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Does Beer Kill Brain Cells?
8 May 2010
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27th Jun 2010

What's the point of eyebrows?


Andrew Pontzen

Helen Scales

Chris Smith
Eyes

Why do we have eyebrows?  Can we taste food if we can't smell it?  What's a cold sore?  This week, we take on your science questions, as well as explore the world of social gaming, and find out how much it costs to fly an England flag from your car.  We'll be asking if altitude affects how a football flies, if a large enough fan could propel a spacecraft and how spiders spin webs from one tree to the next.  Plus, why size matters in bird beaks, how plant roots cope with competition and building lungs in the lab!

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Transcript
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News

(c) Dbush @ Wikipedia

Smaller beaks for colder climates

Birds living in colder climates evolved smaller beaks than their fair-weather cousins to help keep them warmer, a new study shows. Led by Matt Symonds from the University of Melbourne in Australia, the study published in American Naturalist looked at over two hundred bird species from across the gl...

(c) I.Sá&#269;ek, senior

Plants can make decisions

Scientists have discovered that plants are far less passive than we first thought and can integrate information to help them make decisions. University of Alberta researcher James Cahill and his colleagues made the discovery by growing specimens of a Chinese flower called Abutilon theophrasti (also ...

(c) John Lanoue

Astronomers close in on the mass of elusive neutrino particles

Physicists are desperate to explain shortcomings in our understanding of the behaviour of fundamental particles; an announcement this week from astronomers remind us that the sky can tell us as much -- perhaps sometimes more -- about particles  than experiments down here on Earth can. The anno...

(c) Jennifer Smith

Ocean Algae Mystery Solved

Scientists have taken steps towards solving a thirty-year oceanographic puzzle, with the discovery that microscopic algae living in mid-ocean areas must be getting essential nutrients from as deep as 250 metres beneath the waves. But exactly how they are getting hold of nitrates from deep down remai...

(c) Grey's Anatomy
 

Re-grown lungs a breath of fresh air for respiratory diseases

In a first of its kind experiment, US-based scientists have re-grown a functioning lung that could be successfully implanted into a rat. Writing in the journal Science, Yale researcher Thomas Petersen and his colleagues describe the technique, which could in the future be used to provide genetically...


Interviews

(c) Jpogi

Growing an artificial lung

Also in the news this week, researchers at Yale University in America have come one step closer to building a functional lung in the laboratory...

(c) Dave Ansell

Online social gaming - what's all the fuss about?

As well as helping to keep you in touch with your friends and family, social networking sites like Facebook are increasingly offering alternative forms of entertainment in the form of highly addictive online games - I can testify to that – that you can play with your friends. Meera Senthilingam went...


Kitchen Science

(c) Robin Hall, geograph.org.uk
 

What the England football team cost a nation

How much are all those england flags costing the nation? We find out with a car, a force meter and a stick.


QotW

(c) Vesalius (via Ancheta Wis)

Why is the right side of our brain in control of the left side of our body?

Why is our brain the wrong way round? Why is the right side of our brain in control of the left side of our body, and vice versa?


Questions

What is a cold sore?


Can we taste without smelling food?


How is North determined?


How do you keep the fizz in a bottle of fizzy drink?


How do spiders spin webs across open spaces?


What's the point of eyebrows?


Do spiders have eyelids?


Does take-off weight vary with latitude?


Could playing football at high altitude affect how you kick the ball?


Can birds see blue?


Could a human survive being swallowed by a whale or big fish, like Jonah


Will rockets accelerate until they run out of fuel?


 

Could a large enough fan propel a space shuttle?


 

What would happen if you jumped down a hole through the centre of the Earth?





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