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25th Jan 2009
Material, Heal Thyself...
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We get Smart on this week's Naked Scientists with the science of self-healing, self-sensing and self-cleaning materials. We hear how carbon fibre polymers could lead to self-healing spacecraft, why a titanium coating keeps windows clean and kills superbugs, and how helicopters can warn you when they're damaged. Also, how gut bugs tell the story of our ancestors' migration into Australia and beyond, how RNA housekeeping allows humans to function with fewer genes than a banana, and how molecular metal cages safely store hydrogen, or sieve out carbon dioxide. Plus, we mix borax and glue to make bouncy, stretchy goo!
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News
This week, two studies published in the journal Science found evidence from bugs that live inside our guts and the words that come out of our mouths, that both shed light on how ancient human ancestors migrated out of Asia and spread across the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean, a subject that has ke...
Scientists have discovered a role for the DNA that makes up the majority of the genome but which had previously been written off as rubbish.
Writing in the journal Molecular Cell, Edinburgh University researcher David Tollervey and his colleagues explain how these non-coding segments of DNA, which...
When it comes to being a male fish, life can be tough when the lady in your life gets around a bit and mates with lots of other males. It means that to make sure you produce lots of offspring you must compete with all the other guys on the scene, and more specifically your sperm has to be up to the ...
Questions
Does stronger sperm mean stronger people?
Chris - The sperm are a symptom of the quality of the genes that make them, so if you have good genes to make sperm, that gets your sperm there first, then if the rest of the genes don't make a healthy individual, then they won't have good sperm to make and they won't make much sperm, so I suppose you can't really have one without the other.
Kitchen Science
Make a truly irresistible rubbery solid that you just can't keep your hands off...
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Interviews
Metal-Organic Frameworks, or MOFs, are a promising species of molecules which have enormous internal surface areas. They can be used to selectively grab hold of chemicals such as hydrogen or methane for fuel, or even act as a molecular sieve, scrubbing carbon dioxide from waste gasses......
A car which silently repairs scratched paintwork, chipped windscreens or engine faults sounds fantastic, and may not be too far away...
Window cleaners may be forced to join the unemployment line, as new technology lets the windows clean themselves...
Having a material which can tell you when it's cracked is one thing, but integrating it into existing systems is quite another...
QotW
Say you had three eggs on the table, by simply looking at them you can tell that there are three eggs (without counting one, two, three etc...). My question is, how many eggs or any other objects does there have to be until you have to start counting them?
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