CLS Junior Science Magazine (Issue 01)

Junior Science Magazine

Nuclear Fusion The Science behind the television Roll Over Chlorophyll The Smell of Happiness Nobel Prize Winners William Perkin Can Ants Cope in Zero Gravity?

I Can’t Wait for 2029 Why Giants Don’t Exist Caribbean Super-Rat Can We Make an Iron Man Suit

Nuclear Fusion Alex Bridges, 1H What Is Nuclear Fusion?

Nuclear fusion is the act of fusing two atoms together to create a huge amount of energy.

Basically, what happens is that when the two atoms in question are fused together the act of fusion converts a tiny fraction of their mass into the aforementioned huge amount of power (this follows Einstein’s famous equation e=mc2). The atoms fused together are usually of hydrogen 1 isotopes 2 and create a single helium molecule when fused together. Nuclear fusion happens all the time in the sun and other stars because the huge amounts of heat are sufficient to fuse atoms together.

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Fission is used in nuclear reactors all around the world to produce energy. However, billions of pounds are being spent on fusion research. This is because nuclear fission produces a lot of hard-to-get-rid-of radioactive waste, whereas nuclear fusion is a much cleaner source of energy (as discussed in benefits).

Benefits There are huge benefits from nuclear fusion.

First of all, it would provide a nearly limitless source of clean energy. If this could be achieved, then humanity could stop pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere while still supporting the fuel-intensive lifestyle most of us are used to. Better still, there is no trouble with fuel, as the ingredients needed, tritium How nuclear fusion

Fusion has been achieved in the infamous hydrogen bomb 3, releasing a huge destructive force.

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Its counterpart Nuclear fission, fusion’s ‘brother’, also follows e=mc2. This time, however, the huge amount of power is created by splitting the atom in question into two separate pieces.

The process of fission releases a neutron, which is then carefully guided to hit another atom, and so on. This chain reaction is kept very carefully controlled, so the amount of energy produced doesn’t spiral out of control and cause a massive nuclear disaster.

And hydrogen is used because, in fusion, the lower numbered elements give out energy while the higher numbered ones suck it up 2 An isotope is a form of an element, consisting of the same number of protons and electrons but not the same number of neutrons.

3 Interestingly, the fusion reaction was achieved using fission (discussed below) to start it off

and deuterium, are both common isotopes of hydrogen. There are no harmful emissions, the only waste product being the inert hydrogen, and there is no long-lived What fusion would look like on the sun

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radioactive waste, as only the plant components become radioactive, and those will be safe to dispose of within 100 years.

Plus, it is very energy efficient, as 1 kilogram of fusion fuel creates the same amount of energy 10,000,000 kilograms of fossil fuel creates. Fusion is also much safer than its counterpart fission, as the amount of fusionfuel that will be used in fusion reactors is miniscule, so the chances of an accident are greatly reduced.

Downsides The government is pumping huge amounts of money into the fusion programme, money which could be spent on renewable energy. If by some chance this pays off, and commercial fusion is achieved, power plants would be extremely expensive to build. And further still, if fusion takes off, the government will be inspired to fund research into cold fusion 4, a hugely expensive and possibly futile venture.

have towards each other and force them to fuse. To create the heat needed to overcome the repulsion, you basically have to create a synthetic sun, a hugely difficult feat of engineering. However, it is being done, in huge doughnut-shaped chambers called tokamaks, and one particular centre has produced 16 megawatts of energy in one.

The difficulty then is sustaining this reaction, which is hard as there are few materials which can stand up to the heat in the fusion chamber for more than a few seconds.

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And think of what would happen if the human race got its hands on a limitless supply of energy. If fusion became commercial, then all restrictions that we have about responsibly using energy would evaporate. I said earlier that nuclear fusion would be able to support our extravagant lifestyle, but we shouldn’t be living that lifestyle in the first place! I don’t have any problems about this limitless supply of energy, but I am doubtful that humanity can use it responsibly! And in any case, it is touch and go whether we will achieve sustained fusion at all.

Although the theory behind fusion is hypothetically sound, there are lots of pitfalls when you put it into practice. Fusion is achieved by overcoming the natural resistance two particles of the same time Basically, cold fusion is the hypothetical possibility of creating fusion at room temperature

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Progress The theory behind nuclear fusion is firmly established (see ‘What Is Nuclear Fusion?’), and limited success has been achieved, but fusion is far from becoming a national source of power for at least thirty years. The difficulty is making fusion give off significantly more power than has been put in. This has been done, but not on the level that we would need to use it as a commercial energy source. However, professionals guess that fusion energy could play a big role in the second half of the 21st century.

Fusion is a truly monumental task, so lots of countries are cooperating to coax it into fruition. Already, an ambitious project called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Research) is in production in South France, expected to be running in roughly 2050. However, what sets ITER apart

from all the other tokamaks is that the ITER staff aim to create ‘burning’ plasma, plasma which is kept hot without need for external heat. If this ‘burning plasma’ works, then it might be possible to make the fusion reaction give out more energy than it takes in, and set up fusion as a sustainable source of electricity.

The Brain and the Television Now for a quick Biology lesson (Dr Pattison could probably do a better job), about the brain.

When offered a still image in the form of a collection of small coloured dots, the brain will reassemble the dots into a meaningful image. This is a major positive for the brain

The Science behind the Television Adam Holder 1P While watching England thrash Lithuania 4-0, I began to wonder how ITV manage to give us this amazing, full colour picture of Harry Kane. My brain then drifted away to the less

as that ability is one of the two functions it has to complete to be able to watch television. The second skill the brain has to accomplish is the ability to piece together a sequence of images into one moving scene. It links different frames to complete a single motion. Without this ability, television would not be possible.

How the Black and White Television Works

specific question of: How do our televisions receive so many signals from so many different channels? With the average Briton watching almost four hours of television a day, I felt it was an appropriate question to answer.

Ignoring the technical side of things, there is an electron beam coming from a Cathode Ray Tube inside the television which hits the screen (coated by phosphor: any material which, when exposed to radiation, emits visible light) and paints an image. Magnetic coils in the television are used to perform a ‘raster scan’ which is a sequence of horizontal lines. The electron beams are transmitted at different intensities to produce different shades of grey, black and white.

How the Modern Television Works The standard television uses an interlacing technique. In this technique, the screen is painted 60 times per second but only half of the lines are painted per frame. The beam then paints every other line as it moves down the screen to complete all of the lines. When a television station wants to broadcast a signal to your TV, the signal needs to mesh with the electronics controlling the beam so that the TV can accurately paint the picture that the TV station sends. The TV station therefore sends a well-known signal to the TV that contains three different parts: Intensity information to produce different colours, ‘horizontal-retrace’ signals which tell the television when to move the electron beam back to the end of each line and a ‘vertical-retrace’ signal 60 times per second.

A colour TV screen differs from a black-andwhite screen in three ways: There are three electron beams that move simultaneously across the screen. They are named the red, green and blue beams. The screen is not coated with a single sheet of phosphor as in a black-and-white TV. Instead, the screen is coated with red, green and blue phosphors arranged in dots or stripes. If you turn on your TV or computer monitor and look closely at the screen with a magnifying glass, you will be able to see the dots or stripes. On the inside of the tube, very close to the phosphor coating, there is a thin metal screen called a shadow mask. This mask is perforated with very small holes that are aligned with the phosphor dots (or stripes) on the screen.

When a colour TV needs to create a red dot, it fires the red beam at the red phosphor.

Similarly for green and blue dots. All colours on a TV screen are combinations of red, green and blue.

How Does Information Get Transmitted?

There is one signal that contains the three vital components and it is called the composite video signal. That video signal looks something like the picture shown.

The horizontal-retrace signals are 5microsecond (abbreviated as "us" in the figure) at zero volts. Electronics inside the TV can detect these pulses and use them to trigger the beam's horizontal retrace. The actual signal for the line is a varying wave between 0.5 volts and 2.0 volts, with 0.5 volts representing black and 2 volts representing white. This signal drives the intensity circuit for the electron beam. In a black-and-white TV, this signal can consume about 3.5 megahertz (MHz) of bandwidth, while in a color set the limit is about 3.0 MHz. A vertical-retrace pulse is similar to a horizontal-retrace pulse but is 400 to 500 microseconds long. The vertical-retrace pulse is serrated with horizontal-retrace pulses in order to keep the horizontal-retrace circuit in the TV synchronized.

So there you have it, next time you see England play and, most inevitably, Harry Kane score, imagine what he looks like as a television signal and remember to acknowledge the hard work that scientists and inventors alike have done to bring the almighty roar of a goal to your living room.

Roll Over, Chlorophyll!

Alex Teeger 3H Chlorophyll has completed its job ! Autumn is the time when the deciduous trees and shrubs have their stores of starch in their branches, roots and buds for the next year of growth. So what is the purpose of the Autumn colours?

The Autumn leaf changes are triggered at the same time each year, regardless of temperature, as a result of the falling levels of light. The cells that border the leaf and the stem react quickly and divide to form a barrier layer of cork. The barrier prevents the transport of minerals from the roots to the leaves, and the production of chlorophyll stops. The remaining chlorophyll is broken down at a constant rate and the green colour will gradually fade away to reveal the autumnul pigments.

The yellow xanthophylls, the majority of the pigmentation, and the orange, red and yellow carotenoids are present in the leaf throughout the year. They assist with capturing sunlight for use in photosynthesis.

Unlike chlorophyll, however, light is not required to produce them and so their levels do not drop in Autumn.

Surprisingly, the cork layer of cells also ensures that there are residual sugars left in the leaf. It is from these sugars that the red and purple anthocyanins are produced. The red, blue or purple hue depends on the acidity of the soil. The redder the leaf, the higher the pH. If it is a cool but sunny Autumn, there will be a rapid decomposition of the chlorophyll and more anthocyanins

will be produced. The red and purple leaves will therefore be at their brightest and will mask the other pigments. If there are sufficient carotenoids, the leaves will look orange. However, if we have a dull, cloudy Autumn, we will see more of the yellow and brown leaves containing xanthophylls and tannin.

So why do the leaves keep stores of starch to make the red and purple anthocyanins?

There are various theories. It has been suggested that they warn off insects by displaying the vitality of the tree. The egg laying insects will then seek a weaker host.

Another theory is that the red pigments may limit water transpiration when Autumn is particularly dry.

Ultimately the leaves will fall when the corky barrier becomes too dry. Whether they stay on the tree longer or fall to the ground early, they share a common fate: they decompose in the light and the frost until all the leaves are brown.

The Smell Happiness

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in happy, fearful and neutral states, using pads under their armpits, while they watched different film clips. These pads were then cut up and placed into jars, which were later presented to a further group of participants, to sniff in a random order.

Can happiness really be contagious? Well recent scientific studies suggest that it is and researchers think they have discovered a new way in which it spreads - via the phenomenon known as chemosignalling.

The second group of participants were hooked up to an electromyograph while they sniffed the jars, so that any small differences in their facial expressions could be measured to determine what emotions they were experiencing. The results showed that the sweat from the happy participants made those sniffing it produce happier facial expressions than the sweat from fearful and neutral participants. The researchers concluded that exposure to an odour produced by a happy person caused the person smelling it to feel happier.

Isaac Sanders 1C

The human sense of smell is often underrated; we are usually far more aware of all our other senses. However, it turns out that our sub-conscious sniffing is better than we thought. In the past, there has been considerable research showing that humans have the ability to detect the emotional and physical states of other people using their noses. However, it was previously thought that this was restricted to negative emotions, such as fear and disgust. Indeed, the ability to detect such chemical signals is widespread within the animal kingdom and it is well known that animals such as dogs can smell if you are fearful.

However, researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands have now shown, through recent experiments, that our bodies can also communicate our positive emotions, such as happiness, too. In their study they collected the sweat of participants

The researchers commented that prior to this experiment, humans were believed to transmit positive emotions only by sensory perceptions such as vision, hearing and touch causing behavioural changes, such as mirroring, but now this exploratory study suggests we use our sense of smell subconsciously as well.

Happiness benefits the health of individuals in many different ways, as it restores the damaging effects of negative emotions on the cardiovascular, neuroendocrine and immune systems, as well as improving our psychological condition. This experiment therefore suggests that there might be a way to replicate the chemicals that we produce when we are happy, to create pharmaceutical remedies to treat people who are depressed.

Nobel Prizes Awards Sam McMahon 3 The Nobel Prize Awards are always a well looked forward spectacle of the scientific community. Celebrations of scientific achievement throughout the year were nominees are selected from all over the world. Showing an unquenchable spirit of curiosity through mankind, the founding of which came from a man overcome with depression as a result of his own scientific discovery, wanting to celebrate what is good in the world and make it better for future generations. Developments from many fields of research, from the written word to quarks to silenced gunshots. The nominees and indeed winners of these highly desired awards not only receive 700,000 kroner (£75,000) but much we deserved praise.

The Physics Nobel prize this year went to three Japanese scientists Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for their invention of the blue LED bulb. On first impression this must seem a rather measly achievement. A different colour is all it appears on first inspection but delving deeper the discovery is linked to energy efficiency and physics on a whole.

Blue LEDs – Filling the world with new light These LEDs not only allow us to see beyond the places where LEDs are normally used e.g. for small scale products, but also have a role in the production of white light. A necessity to humans as white light has always been seen as normal for us. This has opened up a new domestic industry for the LED bulb previously known plainly for blinking lights on gadgets and gizmos. With a significant increase in sales of LED lighting systems over halogen or incandescent we could see a cut down in cost for the home user and for government energy providers. This is because they are cheaper, longer lasting and require less energy than conventional bulbs.

Many see this as a step from the previous systems to a 21st century technology that could help us save resources, a quarter of the world’s energy output is used on lighting. In an age of increasing energy saving this discovery will have major implications for the future.

A well-deserved Nobel Prize

complicated and actually is what happens is that lasers are used both to stimulate and unstipulated the sample under the microscope. One of the lasers stimulates them to the extent of making them glow in fluorescence while the other makes that glow all disappear apart from that in a nanometre sized radius. This allows one to focus in on the subject better.

This next prize for Chemistry is shared by two Americans and a German and is awarded for advancements in the field of microscopy, more specifically “the development of superresolved fluorescence microscopy” this may not mean an awful lot to the average person but it does very much so to the scientific community.

The new technology which they have developed will allow scientists to access Nano dimensions that were only figments of the imagination beforehand. This will allow scientists to see the fine detail of objects.

The creation was actually of no collaboration before the invention of this technology.

There were two separate points that the

award was given for one for stimulated emission depletion or STED and one for single molecule microscopy. Solely Stefan Hell did the first, this method sounds very

Eric Beitzig and William Moerner created the second technology. These scientists were actually working on the same thing in their own different places one on each side of America. Their method is that of to single out individual molecules for activating and deactivating the fluorescence. This technique allows scientists to fully map an item to Nano dimensional levels. And these technologies put together unlock a new world of possibility for all of science.

A lot of this article has been about the positive contributions to Science of these new technologies. Humanity is curious and I have discussed the innate curiosity of humanity and a thrive for good from depression, but these prizes have a slight veil over them. The massive implications of these technologies have been expressed in this article but what must be faced is that these are relatively old in a progressive world. The Chemistry award for a phenomenon synthesized first 8 years ago and the LED technology which has been around for twenty years. We still haven’t unlocked the secrets of nanoparticles or clean efficient energy for all homes, some don’t even have any in the first place, but maybe the advancements of Science is a slow process, one starting 50,000 years ago with the first genetic breed of human and ultimately never

ending and that's what the Nobel prize award celebrates.

Old Citizen: William Henry Perkin Sean White 3c Quinine, in 1856, was a rare treatment for malaria, and needed in huge quantities by the European empire-building powers. Extremely hard to get, anyone who synthesised it artificially would make a fortune. However, when old citizen William Perkin took up the challenge he found something completely unexpected…

Quest for Quinine The cinchona tree was first discovered by the Quechua (an Inca tribe) of Peru. They used its bitter bark, mixed with sweetened water, to stop shivering. Italian born apothecary and Jesuit priest, Agostino Salumbrino, who lived and worked in Lima, unlocked its full potential. He observed how the Quechua tribe used the cinchona bark to stop shivering, and prescribed it for malaria. His experiments were successful, and in 1631 it was first used to treat malaria in Europe, in Rome. Throughout the 17th century, cinchona bark, called at that time Jesuit’s bark or Peruvian bark, was used as a cure for

malaria in the swamp-ridden area surrounding Rome, as malaria had caused the deaths of many cardinals. It saved the lives of many important figures, including King Charles II, which popularised the bark with affluent Londoners.

Quinine, the active ingredient in the cinchona bark, was not extracted until 1820, by two French chemists and pharmacists, Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou. Previous to this, the cinchona had been ground into a powder and dissolved in wine (as ethanol dissolved it better than water). Quinine, in its pure form, allowed precise quantities of the cure to be measured out.

From Malaria to Mauve Enter William Perkin. Born in east London, near Shadwell, in 1838, he attended City of London School when he was 14, where he was encouraged by the school to pursue a career in chemistry. A year later, he left, and joined the Royal College of Chemistry (now part of Imperial College London).

At the Royal College of Chemistry, Perkin became an assistant to the head of the College, August Wilhelm von Hofmann.

Hofmann was interested in whether one could synthesis quinine from aniline, made from coal tar when gas was extracted, a waste product. Quinine and aniline were thought to have the same sort of chemical structure, and quinine was very expensive, but aniline cheap.

During the Easter of 1856, Hofmann went on a visit to Germany, and left Perkin to continue his investigations into aniline.

Perkin tried to oxidise aniline using potassium dichromate (this was thought would make quinine). However, the

chemicals reacted to leave a black sludge – not at all like the white powder that was quinine. Despite this, Perkin persevered and after using ethanol he managed to extract a deep purple colour from the sludge.

Intrigued, he found that it dyed silk and did not wash off.

At the age of 18, Perkin left from the Royal Society of Chemistry, and took out a patent for his new dye. With the help of his father and elder brother, both architects, he set up a dye works on the Grand Junction Canal, at Greenford. Calling his dye mauve or mauveine, it made an affordable replacement to ‘Tyrian purple’ a dye made from mucus secreted by certain molluscs, which was extremely expensive and variable in quality. Mauve, named after the French for the mallow flower (a purple flower), was popularised when both the Empress Eugénie (wife of Napoleon III) and Queen Victoria wore it, as it was thought that mauve even looked better than Tyrian purple.

Perkin made brightly coloured clothing affordable for the masses. After the success of mauve, Perkin continued researching aniline and managed to derive many more cheap synthetic dyes to replace the more expensive natural ones. These included aniline red (1859), aniline black (1863), alkalate magenta (1864), Britannia violet (late 1860s), Perkin’s green (late 1860s), and a synthetic version of alizarin, a vibrant red colour previously derived from the Madder root (1869). In 1874, at the age of 36, after making a fortune from his dyes, Perkin sold his company and retired, as Germany had a near monopoly on all other dyes. In 1907, aged 69, he died from pneumonia and a burst appendix.

Can ants cope in zero gravity?

Noam Elstein OGH Ants remain a unit and support each other in search to find new areas in their containers despite the tough zero-g conditions in space aboard the International Space Station.

The objective of the experiment was to see how ants coped in space. They were housed in a large container that had a nest, two other compartments where the ants eventually searched in, as well as vents that allowed them to breathe.

When searching for the new areas, they attempted to climb the walls of the container. Despite the fact that they continuously fell of the walls, they remained a team and kept on using teamwork to help each other get back onto the wall.

I Can’t Wait For 2029 Theo Kitsberg OGH

The ants showed an impressive talent for regaining their footing after taking a zero-g tumble. This same experiment was conducted on Earth so scientists could make observations and learn from the different

data results from both experiments.

During the experiment in space the ants battled to keep their footing on the plastic surface and they didn’t spread out as effectively as the ants on Earth. The ants in space did their best to search the container, though many areas of the container remained un-touched for the whole experiment. The ants on Earth were much more successful at searching due to the luxury of having normal gravity.

Infiniti make family cars and executive cars.

They have had a few attempts at making a supercar but none of these have led to any real success. In 2029 they plan to release the car that could quite possibly be the greatest car of all time. The Infiniti Synaptiq is the name of the car that will change history. It will be the first production car to be able to turn into a vehicle capable of flying. This is not the only thing that the Synaptiq can change into though. The car has three modes.

One is rally. This is where the body of the car is lifted high over the wheels to drive over difficult and rough terrain. Another mode is circuit mode. In this mode the body of the car is extremely low and the wheel hubs are practically touching the wheels. The best feature of the car though is the flight mode.

This feature turns the car into a jet that is so extreme that the pilot has to wear a special suit to fly the jet.

The concept behind the car ties in with the so called A.R.C. race. This stands for Air-RallyCircuit race. The race is split into thirds with each mode having one third of the race. In the next 15 years or so this type of racing might become as popular as F1 or even more so. An example of an ideal area for an A.R.C. race is from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. In this race the first third is in rally mode across difficult terrain. The second mode is flight mode where the racers will fly over the Grand Canyon. The last mode is circuit mode.

The drivers will tear around a circuit to determine the winner of the race. The car also comes with in my opinion the most helpful and cool user interface ever. For the circuit and rally modes, the system uses GPS

to find out where you are and draws up a floating 3D holographic map of your position.

For flight mode it draws up a 3D holographic

image of the jet you are flying and displays vital pilot data and information. It has its own flight gyroscope as well. It will also tell you if you are near another aircraft.

The top land speed the vehicle is predicted to reach is 200mph and it is predicted to reach 60mph in 3 seconds. Its top speed in flight mode has not yet been calculated but it is likely that it will be well over 300mph. You can get all of this for the guesstimated price of only $100,000! Wow!

same proportions as a regular human. The reason for this was discovered by Galileo. His proof is based on the fact that a cube twice the height of a smaller one will also have twice the width and length. This means it will have eight times the volume of the smaller cube, and provided it is made of the same material, eight times the mass. It will also have four times the surface area.

Now, imagine a human 1.7m tall weighing 80kg and having a surface area of 2 square metres, and a giant 10 times as tall. The giant therefore is 17m tall, has a surface area of 200 square metres, and weighs 80,000kg (80 tons). The giant’s legs would cripple. The giant‘s weight is 1,000 times greater than the human‘s but the area of the cross section of his weight supporting thigh-bone would be 100 times greater. The human’s femurs together might have a cross-section area of

Why Giants Don’t Exist John Robin Carlyon 1P We’ve all heard stories about giants. There’s Goliath (who was killed by David), Bigfoot, Jack’s giant (from Jack and the Beanstalk), the cyclops (killed by Odysseus) and many others. They all had one thing in common.

They were BIG. That’s what made them giants. They weren’t just big, like a tall man, but BIG, possibly 5 to 10 times the size of a person.

These are all amazing stories, but, sadly, their size makes it hard for them to exist. That is, their size and also the fact they have the

34cm squared. His weight is 80 kg. Therefore, each square centimetre of his femur crosssection would be holding 2.4 kg of weight.

The giant weighs 80,000 kg, but has femurs with only 3400cm squared, therefore each square cm is supporting 24kg of weight.

We can say similar things about heat loss. A human’s body generates heat at x heat per second and has a surface area of 2 square metres. Therefore, each square metre of his skin loses x/2 heat per second. The giant’s

body is a thousand times as big, and generates 1,000x heat per second. He has 200 square metres of skin. Each square metre of his skin needs to lose 5x heat. However, each square metre of his skin can only lose x/2 heat per second. The giant would overheat. Not only that, but the giant’s skin is 10 times as thick, so his heat would take longer to lose as well.

Finally, the same theory helps us realise it is easier for small birds to fly. The largest flighted bird is the Great bustard, and the smallest is the bee hummingbird. The Great bustard can reach 18kg, while the bee hummingbird weighs just 2g. The Great bustard is 9,000 times heavier. The cube root of 9,000 is about 21, so the bustard is about 21 times longer, taller, and wider than the hummingbird. Therefore, it would make sense for the bustard to have a wing area of 441 times the area of the hummingbird’s.

However, wings like these would look remarkably big on a Bustard. The area is actually less, as the Great bustard flies with nowhere near the agility of a bee hummingbird. It really is surprising that it can fly at all.

were lost from the Lesser Antilles. On the likes of St Kitts and Grenada over 100 years ago. They were driven to oblivion by the activities of European settlers. But now, UK researchers' DNA studies have worked out when the rodents first arrived in the islands, and how they radiated across the region.

Selina Brace, Sam Turvey and others report their work in Proceedings B, a journal of the Royal Society. It was a tough job. Only a few examples of these rats are still held in museum collections, and the DNA material recovered from archaeological specimens tends to have degraded in the tropical heat.

Nonetheless, the team was able to find sufficient samples to map out the rodents' history. Surprising diversity the investigations show these creatures probably first arrived in the eastern Caribbean about six million years ago, in the late Miocene. They would have done this on vegetation rafts, flushed out of rivers that entered the ocean on the north coast of South America.

That is why ostriches can’t fly, and why it was so easy for Jack to kill the giant.

Caribbean super-rat Rory McGregor-Smith OGH Scientists have pieced together the evolutionary history of a fascinating group of extinct Caribbean rats, some of which grew to the size of cats. The so-called rice rats

The genetics indicate that there were at least two big dispersals of the rats, but what surprised the team was just how diverse the animals became once they arrived on the islands. Even on St Eustatius, St Kitts and Nevis which would have formed a single island when sea levels were lowered during glacial periods – there was unexpected genetic diversity. "We would have expected, a priori, that the rodents on that island bank

would have been basically genetically identical, because of this potential for gene flow," explained Dr Turvey, from the Zoological Society of London. "In fact, the populations from each of those three islands were highly differentiated, potentially to the level of maybe being different species. And so it would seem the high-end estimates for how many rice rat species there were across the Caribbean about 15-20 are probably accurate." This only goes to underline the scale of biodiversity loss that was initiated when human settlers arrived from Europe.

Tremendous loss They changed the environment, by cutting down trees. They also brought with them brown and black rats, and, significantly, the mongoose, which was used to keep sugar plantations free of pests. This combination of forces obliterated the rice rats from the Lesser Antilles - along with many other mammal species as well - in the space of about 200 years. The last rice rats probably died off in the very early 20th Century.

Today, researchers regard what happened in the Caribbean as one of the largest mammal extinction events in the past few thousand years. Its magnitude rivals even that seen in Australia where settlers removed a great many mammals, including the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger as it is commonly called.

"The rice rat extinction is itself a major extinction event, but it is only a component of the wider loss of mammals across the entire Caribbean basin," said Dr Turvey.

"We've been talking about just the Lesser Antilles, but in the Greater Antilles – the likes of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, the Caymans and Puerto Rico.

Sourced from the BBC NEWS Science

Can we make an iron man suit Tobias Ng OGH U.S scientists are currently working on a suit that not only has the ability to deflect bullets but also can supposedly give soldiers the ability to lift 200lb weights without breaking a sweat as the suit, essentially does all the work for them.

The suit is nicknamed Talos(Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit) and is based on Tony Stark’s suit in Iron Man. The suit would function as a light exoskeleton that can deflect bullets and shrapnel and would be used for U.S soldiers who may be sent back to Afghanistan.

The request for this “super suit” comes after soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have died from wounds that “could have been prevented if light body armour was worn” In the film, Iron man is seen to fly horizontally off the ground. Although we just have not developed the technology to fly an at least 40 kg(without weapons ammunition e.t.c) for sustained periods of time, we can (just like the Iron Man mark 1 suit) use bursts of compressed air to propel suits into the air for short periods of time.

Although exoskeletons are possible in theory, the real challenge for the US military is to create a suit that not only gives soldiers the ability to see in the dark, have superhuman strength but also to make the armour bullet proof, to compress a huge nuclear reactor that stretches over a few acres into one the size of a coke can and to make the exoskeleton light enough for the average soldier in the U.S military to wear. At the moment, the real source of trouble for the U.S tech whizzes is the fact that they still do not know how to make an iron man “arc reactor”. Without one of these, the Iron Man suit cannot move without being tethered to a

nuclear reactor limiting the range of where it can fly to and thus limiting its practicality. In the future, if scientists were (if they ever manage to) make a suit with all the features described above(apart from the so called “arc reactor”) they would still face the problem of powering it. An alternative to having a source of clean energy that can power an entire Iron Man suit with all the bells and whistles the size of a tin can would be to simply connect the suit to hundreds of thousands of batteries but if the suit was to carry all those batteries around with it(apart from the obvious amount of weight added) it would look more like an obese whale than a milestone in human technology, making it cumbersome and slow.

In addition to this, without a fixed power source, the suit would run out of power within a few days making it impractical for desert missions in Iraq or Afghanistan Although it doesn’t look as though Iron Man suits will be made for the time being, scientists have been working on liquid armour which will deflect bullets and shrapnel for 10 years. However many people are sceptical about the Iron Man suits saying that “every time we make better armour, we make a better weapon to go through it”. But for now, the real question is “can it be made” and if so will it just be a weapon stored in the

cupboard for emergencies like the nuclear bomb. It seems much more likely that the US military is going to focus far more spending on making U.S soldiers able to have the same “mutant” powers as Wolverine…