News
Researchers have successfully combined two of natures most powerful adhesive strategies to produce the underwater equivalent of a post-it note!
Writing in Nature, Phil Messersmith from Northwestern University in Illinois describes how he and his team have come up with "Gekel", which cons...
Do you find it hard to listen to two things at once? Maybe you’re watching the TV and someone is trying to talk to you?
If so, then it seems you might be able to blame it on your genes.
That’s according to new research that has just come out from a team of scientists from the National Institute o...
Researchers have found a new gene that is strongly linked to the development of type 1 or "juvenile" diabetes.
Hakon Hakonarson, from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, used the power of SNPs - single nucleotide polymorphisms to track down the gene in children with the disease. SNP...
That’s according to the RSPB who have announced this week that colonies of seabirds, like puffins, kittiwakes and Manx shearwaters are not doing very well at all in their normal breeding grounds on the islands in northern Scotland. The last few years have seen really bad breeding seasons for m...
Japanese researchers have found that when it comes to exercise and weight loss, the perceived wisdom of quantity over quality might be wrong.
Tokyo University's Kuzushige Goto recruited six healthy men and studied their metabolic response to exercise on a cycling machine. The volunteers performed ...
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Interviews
This week, Bob and Chelsea tell us about extreme familily survival.
How deep can you go? Professional free divers can descend hundreds of feet underwater with no scuba gear, but what does that do to your body?
David Thomas is a marine biologist from the University of Wales, Bangor. His work takes him all over the world and he has recently released a book called Surviving Antarctica, we invited him in to the studio for a chat.
He’s also got another book out called Frozen Oceans, described by Chr...
Fighter pilots need to undergo extreme conditions and still be able to make life or death decisions. How do they train to cope? We spoke to US Air Force Phsyiologist Major Todd Dart.
Richard Turner volunteered to have his body tested to extremes of endurance at Everest base camp, all in the name of medical science.
Questions

Elwctric toothbrshes and wobbly TVs
Electric toothbrushes contain an electric motor – which is made to turn by the electricity from the battery inducing a magnetic field. The motor contains a commutator and some brushes, which are usually made of carbon. As the motor rotates, it intermittently connects with the brushes, and this leads to an intermittent current which then makes a spark. This effectively means that your electric toothbrush generates radio waves across a wide range of frequencies, which will affect anything nearby that is sensitive to radio waves, such as your TV or your radio.
Another reason for what looks like a wobbly picture when watching TV and using an electric toothbrush is the vibrations caused to your skull and eyes. This may only effect a TV because it’s scanned at a certain frequency (25Hz), so everything else would not appear wobbly!

Why should you pre-heat the oven?
The main reason is that when cooking from a recipe, or following the instructions on pre-packaged food, there is a recommended time that the food needs to be cooked at the right temperature in order to be cooked properly and safe to eat. If the oven hasn’t reached that temperature yet, you may be cooking it for the wrong length of time.
There are lots of chemical reactions occurring when you cook food, and different reactions occur at different rates depending on the temperature. This means that while your food is in the oven below the right temperature, you will not get the right balance of reactions occurring while you cook.
The reactions which give food it’s distinctive ‘cooked’ flavours and colours are Maillard reactions (between sugars and amino acids) and caramelisation (the oxidation of sugars). These reactions work better at higher temperatures, and so your food will look and taste better if you wait for the oven to heat up.
Also, while the food is pre-heating it will be losing water by evaporation, meaning that the cooked meal is likely to be drier and less succulent.

Why don't your eyeballs freeze?
[We put this question to David Thomas, author of ‘Surviving Antarctica’]
Because your eyeball is contained within your head, and your head is kept at body temperature, it never gets cold enough to freeze. The eyeballs in a dead body would indeed freeze, but while you’re alive and radiating heat it can’t. Even tears wont freeze immediately, as they are very salty, and salt reduces the freezing point.

How do giraffes control their blod pressure with such long necks?
All animals control their blood pressure to an extent, but giraffes have a special adaptation consisting of a series of valves in their neck to control the intense pressure that would build up when they put their head down to drink. This anatomical adaptation controls the blood pressure otherwise they would have a massive surge of blood into their brain and experience ‘red-out’.

Why do rainbows dissappear if you stare at them?
This is an example of adaptation. Everything in the nervous system is adaptable, which means that when you smell something or feel something, get into a hot bath for example, you stop noticing the sensation after a while. Your eyes are exactly the same. If you stare at something for a while without moving your eyes around to refresh the image, the retina degrades the image and it becomes blurry. That’s true of anything you look at, and as rainbows are slightly less distinct, it’s more difficult for the eye to get a fix on it, and so they probably degrade more easily.
Kitchen Science
Float steel on water with nothing more sophisticated than a piece of toilet paper.
Question, why is Chris showing as a guest? Extreme survival, i love the subject. More in the how to live off the land kind of way. I have s...
- paul.fr - 25th Jul 07
I meant to cheekily imply/infer that Chris does all these extreme survival stunts himself !!...
- neilep - 25th Jul 07
oops - and there was me thinking we had some adoring fans who recognised the huge sacrifice we all go to for this programme.
Alas it was just a fli...
- Chris - 27th Jul 07
I must be missing that gene - I am always bad at doing that sort of thing - I can type while listening to the radio, but even when I am tr...
- another_someone - 5th Nov 09
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