Science (Page 77)

Fossilised melanin has revealed some dinosaur colours. shutterstock/AmeliAU One of the goals of palaeontology is to bring the past to life. In recent years, some spectacular discoveries have revealed unprecedented glimpses into fossilised animals and their lives. We know some dinosaurs cared for their young, that the earliest bees were pollinators, and what some ancient birds and crickets sounded like. But one question has remained elusive for decades: what colours were ancient beasts? For years, palaeontologists were unable to answer this, as fossils are rarely preserved with pigments or colour patterns. In recent years, breakthroughs have helped unearth clues to the pigments found in animals’ skin, hair and feathers. But melanin pigments have also been found inside some animals, promptingContinue Reading

gpointstudio/Shutterstock Established the same year Facebook was founded (2004), Safer Internet Day has become a fixture in schools, teaching children how to safely navigate an increasingly complex online world. With much of the world in some form of lockdown, this year’s Safer Internet Day will be different. Parents must take it upon themselves to guide their children to wiser internet behaviour. This is no easy task. As Rooha Foroohar argues in her book “Don’t Be Evil”, big tech firms such as Facebook have “lost their soul” since they rose to prominence a decade ago. Parents agree. A recent poll found that three-quarters of parents of children aged 13-17 think that social media companies put profit ahead of promoting social good.Continue Reading

G-Stock Studio/Shutterstock With gyms closed and millions cooped up and restless at home, it’s little wonder that “healthtech” is now being billed as the next big battleground over which the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google will fight. Chief among their products are wearable devices that measure your heart rate, your step count, and dozens of other data points that keep you informed about your physical health. The increasing prevalence of these devices is to be welcomed. They help people track their workouts, setting quantifiable goals that can help them stay fit and healthy. But the introduction of wearables that measure our mental health – like employee mood tracker “Moodbeam” – should be greeted with a more cautious optimism. SuchContinue Reading

Satellites affect your life every day. Shutterstock Almost 3,000 operational spacecraft orbit our Earth. This number is growing constantly, thanks to cheaper materials and smaller satellites. Having this many satellites in orbit can create problems, including space junk and the way they change our view of the night sky. But satellites provide a vital service. Many people are familiar with GPS, which helps us navigate. Some may know satellites provide crucial data for our weather forecasts. But satellites affect our lives in many different ways – and some of these may surprise you. 1. Spending money Whether you pay for your morning coffee using a contactless payment, Google Pay, or even with cash withdrawn from an ATM, none of itContinue Reading

There are over 100 words for the noise a dog makes, in more than 60 languages, according to the work of psychologist Stanley Coren. These range from “ouah-ouah” in France to others less recognisable to English speakers, such as “hong-hong”, apparently, in Thailand. Of course, these differences only reflect the languages of the countries in question, and are nothing to do with the animals themselves. What’s less widely recognised is that genuine differences can exist in the sounds some wild animals make to communicate, even in different parts of the same country. Song birds such as chaffinches, for example, can show regional differences in the calls they make. This might help to distinguish neighbours from outsiders. These “dialects”, as theyContinue Reading

Zenza Flarini/Shutterstock From Washington DC to Wall Street, 2021 has already seen online groups causing major organised offline disruption. Some of it has been in violation of national laws, some in violation of internet platforms’ terms of service. When these groups are seen to cause societal harm, the solution from has been knee-jerk: to ban or “deplatform” those groups immediately, leaving them digitally “homeless”. But the online world is a Pandora’s box of sites, apps, forums and message boards. Groups banned from Facebook migrated seamlessly to Parler, and from Parler, via encrypted messaging apps, to a host of other platforms. My research has shown how easily users migrate between platforms on the “dark web”. Deplatforming won’t work on the regularContinue Reading

How times have changed since the Apollo era. Within the space of a few days, two space missions from China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), respectively, are set to reach Mars. The UAE’s Hope mission will go into orbit around Mars on February 9. The next day, the Chinese Tianwen-1 mission – an orbiter and lander – will swing into orbit, with a predicted landing date sometime in May. It is a very big moment for both countries. Hope is the first interplanetary mission by an Arab nation ever. And if China succeeds, it will be the first country ever to visit and land on Mars on its first try. The odds are stacked against them with nearly 50%Continue Reading

Releasing his creation for free 30 years ago, the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, famously declared: “this is for everyone”. Today, his invention is used by billions – but it also hosts the authoritarian crackdowns of antidemocratic governments, and supports the infrastructure of the most wealthy and powerful companies on Earth. Now, in an effort to return the internet to the golden age that existed before its current incarnation as Web 2.0 – characterised by invasive data harvesting by governments and corporations – Berners-Lee has devised a plan to save his invention. This involves his brand of “data sovereignty” – which means giving users power over their data – and it means wrestling back control of theContinue Reading

A replica of Noah's Ark from the biblical tale at the Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky. Lindasj22/Shutterstock Many people around the world looked on aghast as they witnessed the harm done by conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the myth of the stolen US election that led to the attack on the US Capitol Building on January 6. Yet while these ideas will no doubt fade in time, there is arguably a much more enduring conspiracy theory that also pervades America in the form of young Earth creationism. And it’s one that we cannot ignore because it is dangerously opposed to science. In the US today, up to 40% of adults agree with the young Earth creationist claim thatContinue Reading

Nasa's Perseverance. NASA/JPL-Caltech, CC BY-SA There are two planned Mars landings in 2021. First, Nasa’s Perseverance rover is due to land on the planet later this month. Then China’s Tianwen rover will follow in May. Both missions intend to search the planet for signs of life. But how do we make sure when our landers touch down on the red planet’s surface, nothing unwanted is landing with them? If we aren’t careful, we could be spreading all sorts of life – like in 2019, when a spacecraft crashed onto the moon’s surface with a cargo of tiny, almost indestructible lifeforms called tardigrades. The good thing is, we have policies and laws to prevent this from happening. In fact, there’s anContinue Reading