Floating around in microgravity inside a spacecraft might look like fun, but it can do nasty things to your body. With the current enthusiasm for crewed space flight and particularly NASA’s plan to send astronauts to Mars, there is a need to find ways to counteract the damaging effects of a lack of gravity.
Cellular Hacking, Motion Camouflage, and Life on Mars.
Download pdf
Back in February, Martin Luck started a debate over what was natural and what was not. This month, Lewis Dartnell takes up the baton.
Download full pdf
Judging by their self-confident lyrics about women and wealth, rappers consider themselves quite a special bunch. And now it’s been proven mathematically that indeed they are, at least as far as their interaction network is concerned. An analysis of the network you get by connecting any two rappers that have performed together shows not only a remarkably close-knit community, but also another feature rarely found in naturally arising networks.
Read full article on +plus
In the last issue Lewis Dartnell explained how chaos in the brain is not only unavoidable but also beneficial. Now he tells us why the same is true for our solar system and sends us on a journey that has been travelled by comets and spacecraft.
Read full article on +plus
Adventure sports such as abseiling and skydiving attract enough scare stories, and bungee jumping is no exception. Everyone’s probably heard about the lady killed whilst jumping from a 60m high bridge in Australia because she’d accidentally been tied to a rope 80m long. Or the newly-weds that tried a tandem jump on their honeymoon, but didn’t hold on tightly enough on the way down and cracked face-first back together at the end of the rope. Fortunately, most of these are urban myths and survive only due to their pub-gossip potential rather than their accuracy.
Continue reading
In countless B-movies giant alien insectoids invade the Earth and wreak havoc, trampling through cities and tearing down buildings. Now we puny earthlings are hoping to turn the tables, and send insect-like robots to investigate the surface of Mars.
Saying that someone is a chaotic thinker might seems like an insult – but, according to Lewis Dartnell, it could be that the mathematical phenomenon of chaos is a crucial part of what makes our brains work.
Read full article on +plus
Nanotechnology has invaded the fuel tank. But forget Prince Charles’s “grey goo” and science fiction tales of rampaging swarms of nano-robots. This invader is a harmless diesel fuel additive, and just a teaspoon in your tank can not only increase your fuel economy by up to 10 per cent, but significantly cut harmful exhaust emissions.
Download pdf
The main supposition of John Gray’s hypothesis, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”, seems to be that the two sexes followed largely independent evolutionary paths on Earth’s planetary neighbours before migrating to their current terrestrial territory. The theory has come to be known (well, by us at any rate) as the multi-planetary hypothesis for the origin of sexual dimorphism. This resettlement was very recent on an evolutionary timescale, so that neither males nor females have had sufficient time to re-adapt to the new conditions, and so retain many behavioural and morphological phenotypic traits that were adaptations to the original environments of their ancestral homes. Here, we critically analysed this claim that each gender’s ancestral home predetermines attributes of their personality.
Download full pdf
Despite its ubiquity, text messaging is still infuriatingly fiddly. Mobile buttons seem to have been designed for only the nimblest of virtuoso-pianist fingers, and a hurried txt often results in a confused mess of superfluous letters. Even if every care is taken over precision-pressing, there is still the spectre of the predictive text synonym (coined here as the textonym or ‘txtonym’) to contend with – the set of words in English that are made up of the same sequence of key-presses. For example, pub and rub are both ‘spelt’ 7‑8‑2.
Here, an exhaustive search of all possible txtonyms is performed, in order to warn people of the worst pitfalls to be avoided as well as show up some of the more humorous coincidences.
Download full pdf
Dr Who’s TARDIS may not have been quite so far-fetched an idea after all. A canister filled with new ‘nanocubes’ is able to hold several times more gas than an empty one. These crystals were developed by scientists working for chemical giant BASF, and are fantastically porous. Just a thimbleful has the surface area of a football pitch. What’s more, they are formed in a reaction so simple it could be done in a school chemistry lab. The crystals represent part of the company’s commitment to the emerging field of nanotechnology – materials on the scale of a billionth of a meter. In the case of their nanocubes, it is only the pores that are nano-scale – the crystals themselves are the size of salt grains.
Download pdf