Table of contents for New Year 2020 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

The new normal NEW YORK, USA, 24 MAY A woman hugs her grandmother through a plastic sheet draped over a clothesline during Memorial Day weekend in New York. By May, the city had been in lockdown for around three months and the photographer caught the pair’s first meeting since it began. It’s thought the first case of COVID-19 was recorded on 17 November 2019, according to documents discovered by the South China Morning Post. The discovery of a novel virus was only announced a month later. Just over a year later, scientists are poised to deploy a range of vaccines to fight the disease. This incredible feat is testament to how vital the science sector and universities are to our collective future. Black summer BLUE MOUNTAINS, AUSTRALIA, 11 JANUARY Much…

Despite its proximity to the fossil-rich Great Britain, the island of Ireland has never had any dinosaur fossils discovered on it. Until now. Two 200-million-year-old bones were found by Roger Byrne, the late schoolteacher and amateur fossil collector, who donated them to Ulster Museum. The bones were discovered in early Jurassic rocks in Islandmagee, on the eastern coast of County Antrim. At the time of donation, they were not formally identified. But now, researchers at the University of Portsmouth and Queen’s University Belfast have confirmed that the fossils came from dinosaurs. “The great rarity of such fossils here is because most of Ireland’s rocks are the wrong age for dinosaurs, either too old or too young, making it nearly impossible to confirm dinosaurs existed on these shores,” said study leader…

Make mine a vindaloo! People who regularly chow down on chilli peppers may live for longer and have a significantly reduced risk of dying from cardiovascular disease or cancer, research from Cleveland Clinic’s Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute suggests. Previous studies have found that capsaicin, the compound that gives chilli peppers their characteristic kick, can have anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-cancer and blood- glucose regulating effects when eaten. To further investigate the effects of consuming chilli peppers, the researchers gathered together the health and dietary records of more than 570,000 patients in the US, Italy, China and Iran, published in four previous large-scale scientific studies. They found that those who ate chilli peppers regularly had a 26 per cent reduction in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, a 23 per cent relative reduction in…

Scientists have come up with a method for delivering drugs to the brain using nanoparticles, which could be used to treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The technique, developed by researchers at Canada’s Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), has been shown to work in both cultured cells and zebrafish. The biggest hurdle in treating neurodegenerative diseases is the blood-brain barrier (BBB), a border designed to protect the brain from potentially harmful substances in the blood. Pathogens, antibodies and large molecules are blocked by the BBB, while certain antibiotics and glucose (with the help of a specific transport protein) are allowed to pass through. “The blood-brain barrier filters out harmful substances to prevent them from freely reaching the brain. But this same barrier also blocks the passage…

APPLICATIONS Most adults have a smartphone now and apps are easily accessible. There’s a wide range of psychology apps with variable evidence-bases behind them. One highly evidence-based blended therapy for psychosis is the SlowMo programme (pictured right) from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, which uses a combination of face-to-face therapy and an app co-designed by clinicians, app developers and people with psychosis, to help people see their thoughts as separate from them and more controllable. The app allows people to visualise thoughts and manipulate their size, shape and colour, or replace them with more helpful ones that their therapist helps to generate. Initial studies have been encouraging and the results of a large clinical trial are imminent. AUGMENTED REALITY If you’ve played Pokemon Go! then you’ve used augmented…

The roar of engines from the Rockot launch vehicle split the air as it lifted off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia on 30 June 2003. The rocket was 30m tall and had been chartered by the German company Eurockot Launch Services. But instead of carrying one large satellite into orbit, the Rockot was carrying eight smaller ones. At the time, no one paid it much attention. After all, it wasn’t the launch of a flagship, billion-dollar mission. Yet in hindsight we can see that’s exactly what made the launch so important - perhaps even a watershed in the way we use and explore space. Some of the satellites lofted into orbit that day were tiny CubeSats, with dimensions of just 10 x 10 x 10cm. Made of standardised…

Ancient DNA teased out from the fossilised bones and teeth of human species has transformed what we know about our ancestors. Over the past two decades, analysis of genetic material has not only revealed new human species, but it’s also allowed archaeologists to recreate what our ancestors looked like, thousands of years after they went extinct. But it can’t give us the whole story because DNA is fragile - it breaks down over time to the point where its code becomes unintelligible. This has meant that many ancient bones can’t be analysed genetically, therefore much of the human family tree has remained hidden from view. But over the past few years, new insights into our ancient ancestors have come from the proteins locked inside fossilised remains. Proteins can survive much…

1 A giant leap for womankind In September, NASA announced its plans to land the first woman, and next man, on the Moon by 2024 as part of its Artemis missions. The space agency is close to finishing work on its cutting-edge Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft - the vessel that it hopes will take humans back to the Moon and then, later, on to Mars. The missions will begin with Artemis 1, an uncrewed test flight of SLS and Orion currently planned for November 2021. The mission will last for 26 days and include six days in lunar orbit. Artemis 2, the first crewed mission for Orion, is currently planned for August 2023. The spacecraft will perform a flyby of the Moon before returning to Earth. If…

Trials of an exciting new way of treating dangerous drug-resistant infections will start to report results in 2021. Thesetreatments involve patients being injected with billions of virusparticles that specifically infect and kill bacteria. Such viruses - known as bacteriophages (or just ‘phages’)- are found everywhere there are bacteria and replicate by inserting their genes into bacterial cells. Once infected with the virus genes, the bacterial cell goes awry and starts producing viral proteins, which assemble into new viruses. Within as littleas half an hour, the cell bursts and tens or hundreds of new viruses are released to repeat the cycle in another host. They’reremarkably effective at this: some studies suggest that for every grain of sand on Earth there are over a trillion phages inexistence at any one time. Given…

The first CubeSat was developed by Bob Twiggs of Stanford University and Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University in the 1990s. According to the story, they decided that a CubeSat should be just 10 x 10 x 10cm because sitting close by was a box for a Beanie Baby toy. Their goal was for a team of students to learn to construct a CubeSat that could transmit a radio signal like Russia’s Sputnik 1, the first satellite launched into space in 1957. But others were thinking bigger. Scott Williams, now a programme director at SRI International, was also developing smaller satellites with his colleague Victor Aguero. Both were at Stanford University, California, at the time. They’d witnessed the impact the microcomputer revolution had and could see the chance to…

OLDEST HUMAN PROTEIN SEQUENCE The oldest human fossil to have its protein sequenced is 800,000 years old - nearly twice the age of the oldest fossil to have its DNA sequenced. In April 2020, researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark announced that they had sequenced proteins from the dental enamel of a male Homo antecessor that once lived in Atapuerca, Spain. When the amino acids in the tooth enamel’s proteins were compared with sequences from other hominins, it showed that H. antecessor is a close relative of the last common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. The oldest human DNA sequenced is from the 430,000-year-old fossilised teeth and bones of early Neanderthals. OLDEST OF ALL PROTEIN SEQUENCES Ancient ostrich eggshells found in northern Tanzania provide evidence that…

ACROSS 1 Airwoman in secret plan to capture his heart (5) 4 Blade that’s reversible (5) 8 Philosopher quietly changes a lot (5) 9 Improve nowadays in organised purge (7) 10 Poor balance around a sphere (3) 11 Diminishing lute composition by head of performance (5) 12 Gold transaction is a very unpleasant experience (6) 14 Sporting award brings city down (9,4) 17 Life’s fashionable for an enzyme (6) 19 Old-fashioned appointment with daughter (5) 22 Canasta certainly includes a card (3) 23 Old colour around top of chart, no longer found (7) 24 Man has planted first tree (5) 25 Agent didn’t finish without money (5) 26 Trainee acted in a strange way (5) DOWN 1 Residents almost well liked by church (8) 2 Left direction to a minimum…

Camels with more fur find it easier to keep cool. This counterintuitive discovery has enabled scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop a new cooling material that could keep things like food and medicines chilled, without the need of a power supply. Camels (and other animals, including humans) cool down by sweating. When their internal body temperature rises, sweat glands in their skin start to produce sweat. This salty secretion sits on the skin, and the humidity difference between that and the dry, desert air drives evaporation, turning the sweat into water vapour that transports the heat away from the body and keeps the camel cool. Previous studies of this process have enabled scientists to develop a cooling material that mimics sweat glands. It uses a hydrogel,…

THE DOGMATIC People who are dogmatic about their views seek less information and make less accurate judgments as a result, even on simple matters unrelated to politics, according to a study led by UCL and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics researchers. FREQUENT FLYERS ‘Super emitters’, frequent flyers that account for just 1 per cent of the world’s population, were responsible for half of aviation’s carbon emissions in 2018, a study carried out at Linnaeus University in Sweden has found.…

The standard model of our Universe may be showing some cracks. Several fundamental cosmological observations are contradicting each other. For instance, the Universe appears to be expanding 10 per cent faster than it should be, according to observations of the leftover heat from the Big Bang. It’s perfectly possible that the contradictions will disappear as our estimates of cosmic parameters improve. But it’s also possible that the contradictions won’t go away and that our fundamental picture of the Universe is about to undergo a radical revision, perhaps to include invisible, ‘dark’ components as complex as atoms, stars and galaxies. ADDITIONAL INGREDIENTS Cosmology is the ultimate science. It deals with the birth, evolution and fate of the Universe. The standard model consists of several ingredients: the Big Bang, dark matter, dark…

Do you ever have days when you can’t seem to do anything right? Days when you’re fed up with yourself? Days when you berate yourself for things you’ve said or done with the sort of angry monologue that you wouldn’t subject a friend to? From time to time, we all do. But while it’s common to sometimes struggle to be kind to ourselves, for some people, especially those with depression, relentlessly picking at their own worst traits can become an endless cycle of self-bullying. Therapy seeks to break that cycle through various approaches and one of the newest involves virtual reality (VR). At University College London, Prof John King and Dr Emma Jayne Kilford are working on a VR intervention to use as an adjunct to face-to-face therapy for depression.…

Dotted through the Scottish Highlands there remain fragments of Caledonian pine woodland whose origins can be traced back to the temperate rainforest that covered much of the country after the last ice age. Often surrounded by Scots pine plantations and land overgrazed by deer, they’re a last refuge for many threatened species. Abernethy National Nature Reserve includes one of the largest remnants of this ancient woodland. Decades of work by RSPB Scotland and others is restoring and expanding it. The project, which now has a 200-year plan, is based on carefully encouraging natural processes to flourish, making it perhaps Britain’s most successful example of the ‘rewilding’ concept so far. “With the [ancient] pine wood expanding, that’s allowing other species to expand their range and spread as well,” says Tors Hamilton…