Table of contents for Summer 2023 in BBC Science Focus Magazine

EYE OPENER This little critter with the cheeky grin is a Mizoram parachute gecko, Gekko mizoramensis, a previously unknown species of gliding gecko from the tropical forests of northern India. It's one of a handful of species capable of gliding, which it does using a combination of skin flaps and webbed feet. The flattened tail, meanwhile, helps it to steer. Although a single specimen of this species was collected over two decades ago, it's only recently been recognised as a new species. And it's an exciting discovery for more than one reason. “Parachute geckos are not common, at least in India,” explains PhD student Zeeshan Mirza, who co-authored the paper describing the new species. “Even when most species have a wide distribution, they're not locally common, which could be because…

COSMOLOGY DISCOVERIES An international team of scientists has found evidence that suggests Earth, and indeed A everything in the Universe, is afloat on a constantly rippling sea of low-frequency gravitational waves. The findings, announced in a series of papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters were made by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a team of researchers from more than 50 institutions in the US and abroad. Together, the papers provide the first evidence of a gravitational wave background – essentially, a soup of spacetime distortions that pervade the entire Universe. “This is the first-ever evidence for the gravitational wave background. We've opened a new window of observation on the Universe,” said NANOGrav scientist Dr Chiara Mingarelli. For more on this story, read BBC Science Focus's columnist…

Lady Gaga's Bad Romance. Beyoncé's Crazy in Love. Adele's Rolling in the Deep. They're all massive global hit songs, but what makes them so successful? A team of researchers in the US might be on the way to finding out after they used a machine learning artificial intelligence to predict hit songs with 97 per cent accuracy. They did it by fitting sensors to volunteers to monitor their brainwaves as they listened to 24 pop songs. The approach is known as ‘neuroforecasting' and aims to record the neural activity of the participants as they experience a sound, act or feeling in parts of the brain associated with mood and energy. Once they had the data, the team used machine learning techniques and computational models to line up the participants' neurophysical…

REALITY CHECK REVIEW REALITY CHECK THE SECIENCE BEHIND THE HEADLINES Mewing | Signs of life | Older dads “It's generally accepted that human jaws are getting smaller and have been since the dawn of agriculture” Visit the BBC's Reality Check website at bit.ly/reality_check_ or follow them on Twitter @BBCRealityCheck Lose your double chin! Straighten your teeth! Get a jawline so well-defined you could open a bottle of beer on it! These are just a few of the supposed benefits of ‘mewing', an odd but popular practice of DIY facial reconstruction – no cosmetic surgery required. Originally conceived by a controversial orthodontist, the technique has become a viral beauty trend on social media platforms. Mewing tutorials on TikTok, popularised by the supermodel Bella Hadid, have millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes,…

In the past year, art created by artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from being the subject of research papers to emerging as a niche fad, all the way through to becoming an internet-dominating tool producing millions of images a day. To get to this point of ubiquity, however, all the AI models had to be trained. And their training involves a hugely comprehensive deep-dive of the internet, in which they scan billions of images along with the images' corresponding descriptive texts. Not only does that raise some major ethical questions around copyright, it also begs one question for the future: what happens when the internet becomes flooded with images made by artificial intelligence? As these models continue to train by scouring the internet, they will undoubtedly be trained on images…

Dive into the biggest issue facing supersonic aircraf in Can supersonic flight ever be sustainable? at bit.ly/SprSncFlight November will mark the 20th anniversary of Concorde's retirement. And with it, a lengthy pause on regular, paying airline passengers (albeit those with healthy bank accounts) travelling faster than the speed of sound – 343 metres per second, or 761mph (1,224km/h). Many still mourn the distinctive, dartshaped aircraft's loss, deeming its costly tickets, urgent fuel use and thunderous sonic booms when it breached the sound barrier as acceptable prices to pay for being propelled across the Atlantic at Mach 2 (over 1,500mph or 2,400km/h). Supersonic travel looks to be on its way back, though, and in a cheaper, cleaner and quieter form. “Concorde was a technical marvel and well ahead of its time,”…

Since dogs began diverging from wolves tens of thousands of years ago, they've been changed for us, and by us, to suit us. This makes sense: natural selection describes how animals who have traits well suited to their environments are more likely to survive and bear young themselves. Artificial selection, the process of domestication, by which humans have taken over the role of nature in determining who survives and can breed, is quite similar. Those animals who have traits well matched to us are more likely to be kept by us, and survive. Thus, animals who we like – who we find useful, or cute, or cute and useful – will be successful. Another way of looking at this, though, is that those animals who have traits we like are…

SMELL Dogs can recognise other people and dogs by their smells. Dogs can recognise the smell of their own urine. Male and female dogs scent mark with urine. Sometimes they scratch the ground at the same time. When meeting another dog, dogs typically try to smell the side of the head and neck, or the rear end of the other dog – often while moving their own rear end away, as if to prevent it being sniffed. The olfactory epithelium in a dog's nose is up to 150cm2 compared to just 5cm2 in humans. Some of the things dogs have been trained to sniff out include: C. difficile; illicit drugs; wildlife scat (for example, grizzly bears); missing people; dead bodies; a drop in their guardian's blood sugar; and invasive species,…

Crates generally aren't needed. There may be times in your dog's life when they need to be confined (at the vet's after surgery, for example) and then it can help if they're already crate-trained. Crates can be used to transport your dog and can help with house training. But you can't shove a dog in a crate and expect them to like it – it takes training. A crate with the door always open can become a safe space for your dog to relax. But don't leave your dog in a crate all day while you're at work – they need space to move around.…

My dog Pepper is an easy-going senior who loves bedtime. I'm sure his treat is part of it, but he also likes us all settling down for the night. He loves short walks, during which he gets to sniff a lot. And he's thrilled to see the horse that lives in a field nearby (he used to be afraid of horses, so this still means extra treats). Lots of dogs would like these things, but they're Pepper's favourites. When we think about how to upgrade a dog's life, we can take what we know is important for dogs in general, and then tailor it to our individual dog's likes. 1. Sniffs The general rule of enrichment is that it should involve the animal's most important sense. For dogs, that's smell.…

SPLENDID PERSEIDS WHEN: EARLY-LATE AUGUST The Perseid meteor shower shows activity from mid-July through to late August. Generally the meteor rate is low, but between 10-16 August, rates are higher, reaching a peak in the early hours of 13 August. Several factors affect the quality of a display. Sky clarity is one and this depends on light pollution, weather and the Moon. The Moon won't interfere much this year, so if the weather looks good, it's worth planning a trip to a dark location if you have light polluted skies. Another factor is radiant altitude. A meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through the fine dust spread around a comet's orbit, in this case 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The typically sand-grain sized particles (meteoroids) are in parallel orbits around the Sun. As they…

You could be forgiven for thinking that the idea of teenage turtles who mutate into humanoid ninjas is a tad far-fetched. But you may be shell-shocked to learn that actually, in reality… it is. “First of all,” says Jeanette Wyneken, professor of biological sciences at Florida Atlantic University, “the chromosomes of a turtle and of a human don't match up. Turtles have more chromosomes than we do. And if your chromosomes don't match up, you often end up with genetic abnormalities called a ‘teratology', a term that literally means monsters.” But let's ignore all of that. Let's suppose, somehow, there are mutant turtles that stand on two legs and say things like, “cowabunga, dude”. Would their turtle physiology be able to adapt to humanoid anatomy? “One big change,” says Wyneken,…

The urgent need for solutions to the climate crisis was made clear in the International Panel on Climate Change's climate report published earlier this year, but who will pay for them? According to a new study, it will be the super-wealthy. According to the study, published in the journal Joule, a transition to renewable energy would have a low impact on the majority of people – despite previous assumptions that moving away from fossil fuels would negatively impact retirement plans and savings. Instead, the team of economists from France and the US estimated that the biggest losses in high-income countries would be to the wealthiest citizens – and even these losses would account for a small percentage of their total wealth. “There's this big question of who's winning and who's…

COMMENT Alie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on. It's a well-known phrase. But a more accurate version would be: a confidently told lie is halfwat around the world before the truth has got its boots on. Lies can travel so much quicker because we humans are far more likely to accept and believe information delivered confidently by a confident person, or some other source, using confident language. And as the modern world has repeatedly shown us, this regularly leads to undesirable outcomes. Humans trusting confident people over those who are more uncertain is an established phenomenon. The ‘confidence heuristic' states that when two (or more) people are trying to make a decision but each person knows different things, confidently expressed arguments are perceived…

Imagine you're an alien on a distant planet and you're desperate to let everyone know you're there. Instead of howling aimlessly into the void, how can you give yourself the best chance of being heard? According to new research, extraterrestrial civilisations could piggyback a signal onto one the brightest beacons in the known Universe: a supernova. These cataclysmic explosions detonate as the biggest stars die. For a time they shine as brightly as 10 billion Suns and release as much energy as the Sun will emit in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. When a supernova goes off, astronomers sit up and take notice. In May this year, astronomers erupted in a flurry of excitement when they spotted the supernova SN 2023ixf detonate in the Pinwheel Galaxy (also known as M101). “It…

You won't find the word ‘love' in the published papers of scientists who research non-human animals. Ironically, though, most animal behaviour scientists were drawn to the subject because of their deep and abiding interest in them. And yet, generations of researchers have been trained not to use anthropomorphic words like ‘love' to describe something a non-human animal might be feeling. Indeed, the use of anthropomorphisms (descriptions of non-human behaviour or characteristics with terminology used to describe humans) has long been condemned in the field of animal behaviour. Hence, researchers talk of ‘temperament' instead of ‘personality' and ‘positive cognitive bias' instead of ‘optimism'. This hard-line stance against the applicability of human terms to non-humans is loosening, however. Partly for the usefulness of some of the terms for describing animal behaviour, but…

C learly, dogs are quite good at understanding us. But how far does this go and how are they able to understand our emotions – what cues are they reading? A dog who has lived among people is a much better reader of us than we are of them (or, one might suggest, of ourselves). In a way, dogs are anthropologists: they spend a lot of time observing us and thus learn associations between behaviours we might not know about ourselves. In the home, you might see this in their learning to predict the difference between you getting up to take them out and getting up to go to the fridge. From studies with owned dogs, we also know that they can read stress and even detect fear, and they can…

There are so many options for dog food, it can be hard to know what to choose. Our choices are often shaped by cultural beliefs – after all, dogs are family members, so it's no surprise we think carefully about what to feed them. Don't be swayed by marketing, though; dogs are not wolves. Dogs are omnivores, meaning they can eat food from both animals and plants. It sent ripples through the dog community when scientists comparing dog and wolf genes discovered that domestic dogs have 4-30 copies of a gene for amylase, a protein involved in starch digestion, depending on breed; wolves only have two copies of it. It was a surprise finding and it showed that dogs have gained the ability to digest starchy foods such as potatoes…

A lead constrains your dog's movement and that can make them more tense, especially if an off-lead dog runs up to them – they don't have freedom to move away. The lead can also interfere with their body language and their ability to read other dogs' body language (they can't move to get a better view). Dogs on leads are less likely to interact with other dogs and sniff less than dogs off lead. What you do with the lead matters too: don't jerk the lead or attach it to a shock, prong or choke collar as this can cause stress and is bad for their welfare.…

It's hard to say whether devouring a dessert at breakfast actually helps with weight loss. The most reported research comes from a team led by endocrinologist Prof Daniela Jakubowicz at Tel Aviv University in Israel. In 2012, her team published a study of 193 people on a calorie-controlled diet who consumed either a low-carbohydrate breakfast or one with high protein and high carbohydrate, including a sweet treat such as a piece of cake or a doughnut. After 16 weeks, the low-carb group started to regain weight while the breakfast treat group lost a few more kilos. The scientists reported that people in the treat group were more likely to stick to their diets, possibly because the foods lost some of their ‘reward value'. The morning dessert also appeared to reduce…

The SARS epidemic of 2002-2004, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), affected over 8, people globally. Research into the long-term effects of SARS has been done, although the number of studies and participants is limited compared to COVID-19. Some documented complications from SARS include reduced lung function, persistent cough and exercise intolerance. Some people also went on to experience physical weakness, fatigue and musculoskeletal issues. However the term ‘long SARS' hasn't gained the same recognition as ‘long COVID'. The concept of long COVID refers to the persistent symptoms experienced by some people after recovering from COVID-19. The symptoms can range from fatigue, brain fog and shortness of breath to joint pain and organ dysfunction. While long COVID has received a lot of attention and research, the term…

Your phone uses GPS to track distance travelled. But try disabling it and you'll notice that fitness apps will still give you step counts. They do this using your phone's built-in sensors, which usually include an accelerometer and a gyroscope. Accelerometers measure acceleration, while gyroscopes help track the direction your phone is pointing in, usually by measuring the movements of tiny components inside them that generate electric signals as they move. According to the experts, the best place to count steps is at the hip and so putting your phone in your pocket should provide a more accurate count than putting it in your bag. A study published last year tried to verify the accuracy of smartphone apps for step-counting, comparing results from a medical-grade accelerometer worn on the hip…

Wipe off your prints I found Dr Peter Bentley's Reality Check article on passwords (June, p36) very interesting. My mother is 88 years old and is a convert to the fingerprint form of self-identification. But I've begun to wonder whether this form of security is actually as good as the article stated. A finger that's pressed against glass or plastic will leave residue on the material from sweat and skin oil. The police have, for decades, used techniques to identify and record fingerprints left at crime scenes using these residues. It's not far-fetched, I believe, to imagine that the criminal fraternity would have access to the same technology, or certainly a version of it. Once captured, the fingerprint could be replicated on soft plastic with the use of a 3D…

Ever wished you could just leap onto the nearest travelling object to cut down your journey time? Well, scientists have just discovered that a microscopic worm can use electric fields to leap onto moving creatures. Much like hitchhiking for humans, this ability allows the worms to save energy and travel further. “When you're very small, the world is a very different place,” entomologist and broadcaster Prof Adam Hart, who was not involved in the study, told BBC Science Focus. “Caenorhabditis elegans is an incredibly well-studied creature and yet even with all that attention we can still find something new.” The 1mm-long C. elegans worms, which are commonly found in the soil, were found attempting to fling themselves from Petri dishes in the labs of Hiroshima University and Hokkaido University, Japan.…

MEDICINE A new study shows that space travel changes how the genes in our white blood cells work, preventing them from recognising and combating infections. “These results are important considerations of the risks to health during spaceflight and space exploration,” Myles Harris, coordinator of the Space Health Risks Research Group at University College London, who was not involved in the study, told BBC Science Focus. The study, published in Frontiers in Immunology, describes how the rapidly decreasing strength of our immune systems in space is likely caused by a phenomenon known as ‘fluid shift'. Fluid shift involves blood plasma, which transports white blood cells around the body, moving from the lower body to the upper body due to the microgravity of being in space. It's thought that this fluid shift…

It's not so much that dogs like to have the last word, more that barking can be a group activity that they all want to join in on. Dogs use barks in several different ways: they can be a greeting to say hello, a warning (for example, that a stranger is approaching), a request for attention when left alone or wanting something, and part of play. Barking is what's known as an allelomimetic behaviour. In other words, a behaviour that other dogs are likely to copy. So when one dog barks, other dogs are likely to start barking too.…

Every meeting of dogs usually starts with an introduction that involves a good butt sniff. What data are they gathering with this form of greeting? Indeed, when they leave their scent on something and smell scents left by other dogs, what information are they getting? Big-brained we humans might be, but we're little-nosed. We're visual creatures, interpreting the world first through sight; dogs are olfactory creatures, seeing that same world as a smell landscape. The difference highlights how hard it can be for us to imagine that dogs are sniffing anything at all on the pavement when we see ‘nothing there', or how baffled we are when they go to sniff another dog's rump for the seventh time. To begin to understand it, look at where your gaze lingers when…

The old cliché is that every year of a dog's life is equivalent to seven human years. In other words, a five-year-old dog is like a 35-year-old human. But it's not so simple. The rate at which dogs develop is different than for humans, and the dog's size and breed make a big difference to its lifespan. Humans take 18 years to reach adulthood, but puppies are only pups for six to nine months (depending on the size and breed). Dogs typically undergo puberty between six months to a year, so that's their teenage phase. Then they count as young adults until they get to three to four years. The American Animal Hospitals Association considers the last 25 per cent of a dog's life to be when they're old. Typically…

The term was coined by a Swiss doctor in the 17th century to describe the homesickness experienced by mercenaries fighting far from home (from the Greek ‘nostos' – the desire to return home – and ‘algos', meaning pain). That's not so different from how we use the term to refer to thinking fondly or wistfully of the past, such as places you've been or people you've known. In fact, psychologists have shown that nostalgia of this kind has various psychological benefits, such as countering feelings of loneliness or existential anxiety. But a yearning for a past that you never actually experienced is different (and has its own name, ‘anemoia', according to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows). Traditionally, psychologists thought of nostalgia as being based on a person's recollections of their…

EXPLAINER THE HUNT FOR ALIEN LIFE There's never been a more exciting time than right now in the search for life beyond Earth. This fast-paced field is called astrobiology and it's one of the more interdisciplinary branches of science, combining biology, chemistry, planetary science and astronomy. Most life in the Milky Way is expected to be single-celled microbial lifeforms, like Earth's bacteria, but perhaps some worlds support more complex forms of life, such as plants and animals. Recent advances in three main areas have boosted astrobiologists' optimism that we could be on the brink of discovering the first signs of extraterrestrial life: extremophiles, exoplanets and robotic exploration… “Perhaps some worlds support more complex forms of life, such as plants and animals” What three things are making astrobiologists so optimistic about…

ACROSS 1 Fancy Nicholas embracing doubting Thomas (5) 4 Concerning that dame's not started to prepare (5) 8 Sound right as a conditioner (5) 9 Seafood delicacy? Throw rest out! (7) 10 Couple as well, by the sound of it (3) 11 Engineers with match to fix again (5) 12 Wrong storey for seafood (6) 14 Transport favourite drinker wearing large, soft shoe (6,7) 17 Resentful, having a beer (6) 19 Finished with a type of Italian food (5) 22 Previously used in poetry (3) 23 Proper turn by the French flower (7) 24 Managed church's farm (5) 25 Thing getting broken in darkness (5) 26 Left debtor further down (5) DOWN 1 It prevents clear sight of waterfall (8) 2 Musical group without a safety measure (5) 3 Get back in central parade (7) 4 More business about puzzle (5) 5 Warp Ten, travelling around city (7) 6…