Innehållsförteckning för September 2020 från BBC Science Focus Magazine

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Cold shoulders I thought the ‘Cold comfort’ article (July, p74) was very interesting! A cold shower - about 7˚C, as cold as the tap allows - is now part of my daily routine, which I believe has had a profound effect on my health. One of the benefits is a greater mental toughness: once I’ve convinced myself that the cold blast will be worth it and endured the freezing, breathless few minutes that follow, I’ve overcome two psychological obstacles, which makes for a great start to the day! Do you think that regular cold showers could be as beneficial as a dip in the sea, as adapting to the shock of cold water is key to both scenarios? Nick Griffiths, Cardiff I talked to environmental physiologist Mike Tipton about this exact…

From an anatomical point of view, we’re pretty different from birds and reptiles, but it turns out that our tears share remarkable similarities. Tears are not simply made up of water, but contain other substances like sodium, calcium, urea, chloride and proteins. While tears play an important role in eye health, until now they had only been analysed in a few mammal species. A team led by Prof Arianne Oriá, from Brazil’s Federal University of Bahia, wanted to get a better picture of how tears work in other animals, so they studied various reptile and bird species, including macaws, owls, hawks, a type of parrot, caimans, tortoises and sea turtles. “Although birds and reptiles have different structures that are responsible for tear production, some components of this fluid are present…

Thanks to their superior sense of smell, dogs have been trained to sniff out various diseases, including diabetes, malaria and tuberculosis. Now, new preliminary research led by the University of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover, suggests that dogs can also detect when people are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19. Currently, in order to detect COVID-19, a swab taken from someone’s nose or throat is sent for testing. But this method can be time-consuming and costly, particularly in developing countries, which means that people are often only tested if they are showing symptoms. According to the research, it took one week to train eight sniffer dogs to detect the virus, by presenting them with saliva samples and swabs taken from COVID-19 patients, as well as healthy people with no history…

WHAT DID THEY DO? Psychologists at the University of McGill had more than 600 students with an average age of 21 listen to a 45-minute audio recording that was designed to induce hypnosis. Next, they were given 12 verbal suggestions such as ‘you will momentarily be unable to open your eyes’. They were then taken out of hypnosis, and asked to complete a questionnaire detailing how many of the prompts they had followed. Next, they answered questions that assessed how much their phone use disrupts their normal lives and were given a score on the Smartphone Addiction Scale. WHAT DID THEY FIND? The higher a participant’s score on the Smartphone Addiction Scale, the more likely they were to follow the hypnotic suggestions. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? There was a small…

The race for a COVID-19 vaccine is hotting up. There are currently over 150 candidate vaccines in development around the world, with around 30 being tested on humans. But for some scientists, the progress isn’t fast enough. There are growing calls for so-called ‘human challenge studies’, which would deliberately infect volunteers with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, with the aim of speeding up vaccine development by, according to one paper, as much as several months, potentially saving thousands of lives. This would be a big ethical leap from current vaccine trials. Currently, a candidate COVID-19 vaccine goes through three phased trials. In the final trial (phase III), up to 10,000 volunteers are given either the candidate vaccine or a placebo. The volunteers then go about their daily lives, and the scientists wait…

Smart doorbells use a camera, speaker, microphone, motion sensor and internet connection to detect visitors and activity on your doorstep, meaning you can stay in touch with your home via your smartphone, wherever you are. The safety and security benefits are obvious. There’s no need to answer the door without knowing who’s there, you can protect packages while you’re away, you can direct delivery drivers, and see who got back home and when. And, during this time of social distancing, a smart doorbell is an essential tool for the vulnerable and elderly.…

As I stagger out of bed in the mornings and begin my ritual of resistance exercises (press-ups, squats, sit-ups and the dreaded plank) the one thing that keeps me going is the promise of a lovely cup of tea when I get downstairs. After my first cup I take the dog for a walk, soak up the sunshine, then sip my first coffee of the morning, normally drunk black. Apart from the flavour, what I love about tea and coffee is that they’re stimulants, rich with the world’s most widely consumed psychoactive drug, caffeine. A white, crystalline powder, it’s produced by plants to protect them against insect attack. Not only do tea and coffee perk me up in the mornings, but there is strong evidence that caffeine consumers enjoy a…

FUTURELEARN.COM FutureLearn says 10 million people have studied the courses on its online platform since it launched almost eight years ago. When it began, in December 2012, it was partnered with 21 UK and two international universities; now FutureLearn is affiliated with over 175 institutions all around the world. There are over 600 free short courses available on the site, 105 of which cover science, engineering and maths-related topics. You can try your hand at understanding the weather, data science in the games industry, and medicinal chemistry. The courses are led by academics and aimed at school or college students looking for a taste of undergraduate study, but anyone can sign up to participate. Most of the courses are two to four weeks long and require less than five hours…

IF NAPS ARE MEANT TO BE GOOD FOR ME, WHY DO I ALWAYS FEEL SO RUBBISH AFTERWARDS? Sleep scientists have found lots of benefits for naps. Napping can help to reduce stress, boostthe immune system and improve our mood. Post-lunch naps can help us to stay alert and improve our performance at work, and there’s even evidence, albeit from small studies, supporting the ‘nappuccino’, where people drink coffee just before a nap - and reportedly wake up feeling recharged from the combination of caffeine and sleep. Despite all this, naps are not for everyone. Many people wake up feeling groggy. This state is known as ‘sleep inertia’, and it’s more likely to happen when we nap for longer than 20 minutes. It’s not known exactly what causes sleep inertia, but…

THERE IS NO ‘RIGHT’ WAY TO SIT. Interviewers expect you to sit up straight, and if you’re on a date, leaning forwards can make you seem interested. But when it comes to preventing aches and pains, there is no ‘right way’ to sit. SLOUCHING ISN’T BAD. People think that sitting upright is good and slouching is bad, but its a myth. There’s no evidence to support this. A big study in Australia, for example, found that if you follow people through life, the ones who develop chronic back pain aren’t the ones who were slouching or who had poor posture. Genetics, anxiety, sleep patterns and stress all play a role. SITTING UP STRAIGHT ISN’T NICE. If I ask a room of people to show me the right way to sit,…

This matters NEW YORK, USA Weighing 1,200 tonnes and as large as a house, this is the Solenoidal Tracker (STAR). One of four experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), it tracks the thousands of particles produced by ion collisions at the RHIC, which is capable of colliding ions as atomically heavy as gold. These collisions have resulted in the creation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which has been hailed as the ‘perfect liquid’. Reaching temperatures of four trillion degrees Celsius - many thousands of times hotter than the centre of the Sun - this perfect liquid provides a rare glimpse of the hot, dense states of matter that existed microseconds after the Big Bang. As the Universe cooled, the quarks and their gluon bonds coalesced into subatomic protons and…

During spring and early summer as the seasonal temperatures rise, shallow pools of water form on the surface of Arctic sea ice. These so-called ‘melt ponds’ are important for the ice’s albedo - a measure of how much sunlight is absorbed by the ice and how much is reflected into space. This is key because larger areas of melt ponds accelerate the melting. They are darker than sea ice and so absorb more solar heat, which causes the melt ponds to grow, creating a larger area to absorb even more heat. Now, an international team of researchers, headed up by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), have used a cutting-edge climate modelling system developed by the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre to estimate that intense spring sunshine has created a larger…

Your next home could be made of mud! By extracting the clay component from soil and mixing it with sodium silicate, researchers from Texas and San Francisco were able to produce a material that could flow easily through a 3D printer, but hardens quickly to form a strong, load-bearing structure. The composition of a soil sample can vary greatly, containing any mixture of clay, rock and organic material. So, the researchers aimed to develop a tool that would turn any type of soil into a useable ‘ink’ for 3D printing. They say that after a quick analysis of the soil, their toolkit could figure out how much sodium silicate was needed to be added to the sample, in order to turn it into a printable building material. The ability to…

Somewhere in the Universe, it is possible that there could be a star that’s orbited by seven habitable planets, an astrobiologist at the University of California, Riverside, has calculated. The search for life in outer space is typically focused on what scientists call the ‘habitable zone’ – the area around a star in which an orbiting planet could have liquid water oceans and conditions for life as we know it. Dr Stephen Kane and his team created a model system in which they simulated planets of various sizes orbiting their stars. They used an algorithm that accounted for gravitational forces exerted by the host star and any orbiting planets, and tested how they would interact with each other over millions of years. They found it is possible for some stars…

What’s the deal? When Honda revealed its Urban Concept car back in 2017, it was an instant hit. The design was an impeccable example of retro-futurism, with end-to-end touchscreens mounted onto faux wood in front of old-fashioned bench seats. By some miracle, that original design survived its journey to the real world and we now have the rather cute Honda-e, Honda’s first proper electric car. It costs £26,160-£28,660, including the government grant. How is it different from other electric vehicles (EVs)? Let’s get this out of the way: the range is between 204 and 219km (127 to 136 miles), depending on the model. If you’ve experienced range anxiety, that figure will put you on edge. But with the average car journey clocking in at 12.5km (7.8 miles), there ought to…

THAT TAKES GUTS GLASS FROG Tropical forests are teeming with predators for whom frogs are top of the menu, so these amphibians have understandably evolved some nifty defences. Glass frogs, which inhabit the humid cloud forests of South and Central America, rely on a novel form of camouflage: they bare all, or almost all. As this studio photo of Hyalinobatrachium aureoeuttatum shows, their see-through skin offers up an eyeful of beating heart, blood vessels, bones and digestive tract. But why display your innards? After all, predators can still see you. A recent study revealed the secret to their curious camouflage, and it lies not so much in their body, but their legs. As the most translucent part of the animals, their legs match the brightness of the background foliage. By…

WHY IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SO POPULAR TODAY? Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since the birth of computers in the 1950s. The original pioneers dreamed of making ‘computer brains’ that could perform the same kinds of tasks as our own brains, such as playing chess or translating languages. But hopes that AI would quickly reach human-level intelligence didn’t come to fruition, and AI soon fell out of favour. Over the following decades, technology improved at an exponential rate. Computers got faster, the internet was invented, and researchers made new advances in AI algorithms. In the last decade, AI has started solving many of the problems that we always dreamed it could. This has prompted billions of dollars of investment from companies, governments and financiers, and many major organisations now embrace…

The woolly rhinoceros was wiped out by warming temperatures, not hunting, a new study suggests. About the same size as today’s white rhino, the woolly rhinoceros was covered with thick, reddish-brown hair, and thrived throughout Europe, northern Asia and Siberia. They became extinct at around the same time as other prehistoric megafauna, including the woolly mammoth and the cave lion. It was previously proposed that hunting by humans had caused their demise, however, this hypothesis doesn’t match up with recent discoveries. “It was initially thought that humans appeared in northeastern Siberia 14,000 to 15,000 years ago, around when the woolly rhinoceros went extinct,” explained study leader Prof Love Dalen, an evolutionary geneticist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden. “But recently, there have been several discoveries of much older…

YOUR STUDY IS ABOUT ‘TARGETED DREAM INCUBATION’. WHAT EXACTLY IS THAT? AH: In short, the idea is that you could target specific content to be incubated in dreams, which is a kind of cheap explanation, but there’s been a long history of trying to have subjects dream of something specific. Partially, the interest is clinical – we want to avoid nightmares, for example. Partially, it’s therapeutic – we want people to help work through the more emotional side of some content. And partially it’s memory-based – if you dream about something, you’re going to remember it better when you wake up. So there are all kinds of reasons to have someone dream about something specific, but it’s failed pretty consistently for the past hundred years. What people have tried to…

Who would you pick as the world’s greatest-ever athlete? Usain Bolt, Serena Williams, Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, or Michael Phelps? No doubt they have all dominated their sports at various times, but what about Joey Chestnut? Most people have probably never heard of him, but for the two million viewers who tune in to what must be the weirdest event of the US sporting calendar, Joey ‘Jaws’ Chestnut is a bona fide legend. Chestnut is the undisputed champion of competitive eating and has utterly dominated the hundred-year-old ‘Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest’ - an event that has become the must-see event for fans of Major League Eating everywhere (yes, seriously). Every summer, frankfurter-guzzling heavyweights fly in from all corners of the globe to…

Ford Mustang Mach-E 1400 Ford’s racing division’s new electric car, the Mustang Mach-E, is a 1,400bhp monster, proving that it can be just as thrilling as the company’s fossil-fuel- powered racing cars. Lotus Evija Okay, we’ll ignore the name, since Lotus says this hyper car will offer 1,972bhp. Production started this year, so expect to see one parked outside your local Tesco Express soon. Rivan R1T Rivian wants to “keep the world adventurous” with its electric pick-up truck. When it arrives, it’ll offer 644km (400 miles) of range and around 750bhp plugged into all four wheels.…

WHY IS COVID-19 ABLE TO AFFECT PEOPLE SO DIFFERENTLY? The wide range of outcomes of being infected with COVID-19-from showing no symptoms at all, to rashes, severe respiratory illness and death - reflects the huge variation found in people’s immune systems. How the immune system responds to a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is influenced by many factors, from our genes and general health to the other pathogens we’ve encountered in the past. With COVID-19, there seems to be a critical period during which the immune system either mounts a protective response, stifling the virus and slowing its spread in the body, or a dysfunctional, inflammatory response, where the body starts to attack itself. As part of a healthy immune reaction, local white blood cells recognise the virus as foreign and…

LEANNE HEPBURN Coral researcher “There are organisms that build reefs up, such as coral and some algae, and there are organisms that break reefs down, such as coral-nibbling parrotfish and coral-eroding sponges. We study reefs in Indonesia, the Seychelles and the Persian Arabian Gulf, and look at the differences between reef production and erosion. We’re worried, for example, that if sea level rises and erosion outstrips production that some reefs could effectively drown. We go on field trips every year and get teams of local divers to help us with our work. We measure everything from water quality and temperature to coral complexity and parrotfish numbers. Overall, I just love being underwater. We don’t just collect data; we try to find ways to translate that data into science policy and…

HARVEY SMITH IN AN ATOM, WHAT FILLS THE SPACE BETWEEN PARTICLES? At school, we’re taught to picture atoms as a kind of mini solar system, with electrons as tiny ‘planets’ whizzing around the nucleus. So it’s natural to think that most of the atom is nothing but empty space. However, quantum theory has revealed a far stranger reality. Rather than solid objects orbiting the nucleus, the electrons are more like fuzzy clouds whose density varies from place to place. This cloud-like nature of electrons means that there’s a probability of them being anywhere in the atom, making it meaningless to talk of empty space lying between them and the nucleus. RM EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO questions@sciencefocus.com OR TWEET US @sciencefocusqa WINNER Harvey wins a bundle of six classic science fiction…

ACROSS 1 Some information attorney must return without having succeeded (5) 4 Six leave, having registered sign (5) 8 Ingredient of bloomer, say (5) 9 Cheerful, left sand around hilly terrain (7) 10 Encourage farm produce (3) 11 Drive back to see film about parking (5) 12 Articles right behind part of flower (6) 14 Vehicle, once abrupt, arranged for waste management (6,7) 17 One brie, a variety from a peninsula (6) 19 Audible is audibly permitted (5) 22 Not going back a great deal (3) 23 Imagine endless choice - true confusion (7) 24 Cruel sort of complaint (5) 25 Scandinavian has time for an Italian writer (5) 26 Small desire for sudden movement (5) DOWN 1 Disagree, lacking energy, perform and spread out (8) 2 Tenor upsets poor…