science uncovered - october 2014 uk.pdf

1276FACTS INSIDE

+ Why our ears ring after loud noises+ What lies beneath tectonic plates+ How heat makes us drowsy + Why moonlight is white

DOOMSDAYSEED VAULT

The underground bunker safeguarding all plant life p66

ENGINEERING

WHY WE FORGET

New evidence reveals how memories really work p44

HUMANS

HUMANS

TECHNOLOGYHUMANSALSO INSIDE THIS SCIENCE-PACKED ISSUE…

+ The damaging effects it has on

your brain, your skin and more

SUGAR’S HIDDEN DANGERS

+ How this killer virus spreads

across the globe

WORLDWIDE EBOLA PANICHOVERBIKE

LIFTS OFF+ Part motorbike, part helicoper:

you will want one...

Issue 11 | October 2014 | @SciUnco

FOSSIL HOAXES

NATURE

From dodgy dinosaurs to suspect skulls p80

BIZARREANIMAL

DEFENCES Exploding ants, vomiting

birds and lizards that squirt toxic blood p76

METHANE RIVERS, DIAMOND PLANETS, STELLAR NURSERIES AND MUCH MORE

MOST

10 HOME TECH INNOVATIONS Breakthroughs that will radically transform your way of life Turn to p82

+ Turn to page 35 to discover the pumice-like moon of Saturn with a totally unpredictable orbit.

Colin StuartAstronomer & author

Michael WhiteleyLoughborough University

Hayley BirchScience writer & editor

Dr Christian JarrettWriter & editor

Prof Brendan WalkerMiddlesex University

Duncan Geere Science journalist

+ A London-based astronomer with degrees in astrophysics

and science communication, Colin is a fellow of The Royal Astronomical Society. On page 30 he takes us on a tour of the Universe’s best sights.

+ Michael is a research scientist investigating hydrogen fuel cells.

On page 58, he looks inside the new technology that will suck CO

2 out of the atmosphere,

potentially reducing global warming.

+ With a degree in biology, Hayley is the co-author of the book Big

Questions in Science. On page 70 she ventures deep underwater to the hydrothermal vents that may have been the birthplace of life.

+ A cognitive neuroscientist by training, on page 4 4 Christian

explores why we forget, as well as some bizarre memory phenomena, such as earworms and the ‘reminiscence bump’.

+ Having originally trained as an aeronautical engineer, Brendan

is the world’s only thrill engineer. On page 64, he explains how the world’s biggest engine – which powers container ships – works.

+ An expert in all things tech and environment, Duncan was the

ideal person to uncover the innovations that will change our homes. On page 82, he explains why biorhythmic beds are heading your way.

3@SciUncovered

WELCOME TO ISSUE ELEVEN A note from the editor

ave you seen the incredible images of the comet that ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has been beaming back to Earth? They are all the more impressive given that the craft is sending

these images 550 million kilometres across space. Our view of space has also been transformed by some other amazing bits of kit in the recent past, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. And let’s not forget the Huygens lander that sent us images of the surface of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.

So we thought it was high time we took you on a tour of

guide than astronomer and regular Science Uncovered contributor Colin Stuart? Take a look at his 25 most incredible spectacles in the Universe on page 30.

Closer to home, we also look at the question of how life got started on our planet. It’s something that’s far from clear. One idea is that the building blocks of life came from elsewhere in the Solar System.

emerged in hydrothermal vents, deep beneath the ocean’s surface.Science

Uncovered. It’s been a pleasure producing the magazine for you. I hope you continue to explore your love of science.

ANDREW [email protected]@SciUncovered

Take a guided tour of our Universe

twitter.com/SciUncovered

facebook.com/ SciUncovered

scienceuncovered. tumblr.com

HOW TO CONTACT US…Editorial enquiries Science Uncovered magazine, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA

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If you have any questions or comments about the magazine, here’s how to reach us

The scientists and presenters explaining the latest breakthroughs

H

4 @SciUncovered

The amazing vehicle that’s half bike, half ’copter

our bodies?

89

54

38 44 58 70

Issue 11October 2014@SciUncovered

30 25 Most Incredible Sights in the Universe Take a sightseeing tour of the

cosmos and discover some truly breathtaking phenomena. 38 How the Universe came into being42 The United Kingdom joins the space race

58 Carbon Capturing The green machine that sucks

carbon dioxide out of the air. Is this the answer to combating climate change? 64 The largest diesel enginein the world66 The doomsday seed vault safeguarding our plant life

44 Why we Forget The latest research on how our

brains store memories - and why they can also fail us at the most inopportune of times.

50 The bionic hand with a sense of touch54 The hidden dangers of sugar

70 The Origins of Life Did life on Earth start in hot

vents at the bottom of the ocean… or could it have come here from outer space? 76 The strange ways animals and plants defend themselves80 The five greatest fossil hoaxes of all time

SPACE UNCOVERED NATURE UNCOVEREDENGINEERING UNCOVEREDHUMANS UNCOVERED

25 MOST INCREDIBLE SIGHTS IN THE UNIVERSE

Coronal mass ejections, Titan’s methane lakes, the Cat’s Eye Nebula and other must-see cosmic sights.

30

5

Is a worldwide Ebola crisis imminent?14

82 10 Innovations that Will Revolutionise our Homes From VR headsets to biorhythmic

beds, our lives are about to change forever…

88 Meet the bike that doesn’t fall over... 89 ..and the bike that glides through the air

8 Science Shot Stunning images brought

to life with science.

14 Intelligence The latest dispatches from

the world of science.

22 Ask a Scientist Our panel of experts answer

your questions.

94 DIY Science Build a simple electric motor,

and measure pH with a cabbage. 98 Antimatter… Notes from the bizarre side

TECHNOLOGY UNCOVERED ON THE COVER + Your quick guide to what ’s inside this fact-packed issue82 10 Home

Tech Innovations The home-changing technologies that will

change the way you live

76 Bizarre Animal Defences Exploding ants, projectile-

vomiting seabirds and blood-squirting lizards

66 Doomsday Seed Vault

The underground bunker safeguarding the future

of all plant life

54 Sugar’s Hidden Dangers Why the World Health

Organization says we all need to cut down – now

30 25 Most Incredible Sights in the Universe

Celebrate the beauty of the cosmos, from Saturn’s rings to

the planet made of diamond

80 Fossil Hoaxes From Piltdown Man to

Archaeoraptor – ancient treasures that weren’t

CONTENTS Issue 11 October 2014

REGULARS

SPACE

How long will it take for the Sun to engulf the Earth? Find out the answer to this question and loads more on page 22

ature’s t angest defences76

or ’s largest eed vault66

82

8

SCALED UPViewed close up, the scaly ‘plumage’ of the butterfly comes into view

PHOTO © IWAN PRUVIC / SOLENT NEWS

Awesome images from Earth and beyondSCIENCESHOT

+ A butterfly’s proboscis. It is used to suck up food, such as nectar and pollen from flowers, and is controlled by its own set of muscles.

Butterflies may not be a creature you usually associate with feathers, but that’s

simply because you’ve not been looking closely enough. This image of a skipper butterfly, taken by photographer Iwan Pruvic in his garden in Indonesia, shows the thousands of tiny scales that cover its body and bear more than a passing resemblance to feathers. These scales help the butterfly to fly, as they increase the amount of lift generated by its wings as they move through the air. They also act as insulation, and form colourful patterns that can act as camouflage.

SCIENCE SHOT Images from Earth & beyondlives for 20-40 days

But some have a lifespan of just a few days, while others may live for up to six months

Are many insects covered in scales?“All butterflies and moths are covered in scales – it’s one of the defining traits of the order Lepidoptera. These scales are what make moths ‘dusty’, for example, and provide insulation as well as increasing the lift-to-drag ratio during flight.”

Christie Wilcox Biologist, University of Hawaii

SCIENCE SHOT Images from Earth & beyond

@SciUncovered10

+ The dome, or ‘overshoot’, at the top of the storm cell is a result of the formation’s strongest updraft. Here, an upwards rotating column of air pushes up against the top of the cloud. This formation can’t be seen from the ground.

The Appalachian Mountains are 480 million years old

Their formation was part of the construction of the supercontinent Pangaea

Seen from a height of 19km (12 miles) up, these clouds over the Southern Appalachian Mountains in the US seem tranquil. But

in fact they form a storm cell, the smallest building block of a storm system – which can consist of just one or many cells. A storm cell is a mass of air that contains ‘loops’ of upwards and downwards air currents moving within it. This rare glimpse of what a storm looks like from above was taken by NASA from a high-altitude aircraft, as part of a study carried out with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Duke University into precipitation over mountain regions.

STORM BREWING

NASA captures cloud formation from above

PHOTO © NASA / STU BROCE

These calcium carbonate crystals form a microscopic rose garden. The crystals are

made up of hexagonal plates, which group together in spherical configuration called ‘varetites’. They’re incredibly tiny – this image was taken using a scanning electron microscope, and shows a group of rosette-shaped varetites just 69 millionths of a metre across. Calcium carbonate is commonly found in rocks such as limestone, chalk and marble. It’s used in medicine as an antacid to treat heartburn, and is also used in industry as a building material, to purify iron ore, and as a water pH regulator in swimming pools.

LOOKING ROSYCalcium carbonate takes on a floral appearancePHOTO © SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

@SciUncovered 11


Calcium carbonate is found in animals’ shells

In fact, it’s the main component in them, as well as in pearls

+ Calcium carbonate is white – the shades here come from the ‘false colour’ microscope technique, which makes individual elements easier to pick out.

@SciUncovered12


+ The prototype material is coated in wax, but the researchers at MIT plan to replace this with sturdier substances such as solder in the future, increasing the strength of the structures it creates.

Wax typically melts at 45ºC

It is made of long chains of hydrogen and carbon molecules, which deform with heat

Do any naturally occurring materials share these properties?“Materials that can change shape and stiffness are common in nature. A classic example is a tree leaf, which can fold and unfold in response to sunlight. It must be stiff enough to support its own weight but flexible in order to minimise wind damage.”

Dr Paul CoxonMaterials scientist, University of Cambridge

@SciUncovered 13


Candles have been used since 200BC

Specimens dating back to this period have been found in China

Creating a robot that can be squashed to manoeuvre through tight spaces is a tough task – to be of any use, it also needs to

be able to exert force without collapsing. But researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the US, have found a solution in the form of a wax-soaked, 3D-printed foam structure. Once set, the wax forms a rigid shell that hold the foam in place. But once heat is applied – by exposing the material to an electric current, for example – it becomes pliable. It is hoped that the material, or something like it, could be used to produce robots that would be used in surgery or in search and rescue operations.

CHANGING STATES

The material that can switch between hard and soft

PHOTO © COURTESY OF

THE RESEARCHERS

14 @SciUncovered

The latest breakthroughs explained and dissected

n 25 March 2014, the Guinean Ministry of Health sent out a chilling

communique: Ebola virus disease was confirmed to have killed 60 people in the country’s southeastern region. Worse, cases had spread to the capital Conakry, and reports were emerging from the borders of neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Ebola, named after the river in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) where it was first identified in 1976, is a virus of modern

legend. It is notorious for its gruesome symptoms (vomiting, fever, diarrhoea, bleeding to death) and a fatality rate of up to 90%. There remains no vaccine or cure – although DNA-based vaccines that have been proven effective in animals have now entered clinical trials, as have a couple of experimental drugs, called Zmapp and TKM-Ebola.

As Science Uncovered went to press, the current outbreak had claimed over 1,000 lives in West Africa. Yet while danger remains high in the region,

O

the risk of infection for those further away is low.

Ebola comes in five varieties, of which four are infectious. The current outbreak is related to the most deadly, the Zaire strain. “But the good thing is that it doesn’t spread through the air,” says Professor David Heymann at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Even if you were to meet an infected person, Heymann says, the risk of getting it is low – “unless they vomit on you or you’re in touch with their body fluids”.

That’s an important point. Another is that those showing no symptoms – even if they are carrying the virus – are not infectious, with the virus taking between two and 21 days to cause symptoms. And the virus can actually be dealt with pretty easily, with ordinary soap – which is why a

“THE ROUTINE INFECTION CONTROL MEASURES SET UP WOULD PREVENT THE DISEASE FROM SPREADING.” Prof David Heymann LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE AND TROPICAL DISEASES

HOW MUCH OF A THREAT IS THE EBOLA VIRUS?

26previous Ebola outbreaks

have occurred

WORDS BY Mun-Keat Looi

This contagious viral disease has been sperading through West Africa, but it’s unlikely to take hold in the UK

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+ The composition of the Ebola virus’ DNA can be studied using electrophoresis – a technique that involves suspending it in fluid and applying an electric field.

INTELLIGENCE Breakthroughs explained

The Ebola virus is believed to be carried by fruit bats

They are commonly eaten in West Africa, and are often served grilled

15@SciUncovered

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key part of the control measures is hand-washing.

“There is no reason why Ebola couldn’t arise in the UK,” says Heymann. But if it did, it could be quite easily dealt with, as we’ve seen with other diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which reached the UK earlier in 2014. “The routine infection control measures set up, including protection of health workers, made sure that the disease didn’t spread any further,” says Heymann. “The same would happen if Ebola came in”.

Early-stage Ebola has symptoms, such as fever, that are similar to the ’flu or malaria. But following a few basic principles can help most countries deal with diseases such as Ebola swiftly. First, suspected patients need to be isolated. Then people who have been in contact with them need to be identified – known as contact tracing – and the patient and any contacts put under fever surveillance, monitoring their temperature three times a day. “And if they get a fever you would make sure that their diagnosis was Ebola or not,” says Heymann.

At the same time, he says, hospital infection controls must be stringent. Health workers must protect themselves using the proper equipment, and ensure that patients are isolated and that none of the equipment used on those patients is used on others.

“Because it’s in hospital settings that not only do other patients get infected, the health workers also get

infected,” says Heymann. “And often that’s how the virus gets into the community.”

So while this is the largest outbreak of Ebola ever recorded, robust healthcare systems ensure that the risk of Ebola infection outside of West Africa remains low. The problems in that region seem to have been born of miscommunication and bad organisation, with basic health principles not being followed. This has been further complicated by cultural clashes, such as a mistrust of doctors and the traditional funeral practice of washing the bodies of the dead by hand.

is the case fatalit y rate of the current

Ebola outbreak

55%

Mun-Keat Looi Science writer & editor+ Mun-Keat is a senior editor at the Wellcome Trust. @ayasawada

How concerned are you about Ebola spreading to the UK?READER REACTION!

Jayne O’Harrow England

I know that the sanitary conditions we live in make it far less likely that the epidemic will take hold. I am not worried at all.

Tony Lawes Great Yarmouth, England

Very. The last time we had such a serious disease it was a very bad time and it nearly destroyed half the country.

Ann Garside EnglandIf science wants it in the UK, there is nothing we can do.

Amy Hartley via FacebookI don’t get why people are so panicked about it. Global warming is a lot worse but no one cares about that.

Log on to one of our community sites and join the conversationJOIN IN THE DEBATE

On Facebook at…facebook.com/SciUncovered

On Twitter at…@SciUncovered

A BRIEF HISTORY OF…THE EBOLA VIRUS1976 FIRS T RECORDED OU T BRE AK IN YAMBUK U, Z AIRE+ On 26 August, Mabalo Lokela, a head

teacher in Yambuku, Zaire (now

Democratic Republic of the Congo) falls

ill with a haemorrhagic fever, at first

thought to be malaria. By 8 September,

he bleeds to death. A total of 318 cases

and 280 deaths are reported in the

ensuing outbreak.

2003 VACCINE T RIALS IN MONK E YS + An adenovirus-based vaccine

carrying Ebola proteins is tested on

macaque monkeys. The vaccinated

monkeys prove resistant to the virus

when introduced to it 28 days later.

Trials of adenovirus-based vaccines for

humans are ongoing as of August 2014.

2011 VACCINE FOR MICE DECL ARED SUCCESSFUL+ A paper in the science journal PNAS

describes an Ebola vaccine that is

effective in mice. Although a human

equivalent has yet to be developed, the

vaccine is promising because it can be

freeze-dried, enabling supplies to be

stockpiled in case of future outbreaks.

Measuring up to 14,000 nanometres in length, the Ebola virus is relatively large

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The largest ever seabirdwas Pelagomis sandersi

Fossils of the creature, which had a 6.4m wingspan, were recently discovered in the US

17@SciUncovered

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BY Changyuraptor yangi

lived in China around 125 million years ago

WORDS BY Dr Darren Naish

ith no fewer than four wings and extra-long tail feathers, a dinosaur that’s

just been discovered in China sheds new light on how they flew. Dubbed changyuraptor, which means ‘long-feathered thief’, it’s thought this beast’s lengthy feathers would have played a crucial role in flight control.

The 125-million-year-old dinosaur – Changyuraptor yangi, to give it its full name – was discovered by a team of Chinese and American researchers in the Chinese province of Liaoning. It was a lightly built, long-limbed predator with serrated teeth and curved claws. Long, narrow feathers grew from its arms and hands to form wings, and also from its legs and feet to form ‘hindlimb wings’.

The longest of the feathers grew from the end half of changyuraptor’s

tail, forming a fan-like arrangement. Some were as long as 30cm – the longest feathers yet discovered in any dinosaur. The sheer size of the tail feathers suggests they had an important aerodynamic role – they might, for example, have helped it to reduce its speed in order to land safely.

“The large tail feathers of changyuraptor match our expectations for what the feathers on the tail should look like if they were used to control flight or rapid descents,” says Michael Habib, an Assistant Professor in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, who was part of the team involved with the research. “The tail would have significantly improved the flight control and stability in the air.”

The Liaoning province has proven to be a rich source of feathered dinosaur fossils over the past decade.

W

Many of the species boasted feathers on their hind legs, but over time it appears evolution abandoned them in favour of focussing solely on the more efficient forelimb wings.

Changyuraptor’s feathers would have covered its body – a body that was 1.3 metres long and would have weighed 4kg, roughly double the weight of the average chicken. This dinosaur’s discovery supports the idea that flight preceded birds, and that birds inherited the ability from dinosaurs. Some of today’s birds still boast feathers on their legs, but they are for insulation rather than flight.

“THE TAIL WOULD HAVE SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED THE FLIGHT CONTROL AND STABILITY IN THE AIR.” Professor Michael Habib UNIVERSIT Y OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

60% is how much larger changyuraptor was

than the previous record-holder for

four-winged dinosaurs, Microraptor zhaoianus

Newly discovered creature would have been a pioneer of air travel

FOUR-WINGED DINO PROVIDES INSIGHT INTO FLIGHT

Dr Darren NaishPalaeontologist & writer+ Based at the University of Southampton in the UK , Darren studies dinosaurs and

named one himself – Eotyrannus @TetZoo

18 @SciUncovered

05

Researchers at University College London have

been studying an ancient, pea-sized part of the

brain called the habenula. Brain scans of volunteers

showed the region activates in response to images

that provoke expectations of bad outcomes.

Earlier animal studies showed that habenula

activity leads to avoidance, as it suppresses the

production of dopamine, which drives motivation.

It’s now thought a hyperactive habenula in

people could lead to a pessimistic outlook on life

– so a greater understanding of its activity could

lead to new treatments for depression.

BRAIN AREA COULD BE LINKED TO DEPRESSION03

+ It’s something that owners will have

suspected for a long time – dogs experience envy.

Researchers at the University of California in San

Diego studied 36 dogs across 14 breeds and

found that they were mostly unresponsive when

their owners read a book, but changed their

behaviour once the owner began to pay attention

to a toy. A quarter of the dogs snapped at the toy,

while only one snapped at the book. Other dogs

barked, wagged their tails or tried to force their

way between the owner and the toy.

This new research backs up an observation by

Charles Darwin in 1871: “Everyone has seen how

jealous a dog is of his master’s affection, if

lavished on any other creature.”

DOGS ARE JEALOUS TYPES

01

+ Different colonies of ants have their own

personalities, showing variation in traits

such as their tendency to explore. Sarah

Bengston, a PhD student at the University

of Arizona, studied colonies of ants both in

her lab and in the wild, and found that

certain patterns of behaviour tend to go

together. Those colonies that explore more

widely also tend to respond to intruders

more aggressively. The patterns of

behaviour varied depending on where the

colonies were, suggesting environment

plays a role in shaping personality type.

Ant colonies have personalities

04

02

is how much less the Milky Way weighs than similarly-sized neighbour Andromeda, according to scientists at the University of

Edinburgh who used a new gravity-based method to ‘weigh’

it. Andromeda is thought to contain twice as much

dark matter.

50%

+ After a decade-long chase that’s spanned 405

million kilometres, the Rosetta spacecraft has

rendezvoused with comet 67P/Churyumov-

Gerasimenko and beamed back fascinating

images of its surface. The next key landmark will

come in November when its lander probe, Philae,

will attempt to reach the comet’s surface.

Analysing the comet’s composition should give us

new insights into the early days of the Solar

System, since comets are remnants of debris left

over from the system’s formation.

ROSETTA CATCHES ITS COMET

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19@SciUncovered

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between our genes and those of

stretches of our DNA do nothing, with redundant genes building up

is how much of your DNA is useful

8.2%

E. coli

FIST BUMPS MORE HYGIENIC

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+ Life-sized chariots and treasure made

from gold, silver and bronze have been

discovered in a 2,100-year-old tomb built

for a Chinese king. Archaeologists from

the Museum of Nanjing believe the tomb,

hidden up a mountain in Jiangsu province,

eastern China, was created for Liu Fei,

who died in 128BC. The tomb had already

been looted, but still housed thousands of

artefacts. It would have contained items

the king needed for the afterlife, including

a kitchen. The findings were reported in

the journal Chinese Archaeology.

CHINESE TOMB YIELDS TREASURE

Tweets deciphered

07 08

+ Antarctic fur seals are becoming

smaller and breeding later – all

thanks to the effect of warmer

seas on krill, their primary food

source. The British Antarctic

Survey has noticed a 27-year trend

for seal pups to be born with ever

lower body mass. Krill uses

Antarctic sea ice as shelter, feeding

on algae growing underneath it,

meaning that as the ice melts,

there’s less for the seals to eat.

FUR SEALS AFFECTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE06

10

40.2 KMis the new distance record for an

off-Earth land vehicle. NASA’s

Opportunity rover on Mars has beaten

the record set by the USSR’s

Lunokhod 2 moon rover in 1973.

Opportunity travels around

4.2km a year.

+ Our planet’s gravity heats up a layer

around the Moon’s core, keeping it

liquid, a new model of the lunar interior

suggests. Researchers in the US and

China created the computer model and

found that a liquid layer between 350

and 500km from the centre could

explain anomalies in the Moon’s orbit

and gravitational field. The finding

prompts an intriguing question – how

such a soft layer could be maintained

throughout the Moon’s 4.5-billion-year

history? It’s thought heat generated by

Earth’s gravity may be responsible.

MOON IS A SOFTIE AT HEART11

+ Ever wondered which bird species

is making a racket outside your window at

5am? A team from Queen Mary University of

London may be able to help, after training

software to be able to pick out differences

between bird calls. Hundreds of bird calls were

analysed using a ‘feature learning’ technique,

and the system has been proven to be effective

at distinguishing different species.

THE PHYSICS OF TOYSHow do these objects hold the power to amuse us?WORDSBY Dr Michael Banks

20

For the uninitiated, a Slinky is a

simple toy consisting of a helical

spring made from plastic or metal. It has

been enjoyed for well over half a century

thanks to its amazing ability to ‘walk’

down stairs unaided. While this motion

might look easy enough, the physics

behind it is fairly complex. Every object

has stored, or potential, energy and when

placed at the top of the stairs the Slinky

will, of course, stay perfectly still. But as

you set the spring on its way, by pulling

one end down on to the next stair below,

this potential energy is transferred to

kinetic energy – energy due to motion.

As the Slinky coils on the step below, this

kinetic energy shifts like a wave along

its length to the other end. Much like

when you crack a whip, all the energy

travels through to the end of it. This

pulsing energy then makes the Slinky

continue down to the next step and

the process continues.

THE SLINKYWALKING DOWN STAIRS BY SHIFTING ENERGY

The spinning top, balancing

on a tiny point, appears to

defy the laws of gravity. The

physics behind how it works are

based on angular momentum – a

measure of the amount of spin

an object has, taking into account

its speed and mass. The angular

momentum of an object only

changes when you apply a torque

to it (twist it, in other words). So

when the top is set into

motion, a large torque is

applied that imparts

a lot of angular

momentum. In full

flight, the top easily

remains upright –

sometimes for minutes

– as the torque due to

gravity is not strong enough

to change its movement.

However, as the top slows down

due to air resistance, gravity

begins to take over, and the

upper part of the spinning top

makes a circular motion before

crashing to the floor.

SPINNING TOPDEFYING GRAVIT Y

USING TORQUE

Explaining the science of your surroundings

@SciUncovered

SCIENCE AT HOME

21@SciUncovered

SCIENCE AT HOME Physics of toys

Methylene chloride is used to

with the solvent

A toy that’s more often found on

shelves in offices than in the

hands of children, it was given the

name ‘Newton’s cradle’ by English

actor Simon Prebble in honour of the

legendary physicist. Swing a ball back

and when hits the first of the four

beneath, it stops immediately. It has

zero kinetic and potential energy. The

law of conservation of energy states

energy can’t be created or destroyed

– the energy must go somewhere.

It’s transferred into ball two, which

then transfers its energy to ball

three, and so on. When the energy

reaches ball five, it doesn’t have

another ball to pass its energy to. So

when it compresses under impact (as

its predecessors have done – each by

a minute amount) and then returns to

its original shape, it pushes on ball

four and swings outwards. The

process is repeated in reverse as ball

five slams into ball four after swinging

into the air.

The farthest flight by a paper

aircraft made from a single sheet

of uncut A4 paper currently stands at

69.14m. That mighty feat was achieved

by US television producer John Collins

and his friend Joe Ayoob on 26 February,

2012. For any aeroplane to fly, paper or

otherwise, it must have two things: lift

and stability. After launch, as the plane

moves forward, its wings cut through

the air to generate a small amount of

lift, which counteracts the force of

gravity that pushes it down. As the lift

acts upwards, it is important that the

plane is stable and flies level. A

reduction in speed, from drag, reduces

the lift and gravity begins to take over,

forcing the plane to land. This is one

reason why aeroplanes are pointed at

the front – so they cut through the air

better and can stay in the air for longer.

NEWTON’S CRADLEENERGY CONSERVATION IN ACTION

In a classic episode of The

Simpsons, Homer gets a drinking

bird to do his job, continuously tapping

the ‘Y’ key on his computer keyboard.

Alas, this would never work, because

Homer doesn’t have a cup of water to

hand. This aspect is crucial as the toy is a

simple ‘heat engine’ that converts heat

energy from the water to mechanical

work. The bird’s body is filled with

methylene chloride – a solvent that

evaporates easily. When the bird’s beak

dips into a cup of water, the beak absorbs

water and the head is cooled as the water

evaporates. This causes the methylene

chloride vapour inside the bird’s head to

condense, reducing the vapour pressure

inside it, and sucking liquid up from the

body into the head. This makes it top

heavy, and so the bird tips over. As the

bird’s head tips back into the water, the

bottom of the tube in the bird’s body is

lifted out of the methylene chloride.

Vapour travels through the tube into the

head, displacing the liquid in it. When

liquid drains into the abdomen, it lifts the

head. And as water evaporates from the

bird’s head again, the process repeats.

THE DRINKING BIRDCONVERTING HEAT INTO MOTION

PAPER AEROPLANESTAYING AIRBORNE USING AERODYNAMICS

Dr Michael BanksWriter and physicist+ Michael completed a degree in physics

at Loughborough University in the UK before completing a PhD in experimental condensed-matter physics at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. @Mike_Banks

GET IN TOUCH…

THE SCIENTISTSOur experts answering your burning questions

22 @SciUncovered

On Facebook at…facebook.com/SciUncovered

On Twitter at…@SciUncovered

As the Sun begins to exhaust the hydrogen fuel at its core, it will enter a new stage of life as an enormous red giant. A typical radius for such a star would be around 160 million kilometres, placing Earth’s present position within the Sun itself.

But the news isn’t totally apocalyptic – Earth may save itself. As the Sun ages, mass is converted into energy at a rate of

SPACE

When the Sun expands to consume Earth, how quickly will it happen?Lara Carroll STEVENAGE, ENGLAND

four million tonnes per second. Clearly, over billions of years that

stages, the rate of mass loss will increase further as it begins to shed its outer layers. Obeying the laws of orbital motion, Earth will spiral outwards.

Sadly, our most educated guess suggests that we won’t travel far enough, and our home

planet will disappear beneath the solar surface. There’s much uncertainty about the destructive timeline, but we’re sure of one thing: it’ll be a gradual process. The expansion of the Sun will take place over hundreds of thousands of years. Just in case, it might not be a bad idea to have become a star-faring civilisation long before we have to worry about any of this! CL

Dr Chris Lintott University of Oxford

Christie Wilcox University of Hawaii

Dr Matthew Genge Imperial College London

Dr Kristina KillgroveUniversity of West Florida

Dr Ian Mabbett Swansea University

Dr Paul Coxon University of Cambridge

+ A co-presenter on the BBC Four astronomy show The Sk y at Night,

Chris also runs citizen science projects to investigate galax y formation, discover new planets and more. @chrislintott

+ While living on Oahu, Christie is pursuing a PhD in cell and

molecular biology. Her particular interest is the toxins of venomous ocean creatures such as the lionfish. @NerdyChristie

+ Not only does Matthew study asteroids, he has one named af ter

him too – 6626 Mattgenge. A planetary scientist, he’s fascinated by rocks on this planet as well as those out in space. @rockbloke

+ Kristina sees dead people – dead Romans, to be precise. As an

anthropologist and archaeologist, she specialises in studying the bones of Romans to f ind out how they lived . @DrKillgrove

+ From the inner workings of steel, to bold new materials, Ian is an

engineer whose research will change the way we build. He’s currently studying materials that generate energy. @Materials_Live

+ As a materials scientist, Paul’s studies span physics,

energy and X-rays. He’s at the forefront of research into nanotechnology – the science of the very small. @paulcoxon

Email us at…[email protected]

An expanding Sun will look vast from the

surface of our planet

million kilometres is the diameter of

the Sun

1.39

Your questions answered by those in the know

mailto:[email protected]

http://facebook.com/SciUncovered

ASK A SCIENTIST Your questions answered

The faster you’re travelling on a bike, the less likely you are to fall

23@SciUncovered

Thanks to its low oxygen content, theBlack Sea has preserved many artefacts

ttttt

The fastest speed achieved cycling Equivalent to 167mph, the record was set by Fred Rompelberg in 1995

ENGINEERING

Why can I only balance on a bike when it’s moving?Lucas Bond MILTON KEYNES, ENGLAND

The most widely held beliefs are that bicycles are stable because

spinning wheels, rather like the forces that prevent a child’s spinning top from falling over, or because the front wheel ‘trails’ behind the axis of steering – or both. However, recent papers have argued that this is only part of the story. A bike becomes stable by steering into a fall and the faster the bike is travelling, the less steering

input is needed to counteract the inertia of an imminent fall. Gyroscopic forces and

to steer into a fall, but researchers have shown that just by moving the centre of mass of the frame forward and above the centre of mass of the front steering assembly, they can help a bike to remain stable even when the two

eliminated. IM

Male lions have manes to signal to female lions that they’re high-quality mates, because the size and colour of a lion’s mane correlates with

healthiest males can support a large, dark mane because of its extra physiological burden – especially in the heat. In fact, the quality of a male’s mane not only tells the females whether they’d make a good mate, it also lets potential rivals know just how hard they’re going to have to

CW

There’s a common misconception that tectonic

However, the mantle beneath the plates is actually mostly solid. Tectonic plates consist of crust and an underlying layer of rigid mantle called the lithosphere. Below these is a malleable layer of mantle called the asthenosphere. The main

lithosphere is temperature – the hotter, deeper asthenosphere is

asphalt. The asthenosphere melts to form magma only where it rises or where water is added. MG

in preserving organic artefacts such as bone, wood and textiles, whether on land or sea. It’s why shipwrecks in a body of the water like the Black Sea, which has extremely low oxygen levels, have harboured many well-preserved artefacts. In an environment that does contain oxygen, DNA in bones can be preserved if the water has a high mineral content – but will likely preserve longer in a land-based artefact. Metal is another story. The most prevalent metal used in antiquity was iron, which corrodes dramatically in seawater. It’s why all artefacts recovered from seawater have to be considered for conservation. Organic objects can crumble within hours when removed from seawater; iron in a few days. Even glass and pottery can disintegrate unless conserved. KK

NATURE

Why do lions have manes?

HUMANS

Does seawater preserve artefacts better than soil?

SCRANTON, US

NATURE

What’s beneath tectonic plates? Helen Bush BY EMAIL

Chris Rogers COLWYN BAY, WALES

CW


@SciUncovered24

Solid carbon dioxide is known as ‘dry ice’

It turns back into a

used to preserve food

ABOVE Ringing ears are associated with damage to hearing cells, but the effect usually passes

WHAT IF… EARTH’S TEMPERATURE SUDDENLY ROSE BY 10ºC?

APOCALYPSE NOW?

Extreme global warming would have catastrophic impacts on our habitats and how we could feed ourselves

What sort of temperature rises

are we seeing at the moment?

Currently, global temperatures

are rising at a rate of around

0.1ºC per decade – so a rise

of 10ºC would be highly

significant indeeed.

What could cause such a jump?

“Such a large temperature rise

would be the result of very large

increases in atmospheric CO2,”

says Dr Douglas Crawford-Brown,

director of the Cambridge Centre

for Climate Change Mitigation

Research, in the UK. This in itself

would give rise to plenty of

problems, including increased

acidity in our oceans and the

death of coral reef systems.

If this rise happened, wouldn’t

things just feel a bit warmer?

The impact on the UK’s weather

would be extreme. “There are the

obvious increases in temperature,

with summers and winters both

seeing an 8-10Cº increase in

average temperatures,” says

Crawford-Brown. “Storm

frequency would almost double

in severity and frequency. Rainfall

would be significantly higher in

winter and significantly lower in

summer – perhaps by 50%.”

That doesn’t sound so terrible…

Thanks to the urban heat island

effect, in which heat is stored in

concrete, the temperature

increase in cities would be

greater than the overal 10ºC.

“Cities that are already close to

being uncomfortable due to

temperatures would become

uninhabitable,” says Crawford-

Brown. And that’s not even taking

into account whether you

currently live in a coastal city – of

which around half would be lost to

rising sea levels.

How much would sea levels

rise by?

By as much as 10 metres,

although this would take place

over a more gradual period. This

would leave us less space, so we’d

also be crammed into a much

smaller area.

Would it affect what crops we

could grow, too?

It would. “Crop yield would reduce

by about 50-60% globally,” says

Crawford-Brown. “We would

probably have to shift to higher-

temperature crops.” These

include tomatoes, peppers and

cucumbers. Lettuce, cabbage and

broccoli are among those that

would struggle.

What about our health overall?

This could actually be larger than

you’d expect. “We would need to

shift our locations into higher

latitudes, where adverse effects

from cold winters would be

reduced, but adverse effects of

hot summers would increase and

infectious diseases would

increase,” says Crawford-Brown.

“Estimates suggest something

on the order of 10-30 million

extra deaths per year globally at

this temperature.” So while a

warmer planet might sound

appealing during a British

summer, it’s one we’d be wise

to take measures to avoid.

Tinnitus occurs when loud sounds damage cells in your ears. ‘Hair cells’ convert soundwaves into neurotransmitters that ‘talk’ to auditory nerves. They’re called hair cells due to bundles of hair-like extensions, called stereocilia, that help them receive and amplify sound. Loud sounds can damage the stereocilia. This alters which

‘hear’ sounds that aren’t really there. While the ringing is often temporary, repeated damage to can lead to hearing loss. CW

HUMANS

Why do our ears ring after a loud night out?Mike Fordham BY EMAIL

Any body of matter – it doesn’t matter whether it’s large or small, as long as it has mass – will exert a gravitational pull. The force of attraction it exerts is in proportion to its mass, so a heavy object will elicit a strong gravitational pull, while a tiny thing will only have a small pull. So you are actually attracting Earth in a similar way to how it attracts you, but because the planet is far more massive, its attractive force is much greater. PC

SPACE

Do all things have gravitational pull?Graham Ellis BY EMAIL

ASK A SCIENTISTYour questions answered

25@SciUncovered

A full Moon is about 500,000 times fainter than the Sun

The Moon’s brightness varies greatly throughout the lunar cycle

The Earth’s core is made largely from iron-nickel metal, a substance that is a steely metallic colour at room temperature. The core is, however, buried deep beneath the surface of the

and has a temperature greater than

controlled by how their surface

hot objects release their own light by a process known as ‘incandescence’, where rapidly moving atoms lose energy by releasing visible radiation. Metal typically becomes red hot at

glow white to blue. The colour of the core, of course, hardly matters since

planet’s inner light. MG

Abigail Whitley BY EMAIL

In many ways, the phaser is the ideal

weapon: small enough to fit in a

pocket, immensely powerful, and

capable of non-lethal shots when set

to ‘stun’. But what are the chances of

us carrying these blasters in real life?

A phaser is, according to Star Trek

lore, a ‘directed energy weapon’ – akin

to a laser, in other words. The main

obstacles to this are the energy

required, and the fact that laser

beams spread out as they travel.

The latter issue means that as a

laser makes its way through the air

towards a target, it begins to diffuse

and therefore imparts less energy in

one spot. What’s more, lasers require

a huge amount of energy to power

them. In fact, a weaponised laser

would likely require a battery the size

of a truck, so they’d hardly be able to

fit in your pocket. They also generate

a lot of heat, which could pose

challenges for cooling.

That’s not to say that phaser-like

weapons haven’t been considered –

they’re something that the US military

has been investigating for years. Its

Pulsed Energy Projectile (PEP) fires a

very short burst of infra-red energy,

causing an electromagnetic blast

capable of overwhelming targets’

nervous systems and knocking them

off their feet. The car-mounted tech

has been ruled unsuitable for use as a

non-lethal weapon, but may still prove

useful for shooting down drones.

NATURE

Is the core of Earth really bright orange, like it’s often depicted?

Mostly because it’s faint. Our eyes contain two sorts of light-detecting cell – rods and cones. The cones give us colour vision, and the rods take over in faint light but can’t perceive colour. There’s also the fact that moonlight is

sunlight appears white, we shouldn’t be too surprised that moonlight does, too. CL

SPACE

Why is moonlight white?

Alice Hunt SUNDERLAND, ENGLAND

Thomas Betts TUCSON, US

#11: PHASERS

HUMANS

people to travel across seas by boat? Will we ever end up wielding

Star Trek’s pocket-sized energy blasters?

SCIENCE OF SCI-FI

Boats have likely been used to navigate short distances since at least the origin of Homo sapiens, but seaworthy boats are a comparatively more recent occurrence. The Pesse canoe, found in the Netherlands, is the earliest surviving

|canoe, however, probably wasn’t used to cross a sea. But a discovery of bitumen slabs in Kuwait in

is a natural petroleum product that was used to seal reed-boat hulls to prevent leaks. If these remains are indeed from a seaworthy vessel, the earliest physical evidence of travel across the seas dates to 7,000 BC, when the peoples of the Indus River valley in modern-day Pakistan were trading with the Mesopotamians of the Middle East. KK


26 @SciUncovered

The average cloud droplet But they can form clouds up

We, like other mammals, can handle wide external temperature changes because we keep our internal temperature constant

amount of work if we’re in a hot climate. Higher temperatures are

tiring, because they force our bodies to work harder to prevent our insides from overheating. From increased circulation to sweating, the more energy your

energy it has for everything else, which can leave you feeling drained and lethargic. On top of that, excessive sweating can lead to dehydration, which can amplify your drowsiness. CW

HUMANS

Why does heat make us drowsy?Damian Stern WINCHESTER, ENGLAND

the impression they’re formed from gas, but they actually comprise tiny water droplets or ice crystals. The familiar cumulus clouds,

Sandra Jones SWANSEA, WALES

SPACE

How do clouds form in areas of sub-zero temperatures?

They do – in fact, single stars like our Sun might be rarer than their more gregarious counterparts. Stars form from enormous clouds of gas and dust called nebulae, and in these crowded conditions double, triple and even larger groups of stars are common. In recent years, planets have been discovered in many of these systems, and occasionally they orbit around both stars in a system. Theoretically, it’s possible for a planet to orbit comfortably one star for tens of thousands of years before transferring across to spend time around a second star. CL

SPACE

Do any planets orbit multiple stars?Ron Brooks BY EMAIL

typical of fair weather, are usually at heights of 500 to 1,500m above the ground – where temperature is above the freezing point and thus largely contain water droplets. The streaky, high-altitude cirrus clouds, in contrast, typically form above 5,000m where the air temperature is sub-zero and contains mostly ice crystals. Thick stratocumulus clouds, which can extend from low to high altitude, contain a mixture of both ice crystals and water droplets. MG

Alpha Centauri A and B form a triple star system with Proxima Centauri – the closest star system to the Sun


27@SciUncovered

What is it?

It’s a new form of radiation therapy for

breast cancer. Instead of the radiation

being delivered externally over multiple

sessions, as is currently commonplace, it is

issued in a single concentrated dose via a probe

that is inserted into the breast.

How will it be used?

The procedure can only be used in

people who have early-stage breast

cancer that has not yet spread. The intra-

operative radiation is given to the patient by a

radiologist immediately following tumour

removal, in a dose lasting roughly half an hour.

The aim of this is to kill off any remaining cancer

cells that have not been surgically removed.

What are the benefits?

One of the main benefits of the procedure is that

the radiotherapy is carried out at the same time

as surgery, rather than over the course of 15 or

so separate, daily appointments following it. The

hope is that this will significantly reduce both

inconvenience and distress for patients. What’s

more, as the radiation is more precisely targeted

than in current radiotherapy procedures, there

is less risk of damage to surrounding organs

such as the heart and lungs. It could also save

the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) up to

£15 million per year.

Are there any side-effects?

As the technique is still fairly new,

scientists don’t yet have long-term

data. Studies have shown, however, that

patients who received intra-operative radiation

rather than external beam radiation had a

slightly higher chance of cancer recurring in

the same breast, but overall survival rates

were the same. Patients receiving intra-

operative radiation were less likely to develop

skin rashes as a reaction to the radiation.

When will it be implemented?

It has recently been given the

provisional go-ahead from the NHS,

with a final decision due later in the year.

Mirages are most commonly seen in deserts

They often resemble bodies of water, such as lakes

An inferior mirage seen in a Libyan desert

‘inferior mirage’ that we see in the air above hot surfaces, like when a camera pans out in a Formula 1 race, is caused by a phenomenon of light called ‘refraction’. Under normal conditions, light travels in straight lines. When it’s bent, it’s said to be refracted. Refraction occurs when light travels between substances

refractive index refers to how easily light passes through that medium in

relation to a vacuum. Water, for example, has a refractive index of 1.33, meaning that light travels 1.33 times slower in water than it does in a vacuum. In the case of heat shimmer, this is hot air rising from the surface into the surrounding

comes about because air isn’t stable – the hot air is rising and moving about, and as a result the light is being bent and distorted before it reaches our eyes. PC

NATURE

What causes the heat shimmer we see above hot surfaces?Laurence Porter GRANTHAM, ENGLAND

#10: INTRA-OPERATIVE RADIATIONHow could it revolutionise breast cancer treatment?

The earliest mechanism that was used for counting is the abacus. Developed before written numbers were invented, the device makes adding and subtracting amounts easy. Our earliest physical example of an abacus-like device is the marble ‘Salamis Tablet’, dating to 300 BC and discovered in Greece. It’s highly likely that other abacuses predated this but were made of perishable material. Based on textual evidence, the Egyptians, Persians and Greeks began to use abacuses around 500 BC, and it’s even possible that an abacus is referenced in the earliest Sumerian

TECHNOLOGY

What were the earliest forms of computers? Margaret Wheeler LIVINGSTON, SCOTLAND

Americas, the Aztec, Mayan and Incan empires all had counting devices, too. Another form of ancient computer is the Antikythera mechanism, found on a Greek shipwreck dating to 150-100 BC. This device was able to predict eclipses and positions of heavenly bodies through its complex gear mechanism, inscribed with Greek months of the year and symbols of the zodiac. It’s why the Antikythera mechanism is often considered the earliest example of an analogue computer, even though it wasn’t used for quantity calculations. KK

THE 60-SECOND PHD


28 @SciUncovered

Sterling silver is a common alloy copper, which helps to

give the metal strength

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‘melittin’ from bee venom can

shred through the protective

coatings that bacteria need

to survive, and thus may be

harder for microbes to become

resistant against.

Others think that we should

stop focusing on killing bad

bacteria with pharmaceuticals,

and instead focus on the natural

mechanisms that keep them in

check. One way to prevent

bacterial disease would be to

boost our own immune system,

making it better equipped to

fight back. Or we could support

our body’s healthy flora and

fauna that naturally make it

difficult for disease-causing

bacteria to take hold.

And then, of course, there are

more futuristic alternatives. We

may, through genetic engineering,

be able to reprogram viruses to

attack bacterial species that pose

a particular threat to us, or even

design pieces of nanotechnology

that work as microscopic

bacterial assassins. But these are

decades from the market at best,

if they are even feasible.

In reality, the best option isn’t

to replace antibiotics – it’s to

ensure that our current arsenal

doesn’t become obsolete in the

first place. Careful use of

antibiotics may enable us to

continue using them for decades

and even centuries to come. CW

Misuse and overuse of our current

antibiotic spectrum is leading to

widespread antibiotic resistance

in the bacteria we fear most. At

the current rate, superbugs such

as MRSA could become

commonplace. But just because

penicillin or tetracycline may lose

their effectiveness in the fight

against bacterial diseases, it

doesn’t mean that we won’t have

weapons. The antibiotics of

tomorrow may look very different

than the plant- and fungal-

derived compounds we commonly

use and abuse today.

Technically, anything that

slows the growth of, or kills,

bacteria is an antibiotic, although

the word has come to be

synonymous with the suite of

drugs we frequently use now. If

today’s microbes become

resistant to these drugs, the

most obvious method to manage

the potentially deadly diseases

that bacteria cause will be to find

new drugs. Compounds from

some pretty unexpected sources

could form the next wave of

antibiotics. Novel peptides called

‘magainins’ from frogs, or

WHAT WILL REPLACE ANTIBIOTICS?

THE BIG QUESTION

Pure metals are made of crystals or grains, and each crystal can be imagined as an arrangement of ball bearings, representing the metal atoms. But if there’s a crystal defect, known as a dislocation, there may be a gap in the arrangement that other atoms can slide into, creating movement and thus a weakness. This is a natural occurrence in all pure metal structures. Incorporating alloying elements

pins these dislocations and stops them slipping. IM

ENGINEERING

Why are alloys better than pure metals?

BY EMAIL

TECHNOLOGY

Why does air feel cooler the faster it moves? Alex Richards BY EMAIL

The cold feeling of moving air is due to heat transfer. If the air around a hot object, such as a person’s head, is stationary then the heat will transfer to the air

heating the surrounding air. If that air is moving away from the hot object, it carries away the heat that has been transferred to it and cooler air replaces it. In a person, the moving air will also help draw away evaporated water from sweat, and so will aid that cooling, too. IM

Daniel Ransonvia FacebookFor all of those that are not

concerned, you should be! It’s

a major concern across Western

countries and should be on

everyone’s minds!

Shelley Popevia FacebookAs a whole, I’m concerned as the

bugs get more virulent. But on a

personal level, I am of the opinion

that the less unnecessary

medication you take, the more

…AND ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE?

likely your body will react to these

stronger drugs.

Rob Wilson via FacebookVery! We are creating those

superbugs ourselves.

Lauren Baker via FacebookVery.

Kane Archer via FacebookVery concerned. If we don’t do

something, well…

Chelsea Wrigleyvia FacebookI am very worried about it but

me and my family rarely

need antibiotics for anything.

I do think GPs are way too quick

to hand out antibiotics to

people, though.

Richard Whitehurstvia FacebookI’m curious, but as yet not

concerned.

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Fancy heading off on an intergalactic holiday? Here are the must-see highlights that no trip around

the cosmos is complete without…WORDS BY Colin Stuar t

38 HOW THE UNIVERSE CAME TO BE What happened during

the Big Bang that brought everything into existence?

42 UK’S NEW SPACE RACE The locations under

consideration for the siting of a new spaceport.

Explore our universe and its mysteries

INSIDE THIS SECTION

30 @SciUncovered

These were Mariner 10 in 1974-5 and MESSENGER in 2011

Only two spacecraft have flown past Mercury

SPACE UNCOVERED Universe’s incredible sights

Our proximity to the Sun makes it a glorious object to point a telescope at. Today’s telescopes keep our nearest star under a careful, watchful gaze. And sometimes the Sun can put on the most spectacular of shows.

The magnetic forces inside twist and curl until the hot plasma cannot bear the strain any longer. Suddenly – and explosively – the Sun throws out a billion tonnes of material

in a single eruption. The material rockets away from the solar surface at a 1.6 million km/h (one million mph). This is the majesty of a coronal mass ejection (CME).

Modern telescopes can capture the spectacle in high

Dynamics Observatory did with this CME in August 2012. Three days later, some of the material arrived at Earth.

CME up closeOur Sun’s most spectacular sight

31@SciUncovered

We’ve only ever landed on the surface of two natural satellites – our own and Titan. The reason for the interest in the Solar System’s second-largest moon is its atmosphere – it is the only moon in the Solar System to boast such a

has a intricate river system.

Titan is not water – it’s too

liquid methane– but it carves coastlines similar to Earth’s.

Our Solar System has a violent

of a giant pinball machine, huge lumps of rock and metal hurtled around the infant Sun, slamming into anything in their paths. One of the more spectacular scars from this period can be spotted on Mercury – the enormous Caloris Basin extends 1,550km (960 miles). The force of the impact also sent shockwaves ripping around the planet. When they met on the opposite side of Mercury to the crater, they created a peculiar strip of grooved terrain.

Titan

The scar of an eventful past

The world of methane lakes and rivers

e

EuropaThe possible home of our neighbours NASHVILLE, US

The question of whether we are alone in the Universe has occupied human minds for centuries. This moon of Jupiter, decorated with an impressive hatched pattern, is perhaps the best place to look for extraterrestrial life in our Solar System. The criss-

crossing lines – called lineae - are cracks in sheets of 21km-thick ice, caused by a vast ocean of salty water sloshing around beneath. That ocean contains twice as much water as all the oceans, lakes, seas and rivers of the Earth put together.

23

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Caloris Basin

22

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32 @SciUncovered


Horsehead NebulaA delicate beauty

The theme of naming objects after Earthly doppelgängers is a common one. Found in the constellation of Orion, just below his famous belt, the Horsehead Nebula is a cold dark cloud of gas and dust. The nebula is normally seen in silhouette against a pink background of glowing hydrogen gas.

However, this infrared image, taken to celebrate the 23rd birthday of the Hubble Space

delicate composition. The sinuous structure is illuminated by light from a nearby bright star

system called Sigma Orionis.One of the two stars

poking out along the top of the cloud is emitting strong ultraviolet radiation, which is slowly eroding away the structure. Astronomers estimate the nebula has about

is gone forever.

We prize diamond as a precious substance, but planet

PSR-J1719-1438 b is made of it

Orbiting a rapidly rotating pulsar, this world is comprised of carbon

go – PSR-J1719-1438 b is 4,000 lightyears, or 3.78421136 × 1016 kilometres away from our planet.

PSR-J1719-1438 bThe most valuable planet out there

never gets dark. Where the

could comfortably read Science Uncovered unaided, even in the middle of the night. This would be your reality if you resided on a world within Omega Centauri – the largest globular cluster (collection of stars) orbiting our Milky Way galaxy. Here, 10 million stars sit packed together in a relatively small region of space. When seen from Earth, they resemble a swarm of

One of the most famous features in the Solar System, Jupiter’s ruddy bruise is a colossal anti-cyclonic storm in the planet’s southern hemisphere.

Earths, but recent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest it is shrinking (see ‘The Vanishing Red Spot’ in issue 10 of Science Uncovered for more).

Omega Centauri

The Great Red Spot

Jupiter’s iconic beauty spot

A world of eternal daylight

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Diamond can exist in These include blue, yellow, brown, green and pink

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33@SciUncovered


Every speck, smudge and spot in this

contains some of the most distant galaxies ever observed, which came into existence only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Originally captured between September 2003 and January 2004, this new version was released in June 2014 and includes ultraviolet and near-infrared light. But the staggering thing is that the image only shows a patch of sky you could cover by holding a grain of sand at arm’s length.

The view that shows how vast the Universe is

The 2014 Hubble

Ultra Deep Field

Young blue stars glimmer like precious jewels in this star-forming region of our Milky Way galaxy, in the Carina spiral arm. The stars, which are more massive than the Sun, are thought to be only one or two million years old. That may sound ancient, but

billion

ears old. Putting that into human terms, if our Sun was around 40, the stars in NGC 3603 would be less than a week old.

The region’s stars are surrounded by the remains of the gas cloud from which they were born. Strong winds and intense ultraviolet

radiation emanating from the infant stars are starting to disperse the cloud. Normally, such frantic regions are found in other galaxies – so having an example here in the Milky Way is great for astronomers trying to understand the processes that govern such areas.

NGC 3603A stellar nursery in our galaxy

The most famous chunk of ice in existence, Halley’s Comet has been seen by humans for thousands of

period comet visible to the naked eye, swinging by

last passed Earth in 1986, when the Giotto probe was dispatched to investigate, and is due to come back into view 2061.

Halley’s CometThe celestial ice show

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Halley’s Comet measures 15km by 8km

Despite the comet’s small size, its tail extends up to 100 million kilometres in length

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34 @SciUncovered


Speaking of galaxies that resemble things on Earth, they don’t come much more uncanny

like a penguin guarding one of

separate galaxies interacting with one another. The immense gravitational pull of the featureless elliptical galaxy – the egg – is sculpting the once spiral galaxy, known as NGC 2936, into that strangely avian shape.

Astronomers are a literal bunch. After all, they named one of the biggest telescopes in the world the Very Large Telescope. So when they saw a distant spiral galaxy that resembles a wide-brimmed Mexican hat, there was no hesitation over its moniker.

a wonderful view of the dust lanes that sweep around the galactic centre – which is unusually large for a galaxy of this type.

Penguin galaxy

Sombrero Galaxy

The avian arrangement

The Universe’s glowing halo

Europe at nightOur species’ mark on the world

Our planet is special. Despite all of our best astronomical

place in the entire Universe that we know for certain hosts life. And that life has been on a pretty remarkable journey. From its likely origin deep at the bottom of the ocean, the many twists and turns of natural selection have resulted in an enormous range of organisms, plants and animals.

One species in particular has left an indelible mark on the Earth, one that is clearly visible in this awe-inspiring satellite image of Europe and North Africa. The electric

lighting of every major city shines like a beacon, alerting onlookers to the fact that a technologically advanced species dwells here. London, Paris and Madrid particularly

and the Low Countries also

the beating heart of our infrastructure – sprawl tentacle-like outwards into the surrounding countryside.

But it’s what you can’t see that is arguably the most

every living thing, from the smallest bacteria to the

biggest blue whale, needs some form of liquid water to survive. Earthly life is so focussed around water that it is currently the primary substance we look for when searching for life elsewhere in the Universe. We label alien planets as ‘habitable’ because they have the ability to host liquid water.

Our telescopes have shown the cosmos to contain many an impressive visual spectacle. But while we gaze up into the sky with awe, we shouldn’t forget how remarkable we would look if an extraterrestrial species were looking back down towards us.

14

12

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galaxies is quite common

This includes everything from mild distortion to galactic cannibalism

35@SciUncovered


Sadly, one day the Sun will die. Exhausted of its fuel, it will expand before shaking itself to death. Still, it’s comforting to know that when it does, it will leave behind a beautiful cosmic tombstone similar to this planetary nebula.

A moon of Saturn, Hyperion is the Solar System’s most

spectacular sponge-like appearance, reminiscent of a giant pumice stone, is currently

moon whose axis of rotation wobbles around unpredictably,

moon to be discovered.

a group of galaxies that goes by the name of Arp 273. Sitting at a distance of three hundred million lightyears from Earth in the constellation of Andromeda, its beautiful portrait was snapped to commemorate the 21st birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011.

The spiral arms of the top galaxy – known as UGC 1810 – are being gradually distorted into a shape reminiscent of the swirling petals of a rose thanks to the gravitational pull of its

companion galaxy – UGC 1813. And the heart of UGC 1813 glows with the light from intense star formation, potentially triggered by the reciprocal tug of UGC 1810.

smaller galaxy actually passed straight through its larger

more massive. The shape of the distortion in the rose’s petals suggests that this encounter was substantial but took place away from the larger galaxy’s centre.

Mount Everest looks like a hill compared to this colossal structure which climbs 22km high into the Martian sky. Three times higher than our tallest mountain, Mars’s extinct volcano Olympus Mons is the highest peak in the Solar System, after a mountain on the large asteroid Vesta. Cat’s Eye Nebula

Olympus MonsThe giant peak of the Red Planet

Arp 273

The highly irregular moon

The distant rose

A vision of our future

Hyperion

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Saturn has 53 named moons

provisional moons, whose

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In the correct conditions, the Crab Nebula can be seen using binoculars

Stars of a similar mass to the Sun go out with a whimper compared to the death throes of more massive stars. The Crab Nebula is the remnant of such an explosive

in 1054 with enough brightness to be seen from Earth by the

naked eye, even during the day. Deep in the heart of the nebula sits a pulsar – a dense, rapidly rotating neutron star spitting out radiation at its poles. One teaspoon of the neutron star’s material would weigh more than everyone on Earth put together.

A dense cloud of beauty

These immense towers are part of the Eagle Nebula

1995, they quickly became one of the most famous astronomical images of all

gravity slowly draws hydrogen together into knots that are eventually sculpted into stars. Except they don’t exist any more. Astronomers believe a supernova explosion has obliterated the pillars, but we won’t observe their destruction until the light gets here in 1,000 years.

These exquisite dancing curtains of light are the result of an interaction between the Sun and Earth. As charged particles in the solar wind distort our

through the top layers of the atmosphere, triggering aurorae.

The Pillars of Creation

Northern LightsA night-time vision of

A vision of past spectacle

Crab Nebula5

6

7

@SciUncovered

The restless moon

Jupiter’s third largest moon is the most volcanically active place in the Solar System. At any one time,

the scars of these violent eruptions, decorated with spectacular shades of green, yellow and red. This unique landscape is the result of the gravitational

being pulled around as it orbits; its surface rises

on the surface – some of which can be higher than

small telescope as a star-like object alongside its giant planet.

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The Northern Lights are most commonly green in colour

They can also appear red or blue, however

37@SciUncovered


There are many wonders that sit outside of the Solar System, but the award for the Universe’s most spectacular sight goes to something orbiting our very

glorious rings of Saturn, seen here at their most incredible during a Saturnian solar eclipse. The Sun is behind the planet in this image, lighting its intricate ring system from the back.

observed by Galileo in 1612, although it took until 1655 to realise what they were. They can be seen today with a very modest telescope.

Made of relatively small chunks of ice, with a smattering of rock, the pieces range in size from tiny granules to the size

of a house. There is structure, too – the most obvious feature is a sizeable gap about halfway out known as the Cassini Division. The gravitational pull of Mimas – one of Saturn’s moons – is the culprit.

Exactly where the rings came from remains unclear. The most popular explanation has them spawned from a moon. Add all the ring particles together and they make up about the same amount of material found in Mimas. So the leading idea is that a moon of similar size once approached too close to Saturn, before being torn apart by the planet’s strong gravity.

Another persistent mystery is the dark ‘spokes’ – shadow-like areas that drift around the

rings as Saturn rotates. They

probes in the early 1980s, and were spotted again recently by

they might be caused by dust interacting with Saturn’s

Despite their celebrity, Saturn’s rings are not the only example in the Solar System – Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also sport rings. None even come close to the beauty of Saturn’s, however.

two incredible sunsets, not just

circumbinary planet to be discovered – it orbits two stars. As if that weren’t enough, the two stars eclipse one another roughly every three weeks. The planet was found by NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting mission.

Truly one of nature’s greatest spectacles. When the Moon slides in front of the Sun, our star is

view. Eclipses provide the perfect opportunity to study the corona – the normally invisible outermost layer of the Sun.

Double sunset

on Kepler-16b

Solar eclipse

The real Tatooine

A celestial alignment

3

Saturn’s rings A stunning sight in our cosmic back yard

2 1

Colin StuartAstronomer & author

+ A London-based astronomer and author, Colin’s f irst

book, The Big Questions in Science, is out now. @sk yponderer

One day on Saturn lasts 10.7 Earth hours

Earth’s though – it is equivalent to 29 of our years

SPACE UNCOVERED Birth of the Universe

38 @SciUncovered

stronomers have come up with a mind-boggling picture of how the Universe

began.observations of its current behaviour, is that it simply erupted 13.8 billion years ago, in an event dubbed the Big Bang. But while it’s a powerful image, the term is actually a misnomer. This was no explosion within a previously unoccupied space, but rather a bursting into existence of everything – space, time, matter and energy – all at the same moment. It is impossible to ask what happened before the Big Bang because time simply didn’t exist, and it happened everywhere because everywhere was within this unimaginably tiny region.

This bizarre scenario reveals that the original Universe was an

nothing that we might recognise today

impossible to explain. This briefest of moments is known as the Planck Era, named after the German theoretical physicist Max Planck. During that brief moment, the Universe grew a trillion times in size in a trillionth of a second. In less than a millionth of a second, cosmologists believe that the temperature plummeted from

THE BIRTH OF OUR UNIVERSE

10 billion trillion trillion degrees Celsius to a relatively cool 10 trillion degrees Celsius, and the Universe

start to a diameter of around one billion kilometres. The fundamental forces of nature – strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic and gravitational – had separated out, too.

PLASMA SOUPFrom the original bundle of energy emerged a hot soup of plasma containing fundamental particles and antiparticles. Reactions between these

and other heavier particles – and within 100 seconds, when the Universe had already grown to many hundreds of lightyears wide, the nuclei of virtually all its helium atoms had formed. Following this incredibly active start, there followed a period lasting many thousands of years when the Universe continued its relentless expansion – it continued to cool, but everything was still too energetic for particles to stay together long enough for any atoms to be produced.

It wasn’t until about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when temperatures had dropped to around 2,500ºC, that protons and atomic nuclei could

FROM THE ORIGINAL BUNDLE OF ENERGY EMERGED A HOT SOUP OF PLASMA CONTAINING FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLES AND ANTIPARTICLES.

Around 13.8 billion years ago, in a moment too brief to imagine and at temperatures too high to comprehend, space and time came into being

A

Georges Lemaître was a Catholic priest

When he proposed a ‘primeval atom’ in the 1920s, he was accused of bringing creationist ideas into cosmology

WORDS BY Paul Sutherland

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TEMPERATURE DIFFERENCESThe different colours in this

image – blue, green, red and

yellow – denote areas of different

temperature. These areas once

varied in density – and it was in

the denser regions that the first

stars and galaxies were formed.

NEW EVIDENCE SUGGESTS WE LIVE IN A MULTIVERSE+ Problems with our existing models

of the Universe have long led some scientists to

suggest that, just after the Big Bang, there was a very

brief period of super-fast inflation. Recent studies of the

CMB seem to have found evidence of the gravitational

ripples that this would theoretically create – and in

most models where inflation occurs, the result is not

just one universe, but millions of ‘bubble’ universes.

DID YOU KNOW?

39@SciUncovered


The ‘steady state’ theory dates back to the 1920s was a key supporter of the theory

ABOVE Sir Roger Penrose suggests patterns found in CMB data point to collisions with other universes

POTENTIAL FATES FOR THE UNIVERSE

+ In the first half of the 20th Century, a

now-discredited rival ‘steady state’ theory

for the Universe held that it had always

existed and that new matter was being

continuously created as it expanded.

However, following the detection in 1964

of the cosmic microwave background, or

CMB – the faint echo of the Big Bang – this

idea was effectively killed off completely.

Since then, new alternatives have

emerged proposing that the Universe is

continually expanding then contracting

in a series of Big Bangs and Big Crunches.

Extensions to this idea suggest that we

could be part of a multiverse, where

separate universes appear and expand

alongside each other like bubbles. In this

model, our entire Universe would be just

one of many universes.

One leading supporter of such a

concept, the British mathematician,

physicist and philosopher of science Sir

Roger Penrose, believes that some

circular features observed in the cosmic

microwave background are likely to be

‘bruises’ left by collisions with other

universes. Four such bruises have been

tentatively identified, although they

remain an extremely controversial

proposition. The general view of most

scientists is that the patterns that have

been ‘found’ in the CMB data don’t actually

exist, but that doesn’t rule out the

existence of a multiverse – see left.

Our Universe may be one of many, or could shrink again in a Big Crunch

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VATHE LAST VESTIGES

OF THE BIG BANG

+ This image is a temperature map of the cosmic

microwave background (CMB) radiation –the final,

lingering leftovers of the Big Bang itself. By looking at

it, we can see what the Universe looked like 13.8

billion years ago. The CMB is detectable by radio

telescopes as a faint background glow that pervades

the entire Universe, but it’s only thanks to the WMAP

and Planck spacecraft (see page 40) that

cosmologists can now study it in much finer detail.

Mapping the cosmic microwave background has revealed a great deal about our Universe

COSMIC BRUISING?Some scientists, such as Sir

Roger Penrose (see right), claim

to have detected circular patterns

in the CMB that they suggest are

the aftermath of collisions with

other universes. Other scientists,

however, remain sceptical.


40 @SciUncovered

combine with electrons to make the

photons were released in the Universe – a faint glow that’s detectable today as ‘cosmic microwave background’ (CMB) radiation. It would still be hundreds of million years before the

Although the Big Bang theory seems to defy rational thought or common sense, the clues to its truth are found all around us today, like the forensic evidence collected at a crime scene. Nearly a century ago, not long

that stars exist within galaxies outside our own Milky Way, it was discovered that those galaxies were all moving away from each other. Through a

chemical elements were observed to

be out of their expected position, with their light shifted towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum.

In the 1920s, American astronomer

that many of the fuzzy objects visible in the night sky were actually external

‘redshift’ in 18 galaxies and discovered the reason for it – the shift revealed that a galaxy was receding. The greater the shift, the faster the galaxy was moving away.

Einstein, whose general theory of relativity had predicted that the Universe must either be expanding or contracting and, as a result, could not stay the same size. Einstein had

prevailing theory of a static Universe,

CATACLYSMIC FLASHBelgian astronomer Georges Lemaître proposed in 1927 that the Universe began as a single atomic particle – he called it a ‘primeval atom’ – that began to expand in one cataclysmic

idea as “abominable, ” but later came

THE REDSHIFT IN A GALAXY’S LIGHT REVEALED THAT IT WAS RECEDING. THE GREATER THE SHIFT, THE FASTER THE GALAXY WAS MOVING.

the term ‘Big Bang’ between Lemaître’s ideas and his own

Over the past 100 years, the fields of physics and cosmology have been fertile ground for great minds and their theories about the nature of the Universe

THE CONSTANTLY CHANGING SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE

The ‘Great Debate’ took placebetween astronomers Harlow

Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920. Shapley believed spiral nebulae

were objects within our own vastMilky Way galaxy, while Curtis

correctly argued that they wereother, independent galaxies.

Georges Lemaître was a Belgian astronomer and priest who,

following studies at Cambridge University and Harvard College Observatory in Massachusetts, posited that the Universe wasexpanding and estimated the rate at which it was doing so.

American astronomer Edwin Hubble surveyed 18 galaxies using the 2.5m telescope at

Mount Wilson in California. He determined that they were

receding and that their velocities increased in proportion to their

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From the Big Bang’s original burst of energy, the Universe has been expanding and cooling ever since

ABOVE Today, stars form inside nebulae. But the formation of the first stars was far more complex

41@SciUncovered


Several spacecraft have studied the CMB

NASA’s WMAP (launched 2001) and ESA’s Planck (2009) supplied most of the data used in current models

to praise it as a beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation.

suggested an ‘echo’ of this event would remain in the form of background radiation. Astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson

as a residual hiss as they scanned the sky for faint radio sources. Initially blamed on bird droppings on the radio telescope, determining its real nature earned them a Nobel Prize in 1978.

A recent problem for the theory has been the detection of temperature

idea that in an expanding Universe, temperature should appear uniform throughout at large scales.

Fred Hoyle, a theoretical astronomer based in Cambridge, England, proposed a rival ‘steady

state’ theory for the Universe that argued the Universe has no start or end. Ironically, he came up with the term ‘Big Bang’ forthe opposing view, and it stuck.

In the US, cosmologistGeorge Gamow and his student

Ralph Alpher predicted that the glow from events following

the Big Bang should still bedetectable as background

radiation in the microwave region of the radio spectrum.

Radio astronomers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias noticed a persistent interference while

using their new antenna atHolmdel, New Jersey. Ruling out pigeon droppings, they realised

they had detected cosmic microwave background radiation.

NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) to measure the diffuse

infrared and microwave radiationgenerated in the early Universe.

Its observations of this glow werefound to closely match predictions

of the Big Bang theory.

In the early 2000s, NASA’s WMAP satellite – and then the European

Space Agency’s Planck space telescope from 2009 to 2013 – mapped the cosmic microwave background in increasing detail.

Planck pinned the age of the Universe at 13.8 billion years. IM

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ABOVE As the Universe expands the wavelengths of light are stretched out, so distant objects look redder

Paul SutherlandSpace writer+ An astronomy and space exploration writer, Paul’s most recent book is Where

Did Pluto Go? He also runs the space and astronomy news website Sk yMania. @suthers

WORDS BY Sarah Cruddas

SPACE UNCOVERED UK’s great space race

42 @SciUncovered

ockets carrying satellites into space will soon be taking off from UK soil –

perhaps even as early as 2018. Eight sites for a UK spaceport are now being considered by the government for the UK equivalent to NASA’s Cape Canaveral. And it wouldn’t just be satellites. Long-term plans could see the likes of Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace and other commercial space companies launching from Britain. “Compare this with commercial aviation,” says Michael López-Alegriá, former NASA astronaut and president of

“100 years ago it was in its infancy, but look how much has changed.”

According to López-Alegriá, within a decade we could see point-to-point space travel, with spaceports around the world allowing travel between cities in record times. However, the main initial focus for a UK spaceport would be launching small satellites. The space industry is worth around £11.3 billion per year to the UK economy, but the government wants

Having a UK spaceport would reduce the cost of launching UK-built small

satellites – made by companies such as Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) in Surrey and Clyde Space in Glasgow – by up to 80%, because they would no longer have to be shipped abroad to launch.

“A spaceport would help to cement the UK’s place as the micro-sat market

of navigation and telecommunications at SSTL. Micro-sats are used for everything from communications to

likely be a combination of government and commercial investment, with the US model for Spaceport America in

is run. The spaceport is leased from the US government at favourable terms. The hope is that a UK spaceport will attract investment from big commercial space companies.

The recommendations for UK spaceport locations were made by the Civil Aviation Authority. Unlike Cape Canaveral, which hosts vertical lift rockets, a UK spaceport would need to support a variety of launch vehicles, such as ESA’s VEGA rocket and Reaction Engines’ SKYLON spaceplane.

“A SPACEPORT WOULD HELP TO CEMENT THE UNITED KINGDOM’S POSITION AS THE MICRO-SAT MARKET LEADER.”

There are several sites are in the running to host Britain’s first ever spaceport, planned to begin operation in 2018

R

from Baiknour CosmodromeThe launchpad is now known as ‘Gagarin’s Start’

UK’S GREAT SPACE RACE

Dr John Paffett SURREY SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY LTD

CAMPBELTOWN AIRPORTMilitary operations stopped here in

1997, and it has a runway length of

over 3km – the longest runway of

any public airport in Scotland.

GLASGOW PRESTWICK AIRPORT51km (32 miles) from Glasgow city

centre, this is the city’s second airport

and has seen a significant reduction in

passenger traffic in recent years.

STORNOWAY AIRPORLocated on the Isle of Lewis, thi

used to be mainly used for militar

purposes. Now it is used mostly for

domestic passenger flights.

43@SciUncovered

OTHER SPACEPORTS AROUND THE WORLD

+ Located in the Jornada del Muerto

desert in New Mexico, US, this is the

world’s first custom-built commercial

spaceport and home to the likes of Virgin

Galactic and SpaceX. It will soon boast a

visitors’ centre and hotel for a complete

space experience.

+ The world’s first launch facility, located

in Ukraine, this is where the first

millionaire space tourists, such as

software exec Charles Simonyi, blasted

off from. It’s reported there are plans to

develop space tourism at the site further

with entertainment zones and hotels.

+ Inaugurated in 2007 and operating out of

Kiruna Airport, this facility will offer launch

infrastructure, satellite communications

and control, and payload integration,

research, test and evaluation facilities.

Kiruna is already a space city, and has been

launching sub-orbital flights since 1957.

SPACE UNCOVERED UK’s great space race

Only one UK astronaut has visited the ISS

there between 1993 and 1994

SPACEPORT AMERICA

BAIKONUR COSMODROME

SPACEPORT SWEDEN

KEY CRITERIA IN SELECTING A SPACEPORT SITE

+ A spaceport would need to be far from any

densely populated areas in case things go

awry, so a coastal location is preferred. The

spaceport would also need to be at a site that

would enable spacecraft to launch in

segregated air space, away from normal air

traffic routes. A large runway is also a must,

so the chosen site should either already have

one, or be capable of hosting one.

There are several factors the government will need to take into account

LANBEDR AIRPORTocated in the Snowdonia

National Park, Llanbedr Airport

is a former RAF base and now

an operational airport, with a

2,300m runway.

EWQUAY CORNWALL AIRPORThe only candidate site in England,

Newquay benefits from uncongested

airspace, as well as one of the longest

runways in the UK (2,744m) able to

support aircraft of any size.

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AF LEUCHARSnother favourite, this site

lready boasts radar and

ommunication equipment. Its

longest runway is 2,589m.

INLOSS BARRACKS former RAF base,

he site was handed

over to the army

in 2012.

AF LOSSIEMOUTH favourite with industry experts.

orth Scotland would be an ideal

location as it already has launch and

aerospace structures in place,” says

Robin Sampson, spacecraft sales

anager at Clyde Space.

+ Connections between neurons are called synapses. At these junctions, messages are carried between cells via chemicals called neurotransmitters.

44 @SciUncovered

Get beneath the skin of our species

50 HOW TO BUILD A BIONIC HAND This newly developed

prosthesis can restore a sense of touch to amputees – but how?

54 SUGAR UNCOVERED! Take a look at exactly

to your body.

The human brain has around 100 billion neurons

The majority of these are housed in the cerebellum

INSIDE THIS SECTION

@SciUncovered 45

The roundworm has just 302 neurons

Scientists have been able to accurately map its neurons, furthering our understanding of how they connect

WORDS BY Dr Christian Jarret t

Our brains store information by creating a complex web of connections – but these can strengthen or

weaken over time, causing our memories to fail us…

Why we forget

n 9 November 2011, the then-governor of Texas, Rick Perry, experienced a

very public episode of forgetfulness. During a TV debate among Republican Presidential candidates, in front of millions of viewers, he failed to recall the third of the government agencies that it was his policy to abolish. Despite this being a central pillar of his campaign, his memory continued to fail him through 54 agonising seconds of questioning.

An inability to recall stored information is one form of memory lapse. Another is to forget what

events instead. This blunder befell another US politician in public fashion in 2008, when a campaigning Hillary Clinton recalled her visit to Bosnia 12 years earlier. She described a dramatic

footage revealed the calmer truth - a pleasant welcoming ceremony on the airport tarmac. Clinton later admitted that her memory had failed her.

To understand why people forget, it helps to consider the three stages

Oinvolved in remembering: the initial encoding stage, storage in long-term memory and then retrieval. The more deeply we think about information

robust the encoding process – and the more likely it will be consolidated into long-term memory. However, often what is stored long-term is the gist or meaning of what happened, rather than a literal representation. That’s why you can remember the plot from the last book you read, but quickly forget the precise wording.

S T RONG WEBIn biological terms, memories are formed through the changing strength of connections between neurons. This leads to the creation of web-like neuronal assemblies or ‘matrices’, in which related information and experiences are interconnected. Each memory matrix includes the context in which

which is why recall is often easier if you can revisit the circumstances in which the original encoding took

HUMANS UNCOVERED Science of memory

SOME PEOPLE HAVE SUPER MEMORIES+ It’s only in recent years that psychologists have identified

a minority of people who have ‘hyperthymesia’ – the ability

to recall almost every day of their lives in exquisite detail.

They can tell you what they were doing on almost any given

date. However, a study published last year found that such

people are just as prone to false memories as the rest of

us. This suggests that although more detailed than ours,

their memories are still reconstructive in nature.

DID YOU KNOW?

46 @SciUncovered


New memories are stored in the hippocampus

Older memories, however, appear to transfer to other parts of the brain

place. It’s also why smells and sounds can be so evocative.

A great deal of forgetting occurs because the encoding process is interrupted, and so information is never transferred to long-term

recall can also fail at the retrieval stage, as happened with Perry’s embarrassing lapse. A common cause of forgetting at this stage is interference, and this may be what Perry experienced. As we trawl the shelves of our minds, sometimes information related to what we’re looking for is activated more strongly

and misinformation. It’s incredibly easy for false information to seep into the process of remembering, which is likely what happened with Clinton’s

US psychologist Dr Elizabeth Loftus has done more than anyone to demonstrate the power of false memories. In a seminal study in 1995, she presented participants with stories of their childhoods provided by friends and family. Mixed in with true information was a fabricated account of a time they were lost in a shopping mall. Loftus asked her participants to

more information where possible.

incident into their life story, even embellishing it with further details.

prospective memory, when we try to remember to do things in the future. You go upstairs only to realise you’ve forgotten what you went up there for. A 2011 study helps explain why this happens. Researchers led by Dr Gabriel Radvansky at the University of Notre Dame, in the US, instructed participants to navigate a network of rooms, picking up and depositing

ABOVE Astrocytes – the star-shaped cells shown above – are the most common cell type in the human brain

as happens when a word is ‘on the tip of your tongue’. It’s notable that Perry kept repeating the two government agencies he had recalled, as if these were blocking his access to the third.

DIFFEREN T PROCESSESNote that recognition memory is

something in the sense that we are unable to recall it, and yet the memory is in there. For instance, you might not be able to name a school classmate seen in an old photograph, but if given a list of names, you would immediately recognise the correct one. Research has shown that recognition memory relies on distinct neural pathways from the deliberate act of recall.

Remembering is an active, constructive process. Brain imaging studies show that recalling the past involves the same brain regions as when we imagine the future. This helps explain Clinton’s variety of memory failure. Rather than our experiences being laid down like data on a computer’s hard drive, each act of reminiscence is a fresh creation. This leaves our autobiographical memories highly prone to suggestion

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Browsing the internet could damage our memories overload, reducing the amount of

recent memories stored

@SciUncovered

various objects as they went. The objects were concealed in boxes after being picked up. Participants more often forgot what object they were carrying when they were quizzed about it after entering a new room, compared with being quizzed in the same room as the object was acquired.

This is because our memories are structured into chapters, with physical boundaries such as doorways sometimes acting as chapter dividers. It’s harder to recall information from a previous chapter than a current one.

CHOOSING T O FORGE TYet another way that we forget is by choosing to. Psychologists call this process ‘directed forgetting’. In 2009, Dr Peter Delaney and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in the US, presented their participants with two lists of sentences – one about Tom, the other

INFANTILE AMNESIA+ The earliest of our

memories are usually

from when we were

aged three or four. What

happens to memories of

our first years? We seem

to forget them from

around age seven. Before that, children can reminisce

about much of what happened. But their memories

are immature, lacking mention of time and place. It’s

thought this contributes to the later forgetting.

THE REMINISCENCE BUMP+ Most people are

better able to remember

autobiographical details

from their teens and early

twenties than from any

other stage of their life -

a phenomenon called the

‘reminiscence bump’. And it’s not just that events from

that time are more meaningful. Researchers have shown

that the bump also holds for memories of news events.

EARWORMS+ It’s not just forgetting

that’s annoying – it’s

also unwanted memories

that come to mind.

An everyday example

is when a song starts

playing in your head – an

‘earworm’. We are most prone when tired or bored, and

songs that we enjoy have the most earworm potential.

THE ZEIGARNIK EFFECT+ This is the finding, made

by Bluma Zeigarnik in

the ’20s, that we better

remember incomplete or

interrupted tasks. The

research was inspired by

her supervisor Kurt Lewin

noticing that waiters at a cafe tended to forget orders

that had been paid for, and remember those that hadn’t.

Some of the weirdest ways in which our memories can fail us are surprisingly common

FOUR BIZARRE MEMORY PHENOMENA

about Alex. Afterwards, half the participants were told to try to forget the Tom sentences, while the others acted as a control group. During a later memory test, the participants who previously attempted to erase the Tom sentences were able to recall far fewer of those sentences than the control group, but remembered just as many of the Alex sentences.

Chronic forgetting can also be caused by injury and illness. Consider anterograde amnesia – a condition associated with damage to the hippocampus in the temporal lobes of the brain, in which a person is no longer able to form long-term

knowledge remains intact (such as riding a bike), they can’t remember what they had for breakfast, or even what they were doing a few minutes ago. If you met them today, they wouldn’t remember you tomorrow.

OUR MEMORIES ARE STRUCTURED INTO CHAPTERS, WITH PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES SUCH AS DOORWAYS SOMETIMES ACTING AS CHAPTER DIVIDERS.

There are two types of long-term memory

These are declarative – facts and anecdotes – and procedural – how to carry out actions

48 @SciUncovered

Another condition, known as semantic dementia, causes patients

while initially retaining ‘super-ordinate’ concepts. Shown a picture of a dog, they’ll identify it as an animal but won’t be able to specify that it’s a

naming problem. A patient might not only struggle to identify a hammer, but also to mime the way the tool is used. As the patient’s temporal and frontal lobes atrophy, they lose not just their neurons, but tragically, also their knowledge about the world.

Learning more about the underlying reasons why our memory fails us will help us to combat the

as Alzheimer’s. And it’s a rapidly expanding area of science. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Texas mapped the brain activity

traumatic stress disorder, using near-infrared spectroscopy, while they performed simple memorisation tasks. The group displayed limited activity in the prefrontal cortex area of the brain. Studies such as these, which help scientists to pinpoint where in

instances, will help us to develop treatments tailor-made for each disease. And since memory loss can

politician, it’s an area of science that


Memory and logic tests such as these are often used in patients with dementia

Dr Christian Jarrett Neuroscientist & science writer+ With a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Manchester,

Christian is an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society. @Psych_Writer

The chemical means of altering what we can recall

CAN WE USE DRUGS TO ERASE OUR UNWANTED MEMORIES?

Memories are particularly vulnerable at the moment

they are being recalled. Researchers are exploiting

this fact to develop ways to weaken or erase our

unwanted memories. One experimental approach

is to have a patient take the drug propranolol after

recalling a traumatic memory. This drug blocks the

receptors for stress hormones that would normally act

to entrench the memory. There’s some evidence that

traumatic memories lose their emotional intensity when

propranolol is used in this way. This sounds promising,

but the research also raises ethical issues – imagine

if people had the meaning of their memories removed

against their will.

Other researchers are trying to find ways to use

technology to boost our memory abilities. It’s early

days, and there could be adverse side-effects, but

several studies have shown that applying weak electrical

currents to specific areas of the brain via the scalp

(using a technique called transcranial direct current

stimulation) appears to boost memory performance.

AS PATIENTS’ TEMPORAL AND FRONTAL LOBES DECAY, THEY LOSE NOT JUST THEIR NEURONS, BUT ALSO THEIR KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE WORLD.

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ON SALE NOW!

PREPARE FOR THE LATEST MARVEL FILM!DISCOVER GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

YOUR GUIDE TO THE BEST IN COMICS!DOWNLOAD TO YOUR DEVICE OR FIND IT AT

HUMANS UNCOVERED Building a bionic hand

50 @SciUncovered

WORDS BY Zoe Cormier

A new prosthetic hand developed in Switzerland can give amputees their sense of touch back. So how does it work?

How to build a bionic hand

Blind and deaf people are often more sensitive to touch

This is thought to be due to the parts of their brains that would be used for sight or sound being reassigned


51@SciUncovered

“The absence of sensation when operating a prosthetic hand is a limiting factor for many prosthetic limb users,” says Sarah Day of the National Centre for Prosthetics and Orthotics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. “This development is one of several exciting advances in bioengineering that, when fully developed, could enhance the function of upper-limb amputees.”

T OUCH T Y PESBeing able to feel the objects they touch as well as move them gives

degree of control, illustrating the point that touch isn’t just a sense. It’s a tool, and one we need to be able to navigate and manipulate the world around us.

While we think of touch as just

complex and made up of a variety of

sensitivities. The skin has the ability to detect pressure, stretch, vibration, temperature and pain. Each form of

kind of receptor – thermoreceptors for temperature, mechanoreceptors for pressure, nociceptors for pain, and so on – and each receptor relays its signal

Interestingly, not all types of nerves transmit their signals at the

wrapped in varying thicknesses of myelin, the fatty insulating layer that enables the electrical signals of a nerve to travel quickly (just like the insulation surrounding a wire). Those transmitting pain are wrapped in a thinner myelin sheath, so their information is more slowly received.

touch travel from their point of

ouch is one of our key sensory windows into the world. And unravelling

its mysteries is allowing scientists

not only move but also feel, giving amputees much greater control over

Researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, recently demonstrated a metal prosthetic hand that allows amputees to not only move

were permanently wired to electrodes implanted into nerves on the patient’s arm. Blindfolded and wearing headphones to block out any sounds, the patient was able not just to pick up and handle objects but also to identify their shape and how squishy they were using sensory feedback.

In 1956, psychologist FA Geldard invented a touch language

Vibratese was composed of 45 symbols, enabling users to communicate using touch alone

T

+ More than 60% of people who’ve undergone amputations

suffer the experience of ‘phantom limb’: the illusion that

their arm or leg is still there. While this might sound simply

unsettling, most people with phantom limbs find them to

be extremely painful – and unshakeably so, as they cannot

massage or treat the imaginary limb.

Nobody really knows why phantom limbs exist. It’s

possible that the brain uses visual input based on seeing

other people to construct an idea of what the missing limb

should look and feel like. Another theory is that the brain

has a hard-wired map of a limb, even if it doesn’t exist

– it’s worth noting that people born without an arm or leg

can also experience phantom limb pain.

The cause remains a mystery, and without

understanding why the sensation of pain is there,

practitioners are unable to treat it. Painkillers,

antidepressants, hypnosis and even acupuncture are all

ineffective for the vast majority of patients. But improving

our understanding of how touch works may help to

produce new treatments.

Amputees can feel pain in limbs they no longer have – but why?PHANTOM LIMBS


52 @SciUncovered

inception on the outside of the body

bundles entering the spinal cord through gaps between the vertebrae. At the top of the spine, these branch into the centre of the brain, travelling upwards and outwards to meet their destination: the primary somatosensory cortex.

PAIN IN T HE BRAINThis strip on the outer surface of the brain, which runs across the top of your head from just behind one ear to just behind the other, is a map of what the human body feels through the

somatosensory cortex correspond to

this and many other regions in the 1950s, through experiments on epileptics who had gone in for surgery to remove the part of their brain responsible for their seizures. There are no sensory nerve endings on the surface of the brain, as you have no need to feel anything inside your skull, so patients can be kept awake under

1

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ABOVE Amputee Dennis Aabo Sørensen is able to ‘feel’ an orange, thanks to the metal hand’s sensors

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Zoe CormierScience writer

+ With a BSc in zoology from the University of Toronto, Zoe is head of communication for UK science outreach organisation Guerilla Science. @zoecormier

You have far more Other senses beyond the traditional list include the ability to feel pain, sensitivity to temperature and your sense of balance

local anaesthetic while surgeons temporarily remove portions of their skull and locate and cut out the small part of their brain responsible for their seizures. Many patients generously agreed to allow surgeons to use the unparalleled opportunity to examine the surface of the brain in otherwise healthy, normal people.

When the surface of their brain was gently poked, epileptics would report what they felt, helping scientists to deduce the distribution of function within the somatosensory cortex. If the region relating to the foot was poked, for example, they would feel a tickly sensation on the soles of their feet. How many nerve endings there are in a given body part determines the size of the corresponding zone on the cortex. The part devoted to the tongue is huge, as are the lips and hands, while the areas relating to the arms, legs and torso are tiny.

Some 60 years after

somatosensory cortex, researchers have gone miles further, wiring metal hands directly into the nervous system and enabling people to control machinery with their minds. Who knows what else we will discover.


53@SciUncovered

1 FIRST CONTACTA fly lands on the tip of a finger. Most prosthetics – from

running blades built for speed, to hands that are designed to

look realistic – won’t be able to detect this, but the sensors

on the fingers of the new sensory hand can.

2 SIGNAL CONVERSIONThe signal is converted by a series of computer algorithms

into a language the nervous system can understand.

Biological systems and electrical components use different

forms of electricity, so the signal must be translated before

being sent on to the brain.

3 IMPLANTED ELECTRODEThe signal is sent to an electrode implanted in one of the

nerves of the arm. These electrodes were designed to be

ultra-thin and ultra-precise so that strong and weak signals

– from the firm grasp of a handshake to the landing of a fly

– could be distinguished.

4 SPINAL CORDThe signal is relayed to the spine via the receptive or

‘afferent’ nerves. Once in the spine, the signal is then

relayed to the brain.

5 MESSAGE RECEIVEDThe signal is passed to the somatosensory cortex, a strip of

tissue on the outermost surface of the brain. This is a map

of the sensation of touch in the human body – different

regions correspond to different anatomical parts.

6 RETURN SIGNAL SENTThis signal is relayed to the motor cortex, a parallel vertical

strip running alongside the somatosensory cortex. This then

relays the signal to the nerves controlling the finger

muscles, instructing them to bend. The signal travels back

down the spinal cord through ‘efferent’ nerves.

7 SIGNAL CONVERSIONA different set of electrodes implanted in the arm receive

the signal, which then convert the electrical signals of the

nervous system back into the language of the electronic

components in the hand, instructing the fingers to move.

8 ACTIONThe fingers move, and the fly is shooed away. Tension in the

artificial tendons that control the fingers is measured, the

signal converted, and the sensation of feeling the fingers

move is relayed to the brain.

How the artificial hand is able to send tactile feedback to the wearer’s brain

SENSING THE WORLD WITH THE NEW PROSTHETIC HAND

7

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54

Sugar

TURN OVER TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT GLOBAL SUGAR CONSUMPTION AND ITS EFFECTS

ver since WWII rationing ended in the 1950s, people have been getting

unhealthier. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, heart disease was largely blamed on fatty foods, and the food industry reacted by launching extensive ranges of diet and ‘low-fat’ foods. But taking fat out of food affects the taste – so sugar was added to make it taste good.

However, one scientist did not leap on the ‘fat is bad’ bandwagon. In his 1972 book Pure, White and Deadly, John Yudkin – Professor of Nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College, in the UK – mused that it was sugar, not fat, causing levels of heart disease to soar. His research also led him to believe that sugar was contributing towards liver disease, obesity and diabetes.

Yudkin became a hate figure in the food industry, and was ostracised by some in the scientific community. Other researchers became nervous of writing negatively about sugar, and so the food industry carried on pumping sugar into all manner of foods.

MORE, MORE, MORE…Some scientists have described sugar as being as addictive as cocaine or heroin. When we consume sugar, we want more. This is because it causes our bodies to release dopamine, which gives our energy levels (and spirits) a boost. After this comes the familiar ‘sugar crash’, which means we want more sugar – and the cycle continues.

But unlike other drugs, the sweet stuff is widely available to anyone, of

any age. According to Paul van der Velpen, head of Amsterdam’s health service, sugar interferes with appetite, which is why some people find it almost impossible to stop eating sweets and biscuits – even when full. He has called for mandatory health warnings on food packaging.

RE APPRAISING SUGARIn 2009, University of California, San Francisco pediatrician Dr Robert Lustig posted a lecture on YouTube called Sugar: the Bitter Truth, citing Yudkin’s theories. The video has had nearly five million views, and Yudkin’s book has since been republished.

However, not everyone agrees with Lustig’s conclusions, nor with some of his more radical suggestions, such as banning the sale of fizzy drinks to minors. In an interview with the New York Times, Lustig himself outlined exactly how his views diverge from those of other leading nutritionists. And Dr David Katz, head of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, penned a public rebuttal of Lustig’s lecture for the Huffington Post, arguing that singling out any single nutrient as ‘evil’ and eliminating it from the diet is a fallacy that can do more harm than good.

But while Lustig’s viewpoint may be extreme, nutritionists do agree that too much sugar is a bad idea, and in March 2014 the World Health Organization recommended that average daily consumption should be halved. So… one lump or two?

Sugar is rotting our teeth, expanding our waistlines and ravaging our internal organs. Perhaps it’s time

sugar lost its sweet reputation for good…WORDS BY Alice Lipscombe-Southwell ILLUSTRATION BY Andy McLaughlin

CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE

50.7g per 500ml bottle

BOLOGNESE SAUCE

14.4g per

200g portion

BANANAS12g per 100mg

55@SciUncovered

WHY WE CRAVE SUGAR+ Sugar is impossible to get away from and

springs up even in seemingly healthy foods. But why do we find it so difficult to resist?

There are many kinds of sugar

They can be grouped into simple ‘monosaccharides’ and more complex ‘disaccharides’

HUMANS UNCOVERED The truth about sugar

1DIGESTION

Our body starts digesting food as soon as we take

a bite. Sugar is processed faster than fats and

proteins. Different enzymes digest different

sugars – for example, lactase breaks down

lactose, and sucrase breaks down sucrose. Most

sugar digestion occurs in the small intestine.

2ABSORPTION

Once the sugars have been broken down, they

travel into the bloodstream. Fruit and veg provide

fibre as well as sugar, which slows digestion and

promotes a feeling of satiation, so we’re less likely

to gorge ourselves. This is why naturally occurring

sugars are not as harmful as added sugars.

4

3REACTION

When sugar levels in the blood increase, the

pancreas starts to release insulin. This allows the

sugar to pass into the body’s cells, causing a fall in

blood-sugar levels. If refined sugars have been

eaten, this happens very quickly, causing a rapid

spike in blood-sugar levels followed by a slump.

ADDICTIONWhen this slump takes place, you may reach for a

chocolate bar or fizzy drink to get that high back.

Sugar causes the feel-good dopamine to be

released, giving it addictive qualities. Professor

David Ludwig from Harvard University carried out

MRI scans on patients and found that sugar

activated the same brain areas as cocaine.

TOMATO KETCHUP

3.7g per tablespoon

COLA 35g per 330ml can

YOGURT 15.9g per 125g pot

RECOMMENDED SUGAR INTAKE FOR ADULTS

25g per day

(World Health Organization)

56 @SciUncovered

WHAT SUGAR DOES TO THE BODY

Glucose and fructose are monosaccharides

Disaccharides include sucrose (table sugar) and lactose. But most sugars are digested in the same way

+ As research builds up a bigger picture of the risks of high-sugar diets, sugar rather than fat seems to be emerging as the villain in our shopping trolley

HUMANS UNCOVERED The truth about sugar

CONSUMPTION OF COCA-COLA DRINKS PER PERSON IN 2012

(227ML SERVINGS)

WAS THE YEAR BRITAIN’S FIRST SUGAR BEET FACTORY OPENED

OF UK ADULTS’ CONSUMPTION OF ADDED SUGAR COMES

FROM ALCOHOL

MEXICO = 745 CHILE = 486

PANAMA = 416USA = 401

ARGENTINA = 364

1912

11%

27%

S o u r c e : S t a t i s t a

S o u r c e : B r i t i s h S u g a r

S o u r c e : N H S

I N N U M B E R S

of five-year-olds in England had tooth

decay in 2013Source: Public Health England

HEARTA 2014 study published

in the JAMA Internal

Medicine journal found that added

sugar causes the risk of heart

disease to soar. Adults who

scoffed 25% or more of their

calories as sugar were three

times more likely to be killed by

cardiovascular disease than

those who ate the least sugar.

DIABETESType 1 diabetes is genetic and

unavoidable, but type 2 diabetes can

be caused by lifestyle factors. Diets that are

high in sugar are linked to weight gain, and

being overweight or obese increases the risk

of developing type 2 diabetes. In type 2

diabetes, the body either produces insufficient

insulin, or the insulin does not work properly

due to wear and tear of the pancreas, the gland

responsible for insulin production.

+ In June 2014, UK experts recommended that

consumers halved their recommended daily sugar

consumption from 12 teaspoons (50g) to six teaspoons

(25g). To put that into context, a single Mars bar would

constitute the total sugars allowed for a day. They

reason that this reduction could vastly improve the

nation’s health and slash the risk of certain illnesses.

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PEOPLE IN THE UK ARE LIVING WITH DIABETES

3.2 MILLIONS o u r c e : D i a b e t e s U K

57@SciUncovered

Sugar isn’t the only thing that’s bad for your teeth tooth enamel – even sugar-free

versions cause damageHUMANS UNCOVERED The truth about sugar

S o u r c e : O m l e t. c o . u k

S o u r c e : O n l i n e N u r s i n g P r o g r a m s

of sugar is consumed per year by each American

Biggest sugar-producing nations, 2010-2011

59KG

BRAZIL = 38.7INDIA = 26

CHINA = 11.5THAILAND = 10.1

USA = 7.2

22,700bees are needed to make

one jar of honey

S o u r c e : I n t e r n a t i o n a l S u g a r O r g a n i z a t i o n

SKINAs well as making us fat and unhealthy, a sweet-

filled diet can also accelerate the ageing process,

leaving our skin looking lacklustre. This is because too much

sugar can cause collagen and elastin to break down, meaning

that skin loses its suppleness and starts developing wrinkles

and a saggy appearance.

LIVERNot a drinker? Don’t

feel too smug – drinking

lots of sweet drinks may do just

as much harm to your liver as

alcohol. If we devour more sugar

than can be used as energy in our

cells, the excess is stored in the

liver as glycogen and fat. This can

lead, eventually, to non-alcoholic

fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Early

stages are considered harmless,

but if the disease progresses

then inflammation, scarring and

even cirrhosis can occur.

BRAINWhile gobbling down a chocolate bar may

initially perk you up, there is evidence that too

much sugar can have a negative effect on the brain. A

2012 study published bythe Journal of Physiology found

that sugar-laden diets harm cognitive skills.

MILLION TONNES

MILLION TONNES

MILLION TONNES

MILLION TONNES

MILLION TONNES

1

3

5

5

2

http://Omlet.co.uk

58 @SciUncovered

64 DIESEL ENGINEERING BEHEMOTH See how the world’s most

powerful diesel engine powers the largest ships.

66 THE DOOMSDAY SEED VAULT Deep in the Arctic, The

Svalbard Global Seed Vault is safeguarding plant life.

See how our future is being built

INSIDE THIS SECTION

Breath of fresh air Could new technology that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air help to repair our climate?

In 2007, 100 people from Tegua were evacuated

Global warming caused an

59

ENGINEERING UNCOVERED+ Carbon capturing

@SciUncovered

WORDS BY Michael Whiteley

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Collecting CO2 on an industrial scale

HOW TO CAPTURE CARBON FROM THE ATMOSPHERE

1 CO2 capture liquid is pumped to the

top of the Air-Contactor and descends

through its corrugated sheets.

2 Large fans push air through the

corrugated plastic sheets.

3 CO2 in the air is captured as it comes

into contact with the capture liquid.

4 Air containing less CO2 exits

through the back of the

corrugated sheets.

5 Liquid with collected CO2 is collected in a large tray

and funnelled into a sump.

6 The liquid is then sent to a

central regeneration facility.

7 The regeneration facility extracts

CO2 from the capture liquid before

returning the liquid to the air

capture technology.

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The Arctic could have ice-free summers soon

By around 2040, global warming will have caused a rapid decrease in sea ice


60 @SciUncovered

limate change has become an increasing cause for concern recently. Man-

made greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), are

are emitting more CO2 than ever before – in fact, carbon dioxide are higher than they’ve been f the past two million years,

So, how can we reduce emissions – not only for our

health, but for the rest of the biosphere, too?

energy penetrates our atmosphere and is then radiated back from the Earth, but some of this energy is

pped by greenhouse gases such as bon dioxide, methane and nitrous

han it would be otherwise, helping

activities, such as burning fossil fuels, have increased greenhouse gas levels to the point where our lanet is in danger of overheating,

RECT CAPTURE

switching to renewable energy, building solar farms and wind

suck CO2 out of the atmosphere? That’s precisely what Canadian company Carbon Engineering is working on, and it is starting to see

You may well have heard of carbon

is the process of removing carbon

The CO2 is transported elsewhere and

you need to have the space available

on the other hand, has developed a technology that can be placed

extracts CO2 from the atmosphere, and the technology doesn’t need to be

location you desire – even the most barren, otherwise unusable land

Currently, the concentration of CO2 in the air is around 400 parts per

lot, but is plenty enough to cause

2 coming out of a power plant chimney

CARBON DIOXIDE COULD B BL ASTED OUT INTO SPACE+ A scientist at the University f f

suggested that we could send a large amount of CO2 into

space to make a dent in the current levels. Professor Alfred

Wong’s idea revolves around using the Earth’s magnetic

field to carry CO2 molecules up and out of the atmosphere.

The molecules like to bond with loose electrons to form CO2

ions; these ions follow the path of Earth’s magnetic field

which, at the poles, is basically a straight line into space.

er e levels or

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DID YOU KNOW?

+ Cement production is normally considered to be a large

polluter when it comes to CO2. Currently, it constitutes

5% of global emissions – more than the aviation industry.

However, that might soon become a thing of the past.

A new method of producing cement by mimicking nature

could actually absorb CO2.

Corals and other sea creatures use CO2 and seawater

minerals, such as magnesium and calcium, to create

their strong exoskeletons. When these animals die,

they eventually sink to the bottom of the ocean and can

form calcium carbonate. Using this principle, we can

dramatically reduce CO2 emissions from the cement

industry by trying to match what nature does.

The US company, Calera, is developing an innovative

system in which CO2 emissions are captured from

industrial sources. The gas is combined with an alkaline

– such as caustic soda – and calcium to form a solid,

calcium carbonate-based cement. The CO2 is therefore

captured within the material forever.

The cement industry could soon become much greener

AN ALTERNATIVE CARBON CAPTURE PROJECT

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Artist’s impression of the carbon capturing technology being developed by Carbon Engineering

Glacier National Park has only 25 glaciers left

this US national park had about 150

61@SciUncovered


technologies are arguably more suited in this situation as the power plant

emissions from transport? It simply wouldn’t be feasible to put CCS technologies on the end of the exhaust

Additionally, traditional CCS looks at tackling future emissions, whereas AC can remove CO2 that is already

MAN VS NATURETrees are nature’s CO2

take in CO2 and release oxygen (O2

Carbon Engineering turbocharges this

500 tons of CO2 per square kilometre, whereas air capture can process as much as 500,000 tons of CO2 per

2 is

converted into the raw material of the tree as it grows, which means that when it dies and rots, this CO2 is re-introduced into the atmosphere at a

lock up CO2 and store it in

we don’t need to worry about it coming

In the process of air capture, atmospheric air is sucked into the plant via a large fan, where it is introduced to the heart of the

through a tightly packed, honeycomb-

PVC block is coated with a CO2

air passes over the solution, its CO2 becomes attached to the liquid,

solution trickles down to a tray and is

inlet to outlet, this process can remove

2 from the air, and as long as the technology is kept supplied with CO2 absorbent

Landfill sites are smelly, but the gas they give off could be captured for useful applications

IT CAN BE POSSIBLE FOR A LARGE ‘SLAB’ AC MACHINE TO PROCESS UP TO 100,000 TONS OF CO

2 PER YEAR.

San Marino has the most road vehicles per person

The tiny European republic boasts over 1,260 vehicles per 1,000 people


62 @SciUncovered

solution, it will keep removing CO2

So what happens to the carbonate solution after the process is complete? It can be processed to remove the CO2

molecules, and the cleaned solution can be returned back to the air capture

energy to do so, but any CO2 produced by the external energy used can also

capture machine to process up to 100,000 tons of CO2 per year,

As the air capture slabs can be placed anywhere on the planet, they could be positioned in an area where there are already renewable energy installations, such as wind turbines – that could provide them with the

Air capture could also be used to create hydrocarbon-based fuels, such

achieved by combining the harvested CO2 molecules with hydrogen generated from renewable electrolysis

with wind-powered hydrogen production could create a closed loop

and CO2 is released, it can be quickly reabsorbed by air capture, and the

Carbon Engineering’s air capture

player in our rush to reduce the CO2

levels in the atmosphere, and the

Michael WhiteleyResearch scientist+ Michael Whiteley is a research scientist at Loughborough University.

His expertise is in green technologies. @MWHFC

CAPTURING OTHER GASES HARMFUL TO THE ENVIRONMENTThere are many ways to clear up our air

G A S F R O M T R A S HA significant percentage

of our waste from homes and factories is sent to landfill, where it decomposes. As the rubbish breaks down,

landfill gas is produced, which is a mixture of methane (CH

4) and

carbon dioxide (CO2). This

gas can be captured via a large cap on the landfill site, and can be burned and used to heat homes

or generate electricity. As well as preventing the gas

from reaching the atmosphere, bad smells

would be reduced.

M E T A L S P O N G E SMetal Organic

Frameworks (MOF) are compounds of metal ions arranged to form

three-dimensional sponge shapes around an organic molecule.

These MOFs can trap all sorts of ‘nasties’, such as sulphur compounds

and volatile organic compounds. They’re a

way off from becoming commonplace, but

researchers are working on ways to make them better at filtering and

capturing these gases.

M E T H A N E Z E O L I T E S

Another potential way to capture methane is to use something

called zeolites, porous minerals comprised of silicon, aluminium and

oxygen. CO2 is relatively

easy to capture as it can be done physically

and chemically, but methane is quite a

bit trickier. However, zeolites can adsorb CH

4

gas, integrating the molecules into their material structure,

and can then be safely disposed of,

taking the harmful methane with them.

G A S C O N V E R T E RBurning fossil fuels in cars produces carbon

monoxide (CO), which is poisonous, and nitrous oxides (NO), which can cause smog and acid rain. However, these

can be filtered through a catalytic converter in the car’s exhaust system to produce gases that are less

harmful. NO becomes inert nitrogen (which

makes up around 79% of our air) and oxygen,

while CO combines with oxygen to make

carbon dioxide.

B I O F I L T E R SMethane (CH

4) is

the second most concentrated greenhouse

gas in the atmosphere after CO

2 and 16% of CH

4

emissions come from cattle farming. Bacteria

found in woodland soil are nature’s way of keeping this gas in check. It’s estimated

that around 30 million tons of CH

4 per year are

absorbed by bacteria named methanotrophs that take in CH

4 and use

it to produce carbon to live. Researchers in the US are testing biofilter

designs as a greener way to reduce the amount of methane in landfill sites.

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ENGINEERING UNCOVERED Largest diesel engine

CONTAINER SHIPS ARE BUILT TO A STANDARD SIZE+ The size of container ships is partly constrained by

the commercial routes they can physically navigate,

and the capacity of the ports they need to visit. Current

New Panamax ships – those that can traverse the

newly expanded Panama Canal – will soon be dwarfed

by the Malaccamax class. These will be just able to

transport 30,000 containers of cargo between

Malaysia and Indonesia via the Strait of Malacca.

DID YOU KNOW?

64 @SciUncovered

he Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C 14-cylinder, turbo-charged two-stroke diesel engine

has all the same parts as, and operates in a very similar fashion to, a conventional two-stroke diesel engine from an old lawnmower. But put them side by side and you’ll quickly spot the

the largest reciprocating engine on the planet, built to power the world’s biggest ships.

FUELLING POWER

squirted in, mixed with air and directed into an enclosed cylinder where it’s electronically ignited. Hot

expands, pushing the piston up the cylinder; the piston’s linear motion is

circular motion.

exhaust the burned gas produced

stroke. Further cylinders are positioned in line so that one cylinder is always exploding as the others are

DIESEL ENGINE BEHEMOTH

designed to power such an immense object through turbulent waters?

almost one metre in diameter, with a

engine is working at maximum

whales to balance the scales, and at

EACH OF THE ENGINE’S PISTONS IS ALMOST ONE METRE IN DIAMETER, WORKING AT 102 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE.

It follows the same engineering template as a garden regular but this massive diesel engine can power one of the world’s largest container ships

T

FUEL INJECTIONFuel is squirted into the engine’s 14

cylinders at high pressure, using

common rail-direct fuel-injector

technology. It is operated

electronically, rather than mechnically,

offering greater precision.

WORDS BY Prof Brendan Walker

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OTHER MEANS OF POWERING SHIPS

+ The Russian Sevmorput is the only

nuclear-powered container ship in

operation today. Its KLT-40 nuclear fission

reactor produces a thermal output of 135

megawatts – used to generate 215

tonnes of steam per hour, at high

pressure, to power its turbines.

+ Transporting cars from Japan to the US,

Nippon Yusen’s experimental Auriga

Leader is the world’s first ship to be

partially propelled by solar power.

However, this produces just 0.05% of the

ship’s propulsion power, so two-stroke

engines may be here for some time yet.

+ The German cargo ship E-Ship 1’s nine

Mitsubishi engines only produce 3.5

megawatts of power in total, but § doesn’t

just drive the propellers. Some power is

used to rotate four 27m-tall ‘Flettner rotor’

cylinders mounted on the ship’s deck,

which work as wind sails.

SEVMORPUT

AURIGA LEADER

E-SHIP 1

65@SciUncovered

ENGINEERING FOR POWER ON A GRAND SCALE

+ The Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C may use the

same principles as a conventional two-stroke

engine, but there are some extra innovations

in place to keep things running smoothly.

REDUCED FORCESUnlike in an automotive engine, the

connecting rod attaches via a

crosshead, which runs in a guide

channel. This reduces sideways

forces that can make a piston

lose its shape over time.

ENGINEERING UNCOVERED Largest diesel engine

Diesel is distilled Other products include kerosene, petroleum and naptha

PRIMED CYLINDERSAs the air-fuel mix explodes on one side of

the piston, pushing it up the cylinder, the

air on the other side is compressed and

used to prime adjacent cylinders for firing.

PROTECTIVE COATINGCylinders are lubricated by regular

injections of special oil, which protects

the cylinders from wear and neutralises

the acids formed during combustion of

sulphurous fuel.

CONNECTING CRANKAll 14 connecting rods attach to a

single 272-tonne crankshaft.

There’s no gearbox – just a direct

coupling to the propeller shaft.

What the captain may lack in

refined speed control, they make up

for in engine efficiency on long runs.

Providing the drive for immense container ships needs some special tricks

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Gymnosperms’ seeds are exposed while those of angiosperms are hidden inside fruits

ENGINEERING UNCOVERED Svalbard Global Seed Vault

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Frozen tunnels on a remote island within the Arctic Circle are safeguarding the future of our planet’s food supply

he St Helena olive lasted until 2003. It was one of 51 species found nowhere

but the Atlantic island from which it took its name, and had been extinct in the wild since 1994. But after cultivated seedlings and cuttings succumbed to fungal infections, it vanished from the world.

If it had hung on a little longer, it might have made it to remote and icy Spitsbergen. The largest island of the Svalbard archipelago is within the Arctic Circle and home to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

SIX T H MASS EX TINC TIONSeeds are a vital source of food for humans, but the variety of species producing them is in decline. In fact, the Center For Biological Diversity has gone so far as to say the planet is experiencing its sixth mass extinction. The vault aims to prevent

TWORDS BY Ian Evenden

the loss of important species by keeping them on ice in Svalbard’s permafrost.

It’s that hard permafrost – the ground is frozen all year round 1,000km from the North Pole – that presented an obstacle to building the vault. But miners have been digging their tunnels on the island since the beginning of the 20th century, and it was these chilly passages that attracted the attention of those looking to safeguard the future of the world’s food supply.

“In the early 1980s, the Nordic Gene Bank had chosen that place as security storage for their seeds,” explains Grethe-Helene Evjen, a special adviser in the Norwegian government’s department of agriculture, who was involved in the project from the very beginning.

“They were using the old mines – most of the mountains around there

A 2,000-year-old seed still germinated

The date palm, excavated from the palace of Herod the Great, was planted in 2005

67@SciUncovered


“THE SEED VAULT IS A LONG-TERM SECURITY BACKUP STORAGE, AND WE FORESEE IT

WILL LAST MANY HUNDREDS OF YEARS.”Grethe-Helene Evjen NORWAY’S DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

were home to coal mines – but it was decided by an expert delegation in 2004 it was not safe enough to use these old coal mines – the mountain is cracking and there’s a risk of explosions from gas in the mines.”

So it was concluded a bespoke vault needed to be built somewhere there had been no previous mining. Plus, under Norwegian law, any important publicly funded building

over a certain size must incorporate artwork, so the roof of the vault’s entrance tunnel is home to an illuminated artwork by Dyveke Sanne that marks its position from a distance using mirrors and prisms in the summer and fibre optic cables in the dark winter months.

The concrete entrance tunnel is the only visible part of the vault, and is its most striking feature. Behind it

lies a steel tube, shipped to the island and sunk into the mountainside. While the mountain itself is old sandstone that’s considered geologically stable, the outside rocks are quite loose, and the tube allowed access to the solid rock during the construction, a process known as a ‘Svalbard tunnel’ thanks to its use in the mining industry on the island. It’s still there now, incorporated into the structure of the complex.

K EEPING IT LOCALConstruction of the vault was handled by a building contractor local to the island, meaning machinery didn’t have to be shipped over. Plus, expertise in working in the extreme environment was readily at hand. “We were really happy they won the contract,” says Evjen. “The project was really small to them. They actually asked us if we could increase the size of the vault, as it was easier to build three rooms than two, to better regulate the amount of mass in each chamber.”

BEANS+ Beans are one of the oldest

cultivated plants, and 23.2

million tonnes of them were

grown worldwide in 2010. Brazil’s

government has deposited 519

varieties of bean into the vault

– the South American country is

the second largest producer of

beans in the world, after India.

POTATOES+ Peru has contributed 191

variants of wild potatoes and 65

variants of wild sweet potatoes

to the vault. As the annual diet

of an average person includes

around 33kg of spuds, this is

a major food crop. China is the

world’s biggest producer, but

the plant originated in Peru.

MAIZE AND WHEAT + The International Maize and

Wheat Improvement Center

has added an astonishing 1,946

variants of maize and 5,964

types of wheat to the vault.

Both cereals are staple foods

across the Earth. Their loss

would sentence millions, if not

billions, of people to starvation.

BARLEY+ Okayama University in Japan

has deposited a collection of

575 barley variants in the vault.

This member of the grass family

is a major cereal crop and is an

important part of many breads,

beers and animal feeds. In 2007

it was the fourth most produced

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Many vital seeds lie deep underground. Here are four…SEEDS IN SVALBARD

Harvester ants love seeds

It’s estimated they eat more than all mammals and birds put together

BELOW The vault has been built high enough to be above sea level, even if the ice caps melt


68 @SciUncovered

Each of those three chambers can store 1.5 million seeds, and the total storage inside is about 1,000m². Refrigeration units powered by locally mined coal cool the vault chambers to -18ºC. It took several years for them to get the temperature down that low, after construction began in May 2007. “There are no concrete walls down there,” says Evjen. “It’s just the rock of the mountain.

“[Without refrigeration] it’s not a very low temperature, between -3 and -4ºC. But even if the energy supply to the vault proves insufficient, the temperature inside the mountain will be low enough to preserve the seeds. The location was chosen for the seed vault because it’s a long-term security backup storage, and we foresee it will last many hundreds of years.” The vault is also high enough to be above sea level even if the ice caps melt.

COPING WIT H T HE COLDSpoil from the tunnelling was used to build an entrance terrace for the complex, while some of it was used to shore up the harbour, benefitting Svalbard’s wider population.

But building in permafrost has its challenges. The steel tube leaks in the summer, as melting snow permeates the tunnel from above. The floor of the tunnel sits in the permafrost layer, so that water immediately freezes again, leaving a potentially treacherous surface

for anyone accessing the vault. The complex has no permanent staff, and pumping the water out provides a short-term solution so visitors don’t get hurt, but investigations into how to keep it dry are ongoing.

The rock walls and constant low temperatures mean the future of our seeds is in good hands. A system that means only the country or institution that deposited a sample can retrieve it again should prevent the theft of such a precious resource, and Norway’s relative stability means the vault should be there for centuries to come. Plus, its position of just a few kilometres from the island’s airport means seeds can be retrieved quickly if needed. “We have quite a good infrastructure in Svalbard these days,” says Evjen. “Norway is looked at as a stable country in terms of governance, and is a quiet place in the world. We’re a trustworthy place.”

And if you were worried about the St Helena olive, don’t completely despair. Although no plants or seeds survive, a sample of its DNA is in storage at Kew Gardens’ vault in Sussex (see Underground Vaults, right) – it’s not quite gone yet.

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The world’s smallest seed is from the epiphytic orchid

A billion of them would only weigh one gram

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT WAR HEADQUARTERS+ Hidden under the

Wiltshire countryside

and a secret until 2005,

CGWH is a 97-hectare

complex that was built

37m underground in the

late ‘50s for the British government to use in the event of

a nuclear war. Blast-proof and self-sufficient, the bunker

could house 4,000 people in isolation for three months.

METRO 2+ Under Moscow, there may be a whole secret rail system.

Rumoured to have been built during the reign of Stalin,

Metro 2’s four lines connect government buildings, airports

and a whole underground town. That is, if it even exists.

MILLENNIUM SEED BANK+ Bunkers are rarely used peacefully, but this Sussex vault

complex is home to Kew Gardens’ seed bank. Its chilled

rooms house the world’s largest collection of seeds – over a

billion – and expeditions are constantly bringing back more.

SENTRALANLEGGET+ The Svalbard vault isn’t Norway’s only foray into massive

earth-moving. This complex, with a name that translates

as The Central Facility, is the war HQ of the country’s

government and royal family, and takes advantage of being

underneath a mountain, protecting it from nuclear attack.

CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN+ The Americans started

drilling this complex into the

Rocky Mountains in 1961. The

1.8-hectare grid of tunnels is

accessed through a 1,400m

entrance passage and serves as

an alternative command centre

in the event of a nuclear war.

UNDERGROUND VAULTSMore buildings safeguarding our future from below…

Inside the mountain, which is old sandstone and geologically stable

69@SciUncovered


Ian EvendenScience writer+ Ian Evenden is a freelance journalist working in the f ields of science,

technology and photography. He has written for numerous titles and has a keen interest in nature.

70 @SciUncovered

76 THE NATURAL WORLD’S AMAZING DEFENCES From expelling organs

to breaking bones, some creatures will go to any length not to become lunch.

80 FIVE FOSSIL HOAXES We examine history’s

most spectacular cases of archaelogical forgery.

Rediscover our planet and its inhabitants

INSIDE THIS SECTION

71@SciUncovered

NATURE UNCOVERED The origins of life

The word ‘life’ is of Germanic origin

It comes from ‘leib’, which is German for ‘body’

WORDS BY Hayley Birch

here do bees come from? On the face of it, it’s a straightforward question:

“Well, son, when a mummy bee loves a daddy bee very much...” But it was a problem that plagued the ancient Greeks no end. As far as they were

or could be conjured by trapping and killing a bull – with the bees emerging

‘spontaneous generation’ was one that persisted for centuries – and it didn’t

from mud, cicadas from cuckoo spit; there was even a type of grub that was

disprove the theory was carried out in the 17th Century by an Italian doctor who realised that life could only come

from other life. Francesco Redi placed pieces of meat in sealed or unsealed jars, proving that insects only appeared when the meat was left open

what Greek translations refer to as bees – are born as maggots from other

“Where do bees come from?” But a related question still has scientists just as puzzled as the ancient Greeks.

Life, as Redi insisted, comes from

from? The bees that made the honey you spread on your toast – they all came from other bees. But what about their ancestors? What if you follow the line of bees all the way back through evolutionary time to the point where it converges with those of other animals? And what if you follow that

How life emerged in the earliest days of the Earth is still a mystery, but recent research suggests vents at the bottom of the ocean could have played a key role

The origins of life

W

#01 The advent of plants transformed the Earth from its primordial state, meaning that early life thrived in a completely different atmosphere from today’s. As plants photosynthesised using the Sun’s energy,

they pumped out the oxygen that now fills the air and sea.

Origin of life factThere’s growing evidence that all life emerged from

deep sea vents

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ROCK FORMATIONS+ In the 18th Century, a wealthy chemist called James

Hutton became one of the first scientists to write about

geological processes shaping the planet in his book

Theory of the Earth. He had visited Siccar Point on the

coast of Scotland and saw sandstone formations that

told of millions of years of slow geological change.

RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPE DATING+ Over millions of years, one radioactive element in a

rock will decay into another, as when uranium decays

into lead. For example, it takes 704 million years for

uranium-235 to become lead-207, so scientists can use

the proportions of each radioactive element to calculate

the age of the rock.

OUR BEST ESTIMATE+ Not all the rocks on Earth are the same age – some

are young at just a few million years old. By contrast,

the oldest rocks on the planet, discovered in 1999 in

Canada, are over four billion years old, giving us our best

estimate of the Earth’s age. But it could be even older.

We’ve found several clues over the years…


72 @SciUncovered

life forms to inhabit our planet four

If you look at it that way, “Where do bees come from?” isn’t such a dumb question any more. In fact, answering it would give us clues to our own origins, as well as those of every living thing on this planet.

SOUP AND SPONGELike the ancient Greeks, scientists studying life’s beginnings have had to use their imaginations. Darwin imagined life emerging in some “warm little pond” and, in the 1950s, US chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey imagined the building blocks

storms raged above the primordial soup of the ancient oceans. Lightning supposedly provided the energy needed to kickstart life on Earth.

Today, though, these notions are regarded as old hat, as evolutionary

“The question is, once you’ve made these building blocks, what happens

force which makes them concentrate and react and join together, and I don’t see where that is in a soup.”

Lane is based at University College London, and is one of a small number of scientists carrying out

life could have begun in the depths

The Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt is home to Earth’s oldest rocks

It is located in northern Quebec province, in Canada

#02 In 2000, an Australian researcher found the remains of thread-like microbes in 3.2-billion-year-old fossilised deep-sea vents called black smokers. The microfossils are some of the oldest ever

discovered and hint at early life around such vents.

Origin of life fact

Hydrothermal vents on the seafloor create some

very unusual conditions

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Could life be transported through

space? There’s new evidence it could…

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73@SciUncovered


Our knowledge of early sharks is based largely on their teeth

The animals leave little trace in the fossil record because they’re mostly cartilage

Where does panspermia assume life came from?

There are several candidates in the Solar System. In early Mars history the conditions were ripe for life to develop, so it’s completely feasible that life could have developed there and then come to Earth. Or it could have originated from outside of the Solar System entirely.

How would life get from one planet to another?

an impact into the ocean and then lots of water with organisms in it was shot into space – a sort of ice asteroid.

You tested whether microalgae that

entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Why these organisms?Well, we wanted something that would be easy to grow and only needed sunlight and some basic nutrients, so that if it ever did get to another planet, it would be able to survive in a

quantify the percentages. At the moment, all we can say is that some

survived in the low-speed shots than in the high-speed shots. The high-speed shots were 6.9 kilometres a

a planet similar to Earth.

But how do they withstand these impacts?We’re not 100% sure, but it does seem

the organism is, the more chance it has of surviving. Saying that,

using little [animals] called tardigrades, which are composed of 40,000 cells, and some of them have survived.

You also showed microalgae can

of weeks. But wouldn’t it take much longer to reach Earth?

average time for a body to go from Mars to Earth is about 16 million years. But once it’s frozen, there’s no decay. So if it survives one week it should be able to survive one year or 100 years or one million years.

So your experiments show that

life to Earth?They certainly show that it’s possible to go from one planet to another – whether life came to Earth or whether it came from Earth and went to another planet.

But if that’s what happened, then it doesn’t really tell us how

problem elsewhere…That’s right: it puts the problem on someone else to solve!

Tests on the panspermia idea – that life came from another planet – show that interplanetary transport is possible

Q&A DINA PASINI

#03 It’s a mystery how the very earliest life passed on its information from one generation to another. DNA is too complex and needs to partner with equally complex proteins to copy itself, so the first genetic molecules

must have been simpler and self-replicating. But how do you make a self-replicating molecule?

Origin of life fact

Dina PasiniUniversity of Kent+ Based at the Centre for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, Dina’s PhD research is focused on whether life could have originated elsewhere and been brought to Earth.

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74 @SciUncovered

of the ocean – but not, as Miller and

His research focuses on a region in the middle of the Atlantic known as Lost City. Discovered in the year 2000,

vents – chimneys pouring hot water into the ocean. The water is heated by rocks in the Earth’s mantle beneath

vents all over the sea bed but according to Lane, these ones provide

The temperature, the acidity and the chemistry of the water are just right.

FAK ING AN ANCIEN T OCE ANUnfortunately, the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is not the easiest place

and even if it was, the condition of the water has changed in the last four billion years. So in Lane’s lab, researchers are making something resembling a four-billion-year-old

“It’s a simple reactor and we can put

Lane. “Basically we can control the chemistry that’s going on and then measure what’s being produced.”

Their chemistry is not dissimilar to that which Miller and Urey once used to simulate their primordial

being that there’s no electrical spark representing lightning. Instead, there’s a ceramic sponge, depicting the porous rock of the Lost City vents. It is in these pores that Lane thinks life on Earth began. Here, hydrogen in the warm alkaline water bursting forth from the vent would have met

the ocean. Ordinarily, the two won’t react but in these peculiar conditions, Lane’s research shows they can come together to make organic chemicals – the building blocks of life.

So from natural geochemical processes, a basic form of metabolism could have emerged. What’s enticing about this theory is that unlike

Tubeworms near hydrothermal vents can grow one metre per year

That’s a faster rate than almost anything else living in the oceans

+ DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid – is often referred to as

life’s blueprint. It is common to all living things, so it

must have arrived on the scene pretty early. But there

are other molecules that have been around for as least

as long: proteins.

You might know proteins as the molecules that make

up our muscles, but they’re more than that. They’re the

general dogsbodies within all of our cells, and there are

lots of them – all with their own responsibilities. They

fetch and carry smaller molecules, take messages to

other cells, defend their own from germs and even help

make new DNA. So without them, early life wouldn’t have

got very far. They’re made from simpler sub-units called

amino acids that could have formed through chemical

processes in the primordial oceans.

Being able to look at the structures of primordial

proteins could tell us a lot about what tasks they might

have performed and what early cells were like. But

four-billion-year-old proteins aren’t preserved in the

fossil record. So scientists have been trying to reboot

them in the lab, working backwards from proteins found

in modern cells. In 2013, Spanish and US researchers

resurrected ancient proteins based on information

gleaned from the descendants of evolutionarily ancient

proteins called thioredoxins. Thioredoxins are found

across all domains of life, suggesting they may have

been present in some of the very earliest organisms.

By making the proteins in the lab, the researchers

were able to look at their 3D structures – as it turned

out, their modern counterparts hadn’t changed shape

much – and see how they fared in various environments.

The old thioredoxins were sturdy molecules capable of

surviving in harsh conditions, like the acidic oceans from

which we think they might have emerged.

Scientists have been reverse engineering proteins to see what their antecedents would have looked like

MANUFACTURING PROTEINS

#04 The chemist Stanley Miller was a hoarder. After his death in 2007, colleagues found boxes in his lab containing vials of samples from almost every experiment he ever did, including his famous

primordial soup experiments on the origins of life.

Origin of life fact

THERE ARE HYDROTHERMAL VENTS ALL OVER THE SEA BED, BUT ACCORDING TO LANE, THESE ONES PROVIDE THE PERFECT CONDITIONS FOR FIRST LIFE.

Proteins are as vital to life as DNA, and have

been around just as long

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75@SciUncovered


lightning hitting soup, there’s a constant driving force in the water from the vent and, as Lane points out,

vent water and seawater has a parallel in cellular life. “All cells are more acidic outside than they are inside, and these vents also are more acidic outside than they are inside.” This is what leads him to believe that a Lost City metabolism could have become trapped inside fatty envelopes that

DIVIDE AND CONQUERThis, however, leaves other questions unanswered. How, for instance, did

machinery of a modern cell? Cell

recently found a possible solution. He discovered that under certain circumstances, bacterial cells can replicate by a much simpler process.

Errington and his team at Newcastle University weren’t even

thinking about early cells when they made their discovery. They were studying cell division in Bacillus subtilis, a common bug found in our guts. They realised that when the bacteria were stripped of the tough, outer walls and left with only thin membranes, they

these membranes, which became warped, until eventually bits would

but as long as a chromosome ends up enveloped inside an intact membrane, then it’s a viable cell,” says Errington.

Bacterial cells have had cell walls for billions of years, and Errington argues that these protective shells may have been important in allowing bacteria to spread so successfully into every nook and cranny on the planet.

earliest bacteria – and perhaps the

– could have divided without them, albeit in a pretty disorderly fashion. The fact that modern cells can revert

Bacillus subtilis is a largely harmless bacteria

It only causes illness in people with compromised immune systems

#05 One of the most Earth-like planets yet discovered is called Kepler-69c. The planet circles a Sun-like star, around 2,700 light years away. It was spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope and is

considered a good candidate for life elsewhere in the Universe.

Origin of life fact

Hayley BirchFreelance science writer+ Hayley co-wrote the book Big Questions in Science, and received

the Richard Gregory prize for science communication. @gingerbreadlady

to this simplistic replication mode suggests the ability has been kept as a back-up mechanism.

Meanwhile, other scientists, including Nobel-winning biologist Professor Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, have been making

represent early lifeforms and have established that these can divide by similar budding processes. Now the

out how they can work together to answer some of the most fascinating questions about how life began.

The trouble with origins of life theories, though, is that they can never be proved. Can we use our imaginations and think about these early cells emerging from a Lost City at the bottom of the ocean? We can, but perhaps we can also learn from the Greeks and their bees – anything we imagine now may seem preposterous to our descendants.

LEFT & BELOW The vents at Lost City differ from the more common ‘black smokers’, producing more methane and hydrogen and less carbon dioxide

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other bees… but where the very first life forms came from is a harder question to answer

76 @SciUncovered

NATURE UNCOVERED Incredible defences

In the south-western deserts of the United States, tasty morsels

are far and few between, which makes the Texas horned lizard a coveted snack for the region’s predators. The lizard’s

that, for the most part, it can avoid

The Texas horned lizard is also called ‘horned frog’

This is because of its squat body and rounded nose

detection by lying still against the sand. But even if it’s rumbled, the reptile has an impressive array of defence mechanisms. It’s covered from head to tail in tough spines, and is capable of

ABOVE Horned lizards have many defences to stop themselves turning up on the menu

WORDS BY

THE DESERT LIZARD THAT SHOOTS BLOOD FROM ITS EYESOnly the toughest survive in Texas

choking the animal that’s eating it.But if all these tricks fail, the Texas horned lizard has one last line of defence – it can squirt up to a third of its blood volume out the corner of its eyes. The stream of blood is laced with toxins that possibly originate from the venomous ants that make up the bulk of its diet. The jet of blood is capable of travelling over a metre, and while it doesn’t prove fatal for the recipient, it usually confuses the predator long enough for the spiky lizard to make a sharp getaway.

The natural world is cruel and full of terrors. But around the planet, species are devising creative defences against the predators that

want to turn them into a tasty snack

INCREDIBLE DEFENCESFOUND IN NATURE

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Fulmars don’t believe in a warm welcome…

These insects are so protective of their colony that they’ll lay down their lives to save it

For some insects, such as ants, the survival of the individual means

nothing – it is the survival of the colony that is all-important. It is quite common to see ants go into battle against much larger intruders in order to save the

soldier ants of Camponotus saundersi, a species of carpenter ant that lives in Malaysia and Brunei. When the ant colony is under attack, these brave

themselves into walking biological bombs, killing both the intruders and themselves in the process.

A soldier ant can perform this suicidal feat thanks to two enormous

at the ant’s mandibles (jaws) and run

Seagulls are a much-maligned urban pest. But perhaps we should

be thankful that we don’t often get the chance to get up close and personal with another seabird, the fulmar. If we did, there is a good chance that we’d end up with a face full of stinking vomit.

The fulmar derives its name from the old Norse words ‘ful-mar’, or foul gull. This is a reference to the bird’s ability

secretion when threatened by predators. Fulmar chicks already have this ability

this party trick to defend themselves from predatory birds who swoop in when

the fulmar parents have left the nest unattended in the search for food.

While the smell of the orange sick is disgusting, this isn’t what deters avian predators. The oil in the vomit causes the tiny barbs that hold the birds’ feathers together to matt and separate, rendering

the damaged feathers are no longer waterproof, meaning the predators drown when they crash land on water. Adult fulmar feathers are immune to the

it takes newborn chicks a number

between friend and foe.

THE SEABIRD THAT DOUSES PREDATORS WITH VOMIT

down the entire length of the insect’s body. When the soldier ants decide to go for the nuclear option, they aggressively contract all their abdominal muscles, causing the gland walls to rupture. The corrosive contents will then spray from the front of the insect’s head. The substance is very sticky as well as corrosive, which means that any unfortunate victims get tangled up and stuck fast in the toxic glue, immobilising them and halting the assault in its tracks.

As these kamikaze ants have control over the timing of the explosion, they are able to lure the unfortunate victim a safe distance away from any food-gathering colony members before deciding to pull the trigger.

THE ANTS THAT TURN THEMSELVES INTO BOMBS

Fulmars are not a seagull species

Although they look like gulls, they are actually related to albatrosses


ABOVE Soldier ants will blow themselves up to kill any intruders

RIGHT The poison glands of a soldier ant run from the jaws all the way down the body

Fulmar adults are immune to the fishy

vomit, so can be sprayed by their

offspring without suffering ill effects


78

Some amphibians grow spines in breeding season

These appear on the males’ thumbs and help them grip the females during mating

Mouse-ear cress can transform its taste

Spiky lizards and exploding ants make for hazardous meals. But

you’d think that if you decided to make dinner out of a plant, your victim would have little chance but to sit there and take it, right? Wrong. Some plants, such as the mouse-ear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) can ‘hear’ when they are being eaten – and can launch a defence against their attackers.

In a 2014 study, researchers at the University of Missouri, in the US, recorded the sound of caterpillars chewing on leaves and used speakers to play the noise to A. thaliana plants. The speakers were designed to play the munching noise as a vibration, rather than as airborne sound. A second set of plants was allowed to grow in silence.

It was found that the plants exposed to the chomping sounds produced higher levels of glucosinolates – chemicals

experiment proved not only that plants can tell when they’re being eaten by monitoring vibration levels of their leaves, but also that they were able to distinguish these types of hostile vibrations from other common sources of movement, such as the wind or non-threatening insects. Since there is considerable overlap between these various noise frequencies, it seems the plant’s method of acoustic recognition is more sophisticated than simply listening out for a particular pitch. Uncovering how these little plants detect and read the various vibrations is the team’s next task. “We’re trying to think about the plant’s acoustical environment and what it might be listening for, then use

Cocroft, who took part in the study.

THE PLANTS THAT KNOW WHEN THEY’RE BEING EATEN

Mouse-ear cress can detect the munching of caterpillars and react accordingly

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This unusual amphibian has a novel way of defending itself against predators

The Central African frog species Trichobatrachus robustus is also

known as the ‘horror frog’, which is the

regret eyeing up this small amphibian as a potential meal. The horror frog’s main weapons are two bony claws on its hind legs which, in their default state, are hidden beneath connective tissue and

threatened or grabbed, it sharply contracts the muscle, pushing the sharp tip of the claw downwards through the

breaks its own feet in order to create a set of pointy claws.

Once the sharpened bones have breached, it appears that the frog has no known way to retract them again – although a number of biologists have

hypothesised that the frog’s claws will retract passively over time as the damaged tissue repairs itself. Because the amphibian is so elusive, the full range of functions of this unique ability is as yet unknown. Some scientists believe the frog could also choose to liberate its claws when it needs to improve grip while climbing.

THE FROG THAT MAKES CLAWS OUT OF ITS OWN BROKEN BONES

ABOVE The region’s locals hunt the frogs using spears so they don’t get stabbed with the claws

The ‘hairs’ on the frog’s body are thought to help it absorb oxygen from the water

ABOVE These marine animals are more closely related to starfish than your garden cucumber

LEFT Some species launch sticky filaments – part of their respiratory system – that entangle their attacker

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@SciUncovered 79

Toxic nicotine is as distasteful to animals as humans

Sea cucumbers aren’t as defenceless as they look

Out in the open ocean, your backside can be your biggest ally.

Take the pygmy sperm whale, for instance. When startled, it excretes a reddish-brown syrupy liquid from its rear end and then swirls the gunk around itself. This conceals the mammal’s location behind a thick haze of faecal fog, therefore allowing it to swim to safety. Certain sea cucumber species, however, protect themselves

movement. When it is attacked by a predator, the marine invertebrate expels many of its internal organs out through its anus. The exact combination depends on the species of sea cucumber and the time of year, but often includes the

It’s been proven beyond all reasonable doubt that tobacco is

bad for humans. And it’s toxic for many animals, too, including insects. Therefore, scientists have long been

caterpillar of North America could get away with making the tobacco plant such a large part of its diet.

In 2013, a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany attempted to uncover the insect’s secrets. They studied a group of hornworms that were fed exclusively on tobacco plants that had been genetically engineered to contain almost no nicotine. The team found that these caterpillars were far more susceptible to being eaten by wolf spiders than normal. Why? It turns out that tobacco hornworm larvae contain high levels of a protein called CYP6B46, which helps them detoxify plant material. But a small amount of the consumed nicotine is retained, shifted into the bloodstream and then vented out through holes in the skin, causing a toxic nicotine fog to

would-be predators.

THE CATERPILLAR THAT WARDS OFF PREDATORS WITH ITS

SMOKER’S BREATH

THE SEA CREATURE THAT SQUIRTS ITS INTERNAL ORGANS AT ATTACKERS

gonads, some respiratory organs and, invariably, its intestines.

The sea cucumber can do this on demand because its body contains a special type of connective tissue that the animal can toughen or soften at will. When threatened, the sea cucumber will deliberately contract its muscles to induce an internal rupture, causing its organs to eject from the anus. The various organs distract the predator long enough for the sea cucumber to make its escape. The lost body parts take up to six weeks to regenerate, which is quick enough for the animal to survive their loss. In the mean time, the sea cucumber can choose to asexually divide, with both sides regenerating the lost organs.

Sea cucumbers are echinoderms urchins and brittlestars. In Asia,

sea cucumbers are a delicacyNATURE UNCOVERED

Incredible defences

The nicotine-laced diet of tobacco hornworms keeps them safe from any predators

People have been faking fossils for thousands of years

Carved fossils were placed alongside the real thing as decor in Roman and Maltese temples

NATURE UNCOVERED Fake fossils

80 @SciUncovered

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In the limestone bed of the Paluxy

River in Texas, many dinosaur

footprints have been found, including some

created in a chase involving sauropods and

a theropod. When what appeared to be

human footprints were found in the river

bed, some considered it evidence that

humans and dinosaurs existed together.

There are several theories surrounding

the creation of the mysterious human-like

footprints, but at least some were definitely

faked by locals, who etched the prints out

of the rock to sell them and make a living

during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Other tracks have been shown to simply

not conform to any likely human stride,

and some scientists have suggested

that the human-like prints are actually

misunderstood dinosaur tracks. Most of

the fakes were spotted by looking at

cross-sections of how the ‘footstep’

affected the stone around it.

1. THE PALUXY TRACKWAYS

Some of the Paluxy prints come from dinosaurs, but the human ones are fake

Hoax fossils have been around for a long time and have included false early humans as well as dubious dinosaurs. Here are five of history’s most prominent fakes…

fake fossils that duped the experts

In 1866, a human skull was found

deep in a mineshaft in Calaveras

County, California. The gravels in which it

was found had been buried by lava over a

million years earlier, making it the oldest

human skull ever found. It was sent to

Harvard professor Josiah Whitney, who

declared that it proved man lived in the

Pliocene epoch, alongside mastodons.

Suspiciously, though, this ancient

skull looked uncannily like one belonging

to a Native American. The circumstances

around its discovery were investigated,

as was the skull itself. It turned out

that several people admitted to having

obtained the skull from a nearby burial

site and planted it in the mine as a

practical joke. In 1992 carbon dating was

carried out on the skull, demonstrating

conclusively at last that it was, in fact,

only around 1,000 years old.

2. CALAVERAS SKULLFALSE FOOTPRINTS SUSPECT SKULL

WORDS BY Mat thew Bolton

There are several suspects in the case of Piltdown Man

One is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward are also prime suspects

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81@SciUncovered

NATURE UNCOVERED Fake fossils

Professor Johann Beringer was a

physician who studied fossils, and

on one of his searches in 1725, he found

some truly remarkable ones. The fossils

were of insects, small birds, reptiles and

amphibians, with inscriptions in Hebrew

and Babylonian, among other languages.

Fossils were barely understood at the

time, and Beringer believed the fossils to

be of divine provenance. He wrote a book

to publish his findings, at which point

two of his colleagues came forward and

admitted to having carved and planted

the fossils he’d found, to punish him

for being arrogant and hostile towards

them. Beringer, however, suspected they

were simply jealous of his discovery, and

wanted to block his book’s publication

and his success.

Inevitably the hoax became known

after Beringer published his work, leaving

him crushed. He ultimately took his

scheming colleagues to court, and all

three ended their careers in disgrace.

3. BERINGER’S LYING STONES

Fossilisation was not understood in the 18th Century, so Beringer concluded the fossils were of divine origin

INSCRIBED FINDS

The Piltdown Man consisted of

fragments of skull found in a

Surrey gravel bed in 1912. The shape of

the skull was human-like, and evidence

such as tools and animal fossils nearby

suggested the existence of early humans.

The skull’s discoverer, Charles Dawson,

and the then keeper of geology at the

Natural History Museum, Arthur Smith

Woodward, declared it to be a

500,000-year-old human ancestor.

But as more early human fossils

were found, it became clear that the

Piltdown find didn’t fit in with any of

them – its features were wrong. New

fluorine tests meant the remains could

be analysed: they turned out to be under

50,000 years old and a combination of

human and ape remains – the lower jaw

of an orangutan, to be exact. It was a

rigorous hoax that had been carried out

with great care. We still don’t know for

sure who was behind it, and 100 years on,

we probably never will.

COMPOSITE CREATUREFAKE HUMAN

Like many successful hoaxes,

Archaeoraptor worked because it

made sense – even if it was ultimately too

good to be true. This fossil was

supposedly unearthed in China in 1997

and illegally smuggled into the US, where

it was thought to represent a ‘missing

link’ between dinosaurs and birds – a

feathered dinosaur that would have been

capable of flying. The problem was that

the remains had been pieced together by

a Chinese farmer who’d assembled it

from various fragments because

complete fossils were worth more.

That it wasn’t a single real fossil was

ascertained fairly quickly. It transpired

that the fossil was built from the front

part of the skeleton of an ancient bird.

and the tail of a bird-like feathered

dinosaur, Microraptor. Archaeoraptor may

not have been a malicious hoax, but it

caused plenty of embarrassment.

5. ARCHAEORAPTOR

The Archaeoraptor fossil seemed almost too good to be true… and ultimately, it turned out that it was

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Matthew BoltonScience journalist+ Matthew Bolton has pursued a keen interest in palaeontology “since I was shoulder high to a Deinonychus”.

@matthewbbolton

Piltdown Man’s skull is the cranium of a human and the lower jawbone of an orangutan

82 @SciUncovered

Learn how science shapes our creations

88 THE BIKE THAT DOESN’T FALL OVER The training device that

can teach you to cycle in the space of an afternoon.

89 INTRODUCING THE HOVERBIKE Half bike, half helicopter

becoming a reality.

INSIDE THIS SECTION

83@SciUncovered

WORDS BY Duncan Geere

TECHNOLOGY UNCOVERED 10 home innovations

INNOVATIONS THAT WILL

REVOLUTIONISE OUR HOMES

10

Today’s advances are paving the way for our future homes to become high-tech hubs where the walls change colour to reflect our mood, our clothes monitor our temperature

while we sleep, and the contents of our recycling bins can be transformed into

replacement handles for our ovens

Powering Britain from a few centralised nuclear and coal plants dotted around the

power lines and transformers shed up to 15% of the energy that passes through them. But what if we could put a miniature power plant in every home? Homes that record usage in real time, letting you see how much you’re using, and enabling power companies to distribute electricity to where it’s needed. In Britain, the government has pledged to install smart meters in all homes by 2020, saving £6.2 billion a decade.

That’s the basic concept behind microgeneration

become commonplace, more and more people can

on some days completely replacing, the amount of power they pull from the national grid. The power is generated much closer to where it’s being used, minimising losses in transmission.

Microgeneration and smart grids

Star Trek’s replicators are

likely to appear in your home sooner rather than later. 3D printing, for the uninitiated, involves

from a digital model. There are many

from the base up by placing successive layers of plastic.

You can use 3D printers to create everything from toys and games to spare parts for household appliances.

you can download a pattern from the web and print a replacement – especially handy if the manufacturer no longer produces that model. You won’t even have to buy the material, either. RecycleBot, a waste plastic extruder developed by Dr Joshua Pearce of Michigan Technological University, shreds waste plastic such as empty shampoo bottles or milk

plastics than can be used as raw material for 3D printers.

ecyc g 3 p te

10

9

Smart meters in your home will enable you to keep track of your energy usage in real time

3D printers are becoming a more common sight in our homes, but you could soon be feeding them with waste plastic

84 @SciUncovered


Solar panels work best They recieve more sunlight in the northerm hemisphere. Below the equator,

Electric cars are not a new technology. They were in widespread use in

the late 1800s, but advances in internal combustion engines and mass production of petrol almost wiped them out in the early 20th Century. Since 2008, however,

battery and power management technology combined have made them viable once more.

manufacturer now has an electric model, and Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors has built a name for

sports cars. But most electric

towards small city cars.

The biggest hurdles to are range and recharge time. While a combustion engine can be refuelled in moments at a petrol station, electric cars take time to recharge – and there are relatively few charging stations in most countries. This makes them

But electric car technology sits comfortably alongside

in your garage can be depleted during the evening when you’re less likely to drive somewhere, then recharged by rooftop solar panels the following morning

reducing both the cost and the carbon emissions associated with operating a car.

Electric cars

The bed is where we spent a

percentage of our time, but modern beds aren’t

pollution and increased screen use, many of us are getting far less sleep than we need – with consequences for our health.

But we now know more than ever about the science of sleep. The cyclical nature of sleep is better understood, and there are already apps that can monitor your sleep and wake

you when you’re in the lightest

But the future holds an even better night’s rest. Several companies are racing

optic and conductive sensors woven into the fabric. These garments could keep an eye on vital signs during the night, and automatically

light levels. Meanwhile, advanced materials could allow us to regulate the rigidity of our mattresses and

Pretty soon your toaster, fridge and microwave are going to be talking about

you behind your back. More and more gadgets now

come with the ability to know where they are and connect to

– accessing the web, but more importantly each other. This ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) could do

up. Your scales could spot that you’re gaining weight and change your shopping order to include

more vegetables. Your windows could automatically open, close or darken depending on the weather. Your wallpaper could respond to what your stereo plays.

In 2012, there were about

person on Earth. But by 2020, that total is expected to be 75

connected devices mean more

your home, and more ways for governments to spy on citizens.

be an internet we can trust.

Rooms that match your mood

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Kitchens of the future could be set up to automatically

order groceries when you’re running low

Advanced pyjamas could help you to sleep by altering room temperatures in line with your vital signs

Special charging stations such as these are required to power up an electric car

85@SciUncovered


BBiioorrhhyytthhmmiicc bbeeddss

One sleep cycle lasts up to 120 minutes asleep, however, averages

intelligence’ was coined in 1955, but it’s fascinated

humanity for far longer. Now,

it a reality.Companies have been using

logistics and other areas for decades, and this is slowly appearing in our homes. The Xbox One’s Kinect and the iPhone’s virtual assistant Siri both use algorithms that have

This research is also

cars are not yet in the hands of consumers, but have been driving on US roads for several years. The Roomba robotic vaccuum

equivalents keep our carpets and gardens neat, and the US military is testing robotic pack mules that can traverse 80% of the same terrain as a human while carrying 180kg of kit.

Over the coming decades,

many more – will only become

The meat industry isn’t sustainable. Not only is it 20 times

source of protein than crops, but

times more carbon emissions

Luckily, more than 30 laboratories around the world are working on ‘in vitro’ meat. Stem cells taken from animals can be grown in a petri dish into strips

While the process still requires an ‘input’ of living stem cells, under ideal conditions

these cells could then continue

technology is likely to be used

chicken nuggets and burgers, but vitamins could then be added.

Taste tests so far have been promising, with food critics describing the consistency of a burger produced by Dutch researchers in 2013 as “perfect,”

thing. But the technology will likely still take at least a decade to become commercially viable

£200,000 to produce.

Want some greens to go alongside your

the future, there’ll be vegetables growing in thin air in your kitchen all year round.

growing plants without the use of soil. The roots are enclosed in a dark box and periodically

water solution, while the leaves remain accessible above.

The technique has many

traditional plant cultivation. The environment can be controlled

quite easily, meaning that the

free so pesticides and herbicides are unnecessary. It also uses substantially less water and fertiliser. Some studies have shown yields hundreds of times that of traditional farming.

including many experiments on the International Space Station, it’s now relatively cheap and easy to set up a system of your own. You can either buy a kit from one of the many online retailers, or build your own with a plastic tub, some PVC tubing and a sprayer.

Vegetables that grow without soil

5 4

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Xbox One’s Kinect motion tracker relies heavily on artificial intelligence research

We could soon be eating meat that hasn’t come directly from an animal

Growing plants in soil could become a thing of the past

thanks to aeroponics

required is the ‘Internet of Things’ connectivity that enables your devices to communicate with each other and the wider web. Once your toaster, lights and TV come with internet connectivity, a Siri for your home is no more complex than that on your phone.

86 @SciUncovered


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Sergey Brin funded in vitro meat research

In the home of the future, art won’t be a thing of the past

display it may well be

working on technology that will enable you to change what’s on your walls at the

map the surface of walls, allowing animations to take into account the contours of the surface that they’re displayed across and creating wallpaper that moves. This wallpaper can actually respond to what’s taking place in the

designs in reaction to movement, noise levels or even conversation topics.

Digital photo frames

substantial fashion, but a much larger version of the same basic concept has successfully raised almost $787,000 (£469,000) on Kickstarter. The EO1, created by a US company called

screen with a matt coating, which comes mounted in a

wooden frame. Inside, there’s a computer that interfaces with the web, enabling you to control what’s displayed from your smartphone using a dedicated app.

That means it’s easy to change what’s on your walls

you’re trying to impress a date, or a more classic piece when your grandparents come round for dinner. Most notably, the company is recruiting artists to create

for the EO1, so if the idea takes

digital art.

Virtual and augmented reality

2

One of the most enduring images from the early ’90s is that of a teenager, wearing

a bulky headset and a pair of

the thrill of virtual reality (VR). The technology has overpromised and underdelivered for years, but it’s now undergoing a revival.

Excitement is building around a product called the Oculus Rift. a headset that’s been designed

solving many of the problems of its predecessors. Hardware partners are now starting to develop accessories such as omnidirectional treadmills to enhance the experience.

But in the home of the future, it’s likely that VR systems will be

the set of a movie, for example.

VR technology can also be overlaid on the real world – known as augmented reality. With a pair

Google Glass, you could get directions, transport info or social media beamed directly on to your eyeballs. We’re about to see the world in a whole new way.

1The Oculus Rift enables users to play videogames in high-definition 3D

Fancy changing the art on your walls with a few button-presses? It’s not too distant a possibility

Duncan GeereGeologist, Imperial College London+ Duncan is a freelance science and technology journalist and has recently

gained an MSc in Environmental Science from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. @duncangeere

87@SciUncovered


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VR in March 2014The cost of the virtual reality company was $2 billion

Digital art

TECHNOLOGY UNCOVEREDSelf-balancing bicycle

88

tabilising wheels have fallen out of favour as a cycling learning aid in recent years,

because while they teach children how to sit on a bike, they don’t teach them how to balance one. Other methods, such as bikes without pedals or good old-fashioned trial and error, yield quicker results – but it can still take weeks of scrapes and bruises before kids get the hang of it. But now one company says it can help kids crack bike-riding in just one afternoon.

self-balancing bicycle. Its Auto Balance system works by exploiting the fact that the faster you ride a bike, the easier it is to balance. This is because when a bike travels at high speeds, the rotating discs of the wheels become natural gyroscopes - and this is the force that keeps the bike

THE BIKE THAT DOESN’T FALL OVER…

states that an object in motion continues to move at a constant speed along a straight line unless it is acted upon by an unbalanced force – such as a lean or jolt. On a stationary or slow-moving bike, a wobble-causing force such as a jolt might push the top of the wheel left and the bottom of the wheel right. But when the wheel is in motion, the top and bottom spin round rapidly, correcting the wheel’s balance and ensuring you stay upright. This is why learning to go fast is such an important part of mastering riding a bike – but this is contrary to the instincts of nervous beginners.

The Jyrobike’s tech will allow even

with a motorised

weighted

Meet the training aid that aims to teach beginners how to ride a bicycle in a single afternoon

S

Gyroscopes are used in spacecraft navigation

They work even in zero gravity, making them perfect instruments for tracking changes in a craft’s orientation

around the wheel’s rim. It can be set to

spins independently of the bike’s movements, it allows the bike to

properties of a wheel travelling at high speed, even if the bike itself is trundling along at a pedestrian pace.

they can reduce the speed of the

eventually they can ride the bike without assistance. The Jyrobike’s tyres are also thicker than standard bike tyres, in order to further increase the bike’s stability.

The team behind the bike claim the key to quick learning

is practising steering and pedalling

together, which stabilisers

don’t allow. What’s more, it’s hoped that this approach

children with motor

skill disabilities the chance to ride a

ABOVE Jyrobike is said to help kids learn cycling skills more quickly, as well as enabling those with motor skill disabilities to ride a bicycle

BELOW Inside the Control Hub on the front wheel,

a spinning disc provides stability for novice riders

WORDS BY Daisy Dunne

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he dreams of sci-fi fans around the world are set to become reality thanks to

Malloy Aeronautics. The UK-based

into the slipstream of Luke Skywalker’s Speeder Bike with the Hoverbike – a technological hybrid between motorbike and helicopter.

The Hoverbike is propelled by four

unmanned, via remote control. Third-scale prototypes have been developed, with the aim of raising enough funds to develop and produce the full-sized version.

“This is an entirely new form of aircraft, so it’s hard to put a date on when it’ll be available to the public,” says Grant Stapleton, director of Malloy Aeronautics. “But we’re looking to keep the price down to the cost of a mid-range saloon car.”

The Hoverbike works on the same principles that keep tandem-rotored helicopters such as a Chinook in the air. Four overlapping protective carbon

“WE’RE LOOKING TO KEEP THE PRICE DOWN TO THE COST OF A MID-RANGE SALOON CAR.”

T

TECHNOLOGY UNCOVERED Flying bicyclewas built in 1907

However, the Breguet-Richet Gyroplane only managed a maximum altitude of 0.6 metres

ducts house propellers, all linked by a

with a foam core. This gives it strength while also keeping the weight down. The counter-spinning rotors cancel out each other’s forces, keeping the

It’s powered by a twin four-stroke engine and is controlled by asymmetrically employing the rotors. Speed up the rear rotors and the craft tilts and moves forwards. Speed up the front ones and it does the opposite.

The full-sized version of the Hoverbike will be three metres long,

weight. Its predicted static hovering height is three kilometres. The small size and lightweight materials will lead to myriad commercial uses, such

emergency services in mountainous or treacherous terrain, where it would be impractical to send a larger, more unwieldy vehicle.

As with all airborne vehicles, the development from unmanned to

stringent safety guidelines. Initial tests will be conducted by remote control. Manned tests will follow, with the Hoverbike tethered to the ground. Safety, however, is an ongoing concern. The current prototype cannot autorotate in the case of an engine failure. Building ballistic parachutes into the frame of the bike, however, may prove a practical solution to the problem.

The prototype’s cutest touch is Buster. The robot, with space in its

on the frame and the Hoverbike comes with instructions for buyers to 3D-print their own.

This agile fusion of bike and helicopter will be our eye in the sky in situations where it’s not practical to deploy a full-sized ’copter

…AND THE BIKE THAT GLIDES THROUGH THE AIR

ABOVE The scale model of Hoverbike includes instructions to 3D-print Buster, its camera-toting robot pilot

Grant Stapleton MALLOY AERONAUTICS

WORDS BY James Wit ts

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LOCATION The Royal InstitutionDATE 26 SeptemberTIME 7.50pmPRICE £17 (standard), £11 (concessions), free to members and FellowsWEBSITE rigb.org

MYSTERIES OF MATTER AT THE LHC

LOCATION The Royal InstitutionDATE 17 SeptemberTIME 7pmPRICE £12 (standard), £8 (concessions), £6 (associates) WEBSITE rigb.org

SCIENCE ON SCREEN

From Back to the Future’s Doc Brown to Jurassic Park’s Dr Alan

enabler of many an outlandish movie plot. But how accurate are the words that tumble out of their mouths – and how much

2015 will see the Large Hadron Collider whir back into life with almost double the collision energy of before. Having proven the existence of the elusive Higgs Boson elementary particle, the huge particle accelerator is now cranking up the power in an attempt to replicate the experiment at higher energies, creating particles with more mass and furthering our understanding of what makes these peculiar particles tick. This talk from Dr Pippa Wells will examine some of the lingering questions around the project, including why gravity is weaker than the other fundamental forces, and the possible origins of dark matter.

LOCATION Natural History MuseumDATE 26 SeptemberTIME Doors open at 3pmPRICE FreeWEBSITE nhm.ac.uk

AFTERHOURS: SCIENCE UNCOVERED

This might be the last ever issue of Science Uncovered, but our name will live on with the NHM’s (in no

Afterhours extravaganza, which takes place on European Researchers’ Night. The event features over 200 activities, including the chance to meet TV presenter and anthropologist Professor Alice Roberts, and to take a sneak peak at next year’s exhibitions, including Coral Reefs: Secret Cities of the Sea.

EVENTS

EXPLORESCIENCEYOURSELF

Your one-stop guide to the month in scienceWHAT MATTERS

INSIDE THIS SECTION

DATE: 6-12 September HOST: britishscienceassociation.org

This September, the heart of England hosts a seven-day programme of talks, workshops, exhibitions and tours that take you right to the heart of what makes science so endlessly fascinating. Among other things, you’ll get a chance to study prehistoric fossils and cancer cells under the microscope, and gain an engineer’s perspective on the new high-speed railway line that will connect London to Birmingham and beyond. The truly bold can even drop in for a snake-handling session…

THE BRITISH SCIENCE FESTIVAL

EDITOR’S CHOICE EVENTS

Data from the Large Hadron Collider still has many secrets to reveal

96 GREY MATTER Test your knowledge of science

facts with our challenging quiz.

98 ANTIMATTER Why scientists have been

94 DIY SCIENCE Build a simple electric motor,

and measure pH with a cabbage.

does it matter, anyway? This talk brings together directors and screenwriters to discuss the challenges of writing science for a mainstream cinema audience, and how to turn researchers and scientists into compelling and engaging characters.

http://rigb.org

http://britishscienceassociation.org

http://rigb.org

http://nhm.ac.uk

91@SciUncovered

Serious Matters

PROFILE: Ex-editor of New Scientist turned Executive of the Science Museum, Roger

interesting news stories from

SAMPLE TWEETS:

Congrats to Maryam

Fields winner.

Hummingbirds edge out helicopters in hover contest

factories inside teeth

Laughing Matters AsapSCIENCE

@AsapSCIENCE PROFILE:

concoction of science

SAMPLE TWEETS:

Spiders are the original hipsters. They were web designers before the internet.

In your lifetime, you will

two swimming pools.

Guess what? Cat pee glows under black light. Just in case you were wondering.

A star walks into a black hole, but doesn’t seem phased. The black hole says, “I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situation.”

Who to follow on Twitter to expand your knowledge

AUTHOR Caleb Scharf PUBLISHER Allen Lane PRICE £16OUT Now

AUTHOR Valerie Neal PUBLISHER Smithsonian SeriesPRICE £20OUT Now

AUTHOR Zoe Cormier PUBLISHER Profile BooksPRICE £9.99OUT Now

THE COPERNICUS COMPLEX

DISCOVERY: CHAMPION OF THE SHUTTLE FLEET

SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL

In 1543,

person to suggest that Earth went around the Sun – plunging humanity into an existential crisis. Now, astrophysicist Caleb Scharf again ponders Earth’s

unlikely circumstances that allowed life to thrive on the edge of nothingness. Drawing on everything from our microscopic mitochondria to the improbable ordering of the cosmos, Scharf argues that we should once again embrace the idea that our planet is truly special.

Between 1984 and 2011, the

more than 30 successful missions, far surpassing the

Spending a total of 365 days in

rescue and return satellites, and

space. Using breathtaking photos from both inside the craft and beyond, Valerie Neal follows the historical missions of the shuttle in chronological order, and details the numerous crews that commanded the ship and the

achieved onboard.

Guerrilla Science founder and occasional Science Uncovered contributor Zoe Cormier takes us on a trippy tour through “the science of hedonism and the hedonism of science”, and the surprising origins of many a good time. The hallucinogenic drug LSD, for example, was originally developed to ease the pain of childbirth. And we humans are far from the only thrillseekers on this planet, as we discover when Cormier takes us on a tour through the animal kingdom’s guilty pleasures – such as goats that practise oral sex, and the internal mechanics of the echidna’s four-headed penis.

EXPLORATORIUM What matters

BOOKS

SCIENCE FOLLOWSHIPS

The Natural History Museum’s Afterhours event offers plenty of scope for hands-on learning

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BOTANIST

If you like getting outdoors, a visit to your local university’s botanic garden is a great way to start your education. If you’re near the University of Bristol, head to the garden’s Bee and Pollination Festival on 6-7 September to learn about the animal-plant relationship behind a third of the world’s food. Readers in London might instead head for Kew Gardens; its historic glasshouses are home to numerous extraordinary plant species.

You can further your expertise by catching

iPlayer. Each 15-minute episode explores stories from the botanic world. Alternatively, tune in to TED.com’s Plantastic! series, and keep an eye out for free lectures from UK plant-loving societies. In London, hear experts explain how medicines are made from plants at the Royal College of

BECOME AN INSTANT…

APPS

Physicians on 29 September, or explore the parasitic lifestyle of climbing plants at The Linnean Society on 22 October. Near Shropshire or Exeter? Attend an October talk from The Carnivorous Plant Society to learn about the bizarre feeding habits of bug-chomping plants.

FROM Wolfram ResearchFORMAT iOSPRICE £1.99OUT Now

WOLFRAMALPHA

Sometimes, when you’re scouring the web, Google just won’t cut it. Want a quick comparison for the Mass of Earth? According to WolframAlpha, that’s 18 times the mass of the Moon. This unique search engine curates information for you,

Local botanic gardens are a great place to start discovering plants

CHANNEL BBC Radio 4DATE SundaysTIME 6.35amDETAILS 22 mins

CHANNEL BBC Two (TBC)DATE Mid-October (TBC)TIME TBCDETAILS 5x 50 mins

CHANNEL None (podcast)DATE No fixed dayTIME No fixed timeDETAILS 2-5 mins

THE LIVING WORLD

LANDS OF THE MONSOON

YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

This Radio 4 show focuses on a

from the guillemots of Skomer to

of the Pentland hills. Tom Heap’s upcoming expedition to the Caicos Islands to visit the endangered rock iguanas sounds like it should make for a particularly interesting adventure… and if waking up at

Set to air on BBC Two in October,

at the dramatic impact that the monsoon season can have on a

and human populations alike and

subcontinent and in Southeast

human societies have developed ways of coping with extreme weather conditions.

Climate change is probably the biggest threat facing civilisation today, yet many people are still content to ignore the problem.

hopes to change that by drafting in celebrities including Jessica Alba, Matt Damon and even Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s a

name that’s been broadcast on US cable network Showtime, but is so far unavailable in the UK (although

The podcast and the show make a compelling argument that we should all be doing more to change our eco-unfriendly ways.

RADIO/PODCASTS

TV

Couldn’t stand biology at school? Forget about photosynthesis and discover food-providing, disease-curing botany

AUTHOR Professor Bill McGuire PUBLISHER Oxford University PressPRICE £7.99OUT Now

GLOBAL CATASTROPHES: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION

When Science Uncovered needs an expert on disaster and destruction, Bill McGuire is the go-to guy. In this pocket-sized book, he toys with a range of natural end-of-the-world scenarios, including the possibilities of another Ice Age,

earthquake or the long overdue eruption of one of the planet’s many dormant supervolcanoes. Assessing both the possibility of such an event and humanity’s

the crack of dawn on a Sunday to listen to it doesn’t appeal, then don’t forget you can always track it down on iPlayer later on.

chance of surviving it, McGuire presents you with the perfect conversation starter for awkward

http://TED.com

93@SciUncovered

According to the US Food and Drug Administration, the most dangerous step in ‘keyhole’ surgery isn’t repairing a valve or

use of trocars. Trocars come in many shapes


TED TALK CHOICE

’s curious mind could have solved one of the most deadly hazards in surgery…

“It’s the puncture that causes risk… and it’s an issue that’s still with us.”

DVD & BLU-RAY

FORMAT DVD PRICE TBC OUT 10 Nov CLASSIFICATION TBC

Professor Brian Cox returns

on TV earlier in the year. Human Universe examines the biggest questions facing science, and humanity as a whole, using stunning photography and CGI to tell the story of our evolution, and to try and answer some of the biggest conundrums. As ever with Cox’s shows, expect a blend of wide-eyed enthusiasm and mind-expanding science.

medical device comprising an obturator (a metal or plastic sharpened tip), a cannula (hollow tube) and a seal. They’re used in surgeries like abscess drainage but, engineer Nikolai Begg argues, they’re outdated.

“It’s the puncture that causes risk. That’s what Dr HC Jacobaeus said back in 1912, ” says Begg. “He

human, and it’s an issue that’s still with us.” Between 1997 and 2002, for example, the FDA received more than 1,300 reports of trocar-related laparoscopic injury, including over 30 deaths.

It’s a predicament Begg’s looking to solve with his updated trocar. When the tip of the device punctures the tissue, the pressure activates a spring-loaded mechanism that retracts the blade within 0.04 seconds, before it can do any damage to internal organs. It’s a simple but ingenious engineering trick that could save many lives.

ABOVE WolframAlpha is a search engine that puts information into context for you

ABOVE Find out what you’re stomping on with the iGeology app from NERC

WEBSITESWEBSITE weatherspark.comHOST DEAR LAKE VENTURES, INC

WEBSITE pubs.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/stuff.htmlHOST CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS

WEATHERSPARK

WHAT’S THAT STUFF?

weatherman’s teatime report isn’t quite comprehensive enough for you, then this website certainly will be. Enter your location and you’ll be presented with a veritable barrage of information, with maps, graphs and charts showing you information such as average temperature, pressure, humidity and so on. You can even travel back in time, and get meteorological data going back as far as the 1990s. Run by two chaps in California, it’s an incredible resource for weather watchers across the globe.

what the name suggests: it presents you with a host of everyday items, and explains what they’re made from, and how. From lipstick and chewing gum to sandpaper and even ‘new

entertainingly written. New car smell, by the way, is made from “alkanes and substituted benzenes, along with a few aldehydes and ketones”. So now you know.

Nikolai Begg’s improved surgical equipment could save many lives worldwide

HUMAN UNIVERSE

FROM Major FormsFORMAT AndroidPRICE FreeOUT Now

GEOLOGY SAMPLE COLLECTOR

If you have an interest in geology, this app for Android devices is a must. It lets you log all

recordings, videos, text notes and GPS data. You can upload your data easily and share it with other rock fans, and the digital ‘strike and dip’ tool, for on-the-spot topological measurements, is a nifty feature too.

rather than just delivering a list of links, and this app puts its

want to wow your pub buddies, it’s worth adding this one to your home screen.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/stuff.html

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/stuff.html

http://weatherspark.com

http://bit.ly/1jNk06e

94 @@@S@@SSciciciiciciiciciciccc UnUnnUUnUU ccccccocooocoooooooovvevverereddd

THIS MONTH…

1. Using your chopstick, poke a little ball of

Blu-Tack into the biro cap, so that it completely blocks the small hole at the end, making an airtight seal.

2. Now attach a nut to the cap by pushing it

over the little tail until it

it in the bucket of water tail down, so you trap a pocket of air inside the cap. If it

above the waterline, add more weight – another nut,

or a little Blu-Tack. If it sinks, try a smaller nut or remove the nut entirely. The goal is to make the cap barely buoyant, so it slowly rises when submerged and hardly breaks the surface

3. When you have it

the rim, put your diver in and screw the cap on tight. Now squeeze the bottle hard – the diver should

when you release.

A plain, round two-litre drinks bottle, a biro cap, some small nuts, Blu-Tack, a chopstick, a bucket of water.

WHAT YOU NEED...a biro

Cartesian diver

HOW IT WORKSBy squeezing the bottle, you

pressurise the water within it, and also the pocket of trapped air in the

diver. The air responds to this pressure change by contracting in volume, and drawing a little more water into the diver. This makes it

less buoyant, so it sinks.

TWEET US YOUR PICS + VIDEOS!

@SciUncovered

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Institution to share its top three makes

DIY SCIENCE Build and experiment at home

WORDS BY Andy Marmer y

Build time: 4 MINS

in association with

The best home experiments

This experiment uses the same method real

submarines use to dive and surface

WHAT TO DO...

95@SciUncovered

EXPLORATORIUM DIY science

Homopolar motor

1. Put the magnet on the bottom

where it will attach itself to the battery case.

2. Now make a coil out of the copper wire. The end of the

A red cabbage, kitchen knife, chopping board, a saucepan of water, a sieve, a jug, drinking glasses, vinegar, lemon juice, bicarbonate of soda, toothpaste, other condiments and cleaning products.

WHAT YOU NEED...

D-size battery, 30-40cm copper wire (thin enough that you can bend it easily, but enough to hold its shape when bent), neodymium disc magnet about 2cm in diameter.

WHAT YOU NEED...

HOW IT WORKSThe battery makes an

through the wire. This

which interacts with the

makes the wire spin.

WHAT TO DO...

WHAT TO DO...

1. and add it to the pan of water so that the cabbage is well covered. Bring it to the boil on a hob and simmer for 20 minutes or so, then

2. Once cool, strain the cabbage with a sieve, being sure to catch

Very acidic solutions will turn the cabbage water red, while strong

alkalis will turn it green

HOW IT WORKS

pigment called anthocyanin, which is a fantastic pH indicator and so can be used to test the acidity or alkalinity of all sorts of things.

Build time: 30 MINS

Build time: 10 MINS

wire needs to make a contact with the nodule on the top of the battery, and stand vertically up from it. The rest of the wire needs to bend over and form a coil running around the battery two or three times without touching it. The other end of the wire needs to touch the side of the magnet.

3. The whole coil needs to balance, supported only by its contacts

with the top of the battery and the magnet. This will take a lot of tweaking of the shape, but once you’ve got this right, the coil should start to spin spontaneously. It might not look like it, but this is an electric motor!

the water in a jug. You should have

3. Pour a little cabbage water at a time into drinking glasses,

and start testing it with your household items. You should see some amazing colour changes from the various chemicals!

Cabbage pH indicator

96 @SciUncovered

What is the average length of the human tongue?

In the human digestive

the small or the large intestine?

GREY MATTER Test your science knowledge with our quiz

The newly discovered dinosaur Changyuraptor

is unusual because it has four of what?

What is the average volume of blood in an adult human?

A 1960 earthquake in Valdivia, Chile was most

powerful earthquake ever recorded. What was its magnitude on the Richter scale?

Au is the chemical symbol for which metal?

What is the only living thing that can be seen

from space?

What is the name given to the speeds at which

Concorde travelled, breaking the sound barrier?

20 July 2014 marked the 45th anniversary of which

feat of human accomplishment?

How many vertebrae are there in the human spine?

True or false: the Moon is gradually moving away

from Earth?

thermodynamics states that energy cannot be what?

planet to be discovered

using a telescope?

Which species is the

the planet today?

In engineering, what is the strongest geometric shape?

Which metal is responsible for the red colour of blood?

What is the chemical that causes you to cry when

chopping onions?

ANSWERS1 Aloe vera. 2 Wings. 3 Five litres. 4 9.5. 5 Gold. 6 The Great Barrier Reef. 7 Supersonic. 8 The first Moon landing. 9 33. 10 True – at the rate of 3.78cm a year. 11 Created or destroyed. 12 Uranus. 13 Great bustard. 14 Triangle. 15 Iron. 16 Sulphuric acid. 17 Io. 18 Nerve cell. 19 10cm. 20 Small intestine.

Name this plant, often used in cosmetics.

HOW DID YOU DO?WHERE DO YOU LIE ON THE STAR SPECTRUM?0-5 Brown dwarf 6-10 Red dwarf11-15 Main sequence16-19 Blue-white star20 Blue supergiant

What is the name of this Solar System body?.

Which type of cell is this?

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EXPLORATORIUM Grey Matter

PLUS! WHERE DO BLACK HOLES COME FROM? ROSETTA & THE COMET

LIFE ON THE ISS DARK MATTER, DARK ENERGY AND OTHER MYSTERIES

HOW OUR SOLAR SYSTEM WAS FORMED AND MUCH, MUCH MORE!

SCB10 2014 PR NTED IN THE UK £9 99

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Why many scientists

believe that life came to

Earth from outer space

WEIRD SCIENCEA STAR IS BORN

EARTH’S EVIL TWINROBOT ASTRONAUTS

ALIEN HUNTING

180PAGES

OF MIND-BLOWING

FACTS AND BAFFLING

MYSTERIES

SEE BACK COVER

FOR MORE

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SECRETS OF THE COSMOS REVEALED

8/13/14 5:34 PM

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CONTRIBUTORSMichael Banks, Hayley Birch, Matthew Bolton, Zoe Cormier, Paul Coxon,

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body, nature, space, dinosaurs, experiments and more.

WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE Our top-selling space bookazine

extra pages covering the latest developments in our ongoing quest to understand our Universe.

out how astronomers identify ‘exoplanets’ and discover if time travel could ever be possible.

MEGA STRUCTURES Discover the most extreme

engineering projects ever undertaken. From the Panama Canal to the Burj Khalifa, and from self-driving cars to the International Space Station, we

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98 @SciUncovered

What was the experiment?Scientists from Georgia Institute of Technology, in the US, pointed video cameras at numerous zoo animals while they had a wee. They wanted

ranging in size from a bat to an elephant

animals to gain insight on the evolution of a particular form or function,” says Assistant Professor David Hu, a mechanical engineer on

biology that are as universal as laws of physics.”

Did they use video for every animal?

also studied YouTube clips. In all, the urination antics of 32 animals were studied. Some of the techniques employed in the research were

while they urinate

biggest and the smallest animals were most

farm animals and pets were easier.”

Surely big animals take much longer?You’d imagine so. After all, an elephant’s bladder

same time

How does that work?It’s all down to the length of the animal’s urethra. In larger animals with larger bladders, the urethra tends to be longer, too. This means a greater gravitational force acts on the urine, and

urethra were constant across all animals,” Hu

So what happens in smaller animals?

tendency of water to travel along a narrow tube

How could the research be used?

length of a tube, be it a urethra or anything else

a liquid may be used to help design better water

+ It’s a common belief that students are quite happy doing

nothing, but a scientist at the University of Virginia, in the US,

has found just the opposite. Subjects were asked to sit with

no external stimulus for 15 minutes, but offered the chance

to self-administer electric shocks to relieve the tedium. Many

preferred to give themselves a jolt – more particularly men, of

whom two-thirds opted for the shock. One of the male subjects

opted for a remarkable 190 shocks.

STUDENTS CHALLENGED TO SIT QUIETLY

ILL

US

TR

AT

ION

BY

AN

DY

WA

TT

WE CAN SEEK OUT LAWS IN BIOLOGY THAT ARE AS UNIVERSAL AS LAWS OF PHYSICS.

B I Z A RRE RE S E A R C H T H AT M A K E S Y O U T HINK

http://warchild.org.uk/syria

9000

9001

http://www.gamefly.co.uk/alienisolationuk

http://www.pegi.info

science uncovered - october 2014 uk.pdf

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