Table of contents for March 2016 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

Our long and troubled relationship with fossil fuels is coming to an end. Though estimates vary, it seems reasonable to say that by the end of the century there won’t be many fuels left to burn. Something has to take their place. China, India, Russia, South Korea and the US have been building more and more nuclear power plants to lend their fledgling renewable energy supplies a hand. Europe, on the other hand, has slowed down its production, while the UK hasn’t built a new nuclear power station in a generation. This year marks the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, and as the UK debates whether or not to build a new power plant at Hinkley Point, we ask: can we afford to neglect nuclear power any longer? The…

It looks like the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics already has a frontrunner: a team at LIGO has directly detected gravitational waves for the first time, 100 years after they were predicted by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by violent events such as the collision of massive objects like black holes. They travel across the Universe stretching and squeezing space-time as they go. However, their effect is so weak that even Einstein doubted we would ever be able to detect them. “Our observation of gravitational waves accomplishes an ambitious goal set out over five decades ago to directly detect this elusive phenomenon and better understand the Universe, and, fittingly, fulfills Einstein’s legacy on the 100th anniversary of his General…

It seems having a bit of a spring clean can leave you feeling like a spring chicken. Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota have found that flushing old cells out of mice extended their lifespans by 17 to 35 per cent, the equivalent of extending a human life from 80 to more than 100 years. The treated mice also looked younger and showed less age-related damage in their muscles and kidneys. The technique is based on removing so-called senescent cells – cells that have stopped dividing and are no longer needed by the body – using an otherwise harmless drug. “Senescent cells that accumulate with ageing are largely bad, do bad things to your organs and tissues, and therefore shorten your life but also the healthy phase of your life,”…

SPACE ADVENTURERS Dehydrated tardigrades were exposed to the vacuum of space while aboard a European Space Agency satellite in 2007. Many of the creatures were successfully rehydrated and brought back to life after returning to Earth 10 days later. SEA FARERS In June 2000, various species of tardigrade were discovered living in the Gulf of Mexico at depths between 625m and 3,159m. Studies have shown the creatures are able to withstand pressures of up to 87,022psi. POLAR EXPLORERS Absolute zero holds no fear for tardigrades. Back in the 1920s, Gilbert Franz Rahm demonstrated this by plunging them into liquid helium at -272°C for almost half an hour. He also submerged another group in water heated to 151°C for 15 minutes. NUCLEAR SURVIVORS Tardigrades are able to tolerate doses of ionising…

“IMAGINE WHAT WILL BECOME POSSIBLE WHEN WE OPEN THE CHANNEL BETWEEN THE BRAIN AND ELECTRONICS” The US’s ‘mad science’ wing DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is working on an implantable brain device that it hopes will let us control machines with our minds. The ‘wetware’ project comes under the auspices of DARPA’s Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) programme, and would take the shape of a small disc no more than a few millimetres thick. The device would monitor chemical signals in the brain and convert them into a series of digital pulses, and vice versa. The technology involved isn’t exactly new: laboratories around the world have been working to develop BMIs for quite a few years now. Indeed, some medical applications of the technology are already in use.…

On 11 March 2011, the future became the past. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake striking about 70km off the Pacific coast of Japan sent a huge surge of water towards the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The control room tried to shut it down, but water damage caused the diesel generators to fail, preventing coolant systems from operating. Three of the reactors in the plant suffered core meltdowns, with a series of accompanying explosions and the release of large amounts of radioactive material into the environment. It was a decisive moment in the history of energy, turning a generation against nuclear power. Five years on and the effects of the disaster are still apparent: small amounts of radiation continue to leak in to the Pacific Ocean and tonnes of waste and…

There is an alternative concept of ‘small modular reactors’. These miniature, sealed units are similar to the ones used to power nuclear submarines. These reactors could be deployed and it would be easy to scale them up or down to suit cities of different sizes. These reactors don’t require such huge up-front costs, so are much easier to roll out, but aren’t significantly cheaper than the big reactors in terms of investment per installed kilowatt. “We may see some of these,” says Muellner, “but I’m not sure that they’re going to make a difference.” So is nuclear energy likely to be a part of our future? It depends. In China and India, where public opinion plays less of a role in governmental decision-making, officials are aggressively expanding their nuclear output…

“Driverless cars will be able to stop extremely quickly once they detect a hazard. Also, they will never get drunk” Heather is an automotive software engineer and test driver. She holds a PhD in bioethics from the University of Bristol. The sound of screeching tyres followed by a bus hurtling directly towards you. It’s not exactly something you’d want to come across when cycling up a steep, narrow road. But in March 2015, on Franschhoek Mountain Pass in South Africa, that’s just what one cyclist was faced with after a bus driver swerved in an attempt avoid two other cyclists while negotiating a sharp corner. The bus overturned and three passengers lost their lives. In the investigation that followed, the police talked of prosecuting the bus driver for ‘culpable homicide’,…

1. The Space Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters were manufactured in Promontory, Utah. To get to the launch site in Florida, 3,862km (2,400 miles) away, each one had to make a seven-day train journey. 2. In order to fit through the railway tunnels along the route, the design of each booster segment was limited to a maximum diameter of just 3.66m (12ft). 3. The width of railway tunnels is determined by the gauge of the railway track. The US uses the standard track gauge of 1.44m (4ft 8.5in). 4. Early trains were drawn by horses. The track gauge was chosen to allow two horses side-by-side to pull a cart. This standard was kept for steam railways, to allow the wagons to be reused.…

WRATH OF GOD God is angry. That used to be the best explanation we had for violent storms. But during the Age of Enlightenment, scientists started to accumulate a better understanding of how weather works. This eventually led to the founding of the Met Office and the ability to forecast the weather in advance. During an early meeting of the newly formed Royal Society in 1663, a scheme was proposed by John Wilkins, the old master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Why didn’t they, he suggested, make a study of the weather in order to build “an art of prognosticating the changes”? It was a bold suggestion. The weather was an elusive and chaotic force that was barely understood. No one knew how clouds stayed aloft, or where storms came from;…

HEATHER BRADSHAW-MARTIN Automotive software engineer Heather puts her PhD in bioethics to good use this month, investigating the moral dilemmas faced when programming driverless cars. p72 MARK MIODOWNIK This month, materials scientist Mark takes on top chef Marcus Wareing in BBC Four’s Chef vs Science: Ultimate Kitchen Challenge. We catch up with Mark to find out his top chemistry-based cooking tips. p103 NEIL ASHTON It’s been 80 years since the maiden flight of doomed German airship the Hindenburg. Aerospace engineer Neil takes a looks at the fleet of new airships about to take to the skies. p58…

In the January edition of BBC Focus, I was fascinated by the news article on batteries made from algae. While studying for a degree in environmental science, I came across the electrical pathways in natural systems and wondered if these could be harnessed to generate power for human purposes. Now, having read the article, I wonder if these blue-green organisms could be used to form a new kind of solar panel, which not only produces electricity but also absorbs carbon dioxide through photosynthesis? Furthermore, when these organisms die, they could be stored in tanks to produce methane (biogas) during their decomposition. If this could be done, each community could have a biological power supply and fuel for heating and cooking. The emissions from burning the gas would be absorbed by…

How big a deal is this discovery? It’s one of the great discoveries of the decade, up there with the detection of the Higgs particle, which caused huge razzmatazz three years ago. The Higgs particle was a capstone to the standard model of particle physics, developed over several decades. Likewise, gravitational waves, vibrations in the fabric of space itself, are a distinctive consequence of Einstein’s General Relativity. Why has it taken us so long to detect them? The problem with gravitational waves is that their detection requires large, expensive and amazingly sensitive instruments. In the LIGO detectors, intense laser beams are projected along 4km-long pipes and reflected from mirrors at each end. By analysing the light beams, it’s possible to detect jitter in the distance between the mirrors, as ‘space’…

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him! A team at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina has printed living body parts and implanted them into host animals. Dubbed ITOP, or Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing, the system has been used successfully to print ear, bone and muscle structures that matured into functioning tissue after being implanted in rats and mice. Although the technology has so far only been tested in animals, the tissues created were of an appropriate size and structure to be used in human subjects, the researchers say. “This novel tissue and organ printer is an important advance in our quest to make replacement tissue for patients,” said Anthony Atala, director of the Institute and senior author of the paper detailing the research, which appeared in…

PROTECTION ENCOURAGES RECKLESSNESS Recent research suggests safety kit may increase the urge to take risks. Volunteers at the University of Bath were asked to inflate a virtual balloon as much as possible without bursting it. Some were given a cycling helmet to wear during the task; those that did were more likely to fill the balloon for longer. OPACITY IS NO GUIDE TO DENSITY Data from NASA’s Cassini mission shows that although the opacity of Saturn’s B ring varies, the amount of material it contains is almost uniform throughout. VENUS FLYTRAPS CAN COUNT Researchers at Germany’s Universität Würzburg mimicked an insect landing on the carnivorous plants and were able to show that one touch didn’t trigger the trap. Only after a second touch would the plant close its jaws around…

A splash of water, a petri dish and a few days was all it took for scientists at Japan’s National Institute for Polar Research (NIPR) to revive a pair of tardigrades that had been frozen for more than three decades. The microscopic creatures, commonly known as water bears, were recovered from a moss sample collected in Antarctica in November 1983. The sample was stored at -20°C in order to preserve it until it was finally defrosted in May last year, when the presence of the tardigrades, nicknamed ‘Sleeping Beauty 1’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty 2’, was spotted. “Sleeping Beauty 1 first showed slight movement in its fourth pair of legs on the first day after rehydration,” reported the NIPR scientists. “Sleeping Beauty 1 started to slowly crawl on the surface of…

GAME OF PHONES Japanese telecoms giant SoftBank is to open a Tokyo phone shop staffed almost entirely by its Pepper robots. Six Peppers will explain products and take your order – but a real human will be on hand to verify paperwork. ELECTRIC DREAMS Local councils across the UK are being given £40m in government funding to build a better infrastructure for electric cars. The Go Ultra Low City Scheme money could be used to build dedicated electric vehicle lanes or install vehicle chargers into streetlights, for instance. GOING UP The International Space Elevator Consortium has published a paper in New Space saying that current advancements in technology mean the materials needed to create the 100,000km ‘rope’ for a space elevator will emerge no later than 2030. TINY TUNES Teenage…

Tired of having to type in a code to use your smartphone, and needing to remember dozens of different passwords for online services such as banking? Don’t worry – those days could soon be gone. The only slight down side is that you’ll need to agree to your every movement being monitored by Google 24/7 instead. Project Abacus is Google’s new plan to replace the password. It uses the various sensors in your Android device to measure your walking speed, location, voice patterns, face and other biometric readings. Essentially, the device you’re using ‘knows’ that you’re you, and also ‘knows’ when it’s been picked up by someone who isn’t you. Google’s system is said to be up to 10 times more secure than even two-factor authentication, and harder to deceive…

“So, how much is nuclear energy contributing to climate change? An operating nuclear reactor has near-zero carbon emissions, as its only outputs are heat and radioactive waste” Over the last 20 years or so, most Western nations have merely maintained their existing reactors, making incremental safety upgrades to meet regulations. Countries that chose to retain their nuclear plants extended their lifespans, in some cases well beyond their original design specifications. “The reactors were designed for a lifetime of 40 years, and then they got extended to 60 years,” says Muellner. “The [older] reactors are going to stay online for a long time, and they dominate the total risk of a nuclear accident.” Safety levels, while not necessarily dropping, were certainly not going up. “If you build new plants somewhere, that’s…

COSMIC CAMERAS The high-resolution GigaPan camera was initially developed for NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover, to send back breathtaking panaromas of the Red Planet. Now, it’s finding a second life in conservation. A team at Carnegie Mellon University used a GigaPan to monitor 100 albatross nests in the Bass Strait in Tasmania, snapping two panoramic pics a day over a six-month period. The images are so detailed that researchers can zoom in to view each nest, enabling them to identify individual birds and study their breeding patterns. The photos can also be viewed in sequence as a time-lapse movie. See panoramas with your own eyes at Gigapan.com SNOT AT SEA Drones armed with an array of high-tech sensors and cameras are increasingly being used to monitor wildlife. However, a team of…

It’s the outermost layer of Jupiter we’re most familiar with, thanks to photos taken with telescopes. Here there are layers of visible clouds of ammonia and water. But all is far from clear. For instance, astronomers have been struggling to explain the orange and brown colour of Jupiter’s outer layer. One explanation is that it’s down to trace elements, such as sulphur. The hydrogen, which makes up the bulk of a gas giant (90 per cent in the case of Jupiter) transforms from the colourless gas we’re familiar with on Earth, to a fluid. At even greater depths, this fluid starts to conduct, just like a metal. Right at the heart of a gas giant is a core thought to be made up of water, methane and nitrogen. Exactly where…

“RESEARCHERS AREN’T QUEUEING UP TO WORK ON SOMETHING UNFASHIONABLE LIKE THE MENOPAUSE” Snoods, spacehoppers, hoverboards… fashions come and go. When they’re later dusted off and wheeled out, usually by TV documentary makers, they often seem laughable. Even as a kid in the 1970s, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to buy a pet rock. Still, at least that fad only affected pocket money – unlike the cosmetics marketed in the 1930s, which claimed to make a woman’s face glow through the wondrous effects of radioactivity. Science has helped debunk fads over the years, from silly diets to screens for blocking ‘harmful radiation’ from PCs. But science itself is also prey to fashion, and the consequences aren’t always quite so funny. When I was a student, researchers working on the…

DR CHRISTIAN JARRETT Christian edits The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog. His latest book is Great Myths Of The Brain. DR ALASTAIR GUNN Alastair is a radio astronomer at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. PROF ROBERT MATTHEWS A er studying physics at Oxford, Robert became a 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. LUIS VILLAZON Luis has a BSc in computing and an MSc in zoology from Oxford. His works include How Cows Reach The Ground. WHY ISN’T EVERYONE AFRAID OF HEIGHTS? MINNETTE CHAMBERS, ANDOVER When we’re up high, the lack of nearby visual anchors makes our bodies sway automatically – this…

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three… though this way of counting seconds works pre y well for playing hide-and-seek, the atomic clock is vastly superior when it comes to accuracy. It could run for 300 million years and would not stray from perfect time by one second. Whereas counting using words relies on how fast you are speaking, the atomic clock gets its information from electrons jumping around in atoms. Such precision is needed for GPS systems and global telecommunication. Since 2014, The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s atomic clock ‘NIST-F2’ has set the standard time in the US. So how can atoms define a second? Atoms contain electrons, which change energy levels when hit with radiation at a certain frequency, causing them to emit light. The frequency at which…

1. Border collie Bred for: herding sheep No wins 2. Poodle Bred for: duck hunting Six wins 3. German shepherd Bred for: herding sheep Three wins 4. Golden retriever Bred for: retrieving waterfowl No wins 5. Doberman pinscher Bred for: guarding No wins 6. Shetland sheepdog Bred for: herding No wins 7. Labrador retriever Bred for: retrieving waterfowl Three wins 8. Papillon Bred for: companionship No wins 9. Rottweiler Bred for: driving cattle and guarding No wins 10. Australian cattle dog Bred for: driving cattle No wins Source: The Intelligence Of Dogs by Dr Stanley Coren…

Scientist: Lewis Fry Richardson Date: 1922 Aim: To predict the weather Lewis Fry Richardson dreamed of setting up a forecasting factory and so he resolved to establish an experiment to test his idea. He sourced a set of sound meteorological data from 20 May 1910 and set out to complete a full working example of a mathematical forecast for his book Weather Prediction By Numerical Means. At this point, WWI intervened. Richardson was a Quaker and a pacifist and so refused to enlist. Instead he volunteered for the Friends’ Ambulance Service and was sent to the Western Front in France. There, in snatched hours over a six-week period between his medical duties, he worked on the meteorological calculations for 20 May 1910. Later, he wrote that his office was “a…

Cold front The leading edge of a cool mass of air that displaces warm air from the ground. It is typically associated with rain. Ensemble forecasting The practice of running a specific weather forecast numerous times with varying initial conditions to test the predictability of the atmosphere at a given moment. Nowcasting A term coined by Met Office scientist Prof Keith Browning to describe short-term forecasts that are updated frequently. Synoptic chart A map that simultaneously shows various attributes of the atmosphere at a given moment. Troposphere The lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere and the space in which nearly all organic life lives and almost all weather occurs.…

There’s so much to love about Dublin. It’s a European capital city, on the sea, with mountains in the background and one of the largest urban parks in Europe – Phoenix Park. I love strolling there in the evenings to watch the fallow deer running free. One of the best things about Dublin is that it’s so ‘walkable’ – you can easily go from cultural institutions to restaurants to gig venues. At the SCIENCE GALLERY 1 , exhibits change every three months, so there’s always something new to explore. Meanwhile, the National Museum is filled with beautiful historical artefacts. My favourite is an exquisite model of a boat, finely crafted from gold. But the NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM 2 is a special treat. Known as the ‘Dead Zoo’ by locals, it’s…

TECHNOLOGY Welcome to the drone age Drones aren’t just for big kids. Discover how these unmanned vehicles are flying us into a new era of exploration, allowing scientists to glimpse never-before-seen worlds. HEALTH ALLERGIES: THE TRUTH Supermarket shelves are increasingly being filled with gluten-free, dairy-free products. But is the growing ‘free from’ movement also free from facts? ENVIRONMENT POISONED PLANET Thirty years after the Chernobyl disaster, we look at how humans are adapting to life in some of the most hazardous and inhospitable places on Earth. PSYCHOLOGY PORN ON THE BRAIN As a society, we’re watching more porn than ever. But what effect is it having on our minds?…

When I started working at the Natural History Museum in 1973 it was incredibly formal. Men wore jackets and ties, and women weren’t allowed to wear trousers. Back then the museum was part of the civil service, so I had to sign the Official Secrets Act! When I was seven, I made a Mesolithic village out of papier mâché. When I was nine or 10 I did a school project on Neanderthals. They have fascinated me ever since. No one ever told me that you could have a career in anthropology. At secondary school I was on track to go into medicine. But then by fluke a friend brought me the University College London prospectus and it fell open at the anthropology page. My teachers were sceptical but my parents…

Don’t forget that BBC Focus is also available on all major digital platforms. We have versions for Android, Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader, as well as an award-winning iOS app for the iPad and iPhone, so you can get your fix of science knowledge wherever you go. Special issues THE BIG BOOK OF WHY We know that our Q&A section is one of your favourite parts of BBC Focus, so pick up a copy of this special edition – it’s stuffed full of answers to all your burning questions. THE UNIVERSE: THE STORY SO FAR Barely a week goes by without some thrilling discovery about the Universe hitting the headlines. So we’ve compiled everything we currently know about the cosmos into The Universe: The Story So Far.…

Climate change is turning the Earth into a giant sponge. NASA scientists have found that while glaciers and ice sheets are continuing to melt, changes in climate over the past decade have caused the Earth to soak up an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water, slowing the rate of sea level rise by about 20 per cent. The discovery was made with NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), two satellites which can detect changes in Earth’s gravitational pull due to changes in the amount of water on the planet’s surface. Vast amounts of water continually evaporate from the oceans, fall as rain or snow, and then run back into the oceans. “We always assumed that our increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting in a net…

What did they do? Scientists investigating animal cognition at the University of Vienna encouraged ravens to hide food next to a box with a peephole in it, linked up to a speaker playing the calls of other ravens. What did they find? When the peephole was open, the ravens believed other birds could see their actions and would go to greater lengths to stash their food, even though they couldn’t actually see another bird watching them. When the peephole was closed they’d hide the food in a more casual manner. Why did they do that? The team is trying to determine whether ravens possess a ‘theory of mind’. If so, this means that they are able to imagine experiencing thoughts and emotions felt by other animals – a skill that…

Quantum dots – tiny flecks of semiconducting materials that react to light – may solve the growing problem of drug-resistant bacteria, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder. Infections such as E. coli, staphylococcus and salmonella, which are contracted by two million people each year, are becoming harder to treat. This is because the bacteria that cause them are adapting to become immune to antibiotic drugs. The scientists, based at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, have managed to create light-activated therapeutic nanoparticles – quantum dots – that are able to destroy 92 per cent of drug-resistant bacteria in experiments. The quantum dots are made from the semiconductor cadmium telluride – a material that can conduct electricity under certain conditions – and are 20,000 times smaller than…

VIRTUAL INSANITY ASUS ROG G20CB The first wave of ‘Oculus Rift-ready’ PCs – machines that come bundled with an Oculus Rift headset and some VR games – will be hitting stores soon. Asus has three models on offer, including two variants of this spaceship-style desktop, sporting either an Intel i5 chip, NVIDIA 970 graphics card and 512GB solid-state drive; or an i7 chip, NVIDIA 980 graphics card and a 1TB hard drive. If you’re on a budget, the lower-specced G11CD is also available at just £725. £1,000/£1,175, asus.com GAMEON 8BITDO RETRO CUBE SPEAKER Hurrah – a Bluetooth speaker built with ageing gamers in mind! The Retro Cube Speaker is styled, as most of you will have noticed, after the controller for the classic NES console. The…

While ecomodernists think that nuclear power could be a useful tool in slowing climate change, more traditional environmental organisations vehemently disagree. “Nuclear power already delivers less energy globally than renewable energy, and the share will continue to decrease in the coming years,” Greenpeace writes on its website. “Building enough nuclear power stations to make a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would cost trillions of dollars, create tens of thousands of tons of lethal high-level radioactive waste, contribute to further proliferation of nuclear weapons materials, and result in a Chernobyl-scale accident once every decade. Perhaps most significantly, it will squander the resources necessary to implement meaningful climate change solutions.” Those resources are significant. The centralised nature of nuclear power, compared to decentralised renewables, means that finding the cash to pay…

“THE MONKEY’S SELFIES REVEALED A LEER THAT WOULD FREEZE THE BLOOD OF ANY TINDER USER” According to artist and lecturer Liz Rideal, “The self-portrait is the artist’s most personal form of expression. It is the ultimate means of self-analysis…a bid for eternity.” But how true is that when the artist is a monkey? The camera phone has led to a sharp rise in gregarious narcissism. Social media teeters under the weight of self-obsession and pouting. Some see this as signalling the end times and, worryingly, it appears to have leapt the species divide. Earlier this year, a court dealt with a Celebes crested macaque called Naruto and her right to be the copyright holder and beneficiary of her selfies. The monkey’s selfies revealed a wide-eyed leer that would freeze the…

There were many questions about the inner workings of Jupiter until the Galileo spacecraft paid it a visit. Launched aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1989, this 2.5 tonne lump of finely tuned instruments took six years to reach the Solar System’s largest planet. On the day Galileo arrived, a probe was flung into Jupiter’s dense atmosphere. During the first two minutes of descent, the air temperature was twice as hot as the Sun’s surface. Despite such brutal conditions, the probe’s instruments provided tantalising information about this planetary behemoth. As well as detecting lightning bolts more powerful than those on Earth, the probe provided intriguing data about the planet’s composition. It showed there to be far less helium than expected. It also revealed there to be less water vapour -…

Could two people who aren’t twins have the same DNA? THOMAS HARRINGTON, WARRINGTON As a species, humans actually show remarkably little genetic diversity. The DNA of two unrelated people only differs by about one in every 1,000 base pairs; orangutans differ by more than double this amount. Even so, there are three billion base pairs in the human genome, so that’s an average of three million genetic differences between any two strangers. Most of these differences are ‘single nucleotide polymorphisms’ (SNPs), in which a single letter of the genetic code is changed. There are about 20 million known SNPs in the human genome. This means that the odds of someone having the same DNA by chance is like having a deck of 20 million cards, all different, and then drawing…

One hypothesis is that the iron sulphide spewing from deep-sea volcanic vents precipitated into a solid mass with lots of tiny chambers where simple biological molecules could become concentrated and assemble, using energy from iron redox reactions. The ‘panspermia hypothesis’, on the other hand, suggests that living cells or spores may have arrived fully formed travelling on comets from outer space. Recent research by Prof John Sutherland at Cambridge University offers a possible compromise between the two: comet impacts may have delivered hydrogen cyanide, which reacted with the hydrogen sulphide already on Earth to form the earliest building block molecules. That then assembled to form RNA. LV…

“IN SOME PARTS OF A PLANT, PRESSURE CAN BE THREE TIMES THAT OF A BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE” This is the time of year when seedlings start to appear. After planting seeds, I’ll find myself going back far too often, checking to see whether they’re visible yet. If you keep looking, you’ll see the seedlings pushing aside small bits of soil and tiny stones as they grow. They’re not just winding around obstacles – they’re shoving them. The more you think about it, the odder it seems. Without any muscles, how does such a tiny plant create enough force to push anything? When a seed starts to germinate, the seed case cracks open and new plant cells start to grow. The seedling has to rely entirely on the energy stored in…

c.50 BC circa 50 BC The Tower of the Winds is built in Athens. Each wall of this octagonal building bears an image of one of the Ancient Greek wind deities. WILLIAM REDFIELD (1789-1857) This New York businessman studies storms in the 1820s and 1830s, demonstrating that they all operated to the same scientific principles. He later becomes the first president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 1843 1843 Elias Loomis presents his paper On Two Storms Which Occurred In February 1842. It includes the first developed, colour-coded weather charts. ROBERT FITZROY (1805-1865) In the 1830s, FitzRoy captains the HMS Beagle. In 1854 he becomes head of the Meteorological Department in London – later the Met Office – where he constructs the world’s first forecasting system. 1861…