Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2022 i BBC Science Focus Magazine

Prehistoric Europeans were drinking milk as adults thousands of years before most of them evolved the gene necessary to digest lactose, a study carried out at University College London and the University of Bristol has found. By poring over DNA and archaeological records dating back 9,000 years, the researchers believe that it was bouts famine and disease periodically killing off the lactose intolerant that drove the protective gene’s evolution. This overturns the widely held model that as we began to farm dairy, a novel genetic mutation occurred that allowed some to be lactose tolerant as adults, and from there this became positively selected for and spread throughout the population. In order to digest lactose, we need to produce an enzyme known as lactase in our guts. Almost all babies can…

Mass plastic clear-up Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit, has managed to clear 100,000kg of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The company created a giant U-shaped barrier that collects plastic waste carried by the ocean’s currents. The company is aiming to clear 90 per cent of the waste in this area by 2040. There are concerns that the device could scoop up sea life along with the junk, but Ocean Cleanup claims to be gathering data to help mitigate the risk. Batteries made from trees A partnership between a paper company and a battery company could result in batteries being created using renewable sources from trees. The team has found a way to turn lignin, a polymer derived from the cell walls of plants, into a hard carbon material for…

Toyota isn’t afraid to try new things. It made hybrid cars popular with the Prius, it sold the first commercial hydrogen car with the Mirai, and it’s now working with the Japanese space agency (JAXA) to put the first proper car on the Moon – one that you won’t need to wear a spacesuit to drive. So it feels odd that it’s taken so long for the company to launch its first electric car, the BZ4X. What’s was the hold-up? Well, from the outside looking in, it seems Toyota was hoping that motorists would back hydrogen power. It’s clear to see why: with a hydrogen fuel cell there’s no range anxiety and you refill your tank in largely the same way you do now. Unfortunately, the infrastructure (the refuelling stations)…

LIVING BRIDGES Army ants in huge raiding columns will deploy their own bodies to form living bridges so fellow workers can cross gaps quickly. A bridge consists of up to 50 ants and a colony may have 40 or 50 bridges in use at any time. Myrmecologists (people who study ants) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Swarm Lab have worked out a simple rule governing this behaviour. Ants only stay in a bridge if they feel sufficient numbers of other ants scurrying over their backs. To justify investing that much labour, the shortcut has to be popular. If fewer ants cross, forming a bridge isn’t worth the effort – it’s better for the colony if these ants go around the obstacle the long way. IT’S A WRAP In…

According to much of what we see on social media, in magazines and on TV, the fat on our bodies is something we need to either fight constantly with exercise and diet, or stop worrying about and celebrate. But in reality, our fat is far more than just a symbol of how healthy our lifestyle is, or of how body confident we may be. Fat is one of the most important elements of our diet, and the fatty tissue beneath our skin plays a part in keeping us alive and healthy. In chemical terms, fats are long, chain-like molecules that have many roles across all forms of life on Earth. Among their many useful properties, they are an excellent way to store energy, and many organisms convert energy from the…

11 September 2022 Waning gibbous Moon rises at 8:23pm BST* 10 September 2022 Full Moon rises at 8:12pm BST* 9 September 2022 Waxing gibbous Moon rises at 7:57pm BST* THE HARVEST MOON WHEN: EARLY SEPTEMBER The full Moon on 10 September is the Harvest Moon for 2022, defined as the closest full Moon to the September equinox, which in 2022 occurs on 23 September at 2:04am BST. The tilt and orientation of Earth’s axis relative to the Sun makes the Sun appear to rise and fall annually against the background stars. An equinox occurs when the Sun’s centre crosses the celestial equator, the projection of Earth’s equator into the sky. The September equinox, also known as the northern hemisphere’s autumn equinox, is the second of two annual equinoxes. The nearest…

ANDY NEWELL, KNARESBOROUGH, YORKSHIRE IF THE ANCIENT CARBONIFEROUS FORESTS DIDN’T GO ON TO CREATE THE OIL AND GAS FIELDS WE EXPLOIT FOR FOSSIL FUELS, HOW DIFFERENT WOULD OUR WORLD LOOK TODAY IN TERMS OF TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT? The Industrial Revolution was largely powered by coal. Wood and charcoal were used as fuel, and to smelt iron, before then, but wood was already becoming scarce in Britain in the 16th Century when the population was still under 10 million. Trees are slow to replace and take up a lot of land area. Wood also has only half the energy density of coal, so you need to burn more of it. Political power probably would have shifted towards Russia, Canada and South America with their huge areas of forested land. Without…

PENCILS AT THE READY! ACROSS 1 Fellow joins the Spanish church (6) 5 Fund energy, down, out of sorts (5) 9 Any curve inside brings disorder (7) 10 Object after fun turned inappropriate (5) 11 Extremist often seen with Violet? (5) 12 Toured around, taking note to become noticeable (7) 13 Couple by river, having a drink (6) 15 Caught you and me hiding deed that’s prickly (6) 18 Mark’s attorney gets sick after church (7) 20 Bartok’s first version of duet sent round for first performance (5) 23 Victor misses front part of target (5) 24 Willing student joins a new orchestra (7) 25 Concurred, taking front off vice (5) 26 Two fivers returned for a cheese ingredient (6) DOWN 2 The artist has concern for others (5) 3…

Unvaccinated Hannah Fry meets a group of people who have so far refused the COVID-19 vaccine, and sees whether the science can change their minds. Available on iPlayer The Curious Cases Of Rutherford & Fry The scientific sleuths return for a new series. In the first episode, they grapple with the psychology of attention – how you can grab it and lose it. BBC Radio 4 Starts 16 Aug, 11am Also available on BBC Sounds The Engineers: The Future Of Cars Engineers at the cutting-edge of car design explore what the future looks like on four wheels. Kevin Fong hosts this panel discussion, held at the Science Museum. BBC World Service and BBC Sounds…

Retrofitting direct air capture technology to trains to recover CO2 could help us get back on track in the fight against climate change, a study carried out at the University of Toronto has suggested. Direct air capture systems typically extract CO2 from the atmosphere via a series of chemical reactions that occur as air passes through them. This captured CO2 can then be stored in a liquid reservoir until it can be sequestered underground in porous rock formations. The technology is already well-established, but stationary, ground-based facilities require a lot of land. This has historically led to residents in the areas near to proposed sites objecting to their construction, the researchers say. “It’s a huge problem because almost everybody wants to fix the climate crisis, but nobody wants to do…

Morti, a robot dog, has taught itself to walk, just one hour after taking its first step. It learned just like animals in the wild: by tripping and stumbling until it understood how to balance on its limbs. Morti was developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems as a way for scientists to closely study how animals learn to walk. With Morti, researchers could measure the forces, torques and muscle power of each limb – something that would’ve been much more difficult to do in a live organism, said Felix Ruppert, a PhD student and first author of the new study. In building the Labradorsized bot, Ruppert and the team first needed to computerise the mechanism by which animals and humans learn to walk. Walking, like…

For palaeontologists this is better than striking gold: miners working to excavate permafrost in the Yukon in northwestern Canada have unearthed a frozen baby mammoth. Geologists from the Yukon Geological Survey and the University of Calgary say the animal, which has been named Nun cho ga – ‘big baby animal’ in the language of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, the First Nations people who live in the region – is female and more than 30,000 years old. Many Ice Age fossils have been found in the Yukon, but mummified remains with intact skin and hair, as seen on Nun cho ga, are very rare. In fact, she is the best-preserved woolly mammoth ever found in North America. She was discovered by miners working in the Klondike gold fields on Canada’s northwest coast,…

Keep active and get moving are messages we hear a lot of when it comes to wellbeing advice. And with good reason. Exercise is miraculous. It is proven medically and scientifically that keeping active has a multitude of benefits. People who take part in regular physical activity have a reduced risk of stroke and heart disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, dementia, hip fractures and dying early. And now, researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine, publishing their findings in the journal Nature, have found a molecule produced by the body during exercise that can reduce appetite and obesity. The research team analysed blood samples from mice who had run on a treadmill and found a modified amino acid called Lac-Phe was produced from lactate and phenylalanine. When obese mice…

Let’s get this bit out of the way, Sony’s new flagship headphones, the WH-1000XM5, cost £379. By any measure that is expensive, even when compared to the likes of Apple and Bang & Olufsen who scoff at the idea of affordable. And with headphone tech improving to the point where you can buy a decent pair for under £100, there’s no sane reason to spend nearly £400. Or is there? If you’re not familiar with these headphones, they have a bit of a history. Over the last five years they’ve scooped up every award in the business, becoming the go-to for anyone looking for noise-cancelling wireless headphones. But with so many competitors now, is this upgrade worth the new, bigger price tag? A COMPLETE REDESIGN Since the first iteration of…

FAT = HIGH CHOLESTEROL Not always. Saturated fats, found in meats, cheeses and butter, boost cholesterol in your bloodstream, increasing your chance of stroke and heart disease. So-called trans fats are even worse: these highly processed fats raise cholesterol, make the blood more likely to clot, and cause inflammation. But unsaturated fats from oils, vegetables, fish and nuts actually help reduce cholesterol levels. CHOLESTEROL = BAD Some is. There are two types of cholesterol: low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL) is the ‘bad’ type that hardens the arteries, but high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) will return excess LDL to the liver for processing. Saturated and trans fats boost LDL and lower HDL, while healthier fats do the opposite. But beware of claims that so-called superfoods can lower your LDL. The best way to…

THE COELACANTH For years, scientists thought it died out with the dinosaurs. The only known coelacanths were fossils. Then in 1938, a South African museum curator found a dead one in a fisherman’s catch. Live specimens were later caught, proving that this curious fish was never actually exinct. Living deep in the waters around Africa’s Comoro Islands and Indonesia’s Sulawesi, this big, bottomdweller is unlike any other living fish. Weird True Fact 1: it has eight fins, including two pairs which stick out from the body like legs. It doesn’t use them for walking though. They’re more like the stabilisers you get on kids’ bikes. WTF 2: instead of a bony backbone, coelacanths have a hollow, oil-filled tube called a notochord. WTF 3: they are fatheads. The brain occupies just…

WHAT IS A DYSON SPHERE? A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical, large mechanical structure – a megastructure – designed to harness the energy of stellar nuclear furnaces. The basic idea is that a structure is constructed around a star which converts, stores or otherwise utilises, the star’s radiant energy. These facilities are postulated as the most likely, necessary and economical way of addressing the colossal energy needs of both future human civilisation and, possibly, advanced alien civilisations elsewhere in the cosmos. WHO THEORISED THEM? AND WHEN? The Dyson sphere concept is named after physicist Freeman Dyson (1923-2020) who, in 1960, discussed the idea in a short scientific paper concerning methods of detecting alien civilisations. However, Dyson admitted that he was inspired by the highly-acclaimed science fiction novel Star Maker (1937)…

The new The Lord Of The Rings TV show, The Rings Of Power, is a prequel set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before Frodo takes his long walk to Mordor. And yet, the show features familiar characters like Elrond and Galadriel, elves who were alive during the original The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. According to the lore of author J. R. R. Tolkien, this is because elven lifespans are tied to the fate of the Earth, effectively making them immortal. But this is not BBC Magic Focus you’re reading. Surely there must be a biological reason for how elves manage to live so long, while we age, decay and die? “There are many explanations for why we die,” says evolutionary biologist Henry Gee, author of…

Accessible cities, please Your interesting article on future cities (July, p62) praises the idea of 15-minute cities, where the idea is that all shopping and entertainment should be within a 15-minute walk or cycle trip. But wouldn’t this disadvantage a significant part of the population? Estimates for the UK show that by 2030, six million people over 65 will have a long-term illness or disability. These people cannot walk or cycle significant distances, and are unlikely to have the balance for an electric scooter. Without door-to-door transport, these people will be totally isolated. And then there are builders, plumbers and electricians who bring their supplies and tools with them and can hardly walk or use a bicycle. And anyone relying upon a delivery of large items like sofas and electric…

Most people experience unwanted thoughts from time to time. These internal intrusions can be as harmless as the urge to touch a button that reads ‘DO NOT PRESS’, or as debilitating as the thought that you can’t step outside or you’ll be immediately judged – an experience some people with social anxiety might be familiar with. When we notice an intrusive thought, we will usually react by trying to replace it quickly with something else, something happier. But research from psychologists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests that distracting ourselves in this reactive way might actually be making the thought stronger. Instead, we should overcome unwanted thoughts using proactive thinking. For the study, Dr Isaac Fradkin and Dr Eran Eldar asked 80 participants to play a word game. They…

Observing the birth of the first stars and galaxies has been a sought-after goal of astronomers for decades. And now a worldwide team has developed a way to observe these ancient stars by looking through the clouds of fog that filled the Universe around 378,000 years after the Big Bang. The research, part of the REACH (Radio Experiment for the Analysis of Cosmic Hydrogen) experiment, will allow astronomers to observe the earliest stars by studying these primordial hydrogen clouds with a radio telescope. “At the formation of the first stars, the Universe was mostly empty and composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. Because of gravity, these elements eventually came together and the conditions were right for nuclear fusion, which is what formed the first stars,” said lead researcher Dr Eloy…

Deep within the lava caves of Hawaii, microbial life thrives. In fact, a recent study has found that the life teeming within the caves is made up almost entirely of unknown species. More surprisingly, the researchers found that the microbial life was structured into complex networks of species that relied on each other. Within these networks were ‘hub species’, with so many links to other species that if they were removed, it could cause ecological collapse. HOW DID YOU SEARCH FOR LIFE IN THESE LAVA CAVES? Dr Rebecca Prescott: We had 70 samples of microbial mats [layers of microbes that live on surfaces] that we looked at from a variety of volcanic environments of different ages. The environments included lava tubes, geothermal caves and steam vents. In order to identify…

Ask a child a question, and you will quickly learn that many of their answers are quite scattered. You ask how their day was, and they respond with a story about how much they like turtles. Try again, perhaps more specific this time, and you might get a curt “yes”. Children respond to questions in such literal and lateral ways that there is a whole section of parenting literature that deals with teaching children how to answer questions. But what about asking the right questions? When you are concerned that something bad has happened, those hard-to-get answers become all the more frustrating. They can become a problem for safeguarding children or investigating a crime. Children aren’t tiny adults, and this means that teachers, social workers, judges, police, paediatricians and psychologists…

Two cosmic anomalies tell us that something big is missing from our model of the Universe. First, stars in the outer regions of a typical galaxy are orbiting the centre too fast for the galaxy’s gravity to hold onto them. By rights, they should fly off into intergalactic space. The second anomaly is that you are reading these words – that is, galaxies like the Milky Way, and therefore you, exist. According to the standard picture of galaxy formation, regions of the cooling debris of the Big Bang that were slightly denser than average would have had slightly stronger gravity and pulled in material faster, enhancing their gravity so they pulled in matter even faster, and so on. But this process – akin to the rich getting ever richer –…

…HIGH FASHION TAKES A CONFUSING TURN ‘Haute Couture Hi-Fi’. That is how Bang & Olufsen describes its new collaboration with Balenciaga which, we can’t help but feel, is another way of saying ‘eye-watering price’. The two companies that pride themselves on premium design have joined to make just 20 bags that probably require selling off your worldly belongings to just put down a deposit. It’s a solid aluminium, pearl-blasted, polished speaker… that is also a handbag. That means it has three functions: you can blare out your tunes, store an item or two, and inform everyone around you that you have too much money. Speaker Bag £TBC, bang-olufsen.com …A WORLD RECORD WATCH AT A RIDICULOUS PRICE ‘Because we can’ are three words that when put together always result in something…

Time it right “The best times to nap are during the morning, between 9am and noon, to recoup some of the REM sleep lost by interrupting your night sleep too early,” says neuroscientist Dr Brice Faraut. “The other time to try is during the early afternoon – for a siesta.” Make it a habit “Humans are driven by consistencies,” says sleep researcher Prof Sara Mednick. “If you want to try establishing naps as part of your routine, try to find a time that you can consistently devote to napping. Make that the time when you just shut off.” Lie back “The ideal napping position is lying flat on a bed or sofa,” says Faraut. “If these aren’t available, sleep seated in an armchair and tilt the backrest by at least…

HOW DO I STOP TURNING INTO A BUNDLE OF NERVES WHEN I’M TAKING EXAMS? Few people like formal tests, but for people with ‘test anxiety’ the fear and stress become especially problematic – they dread exams in advance, experience unpleasant symptoms during the test and fret intensively afterwards. Psychologists say there are two main components to test anxiety – a cognitive element that involves worrying about the consequences of poor performance (for example, ‘I’ll never get a place at a good university’) and an emotional element related to the physical effects of stress during the test, such as a racing heart and sweaty palms. In worst case scenarios, people with test anxiety will avoid evaluations and procrastinate over their studies, ultimately harming their education and career prospects. The good news…