheriting either two copies of a faulty gene, known as recessive mutations, or just one (a dominant mutation). These are known as Mendelian diseases, after Gregor Mendel (pictured) who first laid down rules about how traits are inherited. Recessive mutations usually break the gene’s function, so people with one copy are unaffected as their remaining healthy gene can compensate. But even inheriting two recessive or one dominant Mendelian disease fault doesn’t necessarily mean someone will be severely affected. Genetic superheroes are at the extreme end of this spectrum, carrying ‘bad’ gene faults but appearing to be healthy.…

73% Is the amount global meat consumption is forecast to rise by 2050, due to growing incomes and urbanisation in developing countries. 9.7 billion The estimated population of Earth in 2050. Growing enough food to feed a rapidly increasing global population is already a pressing concern. 15,000 litres The water required to make 1kg of (farmed) beef, compared to 2,500 litres for 1kg of rice. 7.1 trillion kg The CO equivalent contribution of global livestock farming per year. This represents 14.5 per cent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. 68% The proportion of people who said they wanted to try cultured beef following the presentation of the world’s first lab-grown burger.…

Bigfoot A giant, hairy, man-shaped monster famous for leaving human-like footprints. Originally associated with California, cryptozoologists believe that it occurs across North America and even beyond. Cryptid An animal – argued by cryptozoologists to represent an unknown species or subspecies – that has been described by witnesses but remains unconfirmed by science. Cryptozoology The investigative field that aims to discover and study animals that are alleged to exist, but are as yet only known from anecdotal evidence. Mokele-Mbembe An elephant-sized water monster of the Congo region, imagined by proponents to be a long-necked herbivore and perhaps a surviving sauropod dinosaur. Ropen A giant, winged beast of New Guinea, said to be bioluminescent and to eat human corpses. Its proponents – most of whom are creationists – believe it to be…

In 1950, 746 million of us lived in urban areas. By 2014, that had increased to 3.9 billion – 54 per cent of the population Personally, I love cities. And I am not alone. In 1950, 746 million of us lived in urban areas. By 2014, that had increased to 3.9 billion, or 54 per cent of the world’s population. According to the UN, 66 per cent of all humans will live in cities by 2050. There is much that is good about cities. They are highly efficient ways of focusing human activities such as business, education and research. Managed correctly, they offer substantial environmental advantages. Cities bring us into closer routine contact with other humans, and most of us seem hardwired to seek out this enhanced level of contact:…

As GK Chesterton wrote, “lying in bed would be perfect, if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling”. Unfortunately, our horizontal time is not spent doodling on the ceiling – it appears to be spent doing nothing. It seems such a waste to spend one-third of our existence unaware of our existence. Fortunately, I’m an insomniac. While you are wasting your life asleep, I am swearing at the eaves, wishing I was unconscious. Avoiding sleep may increase your productivity in the short term, but it soon leads to madness, irreparable damage, and then death. The worst example of this is those who suffer from Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI). This extremely rare inherited brain disease is caused by a prion – a misfolded protein. Sufferers…

Prague is one of the grandest European cities. It miraculously escaped damage during the wars that ravaged our continent over the last few centuries – partly because Czechs are such bad soldiers. We lost wars so quickly that there was no point in the enemy destroying the capital. Another reason for the city’s unspoiled beauty is the unfortunate fact that, since the failed anti-Habsburg coup in 1618 (that eventually led to the Thirty Years’ War), Prague gradually lost its political and economic importance, becoming a sleeping beauty in the European backyard. For me, the most special thing to do in Prague is just to wander the streets and enjoy its exquisite beauty. In the heart of the Old Town, there is the beautiful CHURCH OF OUR LADY BEFORE TÝN 1,…

KAT ARNEY Does a quirk of your DNA make you immune to certain diseases? Science writer and broadcaster Kat give us the lowdown on the hunt for the genetic superheroes. And yes, you could be one… p34 CHERIE CHENOT-ROSE Some science jobs are not for the faint-hearted. We speak to six people with some of the most extreme jobs in science, including Cherie, the founder of the American Crocodile Education Service. p44 BRENDAN KELLY Brendan is professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin. This month he takes a look at the troubling e ects that urban lifestyles seem to have on our mental health. p72…

“WE FOUND THAT OUR CLONES, CONSIDERING THEIR AGE, WERE HEALTHY” Say ‘Hi’ to Debbie, Denise, Dianna and Daisy, four sheep cloned from the same mammary gland cell line as Dolly. They have just passed their ninth birthdays, disproving a widely held belief that cloned animals suffer from premature ageing. Dolly was put to sleep in 2003 at the relatively young age of six, because tumours were found growing on her chest. This led some researchers to believe that animals cloned using somatic-cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT for short (see box, right), might age more quickly than their natural-born counterparts – but no one knew for certain. “Healthy ageing of SCNT clones has never been properly investigated. There have been no detailed studies of their health,” said researcher Kevin Sinclair of…

40% The amount of energy Google has saved thanks to its DeepMind artificial intelligence offshoot. The firm used machine learning algorithms to improve the efficiency of the systems used to cool its vast data centre servers. 182.5 cm The average height of men in the Netherlands, as found by researchers from Imperial College London. This makes them the tallest in the world. Men in the UK came in at 177.5cm. Latvian women were found to be the tallest at 169.8cm, with women in the UK measuring 164.4cm. 54°C The temperature recorded in Mitribah, Kuwait on 21 July, the hottest ever in recent times. The highest on record is 56.7°C, which was measured on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch, Death Valley, California.…

What did they do? A team from Queens University, Belfast kept pigs in two different pens: one small and bare with a concrete floor, and one large and filled with soft straw bedding. One-by-one they led the pigs out of the pens, kept them in isolation for three minutes before moving them into a pen where they could investigate an object they had not encountered before. Why did they do that? Pigs are extremely social animals who communicate via grunts. The team wanted to see find out if the pigs’ differing personalities affected their style of grunting. What did they find? The pigs with more inquisitive personalities were found to grunt more frequently while pigs kept in the poorer conditions were found to be quieter. The results suggest that pigs’…

Cancer may not be such a modern malady after all. Researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, have discovered some of the most ancient evidence for cancer ever found in the human fossil record. The cancer was found in a foot bone belonging to an unknown species of hominin, or bipedal human relative, that walked the Earth around 1.7 million years ago in Swartkrans, a national heritage site found about 30km from Johannesburg in South Africa. For comparison, modern humans are only about 200,000 years old. “Modern medicine tends to assume that cancers and tumours in humans are diseases caused by modern lifestyles and environments,” said researcher Edward Odes. “Our studies show the origins of these diseases occurred in our ancient relatives millions of years before modern industrial societies…

Prisma This set of 34 filters uses neural networks to turn any photo on your phone or tablet into a masterpiece in the style of Van Gogh, Mondrian or Monet. Free, iOS/Android Snorelax Imagine an alarm clock app that monitored tra ic reports, and woke you a bit earlier if there was a jam on your route. Actually, you don’t have to imagine any more… £1.49, iOS BBC iPlayer Radio The iPlayer radio app is now available internationally, meaning over 60 million listeners around the globe can now catch up with their fave shows on their mobile devices. Free, iOS/Android…

SYNTHETIC MILK Companies such as Muufri are close to perfecting cow-free milk. Milk-producing genes are inserted into yeast, which are then bred in vast numbers to produce milk proteins. INSECT INGREDIENTS Insects are a sustainable protein. While many may not be persuaded to eat them, it’s likely that consumers will start finding ingredients such as flour made from crushed crickets in their food. APPETISING ALGAE Seaweed grows quickly and is a core part of Japanese diets. As it can be grown at sea, it would solve the issue of dwindling land for crops. There are thousands of varieties that could be farmed and eaten. DOWNLOAD DISHES 3D printing is already used to create fancy structures in high-end sweet-making. If 3D printers continue to advance, people will be able to download…

When you stand on a beach and look out over the sea, you’re faced with two gigantic components of the Earth’s engine: the atmosphere and the ocean. Many of us can sit and look at the boundary between water and air for hours, watching it change shape as waves and tides move it around. But we have a strikingly different relationship with the blue below and the blue above. We can look up into the air and see clouds and birds and planes passing by. We know what’s going on up there and it’s part of our world. But when we look down into the ocean, we see almost nothing beyond the surface. There are all sorts of things down there – fish and kelp, mountains and valleys – but…

1933 Mr and Mrs Spicer describe a large, blob-shaped animal at Loch Ness, seen bounding across the road in front of their car. It triggers interest in the Loch Ness Monster. IVAN SANDERSON (1911-1973) This Scottish biologist worked with Bernard Heuvelmans to devise many ideas about cryptids. He travelled widely in pursuit of animals and wrote a lot of books. BERNARD HEUVELMANS (1916-2001) This scientist was the main proponent of cryptozoology. He wrote books and articles, and devised a number of ideas on the evolution of cryptids. 1967 At Bluff Creek, California, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin film a large biped who matches Bigfoot descriptions. Debate rages over the film’s authenticity. TIM DINSDALE (1924-1987) This aeronautical engineer achieved fame for his passionate interest in the Loch Ness Monster. He went…

Some of life’s problems are easily solved. How do we deter people from cheating? Simple: keep an eye on them, and hand out punishment when they transgress. This time last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made headlines when it applied this strategy to Volkswagen. The EPA revealed that for years VW had been secretly fitting its cars with software that detected when a car was undergoing a test, and tweaked the operation of the engine, temporarily reducing performance – along with its emissions. Once the car was on the road, the software brought the performance back up – together with the levels of noxious oxides of nitrogen (NOx), which soared above the official standard. A year on, and VW has confessed, lost its CEO and agreed to pay…

This week we have a puzzle without a known solution. I mean, we have a pretty good solution, but we don’t know for sure if it is the best one possible, or which other solutions are out there. The puzzle is to find the most efficient path through the alphabet where each letter is represented by the binary of its position in the alphabet. And ‘most efficient’ here means the least annoying way to paint them on your nails. Representing the alphabet with binary digits is nothing new. Computers thrive on electrical signals where electrons are either flowing or not. So since the clandestine computers of WWII, we’ve needed ways to convert human-friendly letters into machine-crunchable ones and zeroes. For a while this was done in a haphazard fashion with…

A cell in an early embryo has something akin to a superpower. It can transform into any part of the organism, a skin cell perhaps, a muscle cell, a nerve cell or a blood cell. Before Dolly, everyone assumed that in mammals this process of specialisation, so-called ‘di erentiation’, was irreversible. Dolly proved otherwise. Scientists start with an egg cell 1 . The nucleus (the part of the cell that contains the majority of the genetic material) is removed from the egg cell2 . A single di erentiated cell, in this case an udder cell from an adult donor, is picked up by a tiny needle 3 . The udder cell is injected into the egg cell and a small electrical pulse is used to fuse the nucleus into its…

WHALES MOURN THEIR DEAD Researchers from Italy have observed six species of whales clinging to the bodies of a dead podmate, in clear pain and distress. The findings mean whales join chimps, giraffes and elephants in displaying signs of grief. IT’S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE TO THE PHILAE LANDER After more than a year of failed attempts, ESA have given up trying to contact Philae – the part of the Rosetta mission that landed on the distant comet 67P. Farewell, plucky little spacecraft. BABY TALK HELPS CHILDREN LEARN TO SPEAK Coochy coo! Speaking ‘motherese’ to your little ’un may help them pick up languages more quickly. The effect is due to the exaggeration of certain sounds, making them easier for babies to pick up. APOLLO ASTRONAUTS ARE FIVE TIMES MORE…

TAKEAWAY BOTS HIT UK Remember the Australian pizza-delivery robot we told you about a few issues ago? Well, a similar service is now available in the UK. Developed by Starship Technologies,the robots are currently undergoing real-world testing in London by the Just Eat takeaway network. AI PARKING PAL An AI chatbot created by a British student at Stanford University has successfully contested over 160,000 parking tickets in New York and London, saving drivers over $4m in fines. If you’ve had a ticket you’re not happy about, visit donotpay.co.uk to use the service for yourself. SHEEP VIEW Google StreetView is great, but its coverage isn’t ubiquitous. It doesn’t cover the remote Faroe Islands, for instance. Enterprising locals have therefore created their own version, by attaching 360° cameras to the collars of…

We’re listening The article about the robot that pretends to care (July, p31) may seem like a pointless achievement to some but I disagree. If applied correctly, these little CommU bots could help make our world a far less stressful environment. There are a lot of people who would like someone or something to listen to them. Not to understand, just to listen! With the pace at which people live today, few have the time nor the inclination to listen. M Stokes, via email Heart to heart The Michael Reiss article on xenotransplantation was informative (August, p67). Yet I suspect I was not the only reader who found it disturbing. As far as possible, we need to allow each species to live a life that their nature intends, otherwise they…

What is DNA? DNA is the genetic instruction manual in our cells. Genes are stretches of DNA that act as ‘recipes’ for making molecules called proteins, which build our bodies and keep them working. What is a mutation? Changes in genes (mutations) can affect the protein they encode, making it more or less active, or causing disease. For example, if you have a mutation in the gene BRCA2 (pictured), you have a higher risk of breast cancer. How do mutations happen? Mutations can be inherited or can occur when eggs and sperm are made, or in the fertilised egg (pictured left). Can adults get mutations? Mutations can occur in the DNA within cells in the adult body. While these changes can’t be passed on to the next generation, they can…

“I wouldn’t want to eat something so similar to meat, even if there was no cruelty involved. Putting so much energy in this direction also perpetuates the myth that meat is necessary and desirable. But if it’s marketed as an accessible product, it could have great consequences for the environment and animals.” Elena Orde, editor of The Vegan “While the science of lab-grown meat is interesting, the National Farmers’ Union believes there is great potential for farming to be sustainable and more efficient, to reduce emissions and feed a growing population while offering benefits to the environment, landscape and the rural economy.” Dr Helen Ferrier, NFU’s chief science adviser “If it becomes possible to produce cultured meats that have a similar taste, texture and nutrition to ‘real’ meats, then I…

August 1933. It was a warm summer’s day when Mr and Mrs Spicer were driving along the road adjacent to Loch Ness. Suddenly, lurching from left to right across the road, appeared an amorphous, monstrous apparition that moved with a peculiar bounding motion. An object that looked like the head of a small deer was located somewhere about its middle. The Spicers’ sighting was one of the very first to describe the Loch Ness Monster, a creature known more popularly today as ‘Nessie’. It’s a classic sighting, regarded as part of a field – cryptozoology, the hunt for unknown and typically monstrous animals – seen by its proponents as challenging mainstream science. The Spicers’ account is one of many Nessie sightings, and only one of thousands of monster sightings worldwide.…

DR CHRISTIAN JARRETT Christian is a psychology and neuroscience writer. His latest book is Great Myths Of The Brain. DR ALASTAIR GUNN Alastair is an astronomer at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. PROF ROBERT MATTHEWS Robert is a physicist and science writer. He’s visiting professor in science at Aston University. DR PETER J BENTLEY Peter is a computer scientist and author who is based at University College London. His latest book is Digitized. LUIS VILLAZON Luis is a freelance science and tech writer with a BSc in computing and an MSc in zoology from Oxford University. PROF MARK LORCH Chemist and writer Mark is a professor at Hull University. He recently co-edited A Flash Of Light. How long until we run out of landfill…

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES BY ED YONG Out 1 September (£20, The Bodley Head) There are more bacteria in your gut than there are stars in the Milky Way. This beautifully written guide to the microbes that call our bodies home explains how they protect us from disease, change our behaviour and influence our evolution. THE BIG PICTURE BY SEAN CARROLL Out 1 September (£18.99, Oneworld) What is reality? Why does the Universe exist? Are photons conscious? Sean Carroll doesn’t shy away from the big questions as he attempts to get to the bottom of the origins of life and the cosmos. HIDDEN FIGURES BY MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY Out 8 September (£16.99, William Collins) Set to be adapted as a film next year, this is the untold story of NASA’s African-American…

Over two years ago, we tested the first wave of 4K, or Ultra HD, TVs. We loved the tech, but advised caution since there was a serious shortage of any actual content to watch. In the following years we’d hoped there would be a steady stream of new 4K content, instead we got a lacklustre dribble of YouTube videos and promos. This year, that’s all about to change. Ultra HD is coming to Sky’s streaming service Sky Q with a flotilla of films, sport and TV, while Netflix, Amazon and YouTube are ramping up their Ultra HD offerings. Combined with plunging prices of screens and new, super-accurate OLED panels, the time to upgrade your TV might finally be here. Our guide will pick apart the different technologies out there, show…

When I was little, one of my fingertips got cut off in a door. In hospital, they sliced off part of a toe and used it to recreate my finger. I found the fact that they could develop a finger from a toe absolutely amazing. It made me become interested in medical science. Then HIV/AIDS came on the scene. I remember picking up a magazine with a mirror on the front that said: ‘This is what someone with HIV looks like’. But the mirror was bent, and it distorted my face. I was petrified and told my parents that when I grew up I wanted to find a cure for AIDS. My career aspirations fluctuated. Sometimes I wanted to be a scientist, other times I wanted to be a yellow…