Knowledge

  The science of sleep   We spend a third of our lives doing it. Napoleon, Florence Nightingale and Margaret Thatcher got by on four hours a night. Thomas Edison claimed it was waste of time.   So why do we sleep? This is a question that has baffled scientists for centuries and the answer is, no one is really sure. Some believe that sleep gives the body a chance to recuperate from the day's activities but in reality, the amount of energy saved by sleeping for even eight hours is miniscule - about 50 kCal, the same amount of energy in a piece of toast.   With continued lack of sufficient sleep, the part of the brain that controls language, memory, planning and sense of time is severely affected, practically shutting down. In fact, 17 hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.05% (two glasses of wine). This is the legal drink driving limit in the UK.   Research also shows that sleep-deprived individuals often have diffi...

  The Panda’s Last Chance Chinese authorities have devised an ambitious plan to save the giant panda from the ravages of deforestation. Martin Williams assesses the creature’s chances of avoiding extinction. The giant panda, the creature that has become a symbol of conservation, is facing extinction. The major reason is loss of habitat, which has continued despite the establishment, since 1963, of 14 panda reserves. Deforestation, mainly earned out by farmers clearing land to make way for fields as they move higher into the mountains, has drastically contracted the mammal’s range. The panda has disappeared from much of central and eastern China, and is now restricted to the eastern flank of the Himalayas in Sichuan and Gansu provinces, and the Qinling Mountains in Shanxi province. Fewer than 1400 of the animals are believed to remain in the wild.  Satellite imagery has shown the seriousness of the situation; almost half of the panda’s habitat has been cut or degraded since 197...

  How to make your working day more enjoyable Research shows that work takes up approximately a third of our lives. Most of us get so bogged down with day-to-day tasks though, that we easily forget why we originally applied for the job and what we can get out of it. Here are a few ideas for how to make your working day better. Physical changes to your work environment can make a massive difference to how you feel. Get some green plants or a family photo for your desk. File all those odd bits of paper or throw them away. All of these little touches can make your work environment feel like it’s yours. Make sure any screens you have are at a suitable height so you’re not straining your neck and shoulders. Humans need a change of environment every now and then to improve productivity. Go out at lunchtime for a quick walk. If you have the option, it’s a good idea to work from home occasionally. And if there’s a conference coming up, ask if you can go along to it. Not only will you pract...

  How to get promoted If you’re sitting at your desk wondering whether this will be the year you finally get promoted, here are some tips. It starts with you. You are perhaps the most important part in the ‘promotion process’, so you need to know what you want – and why you want it. Take an honest look at yourself – your achievements and also your skills, particularly those you could exploit to take on a different role. Your boss is the gatekeeper. If you think your boss is likely to be on your side, ask for a meeting to discuss your serious commitment to the organization and how this could translate into a more defined career plan. If you are less sure about your boss’s view of your prospects and how they may react, start softly with a more deliberate focus on increasing your boss’s understanding of the work you do and the added value you deliver. Think about how you are perceived at work. In order for you to get your promotion, who needs to know about you? Who would be on the int...

  Preventing the theft of turtle eggs  Humans have been eating sea turtle eggs (and killing adult turtles for meat) for millennia. However, as human populations exploded and as sea turtles began to confront additional threats such as intensive fishing, beach development and climate change, sea turtle populations declined precipitously. Today, all but one of the world’s seven species of sea turtles are considered threatened according to the IUCN* Red List. And the one that’s not – the flatback turtle – is listed as data deficient, which means scientists simply don’t know how it’s doing.  One major problem is that every year millions of sea turtle eggs are illegally taken by poachers for sale on the black market. The situation is particularly serious in Nicaragua, in Central America, which is home to four sea turtle species. Kim Williams-Guillen, who works for conservation body Paso Pacifico, described the poaching of sea turtle nests on the beaches of Nicaragua as ‘uncontr...

  How animals keep fit No one would dream of running a marathon without first making a serious effort to train for it. But no matter how well they have stuck to their training regime,contestants will find that running non-stop for 42 kilometres is going to hurt. Now consider the barnacle goose. Every year this bird carries out a 3000-kilometre migration. So how do the birds prepare for this? Do they spend months gradually building up fitness? That’s not really the barnacle goose’s style. Instead, says environmental physiologist Lewis Halsey, ‘They just basically sit on the water and eat a lot.’ Until recently, nobody had really asked whether exercise is as tightly connected to fitness in the rest of the animal kingdom as it is for us. The question is tied up in a broader assumption: that animals maintain fitness because of the exercise they get finding food and escaping predators. Halsey points out that this may not necessarily be the case. Take the house cat. Most domestic cats sp...

  The California Gold Rush of 1849 A On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshal!, a carpenter, found small flakes of gold in the American River near Coloma, California. At the time, Marshall was working to build a water- powered sawmill for businessman John Sutter. As it happens, just days after Marshall’s discovery, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and transferring California, with its mineral deposits, into the ownership of the United States. At the time, the population of the territory consisted of 6,500 Californios {people of Spanish or Mexican descent); 700 foreigners (primarily Americans); and 150,000 Native Americans.  Though Marshall and Sutter tried to keep news of the discovery quiet, word got out, and by mid-March 1848 at least one newspaper was reporting that large quantities of gold were being found. Though the initial reaction in San Francisco was disbelief, storekeeper Sam Brannan set off a frenzy when he paraded through...

  The Zebras’ long walk across Africa James Gifford investigates some interesting new research into migration patterns of zebras living in Botswana in southern Africa A For any animal to travel over 270 km in Botswana partly across the sand and low bush terrain of the Kalahari Desert is a remarkable achievement. But to do so in 11 days and without any obvious motivation, as this zebra population does, is quite extraordinary. On average their journey involves an exhausting round-trip of 588 km — between the Makgadikgadi salt pan area and the Okavango river — making it second only to the great trek undertaken by the zebra herds in the Serengeti National Park. However, what is even more incredible still in my view is that until recently it was completely unheard of. Hattie Bartlam, a researcher, discovered this migration while she was tracking zebra groups, officially known as harems, by the Okavango river for her PhD. Each harem consists of a stallion and his seven or eight mares wit...

  The Birdmen Will people finally be able to fly long distances without a plane? John Andres investigates People have dreamt of flying since written history began. In the 1400s, Leonardo da Vinci drew detailed plans for human flying machines. You might have thought the invention of mechanised flight would have put an end to such ideas. Far from it. For many enthusiasts, the ultimate flight fantasy is the jet pack, a small piece of equipment on your back which enables you to climb vertically into the air and fly forwards, backwards and turn. Eric Scott was a stuntman in Hollywood for about a decade and has strapped jet packs to his back more than 600 times and propelled himself hundreds of metres into the air. Now he works for an energy-drink company that pays him to travel around the world with his jet pack. As Scott says: ‘I get to do what I love and wherever I go I advertise Go Fast drinks. Existing packs work for little more than 30 seconds, but people are working on designs whi...

  THE HUMBLE BANANA As the world’s most eaten fruit, it is hard to believe that the banana has only become widely available in the last one hundred years. Nor can most people imagine a world without bananas. However, disease is threatening the existence of popular varieties, and while the banana itself is unlikely to die out, what consumers call a banana could change dramatically since new disease resistant strains may differ in taste, texture, size, and colour from fruit currently on offer. History  A native of tropical South and Southeast Asia, it is thought bananas were first cultivated in today’s Papua New Guinea around 10,000 years ago. Spreading to Madagascar, Africa, and then the Islamic world, bananas reached Europe in the 15th century. The word ‘banana’ entered English via Portuguese from Wolof – a West African language. Only in 1872 did the French writer, Jules Verne, describe bananas to his readers in some detail as they were so exotic, and it was another 30 years b...

  Studying in the UK – Why is Britain now home to over a quarter of a million international students?  Students come to study in the UK from all over the world, from over 180 countries–the European Union, Australia and New Zealand, the USA, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Far East, South America... Some British universities have students from 100 countries. There are currently more than 270,000 international students in the UK. Of that number, about 75 per cent are education courses, with 130,500 (almost equal numbers of men and women) studying full-time undergraduate courses.  Why do they come to UK universities? First, because they gain a high-quality qualification that is recognised worldwide. Thousands of international students have used their UK qualifications to get a good job. Second, if English is not their mother tongue, they will probably be completely fluent by the time they graduate! One other reason for studying in Britain is the ease of the UKIELTS applicatio...

  THE WATER CRISIS Greater efficiency in water use is needed to meet the growing demands of a changing world  Per capita water usage has been on an upward trend for many years. As countries industrialise and their citizens become more prosperous, their individual water usage increases rapidly. Annual per capita water withdrawals in the USA, for example, are about 1,700 cubic metres, four times the level in China and fifty times the level in Ethiopia. In the 21st century, the world’s limited supply of renewable fresh water is having to meet demands of both larger total population and increased per capita consumption. The only practicable ways to resolve this problem in the longer term are economic pricing in conjunction with conservation measures.  Agriculture consumes about 70% of the world’s fresh water, so improvements in irrigation can make the greatest impact. At present, average efficiency in the use of irrigated water in agriculture may be as low as 50%. Simple chan...

  Depression A. It is often more difficult for outsiders and non-sufferers to understand mental rather than physical illness in others. While it may be easy for us to sympathize with individuals living with the burden of a physical illness or disability, there is often a stigma attached to being mentally ill, or a belief that such conditions only exist in individuals who lack the strength of character to cope with the real world. The pressures of modern life seem to have resulted in an increase in cases of emotional disharmony and government initiatives in many countries have, of late, focused on increasing the general public’s awareness and sympathy towards sufferers of mental illness and related conditions. Clinical depression, or ‘major depressive disorder’, a state of extreme sadness or despair, is said to affect up to almost 20% of the population at some point in their lives prior to the age of 40. Studies have shown that this disorder is the leading cause of disability in Nor...

  Snake Oil A Back in the days of America’s Wild West, when cowboys roamed the range and people were getting themselves caughtup in gunfights, a new phrase – ‘snake oil’ – entered the language. It was a dismissivez term for the patent medicines,often useless, sold by travelling traders who always claimed miraculous cures for everything from baldness to snakebite.Selling ‘snake oil’ was almost as risky a business as cattle stealing; you might be run out of town if your particular medicine, as you realised it would, failed to live up to its claims. Consequently, the smarter ‘snake oil’ sellers left town before their customers had much chance to evaluate the ‘cure* they had just bought. The remarkable thing about many of the medicines dismissed then as ‘snake oil’ is not so much that they failed to liveup to the outrageous claims made for them – those that weren’t harmless coloured water could be positively dangerous.What’s remarkable is that so many of the claims made for some of the...

  Understanding Bee Behavior A bee’s brain is the size of a grass seed, yet in this tiny brain are encoded some of the most complex and amazingbehavioural patterns witnessed outside humankind. For bees are arguably the only animals apart from humans whichhave their own language. Earlier this century Karl von Frisch, a professor of Zoology at Munich University, spent decadesof ‘the purest joy of discovery’ unravelling the mysteries of bee behaviour. For his astonishing achievements he wasawarded the Nobel Prize and it is from his work that most of today’s knowledge of what bees say to each other derives. It started simply enough. Von Frisch knew from experiments by an earlier researcher that if he put out a bowl of sweetsugar syrup, bees might at first take some time to find it but, once they had done so, within the hour, hundreds of otherbees would be eagerly taking the syrup. Von Frisch realised that, in some way, messages were being passed on back atthe hive”, messages which said...

  Zeus’ Temple Holds Secrets of Ancient Game Athens already is preparing for the summer games of 2004. But today’s games offer a far different spectacle from the contests of ancient Greece, where naked young men with oiled bodies raced and wrestled and boxed to honor their gods. Those great Panhellenic events began more than 2,700 years ago, first in Olympia and later at Delphi, lsthmia and Nemea. And at Nemea, where the games began in 573 B.C., a Berkeley archaeologist has been patiently reconstructing a site whose legends helped inspire the modern Olympics. For Stephen G. Miller, exploring the site at Nemea, 70 miles from Athens, involves more than analyzing artifacts and ruins, dating ancient rock strata or patiently assembling broken pottery shards. It also means reliving the events he’s studying. For the last two summers, large crowds have flocked to an ancient Nemean stadium (capacity 40,000) to watch a modern re-enactment of the ancient Nemean games. Seven hundred runners fr...

  Red List of Threatened Species Reveals Global Extinction Crisis A The Earth’s most critically endangered animals and plants have been disappearing very rapidly since 1996, the world’s largest international conservation organisation reported today. One in four mammal species and one in eight species of birds are facing a high risk of extinction in the near future, in almost all cases because of human activities. The total number of threatened animal species has increased from 5,205 to 5,435. The 2000 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is released once every four years by the IUCN–The World Conservation Union. The Red List is considered the most authoritative and comprehensive status assessment of global biodiversity. Founded in 1948, the IUCN brings together 77 states, 112 government agencies, 735 non-governmental organizations, 35 affiliates, and some 10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries in a worldwide partnership. Drawing on all these sources of information, the Red...