Innehållsförteckning för January 2019 från BBC Science Focus Magazine

Tangled web LAKE VISTONIDA, GREECE Arachnophobes, look away. Hidden within this mass of cobwebs are hundreds of thousands of spiders, building a fortress on the banks of Lake Vistonida in northeast Greece. Photographed last October, the 1km-long web was the handiwork of Tetragnathaspiders. These arachnids, also known as ‘stretch spiders’ because of their elongated body shape, often build their webs in long vegetation near water. “During breeding season, the spiders produce these webs to protect themselves from predators, such as birds, small reptiles and mammals, as they mate and the females lay eggs,” says Prof Adam Hart, an entomologist at the University of Gloucestershire. “The influx of spiders this year was due to an unusually warm, wet summer, which caused an increase in gnats and other small flying insects that…

Call him Vincent van Bot: a team at MIT has created an artificial intelligence that can faithfully reproduce works of art. Dubbed RePaint, the system uses a combination of 3D printing and deep learning to authentically recreate complex paintings. It could be used to remake famous artworks for the home, or even to produce accurate copies to protect originals from suffering wear-and-tear when hung in museums. “The value of fine art has rapidly increased in recent years, so there’s an increased tendency for it to be locked up in warehouses away from the public eye,” said RePaint mechanical engineer Mike Foshey. “We’re building the technology to reverse this trend, and to create inexpensive and accurate reproductions that can be enjoyed by all.” The team used RePaint to reproduce a number…

A stash of alien planets found hiding in a dusty region where stars form could help scientists trace our Solar System’s history. Astronomers peered through the dust that fills a star-forming region just 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array observatory in Chile. They looked at 32 stars surrounded by protoplanetary discs. These discs, made up of dust and debris, are typically flat and uniform, spreading out around their star like a pancake. But 12 of them in this survey have gaps that can only be fully explained by the presence of planets forming around the stars. The new stars are too bright for us to see any of their planets directly, so the researchers did some calculations to work out how big…

Physicists at the University of Colorado have created tiny blobs of the bizarre liquid-like matter that filled the Universe milliseconds after the Big Bang. The team created the so-called quark-gluon plasma by smashing packets of protons and neutrons into a much heavier gold atom in the PHENIX Detector particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. It is theorised that this matter filled the entire Universe shortly after the Big Bang when it was still too hot for particles to come together to make atoms. The physicists discovered that the droplets of quark-gluon plasma behave in a liquid-like manner expanding to form different geometric patterns – circles, ellipses and triangles – depending on the type of particle used. Shooting the gold with a proton creates a circular pattern;…

#GENDER INEQUALITY SEXIST MEN UNDERESTIMATE THEIR POWER Heterosexual men who hold sexist stereotypes may underestimate how much power they have in their romantic relationships, which could lead to increased aggression toward their female partners, researchers at the University of Auckland have found. Men with more hostile sexist views felt they had less power in their relationships, and were more aggressive toward their partners by being critical or unpleasant, the researchers said. BIASED RECRUITERS A study carried out at New York University has found there’s a bias against women for jobs requiring intellectual ability. The researchers suggests that the odds of someone deeming a woman suitable rather than a man were 25.3 percent lower when the job description mentioned intellectual ability. #DEPRESSION REGULAR OUTINGS GUARD AGAINST DEPRESSION IN THE ELDERLY Regular…

With TheGenealogist, tracing your family history has never been easier. With this magazine, you have received an exclusive invitation to sign up for a free, three-month Gold subscription to The Genealogist. It has all the resources and tools you need to help you begin investigating your personal heritage. STARTING YOUR VOYAGE The golden rule of genealogy is to work backwards. Ideally you’ll start with a date and a place for someone whose roots you’d like to explore. Family documents, such as letters, photographs, wills or newspaper cuttings, will also help. Remember: you will always need to corroborate what you find with actual records. BIRTHS, MARRIAGES & DEATHS Through birth, marriage and death indexes you can buy copies of original certificates from the General Register Office. The actual certificates open up…

British hi-fi company Cambridge Audio is celebrating its 50th birthday with an anything goes, no-holds-barred attempt to produce the best audio system it’s ever made. The result is The Edge, a £10,500 hi-fi system that looks slick and sounds flawless. It consists of three units: Edge A, an integrated amplifier; Edge NQ, a preamplifier and network player; and Edge W, the power amplifier. The focus of this three-year engineering project was sound first, everything else second. Cambridge Audio says that every component was selected through blind auditions, with no consideration for price, specification or measurement. One important feature is the short signal path, which reduces the chance of colour or distortion interfering with the sound. In the Edge W power amp, there are just 14 components (typically, there’d be 30…

San Francisco-based start-up Orbit Fab has taken a step towards building the first fuelling stations in space. The company recently sent an experiment to the ISS, to test a method of fluid transfer that could soon be used to refuel satellites in orbit. The experiment involves two ‘tankers’, one of which was launched filled with water. Onboard the ISS, the water will be transferred back and forth between the full tanker and the empty one. Tests will explore how the valves and pumps work, and examine the effects of weightlessness on slosh dynamics. Right now, the amount of fuel onboard a satellite when it’s launched determines how long it can stay operational. If satellites could be resupplied with fuel, they would be able to function for longer, allowing us to…

Normally it’s easy to tell asteroids and comets apart. Asteroids are solid lumps of rock and metal, capable of careering into planets and killing dinosaurs. You typically find them in the inner Solar System, particularly in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Comets, on the other hand, are icy bodies that form on the outskirts of the Solar System. On their rare forays towards the Sun, their frozen bodies react with solar radiation to create spectacular tails. An object known as Elst-Pizarro, however, refuses to be so neatly pigeon-holed. When it was first discovered in 1979, its orbit in the asteroid belt led to it being classified as an asteroid. Yet when it was examined more closely in 1996, it showed itself to have a tail – like a…

Of all the things leaving astronomers scratching their heads, fast radio bursts (FRBs) are particularly vexing. As their name suggests, they are sudden, rapid chirps of radio waves, often lasting mere milliseconds. The first one was picked up by our radio telescopes in 2007, and we’ve been scrambling to try and explain them ever since. These FRBs appear to be coming from outside the Milky Way, often hundreds of millions of light-years away. To be seen from such a distance, they must release as much energy in a fraction of a second as the Sun does in 80 years. Explanations range from colliding black holes to signals from extraterrestrial civilisations. Yet before astronomers had managed to figure them out, the Universe threw us another curveball. A burst known as FRB…

Back in 1976, a major medical breakthrough occurred. British researcher Michael Davies discovered that the cause of heart attacks was blood clots forming in the arteries on VJG›UWTHCEG›QH›VJG›JGCTV››*KU››PFKPI›PQ›FQWDV› saved the lives of many patients. Clot- and cholesterol-busting drugs, along with intricate artery-widening procedures, are now used routinely to prevent the artery blockages that deprive heart muscle of oxygen and cause heart attacks. “I think ending heart attacks is definitely something we can now work towards” Fifty years ago, the chance of a UK citizen dying of heart disease – the term that describes the buildup of fatty ‘plaques’ in the blood vessels on the surface of the heart – was four times higher than today, yet heart disease and heart attacks are still Western society’s biggest killer, taking the lives…

Back in 1935, Albert Einstein and colleagues hypothesised that quantum theory predicted a remote linkage between particles, called quantum entanglement. Einstein took an instant dislike to the idea, calling it “spooky action at a distance”. He hoped that the existence of quantum entanglement meant that quantum theory, which he wasn’t too keen on to begin with, was somehow flawed, or not yet fully understood. Quantum entanglement is a bizarre offshoot of quantum theory that says certain properties of a pair of particles become linked together in such a way that if you measure the value of one of them, then you instantaneously know the state of the other, even if they are separated by cosmic distances. Weird, eh? Sadly for Einstein, quantum entanglement has been demonstrated to be true many…

compulsion to act upon his sexual urges – was new. It was certainly plausible, his doctors concluded. The tumour was growing in the right lobe of his orbitofrontal cortex, which is a brain area linked to social behaviour, judgment and impulse control. Once the tumour was removed, his deviant urges apparently disappeared, and his drawing, writing and balance improved. He successfully completed a Sexaholics Anoymous programme, and was allowed home. But the following year, he began secretly collecting pornography again, and a brain scan showed the tumour was regrowing. Once more, he underwent surgery to have it removed. We often assume that paedophiles or people who commit other atrocious The tumour growing in the front of the schoolteacher’s brain was the size of an egg. It was the likely source…

In the late 1950s, researchers in Florida made a macabre and perplexing discovery: ants known as Formica archboldi were decking out their nests with the severed heads of much larger and more aggressive trap-jaw ants. Ever since the discovery, the bizarre behaviour has puzzled entomologists – just how are the ants capable of it? Now, by observing the ants with high-speed cameras placed in their nests, researchers at North Carolina State University think that they have the answer. F. archboldi are able to ‘disguise’ themselves as trap-jaw ants, as the cocktail of waxy substances that coats their bodies is chemically similar to that of two species of trap-jaw ant. This means they can then approach their prey unnoticed before paralysing them by spraying them with a concentrated burst of formic…

What is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)? OCD has two primary symptoms. First are the obsessive thoughts, which often revolve around fears of harm occurring to the person with OCD or their loved ones. The second symptom is the compulsive behaviours, which are a way the person tries to regulate their anxiety. Compulsions can be linked with the obsessions – somebody who fears contracting a disease might keep washing their hands. But the compulsions can also be unrelated: the person with OCD might think an event is more likely to happen if they fail to perform an action a certain number of times, for instance. For diagnosis purposes, we typically say the illness should interfere for at least an hour a day and cause significant impairment. Why study brain scans? It’s been…

Ancient people across Europe might have known more about the stars than we give them credit for, according to a new analysis of cave art from the University of Edinburgh. Some of the world’s oldest cave paintings are now thought to depict not wild animals as was previously thought, but constellations in the night sky. This suggests that in these artworks, people were using the positions of constellations to represent dates, and mark events such as comets hitting Earth. The researchers looked at Palaeolithic and Neolithic art featuring animal symbols at sites in Turkey, Spain, France and Germany. The examples of art they looked at varied in age by tens of thousands of years, but the system for representing dates with constellations appears to be constant throughout. Some of the…

Royole has brought the world’s first foldable smartphone to market, speeding past tech giants in the flexible-screen innovation race. It’s called the Royole FlexPai, and it’s a 7.8-inch device that can be used flat as a tablet, or folded in half to roughly the dimensions of a normal smartphone. One feature of flexible screens is that they’re virtually unbreakable (the Royole FlexPai can withstand being folded and unfolded 200,000 times). When folded, users can answer calls and take photos from both sides. It also has two cameras that can be bent to capture objects at unique angles. You can use the phone in single or split-screen mode, and even the ‘spine’ of the phone houses functions. Samsung offered a sneak peek of their upcoming foldable phone at a developer conference…

This solar-powered, virtually indestructible wearable measures UVB and UVA light to help users avoid the damaging effects of the sunshine. It was developed by researchers at Northwestern Medicine and Northwestern Engineering, and can even record light exposure in the water – perfect for long days playing at the beach. Sunlight passes through a window in the wearable, then strikes a tiny photodetector. This produces a minute electric current that’s proportional to the intensity of the light. The associated charge is stored, and that data is passed wirelessly to the user’s phone. The device communicates with the user’s phone to access weather and UV index information, and alerts them if they’ve been in the sun for too long. “UV light is ubiquitous and carcinogenic. Skin cancer is the most common type…

Could an enormous world be lurking in our midst? Astronomers are increasingly certain that there is a ninth planet orbiting the Sun, far out beyond Neptune – a so-called ‘Planet Nine’. It wouldn’t be the first time the roll call of the Sun’s orbiting worlds has been tweaked. When Ceres, the largest asteroid in the Solar System, was discovered in 1801, it was initially classified as a planet, but later downgraded. Pluto, too, was admitted to the planet club upon its discovery in 1930, only to be asked to leave in 2006 and relegated to dwarf planet status. The first clues that there is yet another member of the Sun’s planetary fraternity came in 2014 when American astronomer Dr Scott Sheppard found a small dwarf planet candidate called 2012 VP113,…

‘Oumuamua isn’t the only object that has got people talking about alien technology. Extraterrestrials have also been implicated in the mysterious dimming of Tabby’s Star. Located nearly 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, it is named after the astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. She was the lead author of a 2015 study which showed that the star occasionally rapidly drops in brightness by a whopping 22 per cent. The star’s overall brightness has also been seen to fade more slowly over several decades. The short-term variation was picked up by the Kepler space telescope, whose job it was to find alien planets by analysing the light of distant stars, looking for dips in their starlight as a planet passed in front of them. However, unlike the dimming of Tabby’s Star,…

Inside a small room at a high security hospital in Montreal, Canada, synthetic animations of naked children and adults are projected onto a screen. The men watching them are wired up to devices that track their eye-gaze, the electrical activity of their brains, and the flow of blood to their penises in order to build up a more accurate picture of their sexual preferences than they might be prepared to admit themselves. Each year, Dr Patrice Renaud and his team assess some 70 to 80 sex offenders this way, to help judges establish the risk they pose to society before deciding their sentences. For instance, not all child molesters are sexually attracted to children – sometimes their offence is prompted by another mental health problem – an important distinction to…

How does the phone network know where to send the signal when someone rings me? AMY ROUSE, VIA EMAIL While smartphones are pretty smart, their ability to make and receive calls is due primarily to the clever network they’re in touch with. Known as the cellular network, it’s made up of thousands of masts across the nation, each able to pick up transmissions from phones in its vicinity. By detecting whose phones are currently nearby (using each phone’s unique, 15-digit ‘IMSI’ code), they can send calls from other parts of the network. As we move, we enter the coverage area (‘cell’) of a different mast, which notes our presence in turn. The cellular network also means that phones don’t have to be powerful: they only have to communicate with the…

GOLDCREST These are one of the UK’s smallest birds, weighing just five to six grams – about the same as a 20p coin. They are native to the UK, but large numbers also migrate here from Scandinavia in the winter. They arrive at the same time as migratory woodcocks, so they were once thought to ride on the backs of the larger birds, earning them the nickname ‘woodcock pilots’. Lots of goldcrests nest in the UK, with over 600,000 pairs breeding here annually. WAXWING Large numbers of waxwings flock to the east coast of the UK in ‘waxwing winters’, when there aren’t enough berries to feed them in their native forests of northeast Europe. They have an endearing breeding ritual, where a male and female pass a berry back and…

I enjoyed your news story about healthy mice born from same-sex parents (December, p19). Others may disagree but I feel this is great research. I know the technique is years away from being adapted for humans but, as a bisexual, I love the idea that should I want a child with another woman, we could have one that carries both of our genes. To learn more about the science behind the technique, I read other articles about it and was surprised by the strong opposition shown towards this research. Comments posted online indicated that some people found it to be unethical or against God. It struck me that similar arguments were used in the 1970s regarding test-tube babies. But today we take IVF for granted as an option for couples…

The words ‘spider’ and ‘milk’ are not two that you’d generally expect to see in the same sentence. But that’s exactly what researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Yunnan have found: a spider mother feeding her offspring with her own milk. The behaviour was seen in a species of ant-mimicking jumping spider found in Taiwan called Toxeus magnus. The researchers first made the discovery after noticing a baby spider hanging onto its mother in the lab, in a way that reminded them of a baby mammal. Mothers producing milk for babies is usually behaviour confined to mammals, but some bird species can produce something known as ‘crop milk’ and use it to feed their young. The intensive parental behaviour seen in these spiders, however, is rare. Female spiders…

The first-ever complete reconstruction of the skeleton of Australia’s extinct marsupial lion reveals the animal to have been a fearsome ambush predator and an adept climber. An analysis of several sets of remains of Thylacoleo carnifex, including one nearly complete fossil, carried out at Flinders University has allowed researchers to reconstruct the animal’s entire skeleton for the first time. The extinct marsupial lion lived in Australia during the Pleistocene. It was first discovered in 1859 from skull and jaw fragments collected at Lake Colongulac, and was later sent to the British Museum in London. It has remained something of a mystery ever since. The new fossils, discovered in Komatsu Cave in Naracoorte and Flight Star Cave in the Nullarbor Plain, include the first known remains of the tail and collarbone…

This self-portrait was taken by NASA’s InSight lander using a camera attached to its robotic arm. It’s a composite image made up of 11 shots joined together to show the lander perched on the Elysium Planitia, a broad plain that straddles the Red Planet’s equator where InSight has been positioned since successfully landing in late November. In the coming months the InSight team will manoeuvre the lander’s instruments – a seismometer and a heat probe – into position in the surrounding area in order to begin taking measurements. “The near-absence of rocks, hills and holes means it’ll be extremely safe for our instruments,” said InSight’s principal investigator Bruce Banerdt. “This might seem like a pretty plain piece of ground if it weren’t on Mars, but we’re glad to see that.”…

BULKY BRILLIANCE This new VR headset is bulky and expensive, but it sports a 170° field of view and high-density OLED displays with 5K resolution. It detects your eyes and automatically adjusts its lenses so you can switch between users quickly. VRgineers XTAL Smart VR Headset $5,800 (£4,580 approx), vrgineers.com GROW SMARTER The Akarina 01 smart garden comes with efficient LED lights, so you can cultivate herbs and vegetables year-round. It has a super-clean design and uses only liquid fertiliser, so it won’t muddy up your kitchen units. Akarina 01 £169.99, akarina.uk ON THE WATCH This minimalist Swiss-movement analogue watch tracks heart rate, sleep, steps and other fitness metrics. Its low-energy design means that it’ll last 30 days on a single charge,…

Drones are already being used for smart farming, to monitor crops and sense changes in the environment, but most can only fly for 20 minutes before their batteries run out. Bumblebees, on the other hand, fly for hours and are capable of carrying loads equal to their bodyweight. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed backpacks for bumblebees that allow them to carry sensors while they go about their day’s foraging. The backpack weighs 102 milligrams and consists of a tiny chip loaded with a small, rechargeable battery that has enough juice for seven hours of use. The backpack has built-in sensors for monitoring temperature, humidity and light intensity. Because GPS is too power-intensive for the small battery, the backpacks are kitted out with receivers that communicate with antennas…

The pages of sci-fi books are full of alien interlopers secretly entering the Solar System to snoop on humanity as we emerge as a technologically capable race. So it’s no surprise that excitement started to build when, on 19 October 2017, the astronomer Dr Robert Weryk spotted an object whizzing through the Solar System while using the Pan-STARRS VGNGUEQRG›CV›*CNGCMCNÞ›1DUGTXCVQT[››*CYCKK› Dubbed ‘Oumuamua (after the Hawaiian for ‘scout’), this object is extremely elongated, possibly up to a kilometre long but not more than 167 metres wide, making it look like a space cucumber. +VoU›VTCXGNNKPI›UQ›HCUV›VJCV›VJGTGoU›PQ›YC[›KV›ECP› DG›ITCXKVCVKQPCNN[›DQWPF›D[›VJG›5WP››6JG›QPN[› conclusion is it’s an interloper that formed outside our Solar System and subsequently trekked all the way here. Estimates suggest it entered the Solar System in the Victorian era, but astronomers don’t know exactly how long it…

Imagine drifting off to sleep when, still with your eyes closed, you’re suddenly startled by an intense flash of light. This is exactly what some astronauts have reported when passing through the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) – a region of the Earth’s magnetic field also known as space’s Bermuda Triangle. Scientists believe it is linked to the Van Allen radiation belts – two rings of charged particles trapped in our planet’s magnetic grasp. Our magnetic field is not perfectly aligned to the rotation axis of the Earth, which means these Van Allen belts are tilted. This leads to an area 200km above the South Atlantic where these radiation belts come closest to the Earth’s surface. When the International Space Station passes through this area, computers can stop working, and astronauts…

1 Tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, are a group of eight-legged animals. They are about 0.5mm long, and can be found around the world in a wide range of environments. 2 Tardigrade means ‘slow paced’. It was originally an adjective applied to tortoises, but since 1800 it has been the name of these microscopic creatures. 3 Tardigrades can cope with extreme high and low temperatures that would kill other organisms. Some species can survive exposure to -272.15°C. 4 If a tardigrade is dehydrated and loses up to 99 per cent of its water content, its living processes can be near-suspended for several years before being brought back to life. 5 In 2007, dehydrated tardigrades were taken up into orbit and exposed to the vacuum and radiation…

Can you be guilty for a murder you committed in your sleep? In 2008, when Brian Thomas strangled his wife, Christine, he claimed to have been in the throes of a nightmare about a ‘boy racer’, who he was fighting off after he broke into the campervan that they were sleeping in. At trial, the judge said Thomas bore no responsibility for his actions, and he was released. He was, however, advised to seek treatment for his ‘night terrors’; a disorder in which people experience sudden and intense dread during sleep, and which, in the most severe cases, is associated with injury to themselves or other people. Thomas was also a frequent sleepwalker. In such cases, perpetrators can use a legal defence called automatism, which means they had no control…

01 SPOT BIRDS RSPB BIG GARDEN BIRDWATCH 26-28 JANUARY 2019 RSPB.ORG.UK/BIRDWATCH Put your winter boots on and make a cup of hot coffee; it’s time for the 40th RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch. Over the past four decades, enthusiasts have popped outside for an hour in mid-winter to document the birds that land in their gardens. (If you can’t face the cold, you can stay inside and watch from a window!) Since 1979, 130 million birds have been counted in what’s become the largest garden wildlife survey in the world. Plus, the Big Garden Birdwatch provides invaluable information to the scientists at the RSPB. It alerted them to the increasing numbers of collared doves and wood pigeons, but declining populations of song thrushes and starlings. Among other things, the RSPB uses…