This week’s biggest stories
Proxima b is the new planet on the block. Well, it’s been in orbit around Proxima Centauri for a while, I suppose, but it’s new to us, and is set to inform our space exploration work and the search for life outside our solar system for decades to come. But if the thought of all that intergalactic travel makes you snoozy, go ahead and nap - it’s good for you. This week has seen discovery that sleep ‘resets’ the connections in the brain - and that lack of sleep causes the brain to become “muddled” with electrical activity, which affects our ability to learn and memorise things. Still, you might prefer caffeine to an early night. If so, you might be interested to know that your level of coffee consumption could be genetic (well, partly, at least). Researchers have also found evidence that even quite head injuries during childhood can increase risk of all sorts of things, from poorer educational achievement to early death. So helmets on everyone, and also, for all you bagpipe players and wind musicians out there: keep your instruments clean. Scientists believe a man has died after fungus in his instrument caused a condition know as “bagpipe lung”.
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Straight from the lab - top picks from our experts on the blog network
AI guides your daily life, but is it liberal or conservative? | Raising HAL
Imagine you’re a billionaire, with your own film studio. You’re sitting there on your golden throne, eating peeled grapes off Channing Tatum’s abs. Your assistant has just handed you the script for The Expendables 7 or yet another Spider-Man reboot. You yawn theatrically in his face. Surely, you think yourself, in this data-driven age there has to be a better way. Couldn’t we use machine learning to design the optimum new film?
Not on the map: cartographic omission from New England to Palestine | The H word
Historians of cartography have long studied the practices and consequences of cartographic omission. In a landmark study, “New England cartography and the Native Americans”, published posthumously in 1994, the British historian of cartography J. B. Harley analysed seventeenth-century maps to follow the progressive replacement of the Native Americans with European settlers.
After months of excitement, we’re left with the status quo. But it’s no bad thing in physics | Life and Physics
so far nothing startlingly new has shown up in the data from CERN this year, despite new regions of the landscape of physics being revealed to us by a big increase in the energy of the beams in the collider. This isn’t the end of the story, of course. To use a favourite analogy of mine, we have had a flyby of the landscape, and have not seen any huge cities or towering volcanoes. But this doesn’t mean there isn’t important and interesting stuff going on in the undergrowth.
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Monday Mind Games
How do you tell if something looks small because it is small, or because it is very far away? It seems a ridiculous question because we make such calculations with apparent ease. But it’s actually not that simple ...
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Science Weekly podcast
We’re changing the day that our podcast goes live so that you can wake up with it on Sunday mornings. So if you don’t already subscribe, here’s a chance to catch up with last week’s instalment in our Big unknowns series: What will become of us? Next Friday we’ll carry the latest Science Weekly.
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Eye on science - this week’s top video
Ok, this got me a little teary-eyed, I have to admit - it’s a brilliant story of a brave, horrifically injured man given his confidence - and yes, his life, really - back through pioneering medical science. Happy Friday, people.
