This week’s biggest stories
The sensible thing to do is calm down, figure out how to take care of planet Earth and all be a bit better about not making ourselves extinct. But who cares about sensible: Elon Musk has revealed the details (well, let’s call them that) of his colonisation vision for Mars, including an “intentionally fuzzy” 10-year timeframe for flights. So once you’ve got yourself all signed up, to prepare for the trip you’ll need a tan, right? You’ll be a long way from any salons, and indeed the sun, so what about using a newly-created tanning chemical? It causes the release of dark pigment in skin, creating a real ‘fake’ tan without the need for sunbathing, so for Earthlings that also means it should protect against skin cancer. It won’t be commercially available for a while, but by the time it is, you could be Googling the cheapest place to buy it via the quantum internet. Scientists this week made a huge leap towards a new, secure type of internet by using a satellite to beam “entangled” light particles to ground stations more than 700 miles apart. For the present, however, we have more weighty problems to consider, overweight and obesity being chief among them. This week experts have warned that being overweight – not just obese – kills millions a year and a major Swedish study has concluded that women who are obese when they conceive are more likely to have babies with serious birth defects. On a happier note, men most at risk of testicular cancer could be identified using newly discovered group of genes. So that’s something.
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Mysterious mollusc
You may think there is no connection between saints and fossils. You may even think you know what an ammonite looks like. You’re so very wrong.
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Straight from the lab – top picks from our experts on the blog network
Alien megastructures – where we should look next | Across the universe
It was discovered using Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope, which was designed to look for the slight drop in light caused when a planet passes in front of its star. In this case, the telescope gave astronomers much more than they bargained for. The brightness of star KIC 8462852 dropped by 15% in March 2011 then by 20% in February 2013 then returned to normal. Given that a planet dims the light by a mere 1%, whatever was producing this signal was absolutely huge ...
Russian fake news is not new: Soviet Aids propaganda cost countless lives | Notes & Theories
The KGB saw an opportunity to foster discontent, in a project given the moniker Operation Infektion. The groundwork was laid as early as 1983 in an Indian pro-Soviet paper, which carried an anonymous letter from a “well known American scientist” where it was claimed Aids had been developed in a secret biological weapons laboratory in Fort Detrick. In 1985, retired biophysicist Dr Jakob Segal claimed that the Aids virus was synthesised by combining parts of other retroviruses: VISNA and HTLV-1.
Too young to vote? The science of maturity | Brain flapping
There have been phone-ins about it. Many articles. Letters to the editor. Lord knows how many below-the-line comments. All based around the point that young people voting is bad, and they shouldn’t do it, for reasons. Presumably many of these reasons a variations of “how they vote doesn’t correspond with how I’d vote and I cannot allow this”, but are there any valid ones? As in, scientifically speaking, are there any realistic arguments for younger people being denied a vote? Here are a few candidates
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Science Weekly podcast
“I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all” sang Jon Bon Jovi, and although there’s a lot to unpick in that claim, what is certain is that the human mind is able to process a seemingly infinite array of face types. But how does the brain do it? And how do faces affect our ideas about people? This week’s Science Weekly podcast looks at the science of first impressions.
