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10 Horrifying Human parasites Creatures you really don’t want living inside you p56
ASIA EDITION
SCIENCE • HISTORY • NATURE • FOR THE CURIOUS
ROBOTS LIKE US
The new generation of faster, smarter and more emotional machines p32
Are you mad? Why there are more psychiatric disorders than ever p68
What stars are made of The birth of a new science p42
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Cornell University’s Clive McCay discovers calorie restriction extends lifespan in rats.
The elephant shark hasn’t evolved much in 450 million years
The boys enjoying a much welcomed shabu-shabu at the Restaurant Funkatei
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Honda’s Asimo is the poster boy of the robotics world – it can run at speeds of 6km/h (3.7mph)
How they move Robots are finally starting to master something we take for granted: using two legs
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duncan Graham-rowe is a science and technology journalist
HOW DO WE KNOW?
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The spectroscope that Bunsen and Kirchoff used to study sunlight; in doing so they found out some of the elements in the Sun
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JANUARY 2013 / FOCUS / X X
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You wouldn’t want to see Loa loa staring back at you when you look in the mirror
Michael Mosley and a tapeworm (but not his own – that’s still MIA)
JANUARY 2013 / FOCUS / X X
photo: nigel blake
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ALIEN HUNTERS
SETI@home presents you with a suitably scientific-looking feed of the radio signals you’re analysing
Things don’t go too well for us Earthlings following a cultural misunderstanding in Mars Attacks!
PSYCHIATRY
Could we soon all be classified as suffering from attention deficit disorder?
PSYCHIATRY
A 4.5cm-wide meteorite
Meteorite found on Lake Chebarkul Small meteorite
meteor trajectory
This was the first big impact of the social media age - the event was soon trending on Twitter. Within hours videos taken on smartphones were uploaded to YouTube. This provided a treasure trove of data for scientists to work with. “We checked at least 200 videos,” says Jiri Borovicka from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, who used them to trace back the meteor’s trajectory by returning to the precise locations the videos were taken.
Vital statistics
From this data we now know that a 20m-wide meteor ripped through the air at 69,524 km/h (12 miles per second) – almost 60 times the speed of sound. Coming in at a shallow angle of less than 20°, the rock vaporised at a height of 20km (12 miles), meaning only 0.05 per cent of the material made it to the ground as meteorites. The biggest
piece – a chunk weighing 570kg (1,256lb) – was later recovered from nearby Lake Chebarkul, having smashed through ice 70cm thick.
asteroid make-up
Before scientists could get to that large piece buried in mud at the bottom of the lake, they were able to gather 53 much smaller fragments from around the 6m-wide hole in the ice (pictured). Ranging from a few millimetres to 10cm in diameter, careful analysis of the samples revealed them to be from a class of meteorites known as ordinary chondrites. Although mostly stony, the samples were found to contain about 10 per cent iron, along with minerals like olivine. About 80 per cent of all meteorite falls are in this ordinary chondrite category.
pattern of shockwave
The International Monitoring System’s (IMS) detectors (infrasound station in Greenland pictured) are designed to pick up illegal nuclear weapons tests, but they also recorded the Chelyabinsk shockwave. “For the first time since the establishment of the IMS network, waves that travelled twice round the globe were clearly identified,” says Alexis Le Pichon at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. Their work helped us understand the impact and set a milestone against which future shockwaves can be compared.
force of the blast
The two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (blast pictured) and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War have a combined blast equivalent to 35 kilotonnes of TNT. Measurements of the shockwave by IMS indicate the asteroid exploded with a blast equivalent to 460 kilotonnes. “It was the largest airburst since the 1908 Tunguska event,” says Peter Jenniskens from the SETI Institute, California.
Chelyabinsk State Academic Drama Theatre
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The meteor left its mark on the sky Damage to a zinc plant in Chelyabinsk
Dmitri Mendeleev may have arranged the elements like a game of solitaire to create his famous table
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Tech Hub
By our expert panel
The fundamental building block of nature could be superstrings
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photo: thinkstock x2, getty, science photo library x3, alamy x2
Bendroflumethiazide
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Visual cortex
Frontal lobes
Thalamus
Amygdala
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J Craig Venter Little, Brown
Adam Rutherford is the presenter of Inside Science on BBC Radio 4
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What gave this 42-year-old man
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a) An electrical accident at work b) Staring at the Sun c) Using a virtual reality headset non-stop for four days
5 star-shaped cataracts?
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Far out man…
Solution to crossword 159
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