We're actually not sure about this one!

Most radio-controlled clocks update themselves once a day, but cann't do so if they can't receive a strong enough radio signal.  It's possible that one of the clocks has a weaker antenna, and so isn't receiving a signal, and has fallen out of time.

Please let us know if you can think of any other reason for this!

We're not sure about this one, but we think it could just be that boys are better at making a mess!

If you've got a more helpful answer, please let us know!

That’s an amazing point that you’ve made. I think it’s one which, unfortunately, hasn’t been considered in the present research. You’re absolutely right, diabetes is the leading cause of sight loss in countries like this one and unfortunately because the trial they did involved people being able to see it would mean that people that have blindness from diabetes and had had an amputation would have a problem with doing this. It would be difficult. We therefore have to think, ‘is there another way to do what they did?’ It might be that there are ways of using various nerve stimulation to fool the brain into getting signals from the missing body part and that’s definitely possible because a lot of the nerves that supplied the missing body part, the stumps of those nerves, may still be there. It might be possible to do that instead.

This was asked along with Or's question:

The nervous system is divided into two camps.  There is the central nervous system which is your brain and your spinal cord.  Then there is the peripheral nervous system which is everything else.  The central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) if you injure that as far as we know, it’s permanent.  The nerve cells may die, they may not die but they certainly don’t reconnect where they should connect.  That stops signals getting through which is why you get problems of paralysis of loss of sensation depending on where the damage is.  That’s why a stroke is so disabling.

In the skin the nerve cells there seem to be able to survive.  They also seem to be able to re-grow their targets so they go back to where they should have gone in the first place.  They reconnect to, if it was a muscle they were supposed to be supplying, they’ll reconnect with the muscle.  If it was a patch of skin they can branch out and re-supply the skin so you do get sensation back.  Nerves grow quite slowly, probably a couple of millimetres a day.  So if you’ve got a big injury the length of your arm it can take a few weeks before the nerves can get back to your arm.  The sensation may not be absolutely perfect because some nerve cells might die but you should get coverage of the skin back afterwards.

What happens when you break the nerve the actual cell inside is just one massive long cell.  The distal bit (the bit downstream of the cut site) will degenerate.  It retracts and forms this little lump bulb.  This thing grows back along the original path of the nerve so it uses the original pathway of the nerve as a guide.  Rather like a motorway cone.  It uses the cones and lays down a new road surface, which is the nerve, and it gets back to where it was supposed to attach.  The distal site it was supposed to attach to switches on various markers so it can recognise it and off it goes!

This was asked along with Micheal Stevens' question.

The nervous system is divided into two camps.  There is the central nervous system which is your brain and your spinal cord.  Then there is the peripheral nervous system which is everything else.  The central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) if you injure that as far as we know, it’s permanent.  The nerve cells may die, they may not die but they certainly don’t reconnect where they should connect.  That stops signals getting through which is why you get problems of paralysis of loss of sensation depending on where the damage is.  That’s why a stroke is so disabling.

In the skin the nerve cells there seem to be able to survive.  They also seem to be able to re-grow their targets so they go back to where they should have gone in the first place.  They reconnect to, if it was a muscle they were supposed to be supplying, they’ll reconnect with the muscle.  If it was a patch of skin they can branch out and re-supply the skin so you do get sensation back.  Nerves grow quite slowly, probably a couple of millimetres a day.  So if you’ve got a big injury the length of your arm it can take a few weeks before the nerves can get back to your arm.  The sensation may not be absolutely perfect because some nerve cells might die but you should get coverage of the skin back afterwards.

What happens when you break the nerve the actual cell inside is just one massive long cell.  The distal bit (the bit downstream of the cut site) will degenerate.  It retracts and forms this little lump bulb.  This thing grows back along the original path of the nerve so it uses the original pathway of the nerve as a guide.  Rather like a motorway cone.  It uses the cones and lays down a new road surface, which is the nerve, and it gets back to where it was supposed to attach.  The distal site it was supposed to attach to switches on various markers so it can recognise it and off it goes!

The answer to this is it’s not something you can catch, fortunately.  Glaucoma seems to run in families.  It’s caused by a raised pressure inside the eye.  At the front of the eye you produce fluid and this fluid fills the front of the eye and it then gets reabsorbed further back in the eye.  The fluid’s continuously being replenished.  Sometimes in people with glaucoma, they don’t reabsorb the fluid properly and so the pressure can go up.  This puts pressure on the retina, the part of the eye that converts light into nerve signals that the brain can understand. Over time this can damage the retina.  In particular, it damages the part of the eye called the optic nerve.

All of the information that the retina sends to the brain, it does so along the optic nerve.  There’s about a million nerve fibres in the optic nerve on each side.  They run through this structure called the optic disc at the back of the eyeball.  You can see this in people’s eyes who have raised pressure; you can see the changes that are very characteristic in this optic disc.  If you reduce the pressure with drug then what this does is reduce the severity of those changes.  If you catch it early and take drugs you can prevent any damage from happening.  Depending upon when you catch it then there can be more or less damage to the eye.

The optic nerve is part of your central nervous system and if you damage the central nervous system then it doesn’t grow back.  If you lose a connection or some of the nerve fibres from your retina to your brain then you do lose acuity: the ability to see as sharply as you once did.  The longer a problem goes on, the worse it can be.  If you have a family history of glaucoma then it’s worth going and seeing an optician just to get checked out.