Table of contents for August 2015 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

ON 6 AUGUST 1945 at 8.15am, an atomic bomb struck Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the US would drop a second on Nagasaki. It was the first, and last, time that nuclear weapons would be used in war. Soon after, a scientist who had helped design the atomic bomb, Dr Harold Jacobsen, would tell The Washington Post that “nothing would grow in Hiroshima for the next 70 years”. He was wrong. As soon as one month after the impact, red canna flowers – pictured on our cover – burst into bloom. The flowers would become a symbol of hope for the survivors. Today, 70 years later, Hiroshima thrives. Find out how life returned to the city on p32. Also this month, Curiosity has spent three years on Mars. The bot…

It’s been good for: BACON LOVERS IF YOU LOVE chowing down on a bacon sarnie but aren’t so fond of the effect your culinary habits have on your waistline, you may be in luck. A team of scientists in South Korea has used gene-editing technology to create a new breed of ‘doublemuscled’ pigs. The porkers could be used to make extra-lean bacon. FANS OF CAT VIDEOS IT TURNS OUT all that time we have spent watching funny felines on YouTube wasn’t wasted after all. A study at Indiana University has found that watching Maru, Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub boosted viewers’ energy and reduced levels of anxiety, sadness and stress. The results suggest that online videos may one day be used as a form of low-cost pet therapy. It’s been…

FORGET BARBECUES AND storms: nothing proclaims summer quite as reliably as ‘silly season’ stories. And they don’t come much sillier than those proclaiming that ‘Scientists have found the formula for the perfect…’, well, you name it. Cheese on toast, relationships, handshakes – the list grows longer every year. Everyone with an IQ exceeding their shoe size knows these stories are twaddle dreamed up by PR outfits. Sometimes they’re put together with help from real scientists who really should know better. Some years back, I was offered a tidy sum of money to devise a ‘formula’ for the perfect loo brush or something. As it was clearly going to end up as the formula for appearing perfectly ridiculous, I declined. I’ve since discovered that silly formulas aren’t the preserve of desperate…

What did they do? A team at UCL placed rats on a straight track with a T-shaped junction blocked off by a transparent barrier ahead. They placed food at one end of the T and allowed the rats to view it. They then placed them in a sleep chamber for one hour before putting them back on the track with the barrier removed and allowing them to run into the T. The rats’ brain activity was monitored at each stage of the experiment. What happened? Like humans, rats store ‘mental maps’ in the hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with memory and navigation. However, when resting, ‘place cells’ corresponding to the route they needed to take to the food became active in the animals’ hippocampus suggesting they were ‘dreaming’…

HIROSHIMA, JAPAN, MONDAY 6 August 1945. At 8.15am, the US bomber Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’, the first nuclear weapon ever used in warfare. Measuring just 300cm in length and 70cm in diameter, the atomic bomb was the pinnacle of the Allies’ $2m Manhattan Project. It was a marvel of scientific engineering, and an awesome show of military might delivering unprecedented destruction. Just three days later, Fat Man exploded over the city of Nagasaki. These remain the only two instances of nuclear bomb use in a warfare situation. Little Boy detonated just 43 seconds after its release, and the 4,400kg payload unleashed a punch equivalent to 15 kilotonnes of TNT. Little Boy missed its target, which was the T-shaped Aioi Bridge traversing the city’s Ota and Motoyasu rivers, because the…

SUSAN BLACKMORE Susan is a visiting psychology professor at the University of Plymouth. Her books include The Meme Machine 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 Visiting Reader 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 Focus Q&A, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol, BS1 3BN SUE MORRIS, LEICESTER Q Will spacesuits ever become less bulky? A THEY’LL…

A EASTERN EQUATORIAL PACIFIC EL NIÑO EL NIÑO IS elusive, often threatening an appearance – as reported in this column in spring 2014 – that doesn’t materialise. This time, however, it looks as if a whopping El Niño – the name given to the periodic accumulation of unusually warm water in the eastern equatorial Pacific – is definitely on its way. El Niño stirs up the world’s weather and spawns a maelstrom of drought, floods and storms. Australian scientists are forecasting that the 2015 El Niño could be as intense the one that occurred between 1982 and 1983, which was blamed for at least 2,000 deaths worldwide. While Australia bakes, Europe and California can expect torrential rains and floods. Perhaps the only saving grace is that the arrival of El…

23 JULY Elements: Technetium BBC World Service, time TBC TECHNETIUM IS ONE of the more obscure elements in the periodic table. Radioactive and short-lived, it’s essential for medical imaging, yet it can only be produced in the lab. Justin Rowlatt tells the story of this mysterious metal, meeting the scientists who milk technetium ‘cows’ to save lives. 25 JULY Heart And Soul: Belief In Silicon Valley BBC World Service, time TBC WHAT HAPPENS WHEN the worlds of technology and religion collide? Peter Bowes travels to California’s Silicon Valley to meet some of the high-achieving, high-earning technologists who’ve embraced religion. How do they marry their faith with the seemingly secular world of bits and bytes? 11 AUGUST The End Of The Body Mass Index BBC Radio 4, 9pm TAKE YOUR WEIGHT…

Lilian Anekwe E-cigarettes are becoming ever more popular on our high streets, but are they safe? Lilian, the consumer health editor of The BMJ, finds out if we can breathe easy on p58. Stuart Clark Stuart is an astronomy writer and author of The Unknown Universe, published in September 2015. On p48, he reveals the mysteries that continue to baffle astronomers. Adam Hart Adam is a BBC presenter, lecturer and bug-botherer. On p56 he tells us why we should be kinder to the wasps this summer – even if they do invade our picnics and barbecues. Graham Warwick As technology editor at Aviation Week, Graham was just the chap to take a look at cutting-edge designs for the planes of the future. Turn to p42 to find out what we…

A TEAM OF researchers has recently confirmed what has been suspected for some time about the world’s wildlife: that we are witnessing a sixth mass extinction. Everything from chopping down the rainforests to polluting the oceans and rivers is driving losses on an accelerating scale. And among the most vulnerable are the primates – especially if they live in poor countries where people are hungry. A recent filming trip to Madagascar brought home to me how the famous lemurs of that remarkable island are on the brink of extinction. One image that will haunt me forever is of a baby lemur, bug-eyed and confused, crawling over the body of its dead mother moments after she had been shot by poachers. Hunting is exacting a terrible toll, as is the clearing…

Bacterial fight clubs Er… are you sure you’re supposed to be talking about that? Don’t worry – it’s nothing to do with Tyler Durden. It’s a method of searching for new drugs that was created by chemists at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. Tell me more. The work is based around secondary metabolites – compounds released by bacteria to fight off organisms. Lots of antibiotics and anti-cancer compounds are either secondary metabolites or their derivatives. So where does the fighting bit come in? Analysis of microbial genomes suggests that each of the 150,000 distinct species of bacteria contain the blueprints for hundreds of secondary metabolites. The problem is, getting the bacteria to produce them can be tricky. By pitting microorganisms against one another in controlled ‘fight clubs’, the researchers were able to…

The right trousers IF YOU’VE EVER envied Iron Man’s suit, here’s one for you. Designed to help the elderly or injured walk, Samsung’s robotic suit is an exoskeleton for the legs. Two electromyogram sensors detect electrical activity in the muscles, helping to determine the wearer’s position in the walking cycle. Motors then spring into action, providing power to the legs. Let’s hope it’s portable enough to haul up mountains – we could do with some extra help when hiking. Patent application number: US 20150134080 Ear ear FORGET FINGERPRINTS: HOW about using your ear to unlock your phone? A system from Amazon uses the unique shape of a person’s ear to identify them, unlocking the phone when they hold it to their lug. The technology will be able to determine which…

WE WERE DRIVING through a stark and stunning landscape at dusk, still 80km (50 miles) from the location for the next day’s documentary filming. The final orange glow of the sunset was picking out specific rocks so that they seemed to be on fire. Rob, our cameraman, could barely contain his excitement at the aesthetic smorgasboard whooshing past. Alex, the director, was at the wheel and worried about being late. He agreed that it was fabulous but said that we had no time to stop to film it. I laughed at Alex for being the strict schoolmaster, but the next rock was too much for Rob. He wound down his window a little way to take photos. Immediately, a loud and low-pitched regular thumping filled the car. The whoomph-like noise…

10 MILLION ADULT SMOKERS IN GREAT BRITAIN 70% OF SMOKERS HAVE THEIR FIRST CIGARETTE WITHIN AN HOUR OF WAKING NICOTINE IS ONE OF MORE THAN 4,000 CHEMICALS FOUND IN THE SMOKE FROM TOBACCO PRODUCTS 2.6 MILLION UK E-CIGARETTE USERS FORMALDEHYDE 5 TIMES HIGHER IN CIGARETTES 4,015 AVERAGE UK SMOKER’S ANNUAL CONSUMPTION 4,745 AVERAGE UK SMOKER’S ANNUAL CONSUMPTION METALS SUCH AS TIN, COPPER, SILVER, NICKEL, ALUMINIUM, IRON, CHROMIUM AND LEAD, ARE FOUND AT HIGHER LEVELS IN E-CIGARETTES COMPARED TO STANDARD CIGARETTES 120 TIMES MORE TOLUENE IS FOUND IN CIGARETTES 6.7% OF EX-SMOKERS USED E-CIGARETTES IN 2015 VAT 5% ON E-CIGARETTES 20% ON CIGARETTES…

SAM LEECH, AGE 9, BY EMAIL Q How do penguins see clearly underwater? A FIRST, WE NEED to understand a little about our own eyes. In humans, the cornea – the clear surface at the front of the eye – does most of the focusing. The lens only contributes about 10 per cent, and fine-tunes the focus for sharp images at different distances. Next, we need to look at light. All substances have a refractive index. This refers to the speed at which light travels through them compared to through a vacuum. When we are underwater, the refractive index of the water is too similar to that of our corneas. This means we can’t focus as well and our lenses can’t adjust enough to make up the difference. Therefore, our…

What is quantum physics for? Quantum physics may seem like a pretty esoteric topic with no everyday practical value, but that’s far from being the case. Quantum physics is the science you need to understand the behaviour of atoms, electrons and light. It therefore underpins the workings of microchips and lasers, among other things. The chemical bonds that hold strands of DNA together, and which enable the double-stranded molecules of the famous helix to unzip and make copies of themselves, operate purely in accordance with the laws of quantum physics. Quantum physics is the science of life: it doesn’t get much more basic than that! Wave, particle or both? The understanding of physics that scientists had reached by the end of the 19th Century is now called ‘classical physics’. It…

BLACK BODY An object that is a perfect absorber of radiation is called a black body, hence the name. But if a black body is hot, it becomes a perfect emitter of radiation. So, seemingly paradoxically, the Sun is an almost perfect black body radiator. DIFFRACTION This is the process by which waves can bend around corners or spread out in all directions from a small hole or slit. DUALITY This is the way that quantum entities seem to be both particle and wave. Light ‘waves’ are associated with particles called photons; electron ‘particles’ are associated with waves. ENERGY LEVEL A quantum state, for example in an atom, that is associated with a particular energy. Electrons in atoms will sit on, or occupy, specific energy levels. QUANTUM LEAP The change…

WHAT’S HOT STEAM MACHINES There have been plenty of false starts along the way, but it now looks like the first Steam machines – console-like PCs that run Valve’s gaming-orientated SteamOS and are designed to sit below your TV – should finally be in stores before the year’s out. First off the blocks will be the Alpha from Alienware, and the Steam Machine I from Cyberpower, both priced at around £400. WHAT’S NOT LASTPASS If your entire business model is based around keeping people’s passwords safe, then having your own databanks compromised by hackers is pretty much the worst disaster that could befall you. Yet that’s exactly what happened to online passport manager LastPass back in June, with the company urging all users to change their master passwords as a…

1 BRAIN BOOSTER Want to pep yourself up ready for a busy day – or wind down after one? Try zapping your brain! The Thync system combines an app and headpiece to bombard your neurones with low-level currents that Thync calls ‘Vibes’. You can choose from ‘Calm’ or ‘Energy’. The tech involved is used by neuroscientists, but some have expressed concern about its use by non-specialists outside the lab. Thync $299 (£193 approx), thync.com 2 CHATTER BOT Meet Musio, a cute, artificially intelligent assistant. Originally designed to help kids learn languages, Musio talks to you, answers questions, tells jokes and manages your diary. If you add the optional Bluetooth unit, it can control your smart devices – and the more you interact with Musio, the more it learns. Musio has…

Elements 4D iOS 5.0 or later, iPhone/iPod/iPod Touch, Android 4.0 or later, Daqri, free CHEMISTRY SETS CAN be dangerous, but you can ignite an interest in science without blowing up the kitchen if you use Elements 4D. After printing out and constructing six paper cubes with different elements represented on each side, you bring them to life using the augmented reality viewer. Each image reveals a glass box containing a sample of the element. Pick a cube up and turn it around to examine its contents, or bang cubes together to cause chemical reactions to occur - only with far less risky consequences for the curtains. Pocket Physics Android, Geckonization, free PHYSICS STUDENTS AT all levels can now take some of the strain off their memories thanks to Pocket Physics.…

Hardback Paperback “It’s rare that scientists as brilliant as Wilczek give us a glimpse of what goes on inside their heads” A Beautiful Question Finding Nature’s Deep Design Frank Wilczek Allen Lane £20 DOES THE WORLD embody beautiful ideas? In these days of global turmoil and seemingly endless reports of misery, atrocity and death, a natural response would be: “Are you joking?” Even if everything was just fine, such questions do come across as a bit academic. Sure enough, the author of A Beautiful Question is an academic. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Frank Wilczek is a professor of theoretical physics, whose practitioners are notorious for having little patience with airy-fairy philosophical issues. But Wilczek is no ordinary physicist. In 1973, at the age of just 21, he…

Mind swaps in Self/less MY DAUGHTER ASKED me what would happen if you transplanted the brain of someone who likes dogs onto the body of someone who doesn’t. It raised the spectre of head transplants; a topic, some would venture, that shouldn’t be discussed with a 10-year-old, much less with one who was, at the time, eyeing up the family chainsaw. In Self/less, I told her, medics transfer the mind of a cancer-riddled aristocrat into the body of a young man. But the closest we’ve come in the real world was in 1970 when a US surgeon stitched the head of one monkey onto the twitching corpse of another. This was met with stunned silence. They didn’t attempt to join the spinal cords, I explained, so the monkey was unable…

…got our hearts monitored as we zoomed round a track with a stunt driver at the Goodwood Festival Of Speed. We didn’t scream… honest! Find out more on our website. …paid a visit to the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. Highlights this year included a 3D-printed replica of Richard III’s skeleton, and this rather friendly-looking robot. …chatted with Frank Wilczek about the beauty in physics. Read our interview with Frank on p98, in which we discuss the symmetry found in life and the Universe. FOCUS DIGITAL Available for Android • iOS • Kindle Fire • Kindle e-reader…

What’s he done? Smith recently called on all 18-year-old men to have their sperm frozen if they were thinking about starting a family in later life. He says that this would prevent their children from having genetic disorders. How does that work? The sperm cells of older men contain more genetic mutations than those of younger men. While most of these mutations have little or no impact, Smith reckons that older fathers could be running a higher risk of having children with health issues such as autism and schizophrenia. Is he right? Well, his comments have proven pretty controversial. While it is generally accepted that the risks of certain genetic disorders increase with the age of the father, some experts say the effect is minimal. Smith thinks that sperm freezing…

A PAPUA NEW Guinean tribe famous for eating human brains may be helping to shed light on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). Surviving members of the Fore tribe have developed a genetic resistance to kuru, a CJD-like disease caused by the practice of consuming dead relatives during funeral rituals, a team at UCL has found. When the practice was at its highest during the 1950s, the disease claimed the lives of one in 50 people. Like CJD and some forms of dementia, kuru is caused by ‘prions’ – a type of protein that can change shape and clump together to form fibres that can damage the normal tissue of the brain. But the team found that evolutionary changes in the so-called prion protein gene gave…

MEET THE WARNOWIID: a type of plankton that has been found to have a complex eye-like structure despite being made from just one single cell. The predatory microbes were collected off the coasts of Japan and Canada by a team from the University of British Columbia. Once the researchers placed them under the microscope, they discovered that a dark purple spot situated within the organism was an ocelloid, a complex structure similar to a human eye. “It’s an amazingly complex structure for a single-celled organism to have evolved,” says researcher Greg Gavelis. “It contains a collection of sub-cellular organelles that look very much like the lens, cornea, iris and retina of multicellular eyes found in humans and other larger animals.” So far it’s not entirely clear what warnowiids use the…

JULY 2015 SEES the 30th anniversary of Live Aid, a brave response to a famine in Ethiopia. Its slogan was ‘Feed The World’: a laudable ambition, but one that seems further away than ever, with an increasing human population and the environmental impact of agriculture becoming more apparent. Technological advances have helped feed the world before. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the ‘Green Revolution’ dramatically increased global food production thanks to high-yield grain varieties, new fertilisers and pesticides, and advances in farm management techniques. What of the future? The most familiar technological advance in food production today is probably the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in which individual genes are lifted from one species and inserted into another. GM foods remain controversial; there is no scientific evidence that…

6 August 1945 Bomb dropped At 8.15am, Enola Gay drops Little Boy on Hiroshima. A total of 10 per cent of its 64kg of uranium-235 undergoes nuclear fission. 1 second later Fireball The Little Boy nuclear bomb emits a 280m fireball across the city, increasing the surface temperatures up to a scorching 4,000°C. Expansion The sudden rise in temperature expands the air. Atmospheric pressure reaches 19 tonnes per square metre. Almost every structure collapses. Pressure plunge Air pressure near the hypocentre plummets from high to low. This causes air blowing out from the hypocentre to reverse, sweeping winds towards the centre with tremendous force. 30 minutes later Poison rain Black rain falls, showering the west of the city in dark droplets of mud, dust, soot and radiation from the mushroom…

1. United States Number of users: 152 million Population: 319 million 2. India Number of users: 109 million Population: 1.3 billion 3. Brazil Number of users: 71 million Population: 200 million 4. Indonesia Number of users: 60 million Population: 250 million 5. Mexico Number of users: 44 million Population: 122 million 6. Philippines Number of users: 34 million Population: 98 million 7. Turkey Number of users: 32 million Population: 75 million 8. United Kingdom Number of users: 30 million Population: 64 million 9. Japan Number of users: 27 million Population: 127 million 10. France Number of users: 23 million Population: 66 million…

1900 German physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) discovers that black body radiation can be explained if light is emitted in packets of energy, now called photons. This conflicts with the accepted idea that light is a wave. 1905 German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) explains the photoelectric effect, in which light falling on a metal surface makes photoelectrons jump out of the surface. 1913 Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) explains the spectrum of light radiated by atoms in terms of electrons jumping between fixed energy levels, like steps on a staircase, inside the atom. This is the ‘quantum leap’. 1927 US physicist Clinton Davisson and UK physicist George Paget Thomson (pictured) share a Nobel prize for independently discovering that electrons can be diffracted like waves, confirming the reality of wave-particle duality. 1932…

1. SCIENCE ON A TINY SCALE Quantum physics describes the behaviour of very small things, like electrons and atoms. That’s why we don’t notice weird quantum effects in everyday life. But quantum physics explains how atoms and molecules w ork, including molecules like DNA. We need quantum physics to do everything from designing computer chips to genetic engineering. 2. EVEN EXPERTS GET CONFUSED At the quantum level the distinction between waves and particles is blurred. Everything in the quantum realm is both wave and particle at the same time. Experiments designed to measure waves find waves, while experiments designed to measure particles find particles. What you look for is what you get. 3. PROBABILITY IS KING Probability rules in the quantum w orld. If a single quantum entity, such as…

AS I WRITE this on a train, a camera is filming me and my fellow commuters. It’s there for my ‘safety and convenience’, and it’s increasingly unremarkable to be observed in this way. Soon we will have to make the assumption that we are always on camera when not explicitly in private. Filming in public is not new, of course. CCTV cameras linked to operations rooms have been around since the 1970s, and are a common feature of the urban environment. But today’s combination of high-definition cameras, fast networks, effectively unlimited storage capacity and powerful image processing algorithms is taking us into new territory, and it seems to be unstoppable. The change was highlighted earlier this year when Leicestershire Police pointed cameras at the 90,000 people attending the Download music…

FROM 26 JULY NASA’s Unexplained Files 2 Discovery Channel, 8pm SOMEWHERE IN NASA’S vast archives – probably in a dusty file marked ‘TOP SECRET’ – sits a whole collection of strange and sometimes inexplicable stories. Could huge spider-like formations on Mercury be evidence of alien life? Did NASA accidentally nuke Jupiter? Did the Nazis win the Space Race? Probably not, but it’s fun to speculate, right? 10-14 AUGUST Jungle Babies: Tarsier Tails Eden, 6pm WITH ITS DINNER-PLATE eyes and tennis ball size, the tarsier is undoubtedly one of the cutest animals on the planet. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most elusive. So when given the chance to watch two families of these nocturnal ninjas frolicking and gambolling in their natural Indonesian habitat, how could anyone possibly resist? 17 AUGUST…

29 JUNE – 9 AUGUST Light! Camera! Action! National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 12pm-4pm, free, nms.ac.uk BUILD A SIMPLE camera, experiment with heat and light, and discover the science behind photographic processes at this exhibition. 25 JULY – 30 AUGUST Foyles Summer of Fun Foyles stores, Bristol and London, foyles.co.uk/events ONE FOR THE big kids among us! Star Wars, Minecraft and Aardman characters come alive in science-themed screenings, performances and workshops at Foyles stores. 6 AUGUST Silver Screen Sci-Fi: THX-1138 Royal Observatory Greenwich, London, 7pm-9pm, £8, rmg.co.uk CHOW DOWN ON popcorn while watching George Lucas’s lesser-known sci-fi classic, THX-1138, set in a dystopian future in which mankind’s emotions are controlled by forced medication. 7 AUGUST – 1 NOVEMBER Secret Science Gallery, Dublin, free, dublin.sciencegallery.com CODERS AREN’T JUST computer nerds. At…

Why did you decide to write a book about beauty? The seed was planted several years ago when I was asked to give a lecture on ‘quantum beauty’ at Cambridge University. I was inclined to turn it down at first, because it seemed so outlandish. But I found the idea really growing on me – it brought me back to the kinds of philosophical questions I was obsessed with as a teenager. The lecture was very well-received, and I’ve discovered more and more that if you poke underneath the surface, beauty is a big part [of physics]. Beauty is very subjective, so how do you define it? In common usage, beauty has many subjective elements – a lot of our perception of beauty has to do with the human body…