Table of contents for January 2016 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

1915 WAS A fantastic year for science. Albert Einstein, who graced last month’s cover, published his General Theory of Relativity, a paper that described the threads making up the fabric of our Universe. 1859 wasn’t bad, either: that was the year Charles Darwin gave us On The Origin Of Species, an idea so profound it made humanity rethink its place in the world. And then there was 300BC, when Euclid established geometry as we know it today – a simple tool that’s still essential to our efforts to explore our Universe. Of course, nothing in 2015 could quite touch these seismic breakthroughs. But still, this year it seemed like barely a week went by without news of another ‘world first’ hitting our desks. Rosetta found oxygen – a crucial ingredient…

It’s been good for: GYM BUNNIES LOOKS LIKE IT’S time to hit the treadmill. Older adults who take moderate exercise have thicker cortices, the outer layer of the brain that typically atrophies in cases of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers at the University of Maryland have found. COFFEE DRINKERS MAKE MINE AN espresso. A study at Harvard University has found that drinking two or three cups of coffee a day may reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular and neurological diseases. It’s been bad for: SHARKS IT SEEMS THAT climate change is just as bad news for sharks as it is for humans. Increasing sea temperatures lead to the fish becoming hungrier, but increased levels of carbon dioxide in the water are interfering with their ability to locate food via…

Molecular ‘Death Clock’ That sounds nasty. What is it? It is the name for the processes inside cells that generate genetic mutations at a constant rate. They were discovered by researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Tell me more. Every cell in the human body contains a copy of the human genome. Over the course of a lifetime, cells acquire mutations in their genomes. Some of these occur in bursts thanks to external factors such as smoking or exposure to sunlight. However, researchers have now found two types of mutation that correlate with age, suggesting that they are constantly ‘ticking away’. Is that a bad thing? Probably. The researchers think that these processes could be responsible for a large number of human cancers and may contribute to human ageing.…

THE EARTH IS known as the Blue Planet for good reason: liquid water covers more than two-thirds of its surface. But exactly how it got there has always been a bit of a puzzle. The question at the heart of the mystery is: was water present when the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago or did it arrive later, perhaps carried here by comets and meteorites? Now, researchers at the Universities of Glasgow and Hawaii have found evidence that suggests water has been on the Earth since its formation. The team used an ion microprobe to analyse tiny amounts of water held within a collection of primitive rocks known to have formed deep within the Earth’s mantle. Different Solar System bodies have distinct ratios of hydrogen to deuterium (heavy hydrogen)…

IT’S LIKE AN ultrasound scan for a nascent planet: researchers at the University of Arizona have captured the first ever photo of a planet as it is forming. The team noticed the nascent planet when observing LkCa15, a young star surrounded by a ‘protoplanetary disk’ located 450 light-years from Earth. Protoplanetary disks form around young stars using the debris left over from the star’s formation. It is suspected that planets then form inside the disk as the dust groups together. “This is the first time that we’ve imaged a planet that we can say is still forming,” said researcher Steph Sallum. Of the roughly 2,000 exoplanets – planets that orbit stars other than the Sun – observed so far, only around 10 have been imaged. The photo of the planet…

Tech for tots YOU MIGHT NOT think that all that cooing baby talk has much of an effect, but studies show that speaking to your infant has a crucial impact on their development. The Starling is a star-shaped device that clips to your baby’s clothes and keeps track of the number of words you speak to them, lighting up green when you’ve reached your daily target. The companion app will even suggest activities if you’re at a loss for words. Patent pending Raising the bra WHAT DO GECKOS and women’s underwear have in common? A lot more than you might think. Geckos can run across ceilings thanks to the microscopic structure of the their toes. Now, US engineer Anthony Roy has created a silicone-based material called GeckTeck that uses the…

APES WATCHED ‘HORROR FILMS’ Kyoto University researchers showed two movies to apes. In the first, a person dressed as an ape leaps out from one of two doors. In the second, a person picks up a hammer and bashes the ‘ape’. They used eye-tracking to see what was holding the apes’ attention, then played the films again 24 hours later. When watching the first video for a second time, the apes watched the door from which they’d seen the ‘ape’ jump out. With the second video they stared at the hammer. This proved that apes can store and retrieve information in their long-term memories.…

WHEN THE NEW Horizons probe launched in January 2006, it received little media coverage. Yet in 2015, after travelling nearly five billion kilometres, this 478kg spacecraft, around the size of a piano, captured everyone’s imagination with its stunning images of Pluto. After picking up speed with a slingshot manoeuvre around Jupiter in early 2007, the probe hurtled towards the outer reaches of the Solar System at speeds that peaked at 80,000km/h, yet it took another seven years to reach its destination. In January, New Horizons sent back the first photographs of Pluto and its main moon Charon, showing them as fuzzy dots. By May, features were beginning to appear in the images, along with Pluto’s smaller moons, Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. On 14 July the probe made its closest…

EXPERIMENTAL 3D PRINTING of human tissue has been underway for some years, but 2015 saw real breakthroughs. A team from the University of California, San Francisco used a revolutionary technique called DNA Programmed Assembly of Cells to produce tiny models of living structures containing several hundred cells. Within a decade it could be possible to build a living model of a cancer patient’s affected organ, which could be used to test drugs for side effects. WHY SHOULD I CARE? It opens up a world of research possibilities, without the need for human experiments. WHAT’S NEXT? Longer term, it could be possible to grow complete organs, which would slash the length of transplant waiting lists.…

1543 The publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s (pictured) De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium and Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica revolutionise the worlds of astronomy and medicine. 1907 Leo Baekeland (pictured) invents Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, while Ivan Pavlov conducts his experiments regarding conditioning. 1917 Ernest Rutherford (pictured) splits the atom, spawning the discipline of nuclear physics. In France, US army surgeon Oswald Hope Robertson pioneers the use of blood banks. 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick describe DNA. The Miller-Urey experiment shows how the first amino acids may have formed. 1967At Cambridge University, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers the first pulsar. And speaking of things that pulse, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard carries out the first human heart transplant. 1846 US dentist William Morton pioneers the use of general anaesthetic, while…

SINCE BEING SELECTED as a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut in 2009, Tim Peake has lived underground for a week, spent 12 days in a laboratory beneath the ocean, and completed training exercises that would make Arnold Schwarzenegger weep. In 2013, ESA announced that Tim would be travelling to the International Space Station (ISS) for a six-month stint in space, becoming the first British astronaut to live and work on the orbital outpost. His time has finally come. On 15 December, Tim will be launched into space aboard the Soyuz TMA-19M, blasting off from Kazakhstan along with fellow Expedition 46/47 crewmembers Yuri Malenchenko and Timothy Kopra. His mission is named ‘Principia’ in honour of Isaac Newton’s masterwork of physics Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica – the learnings from which will help…

THE DEAD OF night was upon Barry Murray. The sports nutritionist and ultra-marathoner had been running for 18 hours, give or take. Right now, he was experiencing one of his earworms – tunes that would play over and over in the jukebox of his mind. Mos Def ’s Ms Fat Booty was currently giving him a lift, driving him through the difficult miles. In previous races, Use Me by Bill Withers had helped him along. “That’s the song that rings in my head,” explains Murray, who insists he never eats breakfast before racing. “It has done so for a few years now, during every ultra I have run.” While the mental effort required to run 200km across the trails and mountain passes of County Kerry is unimaginable to most, we’re…

1 A LITERARY NIGHTMARE Mark Twain’s short story A Literary Nightmare (1876) tells of a town afflicted by a jingle-like poem. The jingle was based on a real-life information sign about tram tickets, hence “Punch brothers! Punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare!” 2 MELODIC PATTERNS The early 20th-Century Russian-born composer Nicolas Slonimsky identified patterns in music that could “hook the mind and force it to mimicry and repetition” in his 1947 book Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodic Patterns. 3 VOLGA BOATMEN The late neurologist Oliver Sacks once injured his leg badly while escaping an enraged bull on a mountaintop. In A Leg to Stand On (1984) he explains how the rhythm of Song Of The Volga Boatmen kept him conscious as he slid himself to safety.…

1. Tatooine/Kepler-16b Appearing in everyStar Warsmovie exceptThe Empire Strikes Back, Tatooine is a desert planet and the home of Luke and Anakin Skywalker. In A New Hope, an iconic scene shows Tatooine’s twin suns setting over the horizon. Astronomers have found several examples of planets orbiting in these so-called ‘binary systems’. The most famous is Kepler-16b – a real-life Tatooine. 2. Hoth/OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb In The Empire Strikes Back, the rebels set up their base on the snowy planet of Hoth. Most of the exoplanets found to date are reasonably warm, as planets that orbit closer to their stars are easier to spot. That said, the planet with the name of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb is a contender for a Hoth lookalike. With temperatures plummeting to -220°C, it is almost certain to be covered with…

LYTRO IMMERGE A camera for making virtual reality worlds lytro.com WHEN LYTRO LAUNCHED its first Light Field camera back in 2012, enabling you to refocus pictures afterthey’d been taken, it was revolutionary – so much so that the rest of the camera industry has yet to catch up. But Lytro isn’t resting on its laurels: it’s now putting its Light Field technology to use in 3D motion picture capture for VR applications – a sector of the industry that’s currently booming. Where traditional photography records the colour and intensity of light at a given point (whether on a piece of film or a CCD sensor), Light Field or ‘plenoptic’ photography uses an array of lenses to capture much more information about the light in a given space, including its direction.…

WHAT’S ‘EM-SENSING’? It’s a new technology, developed by Disney and Carnegie Mellon University, that enables a wearable device to know what objects – for instance a keyboard or power tool – you’re holding. HOW DOES IT WORK? All electrical or electromechanical objects emit small amounts of electromagnetic (EM) ‘noise’ that propagates harmlessly through your body when you touch them. These signals can be used to identify objects. WHY IS IT USEFUL? The idea is that a smartwatch or other wearable device with EM-sensing would know what you’re doing and then feed you data that’s specific to that task: local maps if you’re driving, for example, or a timer if you’re brushing your teeth. The system could also be used to log you into your computer without using a password. SO…

POC FORNIX COMMUNICATION £200, pocsports.com In many ways, the Poc Fornix is similar to most other winter helmets out there. The Swedish brand moulds together aramid strings and a foam liner to create a helmet that’ll not only protect you from the daily tumble, but do so at a relatively lightweight 420g. Poc also keeps venting to a minimum, to retain warmth without turning your goggles into a sauna and the slopes into a sweat fest. But it’s the addition of the lowercase ‘b’ that’ll appeal to the helmet-bangers out there, as a cosy neckroll hides integrated Beats by Dr Dre headphones. It comes with a remote control so, as Poc says, you can “take calls, switch tunes and adjust volume right from the cord”. CELESTRON ELEMENTS FIRECEL £30, celestron.com…

4.5-3.8 billion YEARS AGO First living organisms appear. Specks of graphite, thought to be produced by early life, have been dated to 4.1 billion years ago – as old as the oldest rocks. 3-3.5 billion YEARS AGO The oldest evidence of actual microbial cells dates back to around three billion years ago. These were similar to cyanobacteria (pictured). The last known common ancestor of all life on Earth lived in this period, just before cells split into two main types: bacteria and archaea. 2-2.5 billion YEARS AGO Evidence of oxygen in the atmosphere suggests an abundance of oxygen-producing, photosynthetic organisms. The first eukaryotic cells appear, thought to be the result of one cell enslaving another as an energy source. 580 MILLION YEARS AGO Multicellular life on Earth starts flourishing. The…

1. IT IS A LONG STORY All life on Earth evolved from ancient, simple cells. These cells formed around 3.5 billion years ago after chemicals developed certain biological properties, such as the ability to self-replicate or cooperate with other molecules. 2. CHEMISTRY BECAME BIOLOGY There are many competing theories on which were the first biological chemicals and how they formed. It seems likely to have happened over many millions of years of chemical reactions, assisted by catalysts such as UV light, lightning, or deep-sea vents. Some believe that key chemicals fell to Earth from space. 3. THE STAGE WAS SET FOR EVOLUTION soon as a chemical mixture could self-replicate, self-assemble As and produce energy, the process of evolution began. Each generation produced new versions, and those with advantageous features survived…

DECEMBER Big Cats: An Amazing Animal Family Sky 1, exact date and time TBC The cat purring away on your lap belongs to a long and impressive dynasty. From lions and tigers to ocelots and cheetahs, Patrick Aryee looks back over 11 million years of cat evolution, revealing how they became the most successful family of predators on the planet. Grrrr-eat! 15 DECEMBER Stargazing Live Specials BBC One/BBC Two, time TBC TIM PEAKE WILL be appearing on our screens more often than the Queen and Del Boy combined this festive season. In these Stargazing Live specials presented by Prof Brian Cox and Dara O Briain, you’ll be able to follow Tim’s progress as he undertakes his journey of a lifetime. Watch live as he launches into space at around 11:00…

UNTIL 3 JANUARY Destination Space: Astronauts Show Life Science Centre, Newcastle, life.org.uk COULD YOU GIVE Matt Damon a run for his money and survive in space? From wearing spacesuits to food and exercise, this show explores life as an astronaut. Included in entry price for venue. 9 JANUARY 2016 Scottish FameLab Final National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, times TBC, free, nms.ac.uk WITNESS SCIENCE COMMUNICATORS presenting their ideas in three minutes, and decide who will win a place in the FameLab UK Final. 9 JANUARY Silver Screen Sci-Fi Showing Royal Observatory Greenwich, London, 6pm-8:15pm, £8, rmg.co.uk WATCH THE ANIMATED film Renaissance, set in dystopian Paris, then enjoy a talk from an astronomer about the science behind it. UNTIL 10 JANUARY Child’s Play: Toys And Technology National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, free,…

Hardback Paperback The Making Of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Piers Bizony Taschen £49.99 IN SOME WAYS, making an art book about 2001: A Space Odyssey is cheating – Kubrick’s masterpiece is one of the most beautiful films ever made. But this book doesn’t just rely on the source material. It pulls together images, interviews and testimonies that will make you love the film even more. From detailed line drawings to contemporary NASA concept art, there’s a new perspective on almost every page. And though the book’s monolith shape might seem like a gimmick, the gatefold pages add an extra dimension as you open them out. Like the film, this book has a touch of magic. DANIEL BENNETT (Acting Editor) Map Phaidon £39.95 FROM ANCIENT ENGRAVINGS of the sea…

Brian Clegg Brian is author of over 20 popular science books. This month he’s in a reflective mood as, starting on p32, he takes a look back at some of 2015’s greatest scientific breakthroughs. Jheni Osman Jheni is a science writer, TV presenter and former Focus editor. Starting on p42, she looks at some less talked-about ecosystems that are vital for life on Earth. Hayley Birch Science journalist Hayley is co-author of the book Big Questions In Science. On p58 she looks at the annoying phenomenon of ‘earworms’ – tunes that get stuck in your head. Tim Peake Tim is a cross-country runner and former army test pilot. Oh, and the first British astronaut to be sent to the International Space Station! Read our interview with him on p52.…

MY FIRST IMPRESSION of being in a typhoon was that it felt like warm buckets of water were being chucked over me. It made British storms look amateur. I was soaked through in seconds. I was in the Philippines, an island nation that lies in the path of a typhoon production line fed by the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean, in late October just as Typhoon Koppu hit. The producer and I struggled with umbrellas above the cameraman who was desperate to save his lens. The winds were powerful enough to knock down trees but it was the sheer scale of the downpour that did most damage. A staggering metre of rain fell in a couple of days. Roads became rivers. There were casualties, but the death toll, which…

DESPITE BEING AMONG the darkest objects in the Universe, black holes are still capable of producing some of the brightest events. NASA’s Swift and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) space telescopes have successfully captured Markarian 335, a supermassive black hole located 324 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Pegasus, spewing out a gigantic flare of bright, energetic X-ray light. The finding suggests that supermassive black holes send out enormous beams of X-rays when their coronas, sources of extremely energetic particles that surround them, are ejected. “This is the first time we have been able to link the launching of the corona to a flare,” explained lead author Dr Dan Wilkins from Saint Mary’s University in Canada. “This will help us understand how supermassive black holes power…

THE ROYAL INSTITUTION (RI) Christmas Lectures are a fine tradition, right up there with carol concerts and eating too much turkey. But one has always stuck in my memory, and to my amazement it’s turned up on the RI’s online video archive. That’s not because of its age – though it is over 40 years old – but because it caused the RI huge embarrassment. I still remember being dumbstruck by what Prof Eric Laithwaite demonstrated before his wide-eyed audience of youngsters. In classic Christmas Lecture style, he set up various experiments to illustrate scientific phenomena. His aim wasn’t to bore on about some esoteric concept, but to show there was something fundamentally wrong with Newton’s laws of motion. The experiments involved gyroscopes, and Laithwaite showed how these spinning contraptions…

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE world often come in one of two flavours. First of all, we ask why things are the way they are (as many harassed parents will know). Why do chickens lay eggs? Why is it dark at night? Why is the world like this? But often my favourites are the second type: why isn’tthe world like this? Why don’t pigs fly? Why haven’t the aliens come to visit? These questions take a bit more imagination, the mental invention of how the world might be, instead of acceptance of how it is. I was asked a fantastic question of the second type recently, and I love it because it’s such an obvious idea once you’ve thought of it, one that’s staring us all in the face. But I’ve never…

AT CHRISTMAS WE commemorate the birth of Jesus. The Bible shows Jesus’s birth as laden with significance, with the mysterious star hanging in the sky over Bethlehem, and the visit of three sages from the east. It seems likely, though, that nobody at the time realised the significance of Jesus, born as he was to an ‘ordinary’ family at a moment when they were displaced from their home because of the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire, a ladder of power at which Jesus’s family was somewhere near the bottom. It is thought there have been one hundred billion human births over the course of history, and few have been seen as notable at the time. This is particularly true in an age in which inherited power is a less significant…

A team from the University of California figured out a way of untangling proteins in cooked egg whites and allowing them to refold, as if the egg had been ‘unboiled’. First, they hard boiled the eggs. They then liquefied the cooked egg white with urea, before using a ‘vortex fluid device’ to apply forces to the tiny strands of protein in the white. This separated the proteins back to their clear form. Being able to reform proteins from yeast or E. colibacteria may lead to better methods for making proteins, which could help create cheaper cancer treatments.…

THERE IS MUCH talk of reviving extinct animals such as mammoths from frozen DNA. While this is still some way from being possible, 2015 saw an endangered species put on the road to recovery using decades-old frozen sperm. The black-footed ferret, a North American mammal, was already in severe danger of extinction when 18 of them were put in a captive breeding programme back in the 1980s. The sperm of six ferrets, including that of one called ‘Scarface’, was frozen. Then in August this year, Scarface became a donor father, even though he died around 20 years ago. The frozen sperm was successfully used by American zoos and the Smithsonian Institute to artificially inseminate living females, therefore improving the species’ chance of survival by boosting genetic diversity in the tiny…

IT HAS BEEN known for some time that there was water on Mars, notably in the polar ice caps. However, Mars has a combination of a very low atmospheric pressure – which means that any liquid water quickly evaporates – and an average surface temperature of around -63°C, making liquid water unlikely to form in the first place. It was, then, a major surprise when NASA announced evidence that there is flowing liquid water on the surface of the planet. While no water was observed on the move, scientists found dark, narrow streaks a few hundred metres long, running down gulleys, which appeared to ‘ebb and flow over time’. These are likely to have been produced by flowing water, especially as hydrated salts have been discovered on those slopes. These…

GOING TO THE TOILET Visiting the loo in microgravity is completely different to going on Earth. The two ISS toilets use fan-driven suction systems to prevent any nasty mishaps. Poo goes into plastic bags and is stored in an aluminium container. Urine is collected, then processed into drinking water. EATING Space food has come a long way since the insipid pastes of yesteryear. Astronauts today can choose from a range of foods, including fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, rice, tortillas, soup and brownies. Tim Peake will be going one better, tucking into a British-inspired menu developed especially for him by Heston Blumenthal. DRINKING As well as drinking recycled urine, astronauts can enjoy coffee and tea on board – supplied as freeze-dried mixes – and a variety of flavoured drinks and juices.…

DRAKE HOTLINE BLING “I am not a Drake fan. While this probably doesn’t keep the singer/ songwriter up at night, it does make the fact that his latest single is seared onto my brain that little bit more galling.” Daniel Bennett, Acting Editor SISQÓ THONG SONG “I didn’t like Thong Song when it first came out, so it seems particularly cruel that this 90s atrocity is the one tune that never fails to ping into my brain. And singing it out loud in work takes quite a bit of explaining.” Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, Production Editor THOMAS OLIPHANT DECK THE HALLS “The Christmas carol Deck The Halls is the worst for me. I even find myself humming different arrangements: there’s a lounge version, a chiptune version and so on, all of which…

SUSAN BLACKMORE Susan is Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. Her books include The Meme Machine and Ten Zen Questions DR ALASTAIR GUNN Alastair is a radio astronomer at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester ROBERT MATTHEWS After studying physics at Oxford, Robert became a science writer. He’s a Visiting Professor in Science at Aston University GARETH MITCHELL Starting out as a broadcast engineer, Gareth now writes and presents Click on the BBC World Service LUIS VILLAZON Luis has a BSc in computing and an MSc in zoology from Oxford. His works include How Cows Reach The Ground EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO questions@sciencefocus.com or post to FocusQ&A, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol, BS1 3BN Why are Stormtroopers so useless? A IT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE a…

BB-8 Looking like R2-D2’s cooler, cuter cousin, BB -8 is set to be one of the stars of The Force Awakens. We peer inside the toy version of the rollerball droid to find out what makes it tick. Omni wheels Two omni wheels connect the droid’s motor assembly to the inside of the shell, so that the sphere can roll in any direction. An omni wheel can turn forwards, backwards and sideways, thanks to spinning cylinders around its rim. The droids used for the film were less sophisticated: they included remote-controlled props, a puppet, trike versions, and even a throwable ‘bowling ball’. They were all built as practical effects and then enhanced post-production. The working promotional version detailed here was made after filming, by the original effects team and robotics…

WHAT’S HOT WAX CYLINDERS Not the cylinders themselves – they were edged out by newfangled ‘records’ around the time of WWI. Rather, it’s the music stored on them that’s making a comeback. A team at University of California, Santa Barbara has been busy digitising over 10,000 recordings from the 19th and 20th Centuries, which you can hear and download at cylinders.library.ucsb.edu WHAT’S NOT BETAMAX Sony has announced that in March 2016, it will discontinue production of Betamax cassettes. Despite VHS emerging as the dominant video format by the mid-1980s, Sony carried on making Betamax equipment right up until 2002, and it’s been quietly supplying users with new tape all this while. But March will see the format’s 41-year run finally coming to an end. READER POLL Will virtual reality take…

1 BACK ON BLACKBERRY No need to check the date… we really are shouting about a new BlackBerry in 2015! The PRIV is the embattled mobile-maker’s first phone to run on Android, and its name reflects the emphasis placed on security. With an 18MP camera, 5.4-inch screen, 4K video camera and up to 2TB of storage, the full range of Android apps plus BlackBerry’s slide-out keyboard, could a BlackBerry once more become ‘the mobile for business’? BlackBerry PRIV £559, blackberry.com 2 CAN YOU SEE MY AURA? At time of writing, this latest virtual reality headset had smashed its Kickstarter target with three weeks to go, and the first units will ship in February. Unlike Google Cardboard or Samsung Gear, it’s a self-contained unit and doesn’t require you to strap your…

What is this Our most ancient ancestor could be a porous rock. Some scientists believe conditions in deep-sea alkaline vents would have encouraged metabolic-style reactions. Alkaline minerals, reacting with seawater, create concentrated chemicals within tiny pores in the rock. The pores could have acted like the compartments in living cells that generate energy. The origin of life – how long ago was that? Around four billion years ago, when the Earth was still partially molten and under heavy bombardment from meteors, the very first life-like systems appeared. Somehow, chemicals developed life-like properties – using matter and energy from the hellish environment to make more of themselves. Origin of life researchers are still trying to work out exactly how, during this period, chemistry suddenly became biology. Once basic biological systems formed,…

ABIOGENESIS The technical term for life originating from non-living matter such as simple organic chemicals. The opposite, biogenesis, means living matter arising from other living matter, which is how life on Earth proliferated once it started. RNA WORLD RNA is like a single-stranded version of DNA and performs many important functions in all living cells. Scientists have shown that RNA can spontaneously form a self-replicating molecule, suggesting the Earth was once populated by simple self-replicating RNA forms. PROTON GRADIENT Cells can only function properly with energy created by complex metabolic reactions, which generate a difference in chemical charges in different parts of the cell. This is known as a proton gradient. Working out how it could occur spontaneously is a key part of establishing how early life functioned. LUCA The…

DNA Play iOS 6.0 or later, iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, Android 2.3.3 or later, Avokiddo, £2.29 KIDS LOVE MONSTERS, as long as they aren’t hiding under the bed! DNA Play is an open-ended creative experience that uses monsters to teach your little ones about DNA, genes and mutations. In this beautifully illustrated app they can drag, drop and tap DNA strands to tweak and create over 200 billion different little critters. As they do so, the monsters will undergo strange mutations in real time, inspiring young minds and sparking conversations about what makes us who we are. TreeId iOS 6.0 or later, iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, Android 2.2 or later, Isoperla, £2.99 IS YOUR CHRISTMAS tree a Norway spruce? Or perhaps you plumped for a Lodgepole pine this year? What do you mean, you…

My grandfather invented the volume control you get on radios as well as the he induction loop that is still used in theatres to help people with hearing difficulties. My father was a physicist too. Even when I was young, he had already decided that I would follow in his footsteps and become a scientist. I’ve always worked obsessively. My parents went to my school to complain that I was working too much. But the teachers just laughed and said they wished this problem was more common. I have two jobs at the moment. I’m Research Professor at Nottingham University, and Foreign Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society – each of them takes 60 per cent of my time! Sadly, I have little spare time for hobbies. But…

…chowed down on a burger made of mealworms when we paid a visit to Grub Kitchen in Pembrokeshire – the UK’s first insect restaurant. Read about it at bit.ly/1P9D0Kz …went for a spin in the new Tesla Model S. We were testing out the new autopilot feature, which makes it almost self-driving – but it was the face-melting acceleration that impressed us the most. …dispatched Picture Editor James to the Wellcome Image Awards, where he was one of this year’s judging panel. We’ll bring you some of the winning pictures very soon… FOCUS DIGITAL Available for Android • iOS • Kindle Fire • Kindle e-reader…

Who’s he? A mathematics professor based at the Federal University of Oye-Ekiti in Nigeria who claims to have solved the Riemann Hypothesis. Hang on. Riemann what? It’s a notoriously tricky mathematical problem that was proposed by German polymath Bernhard Reimann back in 1859. It involves the distribution of prime numbers, those only divisible by themselves and one. Enoch claims to have the solution, though as he is yet to publish his proof not everyone is convinced he is correct. Why is it so important? The Riemann Hypothesis is one of the seven so-called Millennium Prize Problems set by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. The problems are so fiendishly difficult that the institute decided to offer $1m to the first person to solve one of them. I fancy having a…

IT SEEMS PIGEONS may not be so bird-brained after all. A team at the University of California, Davis has trained the birds to pick out cancerous breast tissue on mammograms. After two weeks of training, using food as motivation, the pigeons were able to correctly identify cancerous tissue 85 per cent of the time. This is a level of accuracy similar to that of human radiologists. “Research over the past 50 years has shown that pigeons can distinguish identities and emotional expressions on human faces, letters of the alphabet, misshapen pharmaceutical capsules, and even paintings by Monet vs Picasso,” said co-author Edward Wasserman. “Their visual memory is equally impressive, with a proven recall of more than 1,800 images.” Even after years of training, physicians can sometimes struggle to correctly interpret…

REMEMBER THE MINI submarine Dennis Quaid used to cruise around the human circulatory system in classic 80s sci-fi movie Innerspace? Well, researchers at Rice University have made the next best thing: a 244-atom nano-submarine that could be used to deliver medicines inside the body. The subs are powered by motors that operate in a similar fashion to a bacteria’s flagellum – the tail-like filament that allows microbes to swim through fluids. When excited by ultraviolet light, the bond that holds the rotor to the body changes state allowing it to rotate a quarter turn. Then as it returns to its resting state, it jumps again rotating another quarter turn. This process continues so long as the light is on. The motors run at more than 1,000,000rpm and can reach speeds…

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT took a big step forward this year. In this small-scale version of a Star Trek transporter, properties of a quantum particle are transferred to another remote particle. The remote particle becomes indistinguishable from the original. This is only possible using a mix of the spooky connection of entanglement and conventional data transfer. The US researchers achieved teleportation along a 100km optical fibre link, four times the previous record. Teleportation keeps the data intact, which is crucial for quantum computers and quantum encryption. WHY SHOULD I CARE? It could lead to unbreakable encryption – no more hacked bank accounts! WHAT’S NEXT? Chinese researchers are planning a long-distance communication experiment that will teleport particles between satellites in the next couple of years.…

THE DISCOVERY OF a new human species is bound to make news, but it takes time to go from finding fossils to a clear scientific result. It was back in late 2013 that a team led by Lee Berger of Witwatersrand University, South Africa, followed up a sighting by cavers in a concealed chamber in the Rising Star cave system. The caves are around 29km from Johannesburg, in an area that has been given the nickname ‘the cradle of humankind’, as many fossils from early humans have been found there. In total, a remarkable 1,500 fossil fragments were removed from the cave, and this year the world discovered what they found. The bones made up the partial remains of 15 separate individuals of an early human species. Homo naledi, as…

11 per cent is the increase in desert foliage over the last two decades. This is due to soaring levels of carbon dioxide. 20 per cent of deserts are covered in sand. One-third of Earth’s surface is desert.* Antarctica is the world’s largest desert. The only plants that grow there are mosses and algae. China is building a 4,500km-long ‘Great Green Wall’ made up of 100 billion trees to try to hold back the Gobi Desert. *Based on the definition of a desert being a region with less rainfall in a year than it gives up through evaporation.…

AS PART OF my job, I get to give a lot of talks at conferences. I enjoy it a lot, partly because I like to meet new people, partly because it provides me with an opportunity to travel, but mostly because I’ve always found that the best way to test out your ideas is by saying them out loud in front of a bunch of sceptical listeners. And I like to use my own photos when I can, because they make the whole thing a lot more real. In fact, I’m writing this in a cafe in Bern where I’ve been taking photos that I’ll use in a talk today. Unfortunately I can’t find a photograph I’d really like to use, of some young people playing a PlayStation game in…