Science (Page 45)

Jonny Bairstow in full flow. Nic Redhead via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Jonny Bairstow played the “innings of a lifetime” when he scored the second fastest century by an England cricketer in a Test match to help his team beat New Zealand, currently the world’s top-rated Test team. To find an English cricketer who scored a Test century more quickly you have to go back to Gilbert Jessop in 1902. Anyone who watched Bairstow bat could see that he was “in the zone”. But what does this mean? How do we know that someone is in the zone – or, more technically, experiencing “flow”? And how do they get there? Within sport, athletes achieving top performances often report being “inContinue Reading

As the latest Jurassic World film hits cinemas, we’re re-running a story from The Conversation Weekly’s archives about what dinosaurs really looked liked – and how our understanding of their appearance keeps evolving. Since the release of the first Jurassic Park film nearly 30 years ago, scientists have learnt a lot more about what dinosaurs looked like and how they moved through the world. Some of those findings, including which dinosaurs had feathers and what colour they were, have made it into the new Jurassic World Dominion film – although it doesn’t get everything right. New fossil discoveries and techniques for examining them continue to change the way we understand dinosaurs. In this episode we hear from Maria McNamara, professorContinue Reading

The RoboFly University of Washington Allow me to take you on a trip down my memory lane. As a young lad, a film I saw captured my imagination: Fantastic Voyage, a 1966 release about people shrunk to microscopic size and sent into the body of an injured scientist to repair his brain. The idea struck a chord with me. I envisioned one day science would be able to create some sort of miniature machine that performs medical procedures from the inside. Fast forward several decades into the 21st century, when I started my career as a robotics researcher taking inspiration from neuroscience to implement artificial perception systems. I thought of robots as machines that range from the size of aContinue Reading

Gaia mapping the stars of the Milky Way. ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier, CC BY-NC The European Space Agency’s (Esa) Gaia mission has just released new data. The Gaia satellite was launched in 2013, with the aim of measuring the precise positions of a billion stars. In addition to measuring the stars’ positions, speeds and brightness, the satellite has collected data on a huge range of other objects. There’s a lot to make astronomers excited. Here are five of our favourite insights that the data might provide. 1. Secrets of our galaxy’s past and future Everything in space is moving, and the stars are no exception. The latest release of data contains the largest three-dimensional map of the Milky WayContinue Reading

Many types of people feel disengaged with technology Shutterstock We take it for granted that technology brings people closer together and improves our access to essential products and services. If you can’t imagine life without your smartphone, it’s easy to forget that people who can’t or don’t want to engage with the latest technology are being left behind. For example, there have recently been reports that cashless payment systems for car parking in the UK are seeing older drivers unfairly hit with fines. This has led to calls for the government to intervene. Age is one of the biggest predictors of digital exclusion. Only 47% of those aged 75 and over use the internet regularly. And out of the 4Continue Reading

We don't know how much information the human brain can store. agsandrew/Shutterstock READER QUESTION: I am 59 years old, and in reasonably good health. Is it possible that I will live long enough to put my brain into a computer? Richard Dixon. We often imagine that human consciousness is as simple as input and output of electrical signals within a network of processing units – therefore comparable to a computer. Reality, however, is much more complicated. For starters, we don’t actually know how much information the human brain can hold. Two years ago, a team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, US, mapped the 3D structure of all the neurons (brain cells) comprised in one cubic millimetreContinue Reading

The galaxy cluster Abell 520, with suspected dark matter highlighted in blue. NASA It has been more than 50 years since astronomers first proposed “dark matter”, which is thought to be the most common form of matter in the universe. Despite this, we have no idea what it is – nobody has directly seen it or produced it in the lab. So how can scientists be so sure it exists? Should they be? It turns out philosophy can help us answer these questions. Back in the 1970s, a seminal study by astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford of how our neighbour galaxy Andromeda rotates revealed a surprising inconsistency between theory and observation. According to our best gravitational theory for theseContinue Reading

That awful feeling when you realise you forgot something important Shutterstock Most of us have experienced the embarrassment of forgetting to do that important thing we promised someone we would do. Sometimes you did everything you could to remember, yet it still slipped your mind. Our new research could hold the explanation. No matter how hard you try to remember your plans, there is always an element of luck involved. In the morning you decide to call your old friend in the evening. During the intervening time, you also decide to buy groceries for dinner, pick up the kids from afterschool club and many other things. Psychologists say we can’t keep all these intentions active in our working memory allContinue Reading