Innehållsförteckning för New Year 2025 från BBC Science Focus Magazine

BEST. SELFIE. EVER. MONT MERCOU, MARS 2021 Launched in 2011, NASA's Curiosity Rover was sent to search for signs that life could have existed on Mars. It has now spent well over a decade on the Red Planet, carrying out experiments with its onboard laboratory. While Curiosity isn't heading back to Earth any time soon, the take-home message from its Martian campaign is that the planet once had free-flowing water and the kind of chemistry suitable for supporting life, namely microbes. One of Curiosity's most memorable moments came in 2021, when the six-wheeled wanderer took this cheeky selfie while posing on a small outcrop of rock that scientists named Mont Mercou, after the French mountain. It's perhaps not quite the ‘moment’ that it first appears, though. To create the selfie,…

Dinosaurs enjoyed a long reign as Earth's dominant species, but for a long time, scientists wondered why it took them 30 million years to reach their apex status. Now, a new study of their fossilised faeces and vomit may have found the answer. According to the study, published in the journal Nature, it was herbivore dinosaurs bulking up on plants that paved the way for the biggest dinosaurs, such as the sauropods and the carnivorous Tyrannosaurus rex. The fossilised faeces and vomit (collectively known as bromalites) were dated to around 230–200 million years ago – about 100 million years before the reign of T. rex, and 150 million years before the Chicxulub asteroid hit Earth. Using the bromalites, the scientists pieced together a ‘food web’ that essentially showed who ate…

37 trillion The number of cells in the human body 100 million The number of human cells the researchers have mapped so far 10,000 The number of people the cells used to compile the Human Cell Atlas have come from. Researchers hope the final Atlas will include billions of cells 1.6 million The number of cells needed to create an intricate map of the gut The image on the left might resemble an estuary system painted in neon colours, but it's actually an extreme close-up of your small intestine. The organ is around 7m (almost 23ft) long and plays a key role in breaking down the food that you eat. The image is part of a project known as the Human Cell Atlas: a map of the human body on…

TISSUE ENGINEERING Sir Mark Miodownik Professor of Materials & Society, UCL Author of It's a Gas: The Magnificent and Elusive Elements that Expand Our World Going to the dentist and having a synthetic resin filling is fine, but it's not as good as a real tooth. But what if we could grow real teeth in the lab from a person's own stem cells and implant them back into their mouth? This sounds like science fiction, but tissue engineering is a breakthrough technology that's already being used to grow human tissue, through ‘scaffold technology’. Scaffolds are porous materials that support stem cells as they divide and grow into new tissues. Artificial ears, trachea (windpipes) and bone have been grown this way and successfully implanted into human patients. Because the implanted tissues…

It's a new year and – as a few thousand vaguely patronising Instagram posts will tell you – it's the perfect time to turn over a new leaf. Start afresh, be better. But where to start? Well, you could adopt a new hobby or make a meagre New Year's resolution. Or maybe you could get much more radical and change your personality. In scientific terms, personality is simply a set of traits that reflect how you tend to think, feel and behave. It might sound harsh or confronting to suggest changing your personality, but many surveys suggest that most people wish to alter at least some of their traits. Psychologists largely recognise there are five key personality traits: openness to experience (your willingness to try new things); conscientiousness (your selfdiscipline,…

Venus is the brightest planet seen from Earth, so intense it casts shadows that can be seen with the naked eye under the right conditions. It's an inferior planet meaning its orbit is smaller than Earth's. From our vantage point, it appears to move from one side of the Sun to the other, barely escaping the evening or morning twilight when at the extremes of this movement. Currently it's in the evening sky, an unmissable sight much brighter than anything else in the vicinity, save for the Moon when it's about. If you're struggling to see it, let the sky darken a bit, then it'll be obvious above the southwest horizon. Venus reaches a position called greatest eastern elongation on 10 January 2025, a point in its orbit where, from…

Not getting many replies to your text messages? A new study suggests it could be down to a common texting habit: abbreviating words. While most texters use abbreviations in their messages, research carried out at Stanford University, in the US, suggests it could signal that you're not fully invested in the conversation you're having. The researchers discovered that people who used abbreviations in their text messages were less likely to receive replies, and the use of them could cut conversations short. “Our findings are especially relevant when we want to appear more sincere and strengthen social ties, such as at the beginning of a relationship or when we need to make a good impression,” said lead researcher David Fang, a doctoral student at Stanford University. The research, published in the…

On 13 November 2024, four witnesses appeared before the Joint Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability of the US Congress for a session of testimony about so-called ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)’. This is the necessary rebrand of the term ‘UFO’ – people spouting those three letters in the past were hardly seen as credible, or worthy of testifying in front of the US government. The four witnesses were the former commander of the US Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, Rear Admiral Dr Tim Gallaudet; retired director of the Pentagon's former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo; investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger; and former NASA associate administrator Michael Gold. The four submitted written testimony ahead of the hearing. Shellenberger also filed an allegedly original document from an unnamed whistleblower about a programme…

GLADYS MOORE, BATH HOW CAN I IDENTIFY MY PSYCHOLOGICAL BLIND SPOT? In the 1950s two American psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, proposed a way of thinking about psychological blind spots – things you don't know about yourself – that they called the ‘Johari Window’ (the term is a combination of their first names). Picture a two-by-two grid, like a window. In one quadrant of the Johari Window is all the things you know about yourself and that other people know about you. Luft and Ingham called this ‘free activity’, in reference to all the information about you that's freely shared and available. In another quadrant is all the stuff you know about yourself, but that other people don't know about – you could think of these as your private…

Assuming you're a human being, you have exactly the same number of abs as everybody else: two. They're called the rectus abdominis, a pair of flat, parallel muscles that are commonly spotted on underwear models, pro athletes and anyone else with very little belly fat. Now, there are other abdominal muscles – shoutout to the transversus abdominis, plus the external and internal obliques. But let's assume your question is about the hallowed ‘six-pack’, those midsection muscles that look like an anatomical ice tray. Those aren't six muscles at all, just the regular rectus abdominis that we're all born with. They are, however, divided by connective tissue known as tendinous intersections. This tissue crosses over the front of the rectus abdominis, a bit like the string that a butcher uses to…

PENCILS AT THE READY! ACROSS 1 Pressure swelling when somewhat overweight (5) 4 60s group making entrances (5) 8 Behold copper getting married to doctor (5) 9 Tonne transported by railway – it's a sign (2,5) 10 Mine is inside ship itself (3) 11 TV detective's code (5) 12 Ingot found among stolen capital (6) 14 Coach to notice timepiece (8,5) 17 Fellow is concealing a company – disaster (6) 19 Clever, removing front side (5) 22 Deploy stratagem, but not initially (3) 23 Enamoured of small glove (7) 24 Trust in a woman (5) 25 Republican, before long, is furious (5) 26 City guides, by the sound of it (5) DOWN 1 Complies unexpectedly in debate (8) 2 Cruel sort of complaint (5) 3 Ceremony that is returned to one doomed city (7) 4 Daughter finds small bishop a nerd (5) 5 Rampaging on a riot in…

Even though we can't feel it, most of us are aware that our planet spins like a top during its interminable journey around the Sun. Rather than revolving about a vertical axis, however, Earth has always been off-kilter, spinning about an axis (or pole of rotation) that's tilted at 23.44°. The amount of tilt – also known as obliquity – is never constant, and displays natural short-term oscillations and longer-term cycles. Earth's tilt can also be changed by shifting huge amounts of mass around the planet. And this is happening right now, on an extraordinary scale, due to us. As global heating drives the melting of the polar ice sheets, it decants colossal volumes of water into the oceans. In a recent paper, scientists have revealed that this redistribution of…

For the first time ever, scientists have captured a zoomed-in image of a star outside the Milky Way. Known as WOH G64, the colossal red supergiant was pictured 160,000 light-years away shedding its outer layers, the prelude to a supernova explosion. To date, experts have only taken zoomed-in, detailed photos of 25 stars within our galaxy. “This star is one of the most extreme of its kind and any drastic change may bring it closer to an explosive end,” said Dr Jacco van Loon, co-author of the study that reported the observation. The dying star lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that's about one-third the size of the Milky Way. “Observing a star within our galaxy in such detail would be remarkable, but it's even more extraordinary…

The cosmetic industry is big business. In 2023, the European market was worth €96 billion, with the UK being the fourth-biggest consumer, spending €11 billion, after Italy, France and the leader, Germany. More and more of us, both men and women, are routinely using cosmetics and the trend shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. But what are we actually putting on our hair and skin, and could it potentially cause us harm? The ingredients used in cosmetics are tightly regulated in the European Union and many other areas. Only approved ingredients can be used and this list is regularly updated based on emerging scientific evidence. The process for banning an ingredient from cosmetics in Europe is that the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), which is responsible for the regulation…

THE METAVERSE If you don't know what the metaverse is (no judgment because it was horribly sold), it was a word that Mark Zuckerberg and roughly four other people used to describe loosely connected immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), open-world gaming, digital avatars and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The internet 3.0, if you will. Zuckerberg imagined a terribly animated dystopia where we could work and socialise on a hybrid plane of semi-digital existence. We would have avatars to attend meetings for us, but for some reason, they wouldn't have legs. You could buy a mansion made of pixels, not bricks. Pop-up notifications would bombard our retinas via AR glasses that superimposed online content over the real world. And thanks to VR, we could do anything or…

Take a look at a Mary River turtle and it's plain to see why they used to be so popular as pets. Tufts of grassy-green algae on their heads give them a look that's more ‘aged punk rocker’ than regular reptile. These freshwater turtles are endemic to the Mary River in Queensland, Australia, where, 60 years ago, their nests were raided for the pet trade. Thumb-sized hatchlings were sold in pet shops in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney as ‘saw-shelled snappers’ or ‘penny-turtles’. The trade depleted the turtles in the wild and pushed the species towards extinction. Despite being one of Australia's largest freshwater turtles, with 40cm-long (15in) shells, scientists had never seen them in the wild. It was only the pet turtles that brought the species to the attention…

The human brain is a remarkable lump of electrified glob – the most complex object in the known Universe, or so we're told. But every now and again, especially at night, don't you wish it would just shut up? Racing thoughts are one of the most common symptoms when we can't sleep. The lights go out, our heads hit the pillow, but our frontal cortex isn't done for the day. Egged on by caffeine, anxiety or everyday stress, our brains start acting like a pinball machine as thoughts ricochet from one place to another. Psychologists call it rumination or mental perturbance. It's a repetitive pattern of negative thinking, and some of it is not even conscious. We dwell on mistakes, over-analyse the day, worry about tomorrow. It's worse in people…