On The Radar

The pick of the news in science

Euro honours for Laurel Hill

A team of students from Laurel Hill Secondary School in Limerick (right) will represent Ireland at the first European Space Agency “Can Sat” competition in Norway next week.

The event will see the team launch their scale model of a satellite integrated into the shape and volume of a regular European soda can (115mm high and 66mm diameter), and have it carry out missions including measuring air temperature, air pressure and UV light levels in the atmosphere before landing back safely on the ground.

Keeping a log of sleeping

Do you sleep like a log through a hurricane, or would a passing butterfly wake you up? US scientists believe they have come up with a way to predict whether someone is easily roused from sleep by noise.

They took EEG readings from the brains of 12 healthy volunteers as they slept in quiet and noisy environments, and found that those whose brains generated more of a “spindle” pattern – which is thought to be linked to screening out stimuli – on a quiet night were better able to sleep on subsequent nights when they were subjected to noise.

– (Current Biology)

“Nobody can claim this was caused by global warming. On the other hand nobody can claim that it wasn’t

Andreas Muenchow, University of Delaware, on an ice island about four times the size of Manhattan that broke off the Petermann glacier in north-west Greenland last week – (Reuters)