FEATURE

In countless B-movies giant alien insectoids invade the Earth and wreak havoc, trampling through cities and tearing down buildings. Now we puny earthlings are hoping to turn the tables, and send insect-like robots to investigate the surface of Mars.

These "biomimetic" robots that can walk, climb and fly like real creatures are already under development - and some can almost think like them. Such designs promise to be more agile, robust and productive than the wheeled vehicles such as NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Wheeled robots only work when the ground is flat and firm, with few boulders. Opportunity has only just freed itself after a month stuck on a 30-centimetre-high sand dune. Giving robots the ability to walk like insects, on jointed legs, makes them far more agile, allowing them to cope with large obstacles, sandy surfaces and steep inclines.

FEATURE

Floating around in microgravity inside a spacecraft might look like fun, but it can do nasty things to your body. With the current enthusiasm for crewed space flight and particularly NASA's plan to send astronauts to Mars, there is a need to find ways to counteract the damaging effects of a lack of gravity.

Without Earth's gravity, astronauts lose their hand-eye coordination and as the days go by they suffer a steady loss of red blood cells and deterioration of bones and muscle, including the heart.

Back on Earth it can take weeks for an astronaut to re-adapt to terrestrial gravity, and they risk broken bones and torn muscles for much longer. "The body tries to adapt itself to a free-fall environment, and this creates enormous problems on return to gravity," says Kevin Fong of the Centre for Aviation, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine at University College London.

The answer, space scientists increasingly believe, is to create artificial gravity in orbit. "We'll be taking our own air, food, heat and light to Mars. Why not just take gravity along with us as well?" says Fong.

NEWS

Did life on Earth begin on a radioactive beach? That’s the claim of one astrobiologist, who says that life's ingredients could have emerged from the radioactive sand grains of a primordial beach laced with heavy metals and pounded by powerful tides.

NEWS

Call it extraterrestrial bling. Fossilised sea creatures have been found that coated themselves in tiny diamonds created in the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs.

NEWS

IN CLOSE-UP, they look like something out of a 1950s B-movie. Colonies of fossilised creatures, dubbed "hairy blobs", have been discovered in one of the harshest environments on Earth. The find may turn out to be crucial for spotting signs of extraterrestrial life in rocks on other planets

FEATURE

ARISTIDES is a typical 13-year-old boy. He plays basketball after school, is learning the clarinet, and in the evening sits in front of his computer playing games. There is one game that he is especially keen on, however, which marks him out from his peers. Every day he logs on to www.fold.it, where, under the nickname "Cheese", he plays a game that involves twisting, pulling and wiggling a 3D structure that looks a bit like a tree's root system. He manipulates different lengths of these snaking green tubes until they fit into the smallest volume possible. It may sound like a rather bizarre game - a distant 3D relative of Tetris, perhaps - but it is in fact a brilliant disguise for one of the toughest conundrums facing biologists today: how do proteins fold?

FEATURE

GUN at the ready, you are picking your way through an alien world, tracking an adversary. Spotting your chance, you launch an attack. It takes your foe by surprise, and you've got him cold.
It's the sort of scenario you'll find in any first-person shooter game, but this one is different. For a start, the virtual world is displayed in stunning 3D. And then there's the fact that the player whose on-screen character you have just dispatched is sitting right next to you. Though your opponent is looking at the same screen as you are, they see an entirely different view, tailored to their own virtual character.
Perhaps best of all, neither of you is wearing the clunky spectacles normally required for 3D viewing.
The technology to make most of this happen is already up and running in developers' labs. It relies, like any 3D illusion, on sending a slightly ...

Meet the alien neighbours

We find out what the folk next door could look like.

Extreme Worlds

Planets with shells of diamond, others completely covered with water – the latest computer models predict some pretty strange worlds are lurking out there. And we could be on the verge of spotting them thanks to the latest planet hunting technology...

Aliens Among Us

We explore the hottest volcanoes and driest deserts to track down the organisms that would be capable of surviving in space.

How Stuff Works

How does a Mars Rover work?

10 Worst Ways to Die in Space

Passing on after blasting off by asphyxiation, suffocation and spaghettification

High stakes space-race

The runners and riders hoping to claim a jackpot of £800 million from the European Space Agency

Life... but not as we know it

From ice grains to plasma crystals: why alien life might be weirder than you think

Life on Mars?

What will NASA's Phoenix lander discover on Mars?

Search for a Second Earth

How astronomers could find a planet just like home in 2009

Search for the Avatar world

When will we find the moon from the movie?

Seeds from space

Did life on Earth have its origins in interstellar gas clouds.

Could planets made of diamond and iron exist? While hundreds of exoplanets have already been discovered, astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell reckons it’s just a matter of time before we find the truly bizarre ones.

Life on other worlds will develop strange, unfamiliar and novel solutions to common evolutionary problems, writes astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell.

Our four-limbed, one-headed body is just right for living on Earth. But what changes might the low-gravity, radiation saturated environment of space bring to our species? Lewis Dartnell finds the answers.

Proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life may be closer than we think, thanks to a surge of research in astrobiology. Lewis Dartnell is determined to ascertain that we are not alone

When you hear about near-misses from asteroids like 2009 DD45, so-called near-Earth objects, your first thoughts might be of the apocalyptic. Hollywood has ensured that we are all fully aware of the risks posed to planet Earth from such space rocks, perhaps not to extinguish all life on our planet (it would take a truly Earth-cracking collision to wipe out the hardy bacteria living miles deep in the hot crust of our planet), but certainly collapse civilization as we know it.

But it is important to not sensationalize such risks, and thankfully the news reporting of 2009 DD45 generally seems to have resisted such cheap hooks

Russian space scientists are currently locked in a race against time. The Fobos-Grunt space probe was launched successfully on Tuesday, but then failed to fire its own rocket engine to leave Earth orbit. The unmanned spacecraft is currently stranded just above our heads, and the rocket scientists have only a fortnight to successfully contact the stricken probe and fire its propulsion system before the batteries fail and it reenters the Earth's atmosphere as an expensive shooting star.

One of the prime drivers for space exploration, both in terms of scientific return and in firing the interest of the public, is astrobiology and the search for life beyond our homeworld.

Information of life

Modern computer processors have been improving rapidly since they were first developed in the 1940s. Computer systems have advanced in two main ways: how fast they can run calculations and how much information they can store in a small space. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the chemical that stores the information of life in all our body’s cells, and nowresearchers are looking into ways of building DNA computers!

All very logical

Computers do many wonderful things: from running medical equipment and scientific simulations to searching the web and playing music or games. Yet all these different computer applications ultimately boil down to straightforward mathematical operations: adding or multiplying two numbers together, checking to see which of two numbers is the largest, and so on. This maths is performed by electrical circuits made up of logic gates. Logic gates are small electrical components that each perform a simple job, but can be built up in circuits to do very complicated processes.

With the thunderous launch of the Delta II rocket this weekend, not only was the Kepler space telescope lofted into the sky, but also our hopes of finding a Second Earth. But now, after those few minutes of intense excitement, comes several months of impatient waiting.

Kepler will spend the next two months being put through its paces, testing its ability to acquire guide stars, maintain absolute accuracy in its orientation, and successfully beam data back to Earth. After this commissioning phase, Kepler will enter active scientific service sometime this Spring.

After the May 9th Q’n’A with Xavier Bonfils, one of the astronomers envolved in the discovery of Gliese 581 C, the possibility of the exoplanet gathering the conditions for the existence of life stayed floating in the air. As Bonfils referred, some of the questions were not from his field of study, in consequence of this Lewis Dartnell, from the University College London and author of 'Life in the Universe: A Beginner's Guide', initiates his participitation as spacEurope’s resident astrobiologist by explaining the astrobiological significance of this new discovery.

This August the Phoenix lander is to be launched for Mars, and like it's mythological namesake will literally rise from the ashes of Mars Polar Lander and Mars Surveyor atop a pillar of flame.

This latest earthly explorer to be sent to the red planet is set to carry out a host of geological and meteorological measurements, important for understanding the interaction between Mars' polar regions and the global climate. But the Phoenix mission has also got astrobiologists very excited. The landing zone for Phoenix has been targeted to the martian polar region somewhere between the latitudes 65º and 72º North, which on Earth would correspond to the chilly climes of Northern Alaska. Mars is not blanketed by the greenhouse effect of a thick atmosphere, and the arctic plains here are truly cold -- during the winter the air itself freezes out on the ground as a thick frost of solid carbon dioxide ('dry ice'). But paradoxically, this is exactly the sort of location where astrobiologists think martian life may be still surviving today.

Lewis Dartnell, author of Life in the Universe, a Beginners Guide and our resident astrobiologist has, once more, taken a close look at Phoenix, after his great lesson published a few days before the launch of the mission. Seems like it was yesterday...

Well, Dartnell did it again. As a way of helping the readers understand the role and expectations of some of the instruments onboard, our own astrobiologist takes us on a vivid tour around the fascinating science we can foresee ahead coming from Phoenix Robotic Arm and its camera, MECA and TEGA.

The USS Enterprise drops out of warp and slips into a parking orbit around an uncharted alien planet. The Captain orders a scan for lifesigns and, within seconds, he is told exactly what lifeforms are present, including the pre-industrial humanoids on the southern continent. How feasible is this, really?


This article is also available on-line here through Blackwell publishers.

There's an old email that's been doing the rounds for a while now, proclaiming that water has been found on Mars. The attached image double‑clicks open to show a glass of water smartly balanced atop a Mars chocolate bar. Very droll, but this humour does hint at a fundamental question that planetary scientists have been asking about the red planet for decades. What is the prevalence and history of water on the surface of Mars? And more importantly, at least in terms of the biological potential of the planet, what is the story of liquid water: the state necessary to sustain and support life as we know it. Has Mars ever been a Waterworld, with long‑standing lakes, seas and perhaps even a great northern ocean, or has the red planet forever been a desert, like Frank Herbert's science‑fiction creation, Arrakis, the Dune planet?


Click here to download the .pdf   [3.5 MB].

The possibility of a living Mars is deeply ingrained in popular culture. The observations of the astronomer Percival Lowell, and his interpretation that these canals were built to channel melt-water from the polar regions down to the dying cities and farms huddled around the equator, are well known. Even into the 1960s, textbooks were being published that explained the temporal variation in surface brightness as due to the seasonal spread of vegetation. Martians are the science-fiction writer's alien invader of choice, from the heat-ray-wielding tripods of H.G. Wells to the bulbous-headed aggressors of Tim Burton's 1996 film Mars Attacks. With the armada of robotic probes currently orbiting and roving across the red planet, Mars has never been so fore-front in the public eye. Much of this interest is focussed on the possibility that our planetary neighbour has supported an independent genesis of life, and that in certain regions it may remain habitable even to this day. In this feature article, a selection of some of the most recent results and discoveries concerning the astrobiological potential of Mars will be discussed.


Click here for the article website, or here to download the .pdf   [700 kb].

This is an electronic version of an article published in Geology Today: complete citation information for the final version of the paper, as published in the print edition of Geology Today, is available on the Blackwell Synergy online delivery service, accessible via the journal's website at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/GTO or http://www.blackwell-synergy.com

As well as the following feature and news articles, I have reviewed a number of books for Plus:

The Math Instinct by Keith Devlin
The Science of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Michael Hanlon
Coincidence, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird
Negative Math by Alberto A Martínez
A Beautiful Math by Tom Siegfried
Mathematics and Common Sense by Philip J. Davis
Chases and escapes by Paul J. Nahin

Mathematicians love games. Not only can they have fun while looking like they're busy working, but even the simplest games can demand clever tactics and strategies to win. These are the perfect kinds of problems for solving with maths.

One branch of mathematics, called Combinatorial Game Theory, was developed around 30 years ago specifically to deal with the analysis of games. It prescribes a way of breaking games down into smaller parts that are easier to examine, and then using a special kind of algebra to add up the values of the individual subgames. And if there's one thing that mathematicians are good at it's counting.

As we saw in the last edition of +plus, mathematical techniques have been applied very successfully to analysing certain types of games. The two examples that we looked at were the simple subtraction game Nim, and the much more complex case of chess endgames. The next step is to see how computers, which are no more than automated maths machines, are being programmed to actually play chess themselves. It is theoretically possible to play chess perfectly, but neither humans nor machines will probably ever accomplish this. Computers have, however, already practically achieved perfection in draughts, and soon may be said to have ìsolvedî the game.

Alan Turing is considered to be one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the last century. He helped crack the German Enigma code during the Second World War and laid the foundations for the digital computer. His only foray into mathematical biology produced a paper so insightful that it is still regularly cited today, over 50 years since it was published. In it he described how a set of 'reaction-diffusion equations' explain how the wonderful diversity of animal patterns may be generated.

Maths at the BA Festival of Science, 4-11 Sept 2004
The BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science) is a nation-wide organisation dedicated to connecting science with people and promoting openness about science in society. It organises Science Week (11-20 March 2005) and an annual Festival of Science, which was hosted this year by the University of Exeter. Mathematics was well represented at this year's Festival, with an exhibition of mathematical art, the launch of the National Cypher Challenge, and a morning of fascinating lectures on the Clay Institute Millennium Problems. The three 'Million Dollar Maths' problems covered were P vs. NP, the Riemann Hypothesis, and the PoincarÈ Conjecture.

The world around us is full of relationships, rhythms, correlations, patterns. And mathematics underlies all of these, and can be used to predict future outcomes. Our brains have evolved to survive in this world: to analyse the information it receives through our senses and spot patterns in the complexity around us. In fact, it's thought that the mathematical structure embedded in the rhythm and melody of music is what our brains latch on to, and that this is why we enjoy listening to it. It is perhaps not surprising then that there is a great deal of overlap between mathematics and the art that our brain finds so pleasing to look at.

This article is a whistle-stop tour of some of the types of art with a strong mathematical component, or conversely where a mathematical visualisation has an astonishing beauty.

The word "stealth" is often associated with high-tech bombers built to be invisible to enemy radar. This technology works through the aircraft's surface being specially designed and having a covering of radar-absorbent skin that ensures minimal radio waves are reflected back to the enemy radar transmitter.

There is another kind of stealth, however, that does not rely on hiding the presence of an object, but on masking the fact that it is moving. If the pursuer approaches along a particular trajectory it appears to remain perfectly stationary from the point of view of the target. The pursuer can use this "motion camouflage" to rush right up to the target before it is perceived as a threat. This technique could be used by missiles to remain undetected for as long as possible, and even appears to have been discovered by nature. There is good evidence that hoverflies and dragonflies have evolved this strategy to fly without being detected.

Saying that someone is a chaotic thinker might seems like an insult - but, according to Lewis Dartnell, it could be that the mathematical phenomenon of chaos is a crucial part of what makes our brains work.

In the last issue Lewis Dartnell explained how chaos in the brain is not only unavoidable but also beneficial. Now he tells us why the same is true for our solar system and sends us on a journey that has been travelled by comets and spacecraft.

Judging by their self-confident lyrics about women and wealth, rappers consider themselves quite a special bunch. And now it's been proven mathematically that indeed they are, at least as far as their interaction network is concerned. An analysis of the network you get by connecting any two rappers that have performed together shows not only a remarkably close-knit community, but also another feature rarely found in naturally arising networks.

Building models forms the core of many areas of scientific and engineering research. Essentially, a model is a representation of a complex system that has been simplified in different ways to help understand its behaviour. An aeronautical engineer, for example, might build a miniaturised physical model of a fighter plane to test in a wind tunnel. In modern times, more and more modelling is being performed by computers - running mathematical models at very high rates of calculations. A computer model of the flow of air over a supersonic wing is incredibly sophisticated, but it is based on very basic principles of program design and simulation. In this article, the first half of a two-part feature on model behaviour, we'll take a look at how simple computer models can be programmed to study some very interesting natural systems as well as focus on how a few scientists are using similar models in their own front-line research.

In the first part of Simulating the World we saw how simple mathematical models can be built to study everything from the flocking of birds to the collision of entire galaxies. In these examples, a matrix, or a grid of numbers, was used as a convenient way of storing information on all the objects included in the simulation, so that it can be updated each time step as the simulation progresses. In this second article, we'll take a look at another class of mathematical models; ones where the matrix or array isn't just a way of storing information during the simulation, but actually is the simulation itself.

Many real-world situations can be simplified as a sequence of objects in a line or an arrangement across a flat space — in other words, they can be faithfully represented by either a list of numbers (a one-dimensional matrix) or a regular grid of cells (a two-dimensional matrix). During the course of the simulation, the objects interact with those near-by according to a set of predefined rules, with the identity of each discrete position on the line or plane changing over time. Such a system is called a cellular automaton model.

Modern technology has changed many things in our lives, including the way we communicate, travel and entertain ourselves. Electronic instruments and computer simulations have revolutionised science. Mathematics, one of the purest forms of human logic and reasoning, has also been changed by computer approaches. Even art has been undergoing a deep upheaval in the way it is created and appreciated, using the fast processing and graphical output of computers. The boundary between artist, computer programmer, and mathematician is becoming ever more blurred. In this article, Lewis Dartnell leads us through some examples of this exciting new wave of digital art.

Two of the most fundamental questions asked by people are how life emerged on the Earth, and whether we are alone in the cosmos. These deeply important questions form the core of a new kind of science, one that recently has been rapidly gathering momentum: astrobiology. Lewis Dartnell explains.

The first world beyond our solar system was discovered in 1992, and since then astronomers have been finding such 'extrasolar planets' (also abbreviated to 'exoplanets') at an ever quickening rate. As techniques and telescopes increase in sensitivity, the race is on to be the first to announce the discovery of a truly terrestrial exoplanet - a Second Earth.

We've all experienced it. It's Monday morning, you've slept through your alarm and are now in a hopeless rush to get in on time. The toast comes out of the toaster, you give it a quick sweep of butter, or in these more health-conscious times, margarine, and pick it up to take over to your newspaper on the kitchen table. And then it happens. Whether it simply slips out of your fingers, or it burns slightly and you subconsciously release it, the toast begins to drop towards the filthy floor. You watch in dismay as the toast falls, neatly performing a half-turn and landing flat on the floor, butter-side down in the grime. You don't even know why you tentatively hoped for the toast to land otherwise - the Universe seems out to get you as far as free falling toast is concerned.

Well, in fact it is. The butterside-down eventuality is the inevitable outcome due to a specific combination of parameters concerned with the dimensions of humans, and ultimately the fundamental structure of the universe. This argument-by-design, therefore, not only conclusively demonstrates the existence of the Creator, but additionally that he is a cantankerous old blighter who organised the Universe in this way to continually torment us with dirty toast.

Summer is rubbish for two fundamental reasons. One: wasps set about stinging everything with two legs without doing anything useful with their time like making honey or pollinating stuff. Two: girlfriends always want to go off on picnics. Avoiding having to eat al fresco was the sole reason our ancestors stopped messing about in trees and found some good caves instead. Picnics are inherently stressful; the apple juice invariably leaks into the bag, the Sports section blows away, and it is always always impossible to find a spot good enough to settle down on. The problem is that as soon as you approach that idyllic lush area of grass you spied from afar it starts looking nasty and patchy. The grass really does seem to always be greener on the other side, or at least further away.

But the Null Hypothesis can reveal the facts behind this illusion, and help spare you picnicking anguish. It's all to do with selective biases, which are also lurking behind other annoyances like always seeming to be in the wrong queue at a supermarket or the slowest lane in a traffic jam on the motorway.

Despite its ubiquity, text messaging is still infuriatingly fiddly. Mobile buttons seem to have been designed for only the nimblest of virtuoso-pianist fingers, and a hurried txt often results in a confused mess of superfluous letters. Even if every care is taken over precision-pressing, there is still the spectre of the predictive text synonym (coined here as the textonym or 'txtonym') to contend with - the set of words in English that are made up of the same sequence of key-presses. For example, pub and rub are both 'spelt' 7‑8‑2.

Here, an exhaustive search of all possible txtonyms is performed, in order to warn people of the worst pitfalls to be avoided as well as show up some of the more humorous coincidences.

The main supposition of John Gray's hypothesis, "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", seems to be that the two sexes followed largely independent evolutionary paths on Earth's planetary neighbours before migrating to their current terrestrial territory. The theory has come to be known (well, by us at any rate) as the multi-planetary hypothesis for the origin of sexual dimorphism. This resettlement was very recent on an evolutionary timescale, so that neither males nor females have had sufficient time to re-adapt to the new conditions, and so retain many behavioural and morphological phenotypic traits that were adaptations to the original environments of their ancestral homes. Here, we critically analysed this claim that each gender's ancestral home predetermines attributes of their personality.

Adventure sports such as abseiling and skydiving attract enough scare stories, and bungee jumping is no exception. Everyone's probably heard about the lady killed whilst jumping from a 60m high bridge in Australia because she'd accidentally been tied to a rope 80m long. Or the newly-weds that tried a tandem jump on their honeymoon, but didn't hold on tightly enough on the way down and cracked face-first back together at the end of the rope. Fortunately, most of these are urban myths and survive only due to their pub-gossip potential rather than their accuracy.

Bungee jumping is, however, undeniably responsible for a range of serious medical complaints, including musculoskeletal pain in the neck and back, headaches, dizziness and blurred vision. Thankfully, most of these symptoms have no lasting effects, yet there are tales of much rarer and more severe afflictions. In this paper we review some of the occurrences of bungee-induced injuries and report on some bungee jumping physics - it's even possible, under the right conditions, for bungee jumpers to cheat gravity itself. We'll then try to answer that burning question; can it make your eyeballs pop out?

Back in February, Martin Luck started a debate over what was natural and what was not. This month, Lewis Dartnell takes up the baton.

The CMS is currently running a number of projects under the banner of "maths careers", aimed at enlightening students from 11 upwards about the opportunities available to students of maths and stats. These subjects improve students' employment prospects and open up many fascinating careers, but they suffer from an image problem and are seen as unpopular and difficult.

Cellular Hacking, Motion Camouflage, and Life on Mars.

The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist
by Frans de Waal