Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i BBC Science Focus Magazine

“Simply, no one has done this before… It’s really amazing how many basic things there are to consider” Mathematicians have declared a new class of shape: the ‘soft cell’, which can take different forms, so long as it has rounded edges and fits together in a tessellated grid – known as ‘tiling’ in maths. Tessellating fully rounded shapes isn’t possible in 2D, unless there are ‘cusps’ – the sharp points between curves (like the top of a teardrop). An example of this in 2D is the crosssection of an onion. But the researchers behind the new study have discovered it’s possible to tessellate a fully rounded shape in 3D – such as the chambers of a nautilus shell (the spiralling marine mollusc). These chambers look angular in 2D, but the…

COMMENT A few years ago, I walked into my department’s weekly coffee club and had an existential crisis about Earth’s future. To be clear, the discussion wasn’t about the future of Earth, per se. We were talking about a newly published paper regarding some interesting features in the spectrum of light from a distant star – technically a ‘stellar remnant’, or dead star, called a white dwarf. This white dwarf couldn’t possibly have any effect on our planet and nothing in its spectrum was particularly threatening. But what that paper did show us was a glimpse of the future of our Sun and, in a particularly gruesome way, ourselves. Let me start by reassuring you that the Sun isn’t going to explode. One of the most common misconceptions I encounter…

Centenarians – people who live to be 100 years old and over – were once a rare breed. But they’ve became increasingly common since the mid to late 20th century, thanks to improvements in diet, healthcare and lifestyle. However, a recent analysis by the Office for National Statistics suggests that the number of centenarians in England and Wales may have peaked. In 2023, there was a 0.5-per-cent decrease in centenarians compared to 2022, with the total falling from 14,920 to 14,850. This drop is thought to be tied to the decline of the post-WWI ‘baby boom’ generation. How did so many people make it to this ripe old age? And can we learn from them to improve our chances of doing the same? It might seem logical to ask the…

So, if you’ve got an aged immune system that’s riddled with CMV and chronically inflamed after a lifetime of infections, is there anything you can do? The first thing to say is that all the basic health advice you’ve heard a million times before still works – it’s never too late to start exercising or improving your diet. But if you’re hoping science might have something up its sleeve, you could be in luck: there’s a medical approach on the horizon that could allow us to wipe the slate clean and start again from scratch. It’s actually a treatment that medics have been using for decades: a bone-marrow transplant. The traditional reason to perform one of these is a blood cancer, such as leukaemia. In this instance, your immune cells…

Q&A ASTRONOMY FOR BEGINNERS After a fairly poor showing of planets early in 2024, fortunes reverse as we enter the latter part of the year. Jupiter is now dominant in the night sky, a bright object nestled against the stars of Taurus, the Bull, near the Pleiades and Hyades open clusters. Mars follows on later in the night, its salmon-pink colour a useful way to confirm its identity. Also referred to as the Red Planet due to this colour (something that arises from the fact that Mars is essentially rusty, its surface containing a lot of iron oxide), Mars’s orbital period means it’s wellpresented for telescope viewing approximately every 2.1 years. The next optimal period is in the months centred around 16 January 2025, the date when Mars reaches opposition…

Buried: The Last Witness We can only apologise that we’re a little late to this party, but this bingeworthy documentary explores some of the biggest environmental crimes in history. Starting with one very sorrylooking calf… Listen now on BBC Sounds Curious Cases Prof Hannah Fry returns to answer readers’ questions, this time with Dara Ó Briain. To kick things off– the team answers what is the fastest fly? Saturdays at 10am on BBC Radio 4 Listen again on BBC Sounds Solar System In case you missed it, the full series is now on BBC iPlayer. It’s a breathtaking tour of our Solar System and the huge variety of spacecraft we’ve sent up to go and study it. Watch now on BBC iPlayer…

DISCOVERIES SPACE An enormous pair of black hole jets has been discovered by a team of astronomers, who nicknamed the jets Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant. That’s because the jets are the biggest ever observed, spanning 23 million light-years across. The jets are powerful streams of energy and particles that shoot out from a black hole. (In fact, their total power output is equivalent to trillions of Suns). As dust and gas surrounding a black hole are pulled towards it, some of it becomes superheated. Instead of falling into the black hole, this super-hot material is blasted out across the cosmos at lightning-fast speeds. “This pair is not just the size of a solar system or the Milky Way; we’re talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total,” said…

The idea of a mass human migration to space, the Moon or other planets is exciting, but… well, a little overzealous. As the authors of A City on Mars say: “An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and zombies and werewolves is still a better place than Mars.” To find out why, we spoke to one of its authors, Dr Kelly Weinersmith, who, after years of research into space settlements, gave us the low-down on how long it’s really likely to be before humans can move beyond Earth. WHY MIGHT IT NOT BE THE RIGHT TIME TO MOVE TO MARS? There’s so much that we don’t know yet. In particular, settlements require that people can have babies and we don’t have anywhere near enough science to know if that’s…

WATCH David Attenborough explores Earth’s extraordinary animals in Planet Earth III https://bit.ly/4hk0q0e Wildlife populations around the world are in crisis. Recent analysis by the World Wide Fund For Nature estimated that over the past 50 years, wildlife populations have reduced by 73 per cent. In the face of these unprecedented declines, it’s more important than ever that scientists understand the challenges animals face and how they’re responding to a changing planet. This requires data collection on a scale never attempted before – tracking the lives of animals at a global level – and scientists are turning to technology to make this mammoth task possible. The development of radio-tracking technology has already opened many new research avenues for scientists interested in animal behaviour, but these studies have been limited by the…

If a total immune reboot sounds a bit too adventurous for now, there may be an alternative. A paper published in March 2024 found that bone marrow’s youthfulness could be restored by selectively removing stem cells damaged with age using one of the immune system’s own tools: antibodies. Antibodies are molecules that bind to a very specific target. Some just gum up the workings of their foe, while others act as flags telling the immune system to come and remove it. So how can we use the immune system’s own tricks to keep us biologically younger? By rebalancing our immune cells. Bone marrow stem cells (see ‘Turn it off and on again’, opposite) make immune cells split into broad families: myeloid and lymphoid. Cells in the lymphoid family make up…

Q&A NATURE’S WEIRDEST CREATURES In 1836, European scientists discovered a peculiar animal from the River Amazon that they struggled to identify. Its eel-like body was a few feet long and its air-filled lungs persuaded anatomists it must be a reptile. A year later, another specimen was found in Africa, and based on the structure of its heart, it was declared an amphibian. Three decades of debate later, scientific consensus settled on the idea that these are fish – only instead of breathing water through gills, they have lungs. Enter the lungfish. If they don’t have access to the water’s surface to suck in air, West African lungfish (Protopterus annectens) will drown. Their withered gills are too small to provide enough oxygen. But lungfish have another unusual ability to help them…

ACROSS 7 Sufficient to have beer with politician (5) 9 Sheep with role in defence (7) 10 Ray rang about grain store (7) 11 Readjust layout of trees (5) 12 Singer heard producing a note (6) 13 Heavy food in celebrity church (6) 16 Replacement brings consolation (6) 17 Hooligan lad reversed vehicle first (6) 19 Accommodation gets stolen by the Spanish (5) 21 Chariot transported a bean (7) 22 Examination of restraint at university (7) 23 New deal, right for a tree (5) DOWN 1 Hug rated badly, but it’s relative (8) 2 See plane design as Asian (8) 3 Addresses deity in audible commendation (5) 4 Ruler in the mirror (4) 5 Service staged and made on an industrial scale (4-8) 6 Let it stand a new test (4) 8 Unattractive dress for a police officer? (5,7) 14 Intermission finds bear wandering in wood (3,5) 15 Not…

It seems octopuses might be the unlikely Muhammad Alis of the marine world. Biologists have filmed combative cephalopods delivering blows to fish who join forces with the octopuses on cooperative hunting expeditions. Though largely solitary animals, octopuses often team up with schools of fish to hunt prey such as molluscs and crustaceans. A team of experts from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Germany observed such behaviour, filming 13 hunting groups consisting of octopuses and several different species of fish (including goldfish, gold-saddle goatfish and blacktip groupers) in the Red Sea. The experts found that the different species in these ‘hunting parties’ took on different roles. For instance, goatfish acted as scouts, deciding where the group patrolled, while the octopuses led the charge when it was time to…

REALITY THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE HEADLINES CHECK REVIEW Our ancient ancestors divided their lives into days, following the natural rhythm of the rising and setting Sun. This system worked well for millennia but by the 20th century, scientists made a big discovery: Earth is actually a terrible timekeeper. Why? It turns out that no two rotations – no two days – are ever exactly the same length. There are many factors that can affect Earth’s spin, including earthquakes. The 2011 ’quake in Japan – the one that triggered the Fukushima nuclear accident – sped up Earth’s rotation by 1.8 millionths of a second. The Moon’s gravity also contributes to all of this. It tries to hold our oceans in place, but Earth continues to turn beneath them regardless. This tidal friction…

The TikTok Shop, the e-commerce branch of the social media giant, is strange. The digital marketplace sells everything. Outfits for cats and pillows with artificial intelligence barely scratch the surface. But it’s the tech section that particularly caught my interest. Drones, tablets, smartwatches – just about every type of gadget is on sale here, often at a fraction of the price you’d expect. But are these cheaper options any good? Only one way to find out. I filled my basket with a selection of gadgets and braced myself to deal with the good, the bad and the disastrous. THE GOOD My first purchase is a smartwatch that costs just £10. While that is suspiciously cheap, budget smartwatches have come a long way, with some well-known brands selling solid devices in…

FEATURE JUNO In an enormous cavern, 700m (almost 2,300ft) beneath a wooded hill in southern China, an extraordinary scientific instrument is being built. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a 20,000-tonne (almost 19,700-ton) sphere of a detector liquid surrounded by 43,000 super-sensitive light detectors, is set to probe the secrets of nature’s most elusive subatomic particle: the neutrino. “We’ve had to overcome many difficulties and challenges in building JUNO,” says Dr Yifang Wang, the Director of the Chinese experiment, who came up with the concept and design in 2008 after reading a paper by Italian theorist Prof Serguey Petcov. “JUNO is a formidable feat of engineering,” says Prof Jennifer Thomas, a particle physicist at University College, London, who sits on the international advisory panel of the Chinese experiment. “It’s scheduled…

IMMUNE SYSTEM REBOOT FEATURE As you read this, your body is playing host to countless battles. If you’re currently fighting off an infection, this might feel obvious. But, even if you’re well, the two trillion cells that make up your immune system, with a combined weight of over a kilogram (a little over two pounds), are battling against incoming germs, as well as keeping your own cells in check if they misbehave. Your immune system is critical for preventing everything from infections to cancer, and can even help slow the ageing process. As such, reinforcing your internal army is key to your overall health. But what’s the best way to do this? Claims in supplement adverts or made by influencers online can be confusing: some will tell you that a…

IMMUNE SYSTEM REBOOT FEATURE Our immune systems decline gradually with age, but most of you reading this will have already lost most of one major component of it: the thymus. Located just behind your breastbone and in front of your heart, this organ is the military academy for T cells – a type of immune cell critical to our ability to adaptively respond to different threats, from infection to cancer. The thymus peaks early: it produces more T cells in your first year of life than in any subsequent year, and sex hormones produced during puberty accelerate a process known as ‘involution’, where productive thymus tissue turns to fat. By the time you’re 30, 75 per cent of your thymus is gone. Why this happens isn’t fully understood, but it…

Human beings don’t like change. As a species, we’re a conservative bunch – very adaptable, of course, but ultimately fond of safe, predictable stasis. So it’s odd that twice a year, every year, we inflict a big, fundamental change upon ourselves when we turn our clocks back in autumn and forward in spring. On paper, this biannual gear shift doesn’t seem that significant – it’s only an hour after all. But our bodies really don’t like change. The negative effects on our wellbeing are such that many health researchers believe the Sun needs to set on daylight saving time (DST) altogether. Their reasoning? The clocks inside our bodies aren’t as easy to change as the ones on our walls. Mounting research shows that artificially altering the time twice a year…

BETTER LIVING THROUGH SCIENCE I doubt the readers of BBC Science Focus need to hear this, but TikTok isn’t the best source of medical advice. Videos on the social media platform have as many eyebrow-raising health claims as dance trends – some entirely spurious, others with a grain of truth, very few presented with much in the way of scrutiny or reliable sources. When a health trend goes viral there are always a few red flags to watch out for. Anything that’s said to be a “quick fix” is instantly suspicious. People will talk about “studies” without citing them or explaining that they haven’t been replicated. They won’t mention that the sample size was small or the control group was non-existent. Another red flag is when multiple claims appear for…