The pick of the science news
Rocket dilemmas
This week in Moscow, volunteers were sealed into a rocket-like environment to see how they fare over 105 days on a simulated flight to Mars.
The idea is to see how the six males, who were plucked from 5,600 applicants, might cope with the cramped conditions of an interplanetary trip.
With any real journey to the red planet at least decades away, the Mars-500 experiment in Russia won’t leave the ground. But there’s also sobering news this week about the increasing numbers of spacecraft that will lift off in the future.
If rocket launches are improperly managed their emissions could threaten the ozone layer as the space industry grows, according to research from California and Colorado.
“If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realised by CFCs,” said study author Prof Darin Toohey.
Charles who?
Despite widespread celebrations of Charles Darwin's bicentennial this year, the public still knows little about the man and his work, according to a new survey in the UK. University of Kent students found that fewer than half of the people they surveyed in Canterbury could pick out Darwin from a line-up of bearded Victorian gentlemen, and the majority of respondents incorrectly identified monkeys rather than birds as being the most prominent species featured in Darwin's On the Origins of Species, reports the website Science Daily. But there is still hope. "Nearly all of the respondents were very eager to discover the correct answers," says Kent researcher Derek Fleming.
An ant's approach to traffic control
How do marching ants avoid traffic jams? They keep their collective pace and they don’t overtake, according to a new study from Germany.
The researchers analysed videos of a natural trail of Leptogenys processionalisants marching in one direction, and found the insects formed "platoons" in which individuals kept their velocity even when almost bumper to bumper.
“In sharp contrast to highway traffic and most other transport processes, the average velocity of the ants is almost independent of their density on the trail,” wrote the researchers in the physics journal Physical Review Letters. “Consequently, no jammed phase is observed.”
Claire O’Connell
e-mail: 1000.claire@gmail.com