Beginning of First Issue of Weird Science

THE DEATH OF DEATHScientists are working hard to conquer immortality!

Will nanomachines ever per-form surgery on their own?

Just what is this strange stuff called antimatter?

35 years on, where is Voyager 1 now?

Is this the luckiest man alive?

CURED OF HIV AND CANCER!

Q&A Who is this cheeky MONKEY?

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Welcome to the science playground!

ππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππ

STAY CONNECTED!

@WiSciMag

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scientified.co.uk

Scan this QR-code among the 13 billion year old star clusters called Messier 56 for exclusive online content. It is hard to navigate in galaxies, thus we have provided you with this nifty little arrow.

Good day and welcome to the first issue of Weird Science! It is January, which not only marks the first days of the Earth’s 365 days cycle around the sun – but also demonstrates the first ep-och in a year of significant scientific progress in different areas. This issue’s purpose is to bring you all the latest news about the incredible things that are going on inside sweaty laboratories and around astronomer’s telescopes all over the world. After doing some scientific research ourselves, we have noticed that most people hate to fight against difficult and sloppily present-ed science in different magazines and journals. Don’t worry! The Weird Science team will win this fight for you by breaking the information down and transforming it into entertaining and humorous material. In this issue we take a look at that inevita-ble thing called death. Will we ever be able to stop this phe-nomenon, and bring immortality to the people? We hope that you will enjoy being part of our community as we endeavor to make science as fun as fiction!

Have a great day and happy reading!

Kind regardsVegard Unger Ellefsen,Editor, Weird Science

January / Weird Science / 3

ON THE COVER FEATURES

The Death Of Death?

Abiogenesis: Fact Or Fiction

Nanomachines

The Golden Ratio

The Opposite Of Things

Disastrous Diseases

Fun Facts About Dinosaurs

The Life of Voyager

Study of Marijuana Effects

Time’s Arrow

8

15

30

33

34

43

44

46

56

58

BRAIN JUICE

Puzzles

Competitions

The Sci-in-fi

Q & A

Local Science

How does it work?

16

18

20

22

25

41

CONTENTSRight, let’s get

stuck in shall we?

Underrated facts illuminated44

The Death Of Death New science might one day ex-tend life or even make humans live forever!

8

22

6

Q & A Our specialist team answers your science questions.

Cured of HIV How two wrongs make a right.

Popular MonkeyWhy this fellow is a genius.

8

We take a look at what turns people into worm food.

Is life just a bunch of chemi-cals?

Little robots gone wild.

1.618 is more than just a num-ber.

Just what is anti-mat-ter?

Paleontology has never been so much fun.

35 years in space and still Voy-ager marches on.

Just what is the truth about the dreaded demon weed?

We explain why time moves forward.

The nastiest things ever to crawl inside the human body.

4 / Weird Scence / January

CURIOSITY

New Gadgets & Inventions

Future Science’s

Things About

Mythbusting

What is This?

48

52

54

61

63

Editor’s Introduction

Reader’s Letters

Editor’s Opinion

Knut Odegaards Crazy Column

Comment Piece

3

52

54

61

69

OPINIONS AND THOUGHTS RECREATION

Latest World News

Biography of...

Workshop Reviews

Five Mindblowing Photographs

Book Reviews

6

11

26

36

64

CONTENTS

Reader’s letters: Fate of the Universe 52

Will this guy ever lose his job?8

Marijuana: Is it dangerous? 56

Newton: Considerably dead11

The latest gizmos reviewed.

Latest science research.

Fun facts.

Don’t believe everything you hear, folks.

Yes, I know it looks weird. We explain what it is.

A warm welcome from the man behind the myth.

You tell us what’s on your mind.

Our editor tells it like it is.

Mayhem from the craziest astro-physicist we’ve ever met.

Should more money be spent on space exploration?

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

The life of a famous scientist. This month: Isaac Newton.

We rate the upcoming sci-ence fairs and workshops.

Weird and wacky imag-es to bend your brain.

We take a look at the latest science-related literature.


Science News

North Carolina, USAScientists at Wake Forest University surely had a light bulb hovering over their heads when they reinvented the fluorescent light. The new product won’t shatter, burn out or flicker. David Carroll, director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest University, commented: “We are working with a company and are hoping to have this technology ready for the consumer next year.” The new light might not replace the sun, but it could potential-ly decrease mental health problems among irritable office workers tor-tured all day by ceaselessly humming lights.

Colorado, USAPrivate trips into space may become a reality by as early as 2027 if Colorado firm Golden Spike gets its own way. The company, comprised of former NASA managers, hopes to offer return trips to the Moon for as little as 900 million pounds. While this is clearly no chunk of pocket change, it does noticeably undercut the costs of a similar government trip. Besides which, who knows? If funds are an issue, it might be possible to negotiate a one-way rate.

SwitzerlandScientists based at CERN in Geneva announced earlier this year that they had discovered a new particle, “consistent with the Higg’s boson.” Physicists have been hunting down this beast-ie for 50 years, ever since Peter Higgs first theorised its existence in the 1960s. In the shell of a nut, the Higg’s boson is thought to be responsible for giving things their mass. For this reason it is often re-ferred to as the God particle—not that they want to give it an ego or anything.

6 / Weird Science / January

CURIOSITY

Across the WorldSwedenBlindness sucks. One minute you’re sitting down chilling with a beer and an action movie. The next someone removes your ability to find the bathroom. This is the luckless fate that 100,000 people around the world experience each year. But fear not! Scientists at the University of Gothenburg have created stem cells which grow and divide when implanted in patients with vision-threatening diseases. In a matter of days these develop into ordinary corneal cells that are indistin-guishable from other healthy tissue. It’s not all good news though. Unemployment among guide dogs is expected to rise sharply, and many will have to begin claiming benefits simply to continue eating Pedigree Chum.

TaiwanResearchers think they may be able to significantly extend the lifespan of flash memory devices; strangely, by baking them. Macronix, the company behind the findings, proposes to include onboard heaters into newer appliances capable of reaching a whopping 800 de-grees Celsius — albeit for only a brief moment. The theory is that this should toughen up flash memory cells and in-crease longevity. It is however worth noting that this process is only believed to work with digital memory and not ana-logue, so students studying for exams would be best advised to refrain from toasting their own heads.

GermanyIn 1995, Timothy Brown was diagnosed with HIV. As if things couldn’t get any worse, he later developed cancer in 2006. However, after chemotherapy treatment resulted in complications, his doctor decided to try a radical new approach, taking bone marrow from a donor which contained a mutation known as CCR5 and using it in a transplant operation. CCR5 causes cells to become immune to the HIV virus. After the surgery, not only was Brown’s cancer treated, but he also tested negative for HIV! Brown may now need further surgery to remove the permanent grin from his face.

Text: Vegard Unger Ellefsen & Glen Parkinson


Pictures: Ulf Stenevi, G

othenburg University, Ken Bennett, W

ake Forest University, M

emo Tech, W

ikimedia Com

mons, Eric Risberg/A

P, PSD G

raphics

Death is a remarkably inconvenient thing. There you are, having the time

of your life, when suddenly your kidneys fail or you fall off a cliff. It’s enough to ruin even the best of moods and there isn’t even an appeals process for when you’ve been killed in error. At least if there is, it’s quite strict and likely has a backlog. Death is the proverbial fly in your ointment and occasionally the literal axe in your head. But surely the infuriating beast can be beaten? They once said man would never fly and he worked that one out quite nicely. So, is it ever really going to be possible to cheat the grim reaper out of your immortal soul?

Well, the bad news is probably not. Not premature death at any rate. Putting you back together and reanimating you after you’ve been hung, drawn, quartered, then fed to a pack of hungry predators is something which might always be beyond the abilities of technology to accomplish. But ageing – and there-fore dying from natural causes – is a

phenomenon which scientists might well one day conquer.

The technical term for ageing is se-nescence and it’s traditionally been thought to happen to all organic things everywhere. Well, it doesn’t. The aptly named immortal jellyfish for instance has the rather odd capa-bility of metamorphosing back into a child after sexual reproduction. Even turtles seem to have trouble growing old and weak with time, so senescence isn’t just an inelucta-ble slap in the mush from the cruel hand of fate. In fact, scientists have been tinkering around with the age-ing processes of various creatures for decades and have yielded some very promising results. For example, in 1993 Cynthia Kenyon managed to isolate a single gene in worms which doubled their lifespan. Unfor-tunately, several of them then had enough time to realise they were worms and there was a marked increase in suicides.

Marching on, boffin types worked out long ago that human cells pe-riodically die and are replaced by

new ones within the body. As a per-son ages, the efficiency of this pro-cess slows and eventually it stops completely. Well, that’s because in-side every human cell are veritable little time bombs called telomeres. As cells divide, these telomeres become progressively shorter until finally a point is reached where a cell knows it must permanently die. Luckily, there is a way to confuse the pesky little blighters.

The unlikely weapon in the war against delaying or perhaps even preventing cellular ageing is, sur-prisingly, cancer. OK, so not cancer exactly, but rather a protein found in cancer cells called telomerase. Although it sounds like some-thing you’d put on a French salad, telomerase actually inhibits the shortening of telomeres after each cell division, giving cancerous cells the ability to, well, kill you. They don’t slow down with time but rather keep duplicating until things get outright nasty. If you’ve ever wondered why cancer is so difficult to beat then it’s because it’s immor-tal and you’re not.

The Death of Death


FEATURE

Now, before any of you have the drunken idea of mainlining telomer-ase into your jugulars to achieve eternal youth, it’s probably best to explain that matters aren’t quite that simple. When cells are strong and healthy, incessant replication might be a good thing, but when they become damaged, as with cancer cells, it’s an entirely different kettle of fish. The last thing you want is a strange cell mutation bouncing around inside you eternally replicat-ing. Not unless you want to be left with few career options other than the Russian circus or a recurring part in the X Men. Somehow scien-tists must find a way of convincing the body to encourage permanent cell death only in problem cells, while leaving all the others in rela-tive peace.

You’ll doubtless all be happy to know that many scientists through-out the world are working on this problem right now. Following her breakthrough with the worms, Cyn-thia Kenyon became so adamant that her research could eventually be applied to humans that she start-

ed her own company to begin look-ing into it. Accusations from local gardeners of wanton worm-hoggery are now well behind her, and others have joined her in the quest to take the fight to death’s own doorstep.

Monkeying about with the ageing process might be an interesting way to spend the afternoons, but it’s also a very potentially dangerous thing to be doing. It’s improbable that get-ting older is entirely an evolutionary conspiracy to give you hairy toes and a blue rinse, so it could have a clandestine purpose which is some-how profoundly beneficial. Not for you, obviously. That’s just silly. But one thing death is very good at is disposing of older genetic models to leave room for newer improved versions. Had ageing been under-stood and prevented thousands of years ago, there’d be an overpopu-lation of knuckle-draggers by now, uninterested in every mystery of time and space that didn’t involve the acquisition of a banana. The battle for immortality might seem a noble one, but man probably needs to understand why he isn’t immor-

tal in the first place before throwing a tantrum about it.So, there might yet come a day when people can be young forev-er – but alas, nobody has quite yet cracked the puzzle. Those of you too excited to wait are either going to have to ask a vicar where Jesus stashed his booze mug or get down with some serious voodoo. There are of course more practical ways to delay father time from wrinkling you up like a soggy prune, but you have to take the leap of faith that Mickey Rourke’s dinghy lips were just a surgical anomaly – a risk only the bravest are comfortable with.

It certainly remains to be seen whether man would be better or worse off without natural death. In any case, maybe someday soon he’ll get a chance to find out.

Either that, or be forever doomed to die trying.Text: Glen ParkinsonPhoto: Jim Penuccci

The Death of Death


FEATURE

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Your Letters...Well, my fellow followers of science: here we find our-

selves again. This section of the magazine is dedicated

to providing relief from the symptomatic head-scratch-

ing associated with utter bafflement. We invite you,

the reader, to contact us with details of what is puz-

zling you, and then we, the boffins, attempt to unravel

the enigma. The author of each question printed will

receive fifty pounds in cash and a year’s subscription

to Weird Science Magazine. Dear Weird Science,

I hope you guys can help settle an argument I’ve been having with a friend of mine about the ultimate fate of the universe. He seems to think that it will eventually contract back into a small particle and that when this contraction starts, time will begin to run backwards. The idea is far too silly for me to even contemplate and we’ve been fighting about it for over three weeks now. I was really hoping you could settle this matter for us once and for all. Which of us is right?

In anticipation,

Ben Chappelle, Leeds.

Well, firstly Ben, thanks for your letter. It’s an interesting topic for discussion because, until fairly recently, the “big crunch” theory your friend is referring to was taken quite seriously by astrophysicists the world over. The reasoning behind it was that the gravity of all the accumulative matter within the uni-verse would eventually slow down its expansion and cause it to collapse back in on itself. Since time is a part of space, it would follow that it would also have to move backwards with it. However, do not fear, because the NASA WMAP mission seems to have put paid to this particular frame of thinking. According to their data, not only will there not be a “big crunch”, but space will in theory keep expanding forever.

They also discovered that the universe is flat, but let’s save that one for another day.

...of the month

Dear Weird Science,If I stand on top of a mountain that is high

enough, and look through a telescope that is

powerful enough, will I see the back of my own

head?

S. Toner, PlymouthNo. Telescopes operate by gathering light,

and light has a measurable speed. When we

look far out into space, because of the great

distances light must travel to reach us, we are

effectively observing the past. If we wanted to

cover a distance as vast as the circumference of

the universe, the quandary would be that we

would be looking back before the universe was

actually there.

Dear Weird Science,

What were the first materials created in the after-

math of the big bang?

Nick Shenton, Dublin.

As far as we know Nick, the first materials were:

hydrogen, helium and lithium.

That’s all for now; thanks for all your questions and we look forward to answering more next month. Unless of course, in the meantime, one of us dis-covers the grand theory of everything hiding in our Weetabix!

Dear Weird Science,

What will happen to me after I die?

Jeremy Butler, Skegness.

Um… You’ll begin to smell.


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US space-plane mission shrouded in secrecy.

An unmanned US space-plane has launched for a third time out of Florida, US, amidst speculation that it may be being used to spy on Chinese spacelab Tiangong-1.

Gamma ray bursts may shed light on theory of everything.

Carbon capture and storage may solve problem of global warming.

Four dimensional field theory leads to physics prize for Israe-li scientist.

Battle foam idea for internal injuries given cash injection by US military.

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Beginning of First Issue of Weird Science