The Lettered League

27/01/2014

The plague is back.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/456831.stm

Climate changes and increasing globalisation could bring back the diseases of the Middle Ages, an expert has warned.

13/09/2013

A common type of planthopper has mechanical gear wheels on its rear legs that allow it to jump with power and speed.

06/09/2013

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? With the help of MIT. And then Chile, if you want to drink it afterwards.

"How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?" THIS is how, Sound of Music nuns!

04/09/2013

Guaranteed to make you hungry. Scientifically.

Scientists link common flavor compounds across the world's favorite ingredients

02/09/2013

On September 2, 1969, the internet (Arpanet) consisted of two computers. In 2012, Cisco estimated the number of internet connected devices as over eight and a half billion.

30/08/2013

http://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/

How many people are in space right now?

26/08/2013

"80% of breeding chickens come from genetic stock developed in the UK. Thanks to our genetics research you get twice as much chicken for a given amount of chicken feed as 20 years ago. Each year we launch a new brand of chicken which will produce many generations over a year or more before a new improved version comes along."

23/08/2013

Ever wondered why reds look darker in low light? It's because the light sensitive parts of the eye respond best to blues and greens, rendering humans almost colour blind under moonlight. Also, it has a neat name.

The Purkinje effect (sometimes called the Purkinje shift, or dark adaptation and named after the CzechanatomistJan Evangelista Purkyně) is the tendency for the peak luminance sensitivity of the human eye to shift toward the blue end of the color spectrum at low illumination levels.[1][2][page needed...

21/08/2013

Carol asks: "Can you soothe me re: fracking? Uneasy on many levels not least the environment re: methane gas releases. What are the impacts?". And as much as we'd like to answer this, New Scientist published a fantastic article on exactly this topic last week- http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23968-frack-on-or-frack-off-can-shale-gas-save-the-planet.html?page=1 #.UhTfdJU7Qts

Such reassuring words are the hallmark of a certain way of thinking, sometimes known as rational optimism. Things will always turn out fine because we humans are almost infinitely creative and adaptable. Confronted with a problem, our technological ingenuity will provide a solution.

12/08/2013

Dear Lettered League, why is bacon so damn good?

09/08/2013

Storing up questions and slowly answering them for next week! In the mean time, today's fact is that while most viruses are tiny (at only a few 100 nanometers in length and with only a couple of dozen genes) the newly discovered "Pandora Virus" is 1000 times bigger than normal, with over 200 times as many genes. It's believed that giant viruses are largely harmless to humans (for now), but they're so odd (with 94% of their genetic material entirely unknown to science), that anything seems possible. The current "tree of life" fails to describe them, and some folks think they might be from Mars.

A newly discovered pandoravirus is 1,000 times the size of the flu virus and has nearly 200 times as many genes. And giant viruses turn out to be everywhere.

07/08/2013

Think light's the quickest, most unstoppable thing in the universe? Not so fast. "Stop-times" for light are now at around the minute mark.

Physicists have been able to stop something that has the greatest possible speed and that never really stops. We’re talking about light. A decade ago, physicists stopped it very for a short moment. In previous years, this extended towards stop times of a few seconds for simple light pulses in…