Table of contents for June 2016 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

Two hundred years ago, the northern hemisphere lost its summer. Rain, snow and frost crept across Europe and North America, leaving disease and famine in its wake. We now know this ‘cold snap’ had actually started on the other side of the planet. In Indonesia, the supervolcano Mount Tambora had erupted, spitting out a cloud of ash into the stratosphere that would hang there for months soaking up the Sun’s warmth. It was this volcanic winter in June, so the story goes, that kept Mary Shelley and friends indoors for days during a visit with Lord Byron to his house near Lake Geneva. To pass the time, they hosted a ghost story competition and Shelley penned one of the earliest works of science fiction – Frankenstein. Shelley’s work was inspired…

Seasonal adjustment In answer to your article ‘When does spring begin?’ (March, p24), assuming there are four seasons of equal length, we should count forward 6.5 weeks from the winter solstice. This gives 8 February for the start of spring or thereabouts, and 8 May for the start of summer. Take no notice of what astronomers and meteorologists say, or you will miss the seasons! British schools’ summer holidays were timed so the children could work on the farms to help bring in the harvest, nothing much to do with when the summer is – autumn starts around 8 August, which funnily enough is when we start to notice leaves falling from the trees, gusty days and warm colours on the landscape from the low Sun. Paul Buck, via email…

 What is life and when does it begin? It’s a fundamental question that has occupied scientists and philosophers for centuries, and one raised once more thanks to results from a groundbreaking embryo study. “THIS COULD HELP US UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENS DURING MISCARRIAGE” Biologists at the University of Cambridge and New York’s Rockefeller University have successfully kept a human embryo alive for 13 days, only stopping to comply with UK law, which places the limit at 14 days. It enabled the researchers to study the molecular processes that occur when a human embryo implants itself into the womb. “Implantation is a milestone in human development as it is from this stage onwards that the embryo really begins to take shape and the overall body plan is decided. It is also the…

What did they do? A team at Washington University School of Medicine bred mice with a mutated strain of Gnptab. A mutated version of this gene has been linked to stammering in humans. What did they find? The mice carrying the mutation paused for longer between squeaks and repeated the same sounds more often that the non-carrying mice. They also produced a smaller variety of sounds than mice without the mutated gene. Why did they do that? Although speech is an incredibly complicated process, the finding could provide researchers with a method of further studying the roles of genes in stammering. The end goal would be the development of effective treatments for sufferers.…

What’s that? A sleazy 70s funk band perhaps? Afraid not. It’s a so-called ‘good’ fat. Unlike white fat, which stores calories and can lead to the dreaded spare tyre, brown fat burns energy to produce heat. Tell me more. Brown fat is di icult to find and study and its exact role is still being figured out. It’s found in di erent areas in people’s bodies. It is activated by cold and may act as a kind of internal jacket to keep us warm. Any new developments? A team at the University of Bonn has found that when there are low levels of miRNA92a, a type of molecule responsible for the coding and expression of genes, brown fat cells burn more energy. The finding may help researchers develop drugs that…

LABRADORS ARE PROGRAMMED TO BE CHUBBY Labs are among the tubbiest of dogs – almost two-thirds of them are overweight. Researchers have found this may be due to a mutant version of the gene POMC, which helps switch off hunger following a meal. OLDER PEOPLE FEEL PAIN MORE Next time your nanna moans about her aches and pains, you might want to show a bit of sympathy. A study at the University of Florida has found that inflammation following an injury occurs faster and lasts longer in older people. STIS COULD BE RESPONSIBLE FOR HUMAN MONOGAMY Canadian researchers used computer models to emulate the evolution of sexual relations as societies grew from small groups of hunter-gatherers to larger agricultural settlements. They found that as partner availability increased, so did STI…

Scientists in Japan have built an early prototype of a system that could one day turn your skin into a computer display. The device consists of polymer LEDs that are just three micrometres thick and equipped with organic photodetectors. In the proof-of-concept trial shown here, the University of Tokyo researchers mounted the LEDs on a flexible rubber substrate and connected them to a sensor that measures blood oxygen levels, and then attached them to a human hand using, essentially, clingfilm. The effect, if you can ignore the clingfilm at least, is somewhat akin to having an LED tattoo. It’s hoped that, going forward, the technology will be used to make wearable devices much less bulky and intrusive. Before long, you could be ditching your smartwatch and getting email notifications right…

One of the most ambitious projects hoping to replicate a mind is the Blue Brain Project – an attempt to reverse-engineer mammalian brain circuitry. To begin with, the team is building a biologically-realistic digital simulation of the neurons in a rat brain. “Although the rat brain is very different from the human brain, a lot of the basic biology is the same,” the team at the Blue Brain Project says. “Research strategies and tools we have developed in rats could also, in principle, be applied to humans.” A breakthrough in this project came last October, when scientists completed a draft simulation of part of the rat neocortex, a region of the brain key to processing sensory information. They reconstructed a section of brain tissue about one-third of a cubic millimetre…

“Human skin is surprisingly easy to print, thanks to its layered structure” Once the brain and head are constructed, the rest of the body is easier to build. Bones are probably the simplest of all – we’ve been fixing bones with pins, rods and screws since the middle of the 19th Century. Titanium is often used to create replacement bones because it’s non-toxic and compatible with living tissue, leading to implants that can last more than 30 years. Frankenstein sourced his bones from ‘charnel houses’, but he would have loved 3D printers, which can form perfect replica bones. In 2012, one 83-year-old woman was given a 3D-printed lower jaw that took just a few hours to print and install. The patient was able to speak shortly after waking up from…

When Londoner George Forster was convicted of murder in 1803, the judge handed down a sentence that would sound rather unusual today. It called not only for his death by hanging, but for dissection a erwards – a common practice at the time, to provide the medical world with corpses to experiment on and also to prevent the condemned from rising again on Judgment Day. A er being hanged on the morning of 18 January, Forster’s body was carted down the street to a house where Giovanni Aldini, an Italian scientist, was waiting. Aldini wanted to show that corpses contained an ‘animal electricity’, and to do so he was going to apply a method named ‘galvanism’, a er his uncle Luigi Galvani who’d discovered it previously. Aldini inserted a metal…

“USING NANOPARTICLES AND NOT SUBMARINES AVOIDS THE RISK OF ANY MINIATURISED VILLAINS” That means that our whole Solar System could be, like, one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being. This is too much! That means one tiny atom in my fingernail could be…” “Could be one little tiny universe.” In days gone by, this was the stereotypical stoned human conversation, as immortalised by National Lampoon’s Animal House. As drugs have changed and our understanding of physics has advanced, I imagine the conversations have moved on to discussions of the possibility that we are all some sort of simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation, or some other burble inspired by The Matrix. Evidence for populations of sentient beings thriving on electrons – even small, clever cats…

Fear of the dark runs deep. According to a survey by the RNIB, more adults in the UK are afraid of losing their sight than they are of developing Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or heart disease. But that could change as the seemingly miraculous idea of a cure for blindness becomes reality. Extraordinary progress in electronics, gene therapy and stem cell treatments in the past decade have brought sight to dozens of people who otherwise faced blindness for the rest of their lives. The coming years hold the prospect of stem cell treatments that seed the retina with healthy cells, along with new techniques that transform nerve cells into light receptors. With UK funders and industry investing heavily in research and treatments for blindness, sight restoration for thousands of previously ‘incurable’ people…

DAMAGE TO RETINAL PIGMENT EPITHELIUM The retinal pigment epithelium is a layer of cells behind the retina that nourishes and maintains photoreceptors. It’s attached to a layer filled with blood vessels, the choroid. Damage to the epithelial cells through age-related macular degeneration, for example, can cause rods and cones to die. PROBLEMS WITH CORNEA AND LENS As light comes into the eye, it is focused onto the retina by the cornea at the very front and the lens within. Supporting muscles change the shape of the lens to focus. Deformations of the cornea, lack of focusing power in the lens and a distorted eyeball can all cause refractive errors that make up more than 50 per cent of cases of partial sight loss or blindness. MACULAR DEGENERATION The macula is…

“The habit of referring to ‘alien civilisations’ may be too restrictive.ET might be a single integrated intelligence” Over the last 20 years, we’ve come to realise that most stars are orbited by retinues of planets. Within our Milky Way, there are millions – even billions – of planets that resemble the young Earth. But do these planets contain life? Now that’s a tricky question, as we don’t even know how life began on our own planet – what caused the transition from complex chemistry to the first replicating entities deemed to be ‘alive’? On other planets in the Universe, we don’t know how likely it is that evolution led to the appearance of ‘intelligent’ creatures with technical capabilities, as it did here on Earth. But if intelligence did emerge on…

1. In 1942 Dr Harry Coover was looking for clear plastics that could be used for lightweight gun sights in WWII. One of the chemical groups he tested was the cyanoacrylates. 2. Coover discarded them as a suitable material because cyanoacrylates bond instantly to almost anything. But in 1958 the company Eastman Kodak took advantage of this and sold it as Eastman #910, which was later renamed ‘super glue’. 3. Cyanoacrylates are liquid at room temperature. But the presence of even a tiny amount of moisture causes the cyanoacrylate molecules to link rapidly into a long sticky chain. 4. In 1966, field medics in the Vietnam War used a cyanoacrylate spray to temporarily seal wounds. Today, medical grade super glue is often used to repair small cuts.…

FALLING DOWN Gravity affects every aspect of our lives – in fact, we wouldn’t be here without it. Yet it’s a surprisingly weak force, and one we don’t yet entirely understand Without gravity, we wouldn’t exist. It provides the force that keeps us on the surface of the Earth, and the Earth in orbit around the Sun. It was responsible for the formation of the Solar System in the first place, and it’s the gravitational attraction of all the material in the Sun, pulling it tightly together, that makes it possible for nuclear fusion to take place, giving us heat and light. Yet despite its ubiquity, gravity is one of the most mysterious forces in the Universe. What is gravity? As one of the four fundamental forces of nature –…

FLUKE: THE MATHS AND MYTHS OF COINCIDENCE BY JOSEPH MAZUR Out 2 June (£12.99, Oneworld) Have you ever bumped into an old school friend on holiday? This mathematical take on coincidence reveals that even the unlikeliest of events can come true. Just ask the woman who won the lo ery four times… GOLDILOCKS AND THE WATER BEARS BY LOUISA PRESTON Out 16 June (£16.99, Bloomsbury Sigma) Astrobiologist Louisa Preston looks at the latest thinking around extraterrestrial life, explaining how earthly ‘extremophiles’ like the water bear are directing our search for life elsewhere in the cosmos. THE GENE: AN INTIMATE HISTORY BY SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE Out 2 June (£25, Bodley Head) A history of genetics with a personal touch. As well as detailing the major breakthroughs, from Mendel and Darwin to Watson…

SIMON CROMPTON Could advances in bionic implants, and gene and stem cell therapies soon make blindness a thing of the past? Science and health writer Simon Crompton brings together the most cutting-edge research. p61 LORD MARTIN REES Despite decades of effort, searches for extraterrestrial life have so far come up short. Is something wrong with how we are looking? The Astronomer Royal shares his provocative theory. p68 MARLENE ZUK Stan and Olli, two male king penguins, were recently moved to Hamburg Zoo after showing little interest in mating with females. We ask behavioural biologist Marlene Zuk if animals really can be gay. p22…

“The framework in which this work has been carried out was first set out in the Warnock Report, published in 1984. This concluded that it was ethical to conduct research on human embryos until day 14 of their development. Parliament agreed with this recommendation when the 1991 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was passed. But, until now, this has been a theoretical restriction as no one had the technical means to keep embryos alive in the laboratory much beyond day seven. To keep the embryos alive in this study, the scientists used methods of culture first tested with mouse embryos. This has allowed them to undertake almost hour-by-hour observations of human embryo development to see how they develop and organise within the first two weeks. This has already provided new…

<0.001% New research suggests there may be up to one trillion species of microbes on Earth, meaning that known species account for less than 1/1,000th of one per cent of the total. 709, 190, 040 Daily flow volume, in litres, of the world’s shortest river, the Roe River. Given the volume of a human tear is 6.2 microlitres, the whole world couldn’t ‘cry me a river’, let alone Justin Timberlake’s ex. 2,325 The number of confirmed exoplanets spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope so far. 49,000 The age in years of a flake of basalt that was found in Australia. It is thought to be a fragment from the earliest axe with a handle.…

How common is homosexual behaviour in nature? We really don’t know. I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of whether there’s same-sex behaviour. Incidentally, that’s a term I like better than ‘homosexual’, in part because homosexual is used to refer to a variety of things in people: sexual orientation and sexual preference, what people want to do, the kinds of partners they have. In animals, we really don’t know anything about their motivations. Animals showing same-sex behaviour aren’t necessarily pairing for life. Bonobos have sex between females and it seems to serve a function of defusing social tension in interactions. Are they gay? No, they’re just doing what they’re doing. Sex isn’t always about reproduction. There are circumstances in which sexual behaviour has a function…

American company Tyco, which makes fire and security products, has unveiled ‘Scott Sight’ – a firefighter’s face mask with built-in thermal imaging. These days, firefighters routinely use thermal imaging to locate people who are in need of rescue from smoke-filled rooms, but until now this has meant carrying bulky thermal imaging cameras into the emergency zone, which obviously leaves them with one less hand for fighting fire and rescuing people. Scott Sight solves that problem by placing a thermal imaging camera on the front of the mask, and a small heads-up display inside it. The camera and display will run for up to four hours on a single charge, and the system can be calibrated for different ambient temperatures, which is kind of useful when you’re inside a burning building.…

EXTREME TRIP In 2001, the Emergency Medicine Journal described a British man who had overdosed on drugs. On the way to hospital, he went into cardiac arrest, and resuscitation attempts failed. He was declared dead, but then a pulse was detected. He recovered fully. I’M NOT DEAD! Eleanor Markham, a young American woman, was pronounced dead in 1894 by her family’s physician. The weather was warm so a burial was hastily arranged for two days later, but on the way to the graveyard the hearse was halted by a banging inside the coffin. SURPRISE REVIVAL In 2014, Walter Williams, a 78-year-old man from the US, awoke in a body bag after being declared dead earlier the same day. It’s thought that a defibrillator in his chest revived him. The next…

A radio dish swivels above vast plains of Antarctic ice, while another scans the skies almost 5,000 metres above sea level in the Chilean desert. Meanwhile, cosmic signals are pinging into receivers in California, Arizona, Hawaii, Mexico and Spain. Despite the distances between them, these radio dishes all form part of the same audacious project: a telescope the size of the Earth itself. This is the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and by this time next year, we’ll have used it to see into the heart of a black hole. Ordinary black holes are gargantuan relics formed by the deaths of the largest stars, those with masses tens of times that of the Sun. Even more brutal versions, with masses running into the equivalent of millions of stars, lurk deep in…

Simply put, bionic eyes replace the retina with an electronic version. Retinal implants, which work the same way as an image sensor chip in a digital camera, have now been implanted into 40 people during trials. They provide basic vision to those who have lost sight through conditions like retinitis pigmentosa, which destroys light-sensitive cells in the eye. The 3mm chip is inserted into the back of the eye in an operation lasting six to eight hours. In response to light, the chip sends out impulses that stimulate nerve cells behind the retina, which then send signals to the brain via the optic nerve. The device is connected to a tiny computer, implanted behind the ear and powered by a magnetic coil. For those who have the implant, images are…

Play smart Inspired by Wayne Rooney and co? Then you need the ultimate ‘wear-a-ball’ device for Euro 2016! Adidas miCoach Smart Ball has an integrated sensor that detects speed, spin, strike and flight path, then relays your kick data to a miCoach smart ball app on your phone. Back of the net! £145, adidas.co.uk Extreme screen Sport brings out the best in people, and that applies to technology, too. Here, home cinema and interior design team up to create an invisible screen. Using a laser diode and Sony’s own SXRD panels, which offer higher contrast, the Sony LSPX-W1S ultra short throw projector produces an Ultra HD 4K projection (four times the resolution of Full HD) a little under 4m wide from just 17cm away. £34,000, sony.co.uk/pro Proper grilling There’s a…

10. Euphausiid (krill) Length: 15cm Distribution: Antarctic Ocean 9. Giant acorn barnacle Length: 30cm Distribution: Coast of northwest America 8. Giant tiger prawn Length: 33cm Distribution: Indian Ocean and West Pacific 7. Alicella gigantea Length: 34cm Distribution: Kermadec Trench, New Zealand 6. Zebra mantis shrimp Length: 40cm Distribution: Indo-Pacific region 4= Tasmanian giant freshwater crayfish Length: 80cm Distribution: Rivers and streams in Tasmania 4= Tasmanian monster crab Leg span: 80cm Distribution: Oceans o southern Australia 3. Coconut crab Leg span: 1m Distribution: Indian Ocean and Central Pacific Ocean 2. American lobster Length: 1m Distribution: Atlantic Ocean around North America 1. Japanese spider crab Leg span: 4m Distribution: Pacific Ocean around southern Japan…

The basic idea of using electricity to create light was first investigated over 200 years ago by the English chemist Humphrey Davy. He showed that when electric current flowed through wires, their resistance caused them to heat up to the point where they gave out light. But he also identified the key problem to creating the first practical ‘incandescent light’: finding a cheap material that both burned brightly, and lasted for many hours. US inventor Thomas Edison is often credited with creating the solution in 1879: the carbon filament light bulb. Yet the British chemist Warren de La Rue had solved the scientific challenges nearly 40 years earlier. He used thin – and thus high-resistance – filaments to achieve the brightness, and delayed burnout by making them from high-melting-point metal…

Antimatter The equivalent of matter, but with some characteristics such as charge reversed. Antimatter has only ever been made in very small quantities, so we don’t yet know how it’s affected by gravity. Inversesquarelaw The gravitational force follows an inverse square law, which means gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects. As they get further apart, the gravitational force rapidly diminishes. Matter A description of the amount of matter (‘stuff’) in an object, mass tells us how much gravitational force it will experience. Mass does not change depending on where the object is. Precession The orbit of a planet does not follow exactly the same path every time, but undergoes precession, shifting its position around its host star. The precession of Mercury’s orbit could…

1 THERE’S NO ESCAPING IT Ma er has a fundamental property that means pieces of it are a racted towards each other. We call this gravity, and it’s everywhere. Gravity gets stronger as the amount of ma er increases, and as the distance between the pieces decreases – as Newton first described over 300 years ago. 2 A TALE OF SPACE AND TIME Although Newton’s formula for gravity will usually describe what happens, it isn’t always correct, and Newton didn’t describe how gravity works. Einstein built on Newton’s work, realising that ma er warps space and time. Objects moving in a straight line curve – so planets orbit the Sun – and stationary objects fall towards massive bodies. 3 RELATIVITY RULES Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted all kinds of…

Paris is such an international city – you can find people here from every corner of the world. But it still feels very French in terms of its customs and traditions, and as the city itself is quite small (you can get from one side to the other in 45 minutes on the Metro), it feels a bit like a village. The one drawback of Paris being a small city is that it can sometimes feel quite crowded. To get away from it all, I either like to walk along the CANAL SAINT-MARTIN 1 with its series of locks, or wander around the city’s largest cemetery PÈRE LACHAISE CEMETERY 2 to admire the interesting gothic architecture. One of my favourite parks in Paris is the PARC DE LA VILLETTE 3…

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In 2015, it was discovered that liquid water pools on the surface of the Red Planet during its warmest summer days. However, thanks to the low atmospheric pressure, it boils away almost instantly (the boiling point of water on Mars is just 20°C). Water was therefore believed to play little or no role in shaping the Martian surface. However, an international team of scientists has now shown that even this short-lived boiling water does have a significant geological impact. The researchers, led by Marion Massé from the Laboratoire de Planetologie et Géodynamique de Nantes (Laboratory of Planetology and Geodynamics of Nantes), recreated two Mars-like environments: one inside a former diving decompression chamber at Mars-like pressure, the other in a cold chamber at terrestrial pressure. When a block of ice melted…

Patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease often struggle to remember recently learned information, meaning they forget things like important appointments or where they left their keys. But it seems these memories are not lost. They are still filed away in the brain somewhere, they just can’t be easily accessed. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a means of retrieving memories in mice suffering from Alzheimer’s. The method relies on optogenetics, a technique that uses light to manipulate genetically modified neurons. Currently it is too invasive to be used in human trials as it involves inserting light-emitting devices into the subjects’ brains, but the same underlying principles still apply, the researchers said. “The important point is this is a proof of concept. That is, even if a memory seems…

This is cutting-edge stuff. A team at Children’s National Health System in Washington has created a robot surgeon that can outperform its human counterparts. Acting under the supervision of a human consultant, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) successfully stitched together the intestines of both live and dead pigs. And although it took longer than a human surgeon, at 35 minutes compared to eight, STAR produced stitches that were more evenly spaced, which helps to promote healing and prevents leakage. “Our results demonstrate the potential for autonomous robots to improve the efficacy, consistency, functional outcome and accessibility of surgical techniques,” said surgeon Peter C Kim. “The intent of this demonstration is not to replace surgeons, but to expand human capacity and capability through enhanced vision, dexterity and complementary machine intelligence…

This robotic hand was created by a team led by Zhe Hu of Yale University and Emanual Todorov of the University of Washington. It’s already incredibly human-like in its abilities, and is able to pick up very small objects – but now the researchers want to go one step further and give it real human tendons and skin. To create the hand, the team 3D-printed exact replicas of the bones from an actual human hand, then joined them together using a polyethylene fibre called Spectra which is both strong and flexible. To give the hand realistic contours, laser-cut sheets of rubber were used, but now the researchers hope to use the hand as a frame on which to grow real human tissue. If it works, the obvious application would be…

More and more jobs can be done by machines these days, and the latest occupation put on the endangered list by robotics engineers is that of the supermarket stocktaker. Developed by Canadian firm 4D Retail Technology Corp, the Space Genius is a Segway-based robot that can inventory an entire supermarket in less than an hour. It uses AI to navigate its way around, while digital cameras and object-recognition software help it determine what is on the shelves. For consumers, this means there’s much less chance of the items you want being unavailable – but the arrival of Space Genius is likely to be greeted with rather less enthusiasm by existing supermarket staff.…

BIOPRINTING The process of creating body tissue using 3D printing technologies. Cells are gradually layered up in the shape and form required and then allowed to grow together before the scaffold holding them in place is removed. BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE A direct communication pathway between a brain and an external device. Often used to research human cognitive and sensory functions, and in mind-controlled prosthetic limbs. CONNECTOME The map of neural connections in the brain and nervous system. Only one animal has had its entire connectome mapped – a tiny roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans. IMMUNOSUPPRESSANTS A cocktail of drugs that intentionally weakens the body’s immune system, lowering the chance of rejection of a transplanted organ. They also leave the body more prone to infection. NEURONS Specialised cells that transmit information to other…

1 ACCRETION DISC Matter attracted towards a black hole spirals around it. Infalling material becomes superheated, leading to the emission of X-ray radiation. 2 ERGOSPHERE The region beyond the event horizon of a black hole where gravity starts to have an influence on objects. 3 EVENT HORIZON The point at which the speed required to escape from the black hole exceeds the speed of light. Effectively the point of no return. 4 JET Jets of matter are thought to form when material in the accretion disc interacts with magnetic fields close to the event horizon. 5 SINGULARITY All matter falling into a black hole gets crushed into this infinitely small and dense point.…

NAVIGATION Receivers for global navigation satellite systems keep track of the KiraVan. But if satellite signals aren’t detected, fibre-optic gyroscopes and precise accelerometers record the truck’s position, direction and velocity to continue mapping its location. TRAILER The trailer shares power and other systems while attached to the tractor, but can also operate as an independent base station. It’s made from composite materials such as aramid and fibreglass, and its walls offer radio-frequency shielding and lightning protection. The main sleeping loft is on a balcony, below a pop-up ‘penthouse’ tent. The kitchen and bathroom areas are expandable, increasing the internal volume by 50 per cent. KIRABIKE The KiraBike is mounted on an elevator at the trailer’s rear. This motorcycle serves as a ‘dinghy’ for short trips such as grocery shopping, and…

According to Prof Robin Ali from the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London, gene therapy is the most advanced new approach to blindness. “It is bringing fantastic improvements in vision,” says Ali. “And now there’s huge investment from the pharmaceutical industry, which is investigating a range of products.” VIRTUOUS VIRUSES Gene therapy uses modified viruses to deliver a healthy gene into a cell that has a mutated version of the same gene. The healthy version takes over, and the cell begins to function correctly. The eye is the perfect location for this type of therapy: it is easy to access and is also partially shielded from the immune system, reducing the likelihood of the body’s defence mechanisms attacking the virus. Since 2007, the main focus of gene therapy research…

“STATISTICIANS HAVE BEEN WARNING ABOUT THIS HOWLER FOR DECADES, YET NO ONE PAID ATTENTION” Are you brainy enough to be a scientist? Try this test, suggested by the Nobel-prizewinning immunologist Sir Peter Medawar back in the 1970s. The works of the 16th-Century artist El Greco often show people looking oddly tall and thin. Was this deliberate, or the result of a visual defect making him see the world like this? According to Sir Peter, anyone who can instantly see that the dodgy eyesight theory is wrong is definitely smart. It requires spotting in a flash that such a defect would affect not just how El Greco saw real people, but also his depiction of them on the canvas. So if he had simply been trying to record accurately what he…

DR CHRISTIAN JARRETT Christian is a psychology and neuroscience writer. His latest book is Great Myths Of The Brain. DR ALASTAIR GUNN Alastair is an astronomer at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. PROF ROBERT MATTHEWS Robert is a physicist and 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. His latest book is Digitized. LUIS VILLAZON Luis is a freelance science and tech writer with a BSc in computing and an MSc in zoology from Oxford University. DR MARK LORCH Mark is a senior lecturer at the University of Hull, where he teaches chemistry and science. What are the most sophisticated drones capable of? TOM…

“I WOULD LOVE TO BE ABLE TO STAND IN A STORM AND WATCH THE RAINDROPS IN SLOW MOTION” Rainstorms are lovely. I like the drama and the feeling of release as the sky washes itself clean. Even though I’m usually happiest outdoors, in the middle of the action, the best place to enjoy a rainstorm is often on the warm, dry side of a pane of glass. A couple of weeks ago I was watching a particularly enthusiastic storm batter the windows, and I noticed that the raindrop streaks on one window facing the wind were vertical – drops hit and then ran straight downwards. But my living room is on the corner of the building, and the drops hitting the window on the other wall were at a considerable…

I’ve always been interested in how things work. When I was 10, I remember buying a book about viruses and then puzzling one of my teachers by asking whether mouse viruses could cause human cancer. I used to make rockets. When I was a child, you could buy all the ingredients to fuel a rocket from the chemist. I’d then ignite it remotely from the house using an electric current. I always knew that I wanted to do medicine. I used to watch the TV show Dr Kildare where the lead character would roam around in a white coat comforting patients. When asked why I wanted to become a doctor at my interview for medical school, I said that Dr Kildare was my inspiration. I was just being honest. Much…