Table of contents for July 2016 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

Once upon a time, I quite fancied going to space (not that NASA was knocking down the door). The gadgets, the outfits, the scenery… what’s not to like? But now I’m having second thoughts. Did you know that astronauts have a constant head cold? Without gravity keeping bodily fluids where they belong, they work their way up into the head, where they tend to stay, leaving astronauts feeling permanently stuffy. They don’t tell you that in school. Nor do they mention that the skin on the soles of the feet tends to moult off after prolonged absence from the floor. And don’t get me started on ‘wet burps’… Space, it seems, is a bit of a disgusting place. But if that doesn’t put you off, then there are more discoveries…

Body builders The article ‘Can we build a human?’ (June, p34) suggests that the brain might be a modular item that can be unplugged and transferred to another body in the same way that a car engine can be transferred to a new car body. Certainly, the Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero believes he can chop off a patient’s head and plonk it onto another body. This view grossly oversimplifies the relationship between the brain and the body: when I play the guitar, where I place my fingers and how I strike the strings is the result of numerous complex interactions between my brain, nervous system and muscles, in addition to my emotions, which involve such things as hormone levels. All this has built up over years of practice. Give my…

“THERE ARE VIRTUALLY NO EQUIVALENT NEANDERTHAL STRUCTURES KNOWN FOR THE SAME PERIOD” Neanderthals are often depicted as slow-witted brutes that spent their time clubbing mammoths to death and dragging women around by their hair. But this stereotype is not true. Archaeologists have discovered complex circular structures made from stalagmites 300 metres inside Bruniquel cave, near Toulouse in southwest France. The limestone structures date back 176,500 years, some 135,000 years before the arrival of modern humans in Europe, indicating that they must have been made by Neanderthals, the only hominins in the area at that time. Evidence of scorch marks in the area also suggests that early Neanderthals were able to use fire for warmth and light well before Homo sapiens developed the skill. “The first impression we had of the…

390,900 The number of plant species known to science, as estimated by researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. 400 PARTS PER MILLION The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere recorded at Cape Grim atmospheric station in Tasmania earlier this month. Many experts believe the figure may never drop lower again. 700 BILLION SOLAR MASSES The most accurate measurement of the mass of the Milky Way yet, made by researchers at Canada’s McMaster University. The figure covers all of the stars, planets, moons, gases and dust, as well as a significant chunk of dark matter. One solar mass is equal to the mass of our Sun.…

With their bold yellow and black markings and fuzzy bodies, bumblebees are some of the most charismatic insects seen in the British summertime. Now, a team from the University of Bristol has found that they use their distinctive fuzz to detect electric signals from flowers. The researchers found that bumblebees’ fuzzy hairs quiver rapidly when exposed to the static electricity created by flowers. By investigating the insects’ nervous system they were then able to confirm that they used the hairs to guide them to sources of pollen. The findings suggest that electroreception in insects may be widespread, they say. “We were excited to discover that bees’ tiny hairs dance in response to electric fields, like when humans hold a balloon to their hair,” said research lead Dr Gregory Sutton. “A…

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have built a ‘materiable tactile display’ that can feel, to the touch, like a range of different materials, from rubber to water to silk. The display is made up of a matrix of columns or pins whose flexibility, viscosity and elasticity can be programmed by the person who is setting it up. Suggested uses for the display include more realistic modelling of landscapes and ecosystems by earth scientists, or the creation of realistic architectural models – and at this stage, that’s probably about as far as it goes. If the technology can be miniaturised and made more affordable, however, the implications for haptic feedback systems for VR are obvious. Further down the line, the display could even be used to create shape-shifting furniture…

Dark Sky Weather app Dark Sky is now on Android. Basic info is free, but to get the hyper-local forecasts that make the app popular, you’ll have to subscribe. Free/$3 annual subscription, Android Moog Model 15 Experience the joys of making music with this app, which emulates Moog’s Model 15 synth – for a far smaller outlay than the $10K asking price of the real thing! £23, iOS BedTime VR Stories This app for Gear VR means that parents who work away from home can still read their kids a story at bedtime – wherever they happen to be. £TBC, Samsung Gear VR…

1894 German biologist Hans Driesch takes a two-cell sea urchin from the Bay of Naples and shakes it in beaker of water. The cells part, giving rise to two, independent but identical, sea urchins. 1902 Hans Spemann, another German scientist, uses a fine hair from his baby son to split a salamander embryo in two. The result: two amphibians for the price of one. 1952 In the US, Robert Briggs and Thomas King perform a successful nuclear transfer, by moving a nucleus from an embryonic frog cell into an egg cell whose own nucleus had been removed. 1962 Instead of using nuclei from frog embryos, Oxford biologist John Gurdon takes them from adults, demonstrating that a differentiated nucleus still has the power to build an entire animal. 1963 Chinese embryologist…

FOR According to Angelika Schnieke, chair of livestock biotechnology at the Technische Universitat Munchen in Germany, cloning is of immense value to biomedical science. “It has allowed us for the very first time to make precise and controlled modification of animals,” she says. The applications are endless. By combining gene editing with cloning technology, we should be able to create livestock that is less susceptible to illness and disease, improving animal welfare and the livelihoods of humans to boot. Cloning also promises to give us more accurate animal models of human diseases, along with organs that can be used for transplantation. Banning cloning would be unethical, says Schnieke. “If I can do something more precisely and I can use fewer animals it makes more sense,” she says. “The world would…

REFUGE FLOOR Safe zones made from more robust materials with fireproof paint and specialised ventilation systems are created so people on the upper floors can shelter in the event of an emergency. MAGLEV LIFTS Alternative methods for travelling around the skyscraper could be provided by maglev lifts running vertically and horizontally along tracks on the outside of the building. SKY LOBBIES Since a single conventional lift is unable to span the distance from the ground floor to the top, certain floors are set aside as interchange areas where people can swap from one lift to the next to continue their journey. MASS DAMPER Essentially a huge pendulum weighing hundreds of tonnes, a mass damper reduces swaying caused by wind or seismic activity. As well as preventing structural failure, they mitigate…

Pause for a second. Stop and think about your senses. At this very moment photons are pinging into your face where two watery spheres that sit in holes in your skull are taking them all in. These are your eyes. The lenses in your eyes (assisted by the iris) are working hard to direct the photons most effectively onto a small mass of cells at the back of your eyeballs which, upon bombardment, send electrical messages to the brain. Brilliant, isn’t it? It’s taken scientists centuries to understand how our senses work. But what about other animals? Could we ever hope to understand how other species experience the world? Amazingly, the answer is yes, and the science has revealed some senses of which we could only dream. RODS AND RECEPTORS…

Scientists: Donald Griffin and Robert Galambos Date: 1939-41 Discovery: Bats navigate using ultrasound Griffin and Galambos’s experiment to determine how bats navigate is among the finest in the history of zoology. First, by converting sound waves to electrical signals that could be read by a machine (an early ultrasonic detector) the two scientists determined that bats emitted streams of intense sounds at frequencies beyond the range of human hearing. Second, in the most famous part of their experiments, they undertook a host of obstacle avoidance tests, using bats with temporarily impaired senses (through the use of tiny ear plugs and mouth restraints). Bats were encouraged to fly from one end of a tunnel to the other, navigating through wires which dangled from the ceiling. Those bats with impaired hearing failed…

What exactly is GPS? The Global Positioning System is a constellation of 31 satellites – 24 of which are active at any one time – that transmit a radio signal. If a GPS receiver can pick up at least four of these signals simultaneously, it can extrapolate its position in three dimensions (latitude, longitude and altitude). The system itself is completely owned by the US Department of Defense – it was actually begun in the early 1970s as a potential way of dropping bombs with greater precision. A lot of the early champions of the technology were veterans of the air campaigns in Vietnam, who were driven by a desire to come up with a more humane method of air warfare. But from the very beginning, GPS was also used…

SHANNON WALKER What’s it really like to go into space? In 2010, scientist and NASA astronaut Shannon spent five months aboard the International Space Station, making her the perfect person to answer our questions. p56 DR GILES YEO Over 62 per cent of UK adults are obese or overweight and the figure seems set to rise. Geneticist Giles looks at the research suggesting the issue is more complex than simply ‘eating less and moving more’. p80 DR ELIZABETH PEARSON Elizabeth is news editor on Sky At Night Magazine and will be keenly following the Juno mission in July. This month, she reveals the secrets that the mission could uncover. p44…

Hard to stomach In your February issue, Lilian Anekwe writes about food addiction. It felt disturbing to learn that the scientists are still debating whether the addiction exists or not, rather than working on a solution to the problem. The journalist defines the term ‘addiction’ before embarking on the precipitous journey of explaining where we currently are. She writes that the criteria include developing tolerance, having withdrawal symptoms and becoming dependent. That’s spot on me and chocolate. Or cake. In fact, I stumbled upon this article after consuming four pieces of cake that day. Not something I wanted to do, especially after three months of healthy eating, but there you go. I downed the last piece and felt sick. It had taken three months to trick my mind into thinking…

“The purpose of the structures and concentrated combustion zones remain enigmatic, but they demonstrate that some Neanderthals were as much at home deep within the cave as at its entrance. There are examples of human habitation of this or even greater age 30 or 40 metres into caves in Africa, but the Bruniquel occupation is some 10 times deeper into the cave, and shows constructions as complex as some made by modern humans only 20 or 30,000 years ago. Accumulations of early human bodies deep within caves are known from Rising Star Cave [near Johannesburg, South Africa] and the Sima de los Huesos [Atapuerca, Spain], but the circumstances and meaning of their deposition are disputed. In Rising Star Cave there is no archaeological material with the skeletons, while at Sima…

A red dragon, a 12-million-year-old ape and a carnivorous plant first spotted in a Facebook photo are among the 10 most awesome animals and plants chosen by scientists from more than 18,000 species discovered over the last 12 months. The list was assembled by the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) to mark the birthday of Carl Linnaeus, an 18th-Century Swedish botanist considered to be the father of modern taxonomy. It is believed that 10 million species still await discovery, five times the number that are already known. But species are going extinct faster than they can be identified, putting researchers in a race against time. “We can only win this race to explore biodiversity if we pick up the pace,” said ESF president Quentin Wheeler. “In so…

Wheelchair users disabled by stroke are now walking again, thanks to the injection of stem cells directly into their brains. Surgeons at the Stanford University School of Medicine drilled access holes into 18 stroke patients’ heads and injected stem cells derived from donor bone marrow and modified to restore neurologic function. The patients began showing significant improvements in mobility within one month and continued to improve for one year. “This wasn’t just, ‘they couldn’t move their thumb, and now they can’. Patients who were in wheelchairs are walking now,” said Dr Gary Steinberg, who performed the procedures. “They improved by several standard measures, and their improvement was not only statistically significant, but clinically meaningful. Their ability to move around has recovered visibly. That’s unprecedented. At six months out from a…

SUSPENSE IS IN THE AIR IN CINEMAS The air in cinemas changes according to what’s being shown, research by the Max Planck Institute suggests. Comedy, action and suspense produce characteristic chemical signatures in the air because of altered breathing patterns of the viewers. PARACETAMOL CAN MAKE YOU LESS CARING It may be the first thing you reach for to get rid of a headache, but popping paracetamol can make you less sensitive to the emotional pain of others, a team at Ohio State University has found. GROWTH SPURTS MAKE SOME TEENAGE BOYS CLUMSY Teens who gain more than 3cm in three months tend to be more physically awkward, a team at the University of Bologna has found. The effect is thought to be due to the brain having to adjust…

Dr Hiroshi Ishiguro of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Japan’s Osaka University built this robot for one purpose: to pretend to listen to you. The robot is called CommU, and when two or more are placed together, they will simulate people having a conversation. If a human attempts to join in, the robots will smile, nod, and respond to comments by saying things like, “I see” or “interesting point”. They won’t actually understand what’s been said, but will appear to. This is, of course, an entirely pointless achievement. But the motivation behind the CommU was to try and model the subtle body language and polite niceties that are so important to conversation. Ishiguro and his team now hope to make robots endowed with actual AI seem more ‘human’ and less…

“DOES SCIENCE SUGGEST THAT THE EXPERIENCE OF SUMMER FESTIVALS IS GOOD FOR OUR WELL-BEING?” The Klingon lunged for me, but in doing so, his spiny forehead came loose and fell to the ground. Revealing his human head reality, ashamed, he ran back into the pit of heckling and fury. This was my abiding memory of Glastonbury 1998. The music festival has gone from outsider cultural activity, apparently populated by naked, drug-filled pagans and facially tattooed anarchists, to the sort of events contentedly critiqued by the Daily Mail, with a pictorial spread on the best wellingtons worn by the attending supermodels. Alan Moore, counter-cultural icon for four decades, went to a contemporary festival in 2013. He was flabbergasted by what he saw. What were once ramshackle and fecund fields of rebellious…

“THE KEENNESS OF NUTTERS TO REACH FOR THE ‘Q-WORD’ HAS MADE LIFE TOUGH FOR RESEARCHERS”  Jim Al-Khalili’s television documentaries take on challenging subjects without being patronising or gimmicky. And that’s why I’m a huge fan of his. As the host of The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4, he does a great job of getting scientists to reveal what they do all day. And as an author, he explains tough scientific ideas with amazing clarity. But while I envy his skill, I sure don’t envy his celebrity. His website hints at the reason: it carries a polite notice saying in effect he can’t check out claims for perpetual motion machines or time travel. Like all science celebrities, Al-Khalili is a target for every crackpot with an email account. Worse…

Echolocation The ability to navigate or hunt by emitting noises and processing the echoes from nearby objects, in the same way that ships use sonar. Infrared Electromagnetic radiation that lies beyond the far end of the visible light spectrum. It is emitted particularly by heated objects. Neuroethology Founded by Donald Griffin and Robert Galambos in the mid-20th Century, this is the area of science involved with sensory perception in animals, including humans. Pheromone A chemical signature produced by an animal in order to influence the behaviour of an animal of the same species. Pheromones are often about sex. Receptor cells These are crucial in sensory systems. When excited by an external stimulus (molecules, heat, light) they fire off an electrical signal to the brain. Ultrasonic Sound waves with frequencies higher…

HOME LAB BY ROBERT WINSTON Out 1 July (£12.99, Dorling Kindersley). Inspire the scientists of the future with this collection of 28 hands-on projects for kids. Features erupting volcanoes, soap-powered boats and homemade bath bombs, as well as a guide to the science behind every experiment. THE RADIUM GIRLS BY KATE MOORE Out now (£16.99, Simon & Schuster). The tragic true story of the US women who painted dials onto watches and instruments during WWI. Poisoned by the luminous radium paint they used, this book tells how they fought for justice amid the horror of a certain death. MAKE WAY FOR THE SUPERHUMANS BY MICHAEL BESS Out 7 July (£14.99, Icon Books). Robotic implants, brain-to-brain interfaces, 3D-printed organs… there seems to be a new breakthrough in bioenhancement every week. Michael…

“In this country, people seem to think that maths is irrelevant and uninteresting” I use maths to look at patterns in human behaviour. People leave behind traces of themselves in the data they create. When you start to look, say, at where people spend their money or where burglaries happen, you find there are patterns that can be described mathematically. You can then look at what causes these patterns and think about ways of redesigning the environment for the better. I wanted to be a hairdresser when I was at school. But my mum steered me towards doing A-levels. My dad was a pro motorbike racer, so I also quite fancied Formula 1! I wasn’t particularly brilliant at maths when I was young, but one summer holiday when I was…

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Astrophysicists from the University of Birmingham have captured the sounds of some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way. Using a technique known as asteroseismology, the team analysed data recorded by the NASA Kepler/K2 Mission to study resonant oscillations of stars in the Messier 4 globular cluster, a group of 13-billion-year-old stars located 7,200 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius. Sound waves trapped inside stars cause them to pulse and wobble, which causes tiny but observable changes in the brightness of the light they emit. Observing these changes allows researchers to determine the frequencies of this internal ‘stellar music’ and thus the structure of the star. The technique allows astronomers to determine the mass and age of stars more accurately than brightness measurements and opens the door to…

What are they? Angry vegan activists, perhaps? Now, you’re just being silly. They are a group of chemicals that researchers at Northumbria University have found are responsible for making socks stink. Er, isn’t that just sweat? Nope. Sweat is odourless until it comes into contact with bacteria on the skin, which it then reacts with to form VOCs. So how did they find them? The team had a group of volunteers wear fresh socks for 10 hours and gave another group fresh t-shirts to wear for an intense game of five-a-side football. They then took samples from the socks and t-shirts to determine what chemicals were making them whiff. So what do they smell like? Butyric acid smells of rancid butter, dimethyl disulfide of onions, 2-heptanone of bananas, 2-nonanone of…

It is one of the laws of physics; you cannot magic calories out of nowhere, and likewise you cannot magic them away Recently, a small supermarket opened at the hospital where I am based. It was one of those places that primarily sells convenience food and drink. I was there one day getting a sandwich for lunch, with what appeared to be everyone else in the hospital. I was standing in line behind a nurse, who had a salad and a yoghurt clutched in her hand. This nurse had clearly started her foraging expedition with all the best will in the world, and if the cash till had been right there, she would have made it out of the shop with an undeniably healthy lunch. However, as the line snaked,…

“THIS IS THE WONDERFUL THING ABOUT SUGAR. IT CAN EXIST AS BOTH A CRYSTAL AND AS A GLASS” Sugar had never been this frustrating before. My friend Sarah and I were prowling around the pan of sweet, melting crystals, desperate to stir it all together. Siobhan, who was following recipe instructions, was stern. “Don’t touch it!” met our ears every time we got too close. Sugar looks simple, but it’s got the potential to take on different guises. Sarah and I were convinced that this batch was heading straight for the guise called ‘burnt’, but Siobhan was on a mission to do something more elegant: turn sugar into glass. Each molecule of the sugar is made up of two components: glucose and fructose. Together, these make up sucrose: 45…

1700s LUIGI GALVANI (1737-1798) While dissecting a dead frog, Galvani notices its legs move when an electrical current is applied. He postulates about the role of electricity in animal bodies, an effect that becomes known as ‘galvanism’. 1834 1834 Though they had long been known about, anatomist Max Schultze investigates the roles of the rod and cone cells in human eyes. The idea of specific sensory receptor cells is born. CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882) Natural selection added an air of inevitability to the evolution of senses. Darwin appreciated that those with the best senses would flourish. 1941 DONALD GRIFFIN (1915-2003) Griffin (pictured) was a co-founder of neuroethology. He went on to describe in detail a whole host of unusual methods through which bats use echolocation. 1941 Donald Griffin and Robert Galambos…