Science (Page 73)

Quality of sleep is important. Shutterstock/New Africa As the pandemic spread in 2020 and nations entered lockdown, many people noticed their sleep patterns changing. On social media celebrities started recording bedtime stories to help people fall asleep, while on Twitter #cantsleep was trending regularly. A year into the pandemic, sleep scientists are beginning to understand how our sleep has changed, and what the implications may be for people’s wellbeing. Two recent studies tracked sleep patterns of volunteers in Europe and South America in the first months of lockdown. The results told a consistent story: people are sleeping more during lockdown than before it and the timing of their sleep had changed. Both studies found that lockdown has reduced “social jetlag”Continue Reading

The brains of humans are subtly different from those of Neanderthals. Petr Student/Shutterstock How we humans became what we are today is a question that scientists have been trying to answer for a long time. How did we evolve such advanced cognitive abilities, giving rise to complex language, poetry and rocket science? In what way is the modern human brain different from those of our closest evolutionary relatives, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans? By reintroducing ancient genes from such extinct species into human “mini brains” – clusters of stem cells grown in a lab that organise themselves into tiny versions of human brains – scientists have started to find new clues. Most of what we know about human evolution comesContinue Reading

Cave bears are now extinct. Shutterstock/Liliya Butenko Cave bears were giant plant eating bears that roamed Europe and northern Asia, and went extinct around 25 thousand years ago. They hibernated in caves during the winter. This was a dangerous time, as those which had failed to fatten up enough during the summer would not survive hibernation. As a result, many caves across Europe and northern Asia are now filled with the bones of cave bears, each one containing potentially thousands of individuals. In our new study, we analysed a bone from a cave in the Caucasus Mountains. Our team recovered the genome from a 360,000-year-old cave bear, revealing new details of the animals’ evolutionary history and almost rewriting their entireContinue Reading

Illustration of the lunar gateway. Nasa Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan blasted off from the Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon in their lunar module Challenger on December 14 1972. Five days later, they splashed down safely in the Pacific, closing the Apollo 17 mission and becoming the last humans to visit the lunar surface or venture anywhere beyond low-Earth orbit. Now the international Artemis programme, lead by Nasa, is aiming to put humans back on the Moon by 2024. But it is looking increasingly likely that this goal could be missed. President Nixon welcomes astronauts aboard the USS Hornet. wikipedia History shows just how vulnerable space programmes, which require years of planning and development spanning several administrations, are. After ApolloContinue Reading

Boredom can be good and bad. Shutterstock/fizkes Many of us have probably felt bored at some point in the past year. Restrictions on social gatherings, travel and plenty of other activities may have been necessary to control the pandemic, but have left lots of us with little to do. On the surface, boredom may seem rather trivial; an experience reserved for those of us who with the luxury of having too much time. But it turns out that boredom affects people in many ways. This begs the question: on balance, is boredom a vice or virtue? According to science, the answer might be a bit of both. 1. Impulsiveness Boredom comes with a desire to find a more satisfying activity.Continue Reading

A prototype of our novel plasma-based particle accelerator EuPRAXIA Conceptual Design Report In 2010, when scientists were preparing to smash the first particles together within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), sections of the media fantasised that the EU-wide experiment might create a black hole that could swallow and destroy our planet. How on Earth, columnists fumed, could scientists justify such a dangerous indulgence in the pursuit of abstract, theoretical knowledge? But particle accelerators are much more than enormous toys for scientists to play with. They have practical uses too, though their sheer size has, so far, prevented their widespread use. Now, as part of a large-scale European collaboration, my team has published a report that explains in detail how aContinue Reading

mundissima/Alamy Stock Photo, CC BY-NC Facebook’s recent decision to block its Australian users from sharing or viewing news content provoked a worldwide backlash and accusations of hubris and bullying. Although the company has now reversed its decision following an agreement with the Australian government, the row has exposed the fragility of Facebook’s founding myth: that Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild is a force for good, providing a public space for people to connect, converse and cooperate. An inclusive public space in the good times, Facebook has yet again proved willing to eject and exclude in the bad times – as a private firm ultimately has the right to do. Facebook seems to be a bastion of free speech up to and untilContinue Reading

shutterstock Dieter Hawlan/Shutterstock How does your brain tell you to stop if you’re crossing the road and you have to stop quickly? – Ruby, aged nine, Rochester, UK The human brain is really clever. It keeps our heart beating, it allows us to see and hear the world around us, and it also helps us to make hundreds of decisions every day. Sometimes decision making is hard, like deciding what book we want to read next. At other times decisions seem to happen without us even thinking, like when we stop crossing the road suddenly if a car is coming. So, how does our brain make decisions? Curious Kids is a series by The Conversation that gives children the chanceContinue Reading

Many people feel anxious when receiving a phone call. Shutterstock/Sergey Mironov Staying in touch with loved ones without seeing them in person has become even more important during the pandemic. But for some people, making or receiving calls is a stressful experience. Phone anxiety – or telephobia – is the fear and avoidance of phone conversations and it’s common among those with social anxiety disorder. Having a hatred of your phone doesn’t necessarily mean you have phone anxiety, although the two can be related. There are, of course, many people who dislike making or receiving calls. But if this dislike causes you to experience certain symptoms, you may have phone anxiety. Some emotional symptoms of phone anxiety include delaying orContinue Reading

Could God travel faster than the speed of light? robert_s/Shutterstock I still believed in God (I am now an atheist) when I heard the following question at a seminar, first posed by Einstein, and was stunned by its elegance and depth: ‘If there is a God who created the entire universe and ALL of its laws of physics, does God follow God’s own laws? Or can God supersede his own laws, such as travelling faster than the speed of light and thus being able to be in two different places at the same time?’ Could the answer help us prove whether or not God exists or is this where scientific empiricism and religious faith intersect, with NO true answer? DavidContinue Reading