News
With asthma and allergy cases amongst young people at an all time high, a study from scientists in Switzerland offers a breath of fresh air. Gabriela Senti and her colleagues at University Hospital Zurich, writing in this week's PNAS, have found that injections designed to desensitise people with al...
Listening to your favourite, feel-good music might not only put you in a great mood but it could also be good for your heart.
Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore in the United States have shown for the first time that the emotions associated with listen...
Swiss scientists have solved a Sauvignon conundrum this week with the discovery that part of the flavour of the famous white wine is down to bacteria in your own mouth! The French enologist Emile Peynaud drew attention to the burst of fruity flavours that follows 30 seconds or so after a gulp of the...
While the world headlines are still full of the news that the Americans have elected Barrack Obama as the first African-American president there is also news this week of how members of the fish world elect their leaders.
When it comes to deciding which leader to back, most of the time fish r...
Questions
Why, when someone drinks beer after having food with a lot of salt in it why does the beer seem to go flat quicker?
Chris - It’s all down to something called nucleation and that is that the salt in the drink, the little crystals, if you’ve got some of those stuck on your lips or still in your mouth the salt forms a rough surface for the beer bubbles (the carbon dioxide that makes beer fizzy) to form on. It’s much easier to form where there’s a little imperfection. The beer fizzes out and all the carbon dioxide gets released where the salt crystals are and that makes the beer go flat. You can demonstrate this for yourself if you take a bit of beer and pour some salt into the beer it should froth up. That’s the CO2 coming out.
How does radio carbon dating work?
Preston - It works because you have carbon 14 which is a heavier form of carbon 12 formed in the upper atmosphere with the bombardment of the carbon by cosmic rays and other bits of radiation. We know how much of that is being formed today. Therefore by looking at the ratio of carbon 14 to the carbon 12 in anything that has taken carbon in: any plant or animal that was living in the past you can measure the level of the carbon 14 that’s left. That way you can infer how long it has been dead since that carbon 14 has decayed.
Chris - Because it stops taking the radioactive form in the minute it dies. Therefore the radioactive carbon in it must decline after death and therefore working out how much is in there tells you how it died: how long ago. Because we know how long the carbon takes to disappear.
Preston - Exactly
How did early civilisations learn the language of their neighbours?
Martin - One thing we know is that as farmers spread probably languages spread with them. You can do a family tree of languages and a family tree of genes. There’s a reasonable match but we also know that there was contact between hunter gatherers and farmers and so there would have been an interaction with people with very different languages. I guess we must just assume that their body languages were sending the right messages.
Chris - And also their tummy telling them they’re hungry so they’d be willing to swap food and things.
Martin - That’s right and I think there are more multilingual communities now than in the English speaking world we imagine there were.
Kitchen Science
Build your very own medieval siege machine out of odds and ends you can find lying around the house
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Interviews
Analysis of DNA and early remains can reveal the hunting techniques of our ancestors.
We reveal how DNA analysis can reveal the origins of crop domestication.
Can the bodies buried at stonehenge reveal what happened there?
Find out the fate of the Nazca Line creators.
QotW
Are we the only animals to cook food, why do we do it and does it give us an advantage over other animals?
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