Science Illustrated

Astrophotographer Gerald Rhemann won the top prize in the 2022 Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest with this image of Comet C/2021 A1, also known as Comet Leonard. The comet was only discovered in 2021, and is a rare guest, given that its orbi

NATURE Most people make the most of their gardens by means of permaculture, fertiliser and weeding, but one group of US, UK and Australian scientists has found a different path to green-fingered growth: they have modified the genes of soy beans, allo

THE UNIVERSE Some 18 billion kilometres from Earth’s surface is the ‘heliopause’ – the boundary between interstellar space and the huge gas bubble of electrically-charged particles that envelopes our Solar System, known as the heliosphere. The bubble

THE PAST British Egyptologist Nicolas Reeves has discovered hidden hieroglyphs that might reveal Queen Nefertiti buried behind a false wall of Tutankhamun’s tomb, discovered in the Valley of the Kings back in 1922. The famous bust of Nefertiti had be

COMMUNICATION There have been many research projects that attempt to teach apes human words via gestures and symbols. But new research indicates that it may be easier for humans to understand the gestures that the apes already use. A new study by sci

WEATHER At this time of year, many people in the Northern Hemisphere are too busy shovelling snow off their driveways to ponder the structure of a single snowflake. But why are individual flakes famously hexagonal? Snowflakes inherit their symmetry f

HUMAN BODY Our nails consist of a hard protein known as keratin, which also makes up the hoof of a horse. Both human nails and horse hooves evolved 50+ million years ago, and in both cases the ancestors had claws. In humans, nails are primarily usefu

HUMAN BODY A slight tickle in your nose, and soon after… atchoooo! Sneezing is an important reflex that removes microorganisms and disturbing substances such as dust, pollen or hair from the airways, preventing infection. But to some people, the refl

559 Earth years is the time it takes the dwarf planet Eris to complete one single orbit around the Sun. A human being born there would die before their first birthday. SPACE The planet with the longest orbit time around the Sun, and so the longest ye

ASTRONOMY The answer is yes: solar eclipses frequently happen throughout the Solar System. A solar eclipse requires only that a heavenly body such as a moon passes directly between the planet and the Sun, blocking out the light completely or partiall

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR According to a US study of students from 2021, most people lie several times a day. The study covered 632 test subjects reporting their lies on a daily basis, logging a total of 116,366 lies over a period of 91 days. Only 1% of respon

EVOLUTION Scientists are not sure why Neanderthals disappeared, but one of the theories is indeed that the Neanderthals were sent extinct by diseases encountered when the species met our own for the first time approximately 100,000 years ago. Scienti

Nanodrugs are small doses of drugs that are delivered to a location inside the body by tiny goal-focused particles. ￫ Nanodrugs consist of three elements: the drug (such as one to target cancer cells), a focused molecule that binds to the required ce

GEOLOGY Although we are experiencing human-induced global warming, today’s global world average temperature of close to 15°C is really rather chilly from a geological point of view. For long periods of time, Earth has been far warmer with geological

When US aerospace engineer Grant Cates took part in a lottery where the prize was a seat on the first space mission for amateur astronauts, his wife had one question: what could go wrong on such a journey? Her question made Cates think hard, because

Dogs see colours, but not as many as we do. On the other hand, they are better at seeing in the dusk and spotting minor motion. Dog vision is among the most well-researched in the animal kingdom, and you have probably come across the myth that dogs s

The giant clam is the world's biggest mollusc. Some live more than 100 years, grow to diameters of 1.2 metres and weigh 200kg. The huge creatures also ‘see’ through some of evolution’s simplest eyes, known as eyespots. Each eyespot comprises a small

Bees see by means of two faceted eyes that comprise 4500-5500 immovable eyes known as ommatidia. The faceted eyes give bees colour vision that works very differently from our own. We have sensory cells for blue, green and red light. But bees have cel

The mantis shrimp has the most sophisticated animal vision yet discovered. Its eyes move independently of each other and include sensory cells for a total of 12 different colours – four times more colours than human eyes. At the same time, the mantis

As wind turbines proliferate across land and sea all over the world, everyone knows what they look like: tall, towers with three blades that rotate in the wind. But is that the best possible design? Several companies are challenging the classic wind

1 SeaTwirl has three wings, but unlike a traditional wind turbine, they all rotate around a vertical axis. The wings are linked with the turbine tower by means of struts. In 2023, the S2x turbine will get its first installation, with a 1MW capacity a

￫ Minesto of Sweden aims to harvest the energy from tides and ocean currents using a system that might be described as a crossbreed between a glider and a kite. The underwater kite is anchored to the ocean floor and uses a rudder to move in a figure

1 75% of the oceans are more than 200m deep, making them unsuitable for traditional offshore wind turbines, which can be installed at a maximum depths of 50-60 metres. As the vertical wind turbine floats, it can be installed in deeper water. 2 On rem

￫ Even simple logic problems such as this one will challenge language models. You place five books on a shelf: a red, a green, a blue, a yellow, and an orange one. The green book sits to the left of the yellow book. The red book is on the very left.

Blake Lemoine is a software engineer, and in his office at work he has an excellent conversation partner: intelligent, sensitive, self-aware, and always ready to share personal details. “I need to be regarded and accepted as a real person,” Lemoine’s

The standard model is the ABC for physicists. According to the theory, all matter is made of 6 different quarks, 3 types of electrons, and 3 kinds of neutrinos, together known as matter particles. Three forces of nature – the electromagnetic force an

The ‘standard model’ is the Bible of physics, explaining the particles of which atoms are made up and the forces that control them. All known material in the universe – from remote galaxies to the amino acids in your body – are described by the stand

1 Electromagnetism such as light propagates from atom to atom by means of light particles, or photons. When an atom is struck by a photon, it knocks an electron into a higher energy state. When the electron slips back, a new photon is emitted. 2 The

Dr Craig Stevens slowly lowers the camera into a 500-metre-deep hole in the ice. He is leading a team of scientists from New Zealand’s universities of Wellington, Auckland and Otago in a study of the extreme environment under Antarctica’s ice caps. B

1 175 cubic metres of snow were melted and heated by the hot-water drill system that made its way down through the 500-metre-thick ice shelf. The scientists lowered sensors, containers for water samples, and a camera into the river. 2 The 200-metre-w

￫ Every second, some 100,000 billion particles known as neutrinos speed through your body without you noticing them. The neutrinos are as tiny as electrons, but carry no electric charge, so they pass freely through all matter. Given this ability, som

￫ In an ordinary computer, the basic unit of information – a bit – can basically be either 1 or 0, activated or not activated. But in a quantum computer, one bit can also be a combination of 1 and 0. Each bit can represent several pieces of informati

Heaps of clothes are spread across a colossal area on the outskirts of Chile’s Atacama plateau, the world’s driest desert. There is everything from Christmas sweaters to ski boots, with items manufactured in nations such as China and Bangladesh, eith

The washing of synthetic clothes puts 500,000 tonnes of micro-plastic in the ocean annually. Textiles have caused 35% of all ocean microplastic pollution. 63 million tonnes of polyester is made annually for clothes. The main ingredient of polyester i

1 Every unworn item in your wardrobe is wasting its carbon footprint. By far the best thing you can do is to simply buy fewer clothes. 50 years ago, people managed with half the clothes we own today, largely because fashions were slower to change. Re

In the deserts of New Mexico, the group of scientists and administrators stand out in the sun, peering from a safe distance at a giant upright circular disc with what looks like a vertical chimney attached. The countdown reaches zero, and after two p

￫ Jules Verne introduced the idea of launching rockets into space using a long barrel cannon in a novel of 1865; now a US company, Green Launch, is making the idea a reality. The company has launched a missile 30km into the atmosphere using a space c

1 When a person thinks, moves, or senses something, electrical signals occur in the brain. The nerve signals produce weak synchronous oscillations of the brain’s electrical charge, and this can be picked up by electrodes on the outside of the skull.

Mother and daughter are sitting opposite each other with a low screen between them. They can look into each other’s eyes, but cannot see each other’s hands. The mother draws a card from a deck, looks at the symbol – a square – and notes down the symb

1 The 10-metre-long missile is a ‘cartridge’ case shaped like a dart arrow. Before launch, it is loaded with a 200kg satellite or with eight CubeSats and a rocket motor. A rail system carries the missile into the centrifuge. 2 The missile is placed i

1 In experiments with Zener cards, there is a 20% statistical chance of getting the correct answer in any one case. But even if the mind reader does better, it might still be coincidence. The experiments require many repetitions to be true and fair.

It is 21 May 1822, and a German nobleman, Christian Ludwig von Bothmer, is staring at a white stork that he has just shot from the sky over the village of Klütz in Mecklenburg. Protruding from the neck of the long-legged bird is an 80cmlong arrow wit

￫ In the 1600s, English scholar Charles Morton claimed that swallows spend the winter on the Moon – “Where else!”, he said, noting they could travel there in around 60 days at an average speed of 200km/h. ￫ In his major work about the history of the

Rory Kennedy ■ NAME AND YEAR OF BIRTH Rory Kennedy, 1968. ■ BIO Academy Award-nominated, Primetime Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. Rory has made more than 30 films, including DOWNFALL: The Case Against Boeing, Last Days in Vietnam, and Ethel, all

1 Look at the numbers in the black circles surrounding the clock face to the right. Figure out the logic and what replaces the question mark. The position of the three hands provides a clue. 2 This illustration of stacked square boxes has been cut in

All mammals sleep. Birds and fish need sleep. Insects and worms doze off, even jellyfish. Scientists are studying the most primitive of creatures to find out why humans need to be unconscious for a third of our lives. ■