This is a really interesting one. It’s something that’s only started to become clear relatively recently – the role of the immune system in preventing cancer. For example, in patients with HIV they have a very depleted immune system. This leaves them vulnerable to infections like viruses that can cause cancer. Also, it’s thought now that the immune system is actively patrolling your body, spotting early dodgy looking cells and getting rid of them. Obviously sometimes that goes wrong and cancer can develop. It’s really becoming an interesting field is how the immune system may be able to recognise some cancer cells. Whether we can turn it into overdrive and use immunotherapy to really kick start the immune system into killing cancer cells in patients: that’s a very active area of research. Another thing that’s quite interesting is that the whole role of the immune system first started to become clear, partly through studying people with HIV, also through studying patients who’ve had transplants. They take immuno-suppressing drugs and are also more likely to get certain types of cancers. That started to make a link, also with patients with melanoma. It was noticed that some people with melanoma just spontaneously get better. That’s thought to be that their immune system has woken up and recognised their cancer. It’s a really active field of research studying how the immune system is involved in this. We’ll probably, in the future, see a lot more coming out about it.

It’s actually because planets are fairly large. You can actually see them on the back of your eye. It’s a bit like having 100 stars all very close togther. All those 100 stars will be twinkling. On average some of them are going to be twinkling brighter and some of them are going to be darker than average. They tend to twinkle less when you see them all together. If 20 of them are going to be brighter and 20 of them are going to be darker then on average it’s not going to twinkle very much.

This is to do with how big telescopes are made. They’re actually two mirrors and we have one big primary mirror and there’s a secondary mirror held above that primary mirror. That reflects the light back down where you’d put a camera. The secondary mirror is in the middle of the tube with the big one on. They’ve got to support it somehow. They tend to have four supports, vertical supports that hold it up or else it’s gonna fall down. That star shape you see round the stars is basically a really, really out of focus picture of this star shape. It’s also called diffraction pattern and that’s what’s producing all these star shapes.

The nerves in your body have an incredibly high energy requirement so they have a big supply of blood and sugar to keep themselves going. If you lie on you arm when you go to sleep then the common place for this to happen is in your forearm or under your armpit. There is a condition called Saturday Night Palsy. This is where people go up the boozer and have a few. They come home and they fall asleep with their arm over the back of the chair. The arm of the chair pushing up under the arm compresses the nerves supplying their arm against their humerus (the upper arm bone). It squashes the nerve flat and you can actually get a nerve palsy because of it. Normally when you go to sleep at night, when you squash a nerve flat, you squash the arm but reduce the blood flow down the nerve. This means the brain doesn’t get signals back into the spinal cord from the nerve because the interruption of the blood flow because of laying on your arm or just physically pushing on the nerve stops the flow of information. The brain starts wondering where the signal has gone from that bit of the body and so it increases sensitivity to whatever that nerve was supplying. You start to get spurious signals as though you could really feel that bit of your body. It’s a bit like phantom limb pain you get when you have apart of the body amputated. When you restore the blood flow by moving in your sleep or rubbing or elevating the bit of the body that’s starved of blood such as your leg then all the blood rushes back in. The pressure’s taken off the nerve as well and it starts to work again. So you get your sensation restored. Thankfully, it’s not harmful. But, it can also be assign in people who have other diseases like diabetes that the nerve is deteriorating. As long as you’re getting pins and needles that’s good news. If you had it all the time then that might be a sign that something bad is happening. If you’re just going to bed and laying on your arm it’s nothing.