A. V.

Although the ‘Big Crunch’ idea is currently out-of-favour with cosmologists, it is still one possible fate for the Universe. However, the eventual endpoint of the Big Crunch is not known. In simple terms, if we regard it as the opposite of the Big Bang, we might indeed expect that all matter and space-time itself would collapse into a ‘singularity’: an infinitely dense point similar …

Would the Big Crunch Collapse Everything – Matter and Space-Time? Read More »

People with damage to the brain’s parietal lobe, which integrates sensory information, don’t dream. One hypothesis suggests that while we sleep, the parietal lobe continues generating signals, and our forebrain tries to make a story out of this activity. Other researchers have suggested that dreams occur when short-term memories are encoded and moved to long-term memory, or when …

Amazing Questions: Why Do We Dream? Read More »

The genes we inherit from our parents influence our psychological characteristics – things like our intelligence and memory ability – and our chances of developing conditions that affect the way we think, such as autism and schizophrenia. In that sense, identical twins – who share all the same genes – do think more alike than …

Do Identical Twins Think Alike? Read More »

There is no reason you can’t 3D print a musical instrument. Cheap violins have been made out of plastic for years, and 3D printing is just a handy way of assembling them. An electric voilin converts the string vibrations into an electrical signal, so it doesn’t depend on the acoustic properties of the resonating chamber. …

Would a 3D-Printed Instrument Sound the Same? Read More »

Physicists argue that their field is the most fundamental science. After all, every other science – biology, engineering, chemistry and so on – depends on the substances, energies and interactions of physics. But Robert Lanza, a US doctor and eminent scientist, believes this is upside-down, and that biology is the central driving science in the …

The Universe Is Created By Life not the Other Way Around Read More »

Two hundred thousand years ago, human brains were substantially smaller than they are today. They’d been growing slowly for about three million years or so, but then abruptly there was a dramatic increase of about 30 per cent or so. So what happened? Prof Colin Blakemore, a neurobiologist from Oxford University, believes that it’s all down to an …

is Intelligence a Genetic Mutation? Read More »

The Universe is filled with binary star systems in which planets rotate around more than one star at the same time. But the Solar System just has one star, the Sun, right? Well, perhaps not if the ‘Nemesis theory’ is correct. The theory goes something like this: over the last 250 million years, Earth has seen …

Does The Sun have a Hidden Twin? Read More »

Around the globe, about two-thirds of all deaths are from age-related causes. In industrialised countries, that figure rises to 90 per cent. Forget terrorism, malnutrition, war and malaria – when you look at the stats, the world’s biggest killer is old age. Over the millennia we’ve figured out a lot of ways to live longer, from …

Achieving Immortality Read More »

It’s pretty clear that organisms pass some form of knowledge down in their genes. Newly hatched sea turtles automatically move towards the sea, while baby kangaroos climb into their mother’s pouch when born. The term we use for such behaviours is ‘instinct’ but some researchers believe it may be possible to transfer more than just …

Awesome Questions: Can Memories be Passed Down in Your Genes? Read More »

It sounds like something from X-Men, but geophysicist Prof Joe Kirschvink believes we may have a sixth sense that allows us to sense Earth’s magnetic field in the same way that some birds can – we’ve just forgotten how to use it. And he’s been performing a series of experiments to try to figure out if …

Did Humans Have a Sixth Sense? Read More »

According to quantum mechanics, space is anything but empty. It is full of particles constantly flitting in and out of existence thanks to quantum fluctuations in energy. In principle, these fluctuations could give rise to collections of particles such as a hydrogen atom, a microwave oven, or even a living, thinking brain. The catch? The …

Can Thinking Beings Spring Into Existence From Nowhere? Read More »

The blood of the young can slow down the ageing process, accelerate healing and even treat degenerative brain disorders. That’s not the plot of a sci-fi novel, it’s the result of new research by degeneration expert Dr Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford University. Though to be clear, he’s only experimented on mice so far. “We discovered that …

Are We All Vampires? Read More »

In the constellation of Cygnus, 1,480 light-years from Earth, sits a very weird star. KIC 8462852 (or ‘Tabby’s Star’, named after its discoverer Tabetha S Boyajian) dims and brightens in an odd pattern, utterly unlike anything we’ve seen elsewhere in the night sky. A number of explanations have been proposed, like swarms of comets or planetary …

Mysterious Distant Star is Surrounded by an Alien Megastructure Read More »