Dissected

What's been going on this month

A VERY COOL TELESCOPE

What's the most absurd science fiction film? The movie 2012, according to NASA. The plot of the 2009 flick involves a discovery that particles called neutrinos, carried on solar flares from the Sun, are heating the Earth's core, leading to earthquakes and tsunamis on the surface.

So what are neutrinos? The non-science-fiction versions are particles formed when radioactive elements and other types of particle decay. The resulting electrically neutral neutrinos interact only feebly with matter. In fact, billions of neutrinos could pass through your body each second and never leave a mark over your whole lifetime.

This means neutrinos can travel long distances across the universe essentially undisturbed, so they may be able to tell us a lot about events such as the formation of stars. But we have to detect them first, and a cool new telescope is looking to do that.

IceCube, which has been built at the South Pole to detect the tiny particles, houses a whole cubic km of ice. This lump of ice hopes to "see" neutrinos by banking on the rare times a neutrino passes through the Earth and crashes into an atom of ice in the telescope at the South Pole. Such an interaction should produce a muon, and blue light will be radiated. IceCube uses sensors in ultra-transparent ice to detect that blue light. - CLAIRE O'CONNELL

A PARTIAL COVER UP

Did you see the partial solar eclipse on January 3rd?

Unfortunately, early morning cloud made it hard for many people to see it but some of the country had glimpses and some great pictures were taken.

As the Moon crossed between the Sun and the Earth, it covered 40 per cent of our nearest star. The next partial eclipse is due in three years’ times, in March 2015.

The last total solar eclipse was in 1999 and the next total solar eclipse won’t be seen here until September 23rd 2090 (and only in the south-west of the country). So that makes it a genuine “once in a lifetime” sight.

DISCOVERY BY SUPER NOVICE

A 10-year-old Canadian girl has become the youngest person yet to discover a supernova.

The explosion was in another galaxy – with the rather uninspiring name of UGC 3378 – and is about 240 million light years away.

The light travelled all that way until being photographed by an amateur observatory which sent the pictures to Kathryn Gray’s dad.

Kathryn helped find it by comparing old images of star fields with new pictures. It was no surprise that it was seen in another galaxy – a supernova hasn’t happened in our galaxy since 1680, but it was so bright that it could be seen during the day for three weeks.

WHICH RAZORS CUT EMISSIONS?

Which is better for the environment: shaving with disposables or an electric razor?

There’s a lot to take into consideration, such as the two billion disposable razors that Americans alone throw out every year and the carbon used up in making electric shavers. Anyway, it turns out that both are better than shaving in the shower, which wastes enormous amounts of water. Read more at url.ie/8shs

NEW HUMANS FOUND IN CAVE

Scientists think they’ve discovered a new species of human – although it’s been dead at least 30,000 years. What’s more the find was made using DNA extracted from a piece of finger bone found in a Siberian Cave in 2008. The species has been called the Denisovans after the cave, and was a closer relation of the Neanderthals than of modern humans.

It was thought at first to have been part of a modern human, so it’s possible that other human species are out there in the fossil record just waiting to be found.

THE DINOSAUR AND METEOR

BANG is reading Ted Nield's Incoming! Or, Why We Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Meteorite,which says that 470 million years ago a bombardment of the Earth helped complex life blossom – and that the meteor that came with the death of the dinosaurs isn't the whole story of their extinction.

It’s a good introduction to the history and importance of the “falling sky”.

GOING DOTTY

The New Scientistwebsite has a really good optical illusion you can try out, and an explanation of what causes this "change blindness" when you watch the flashing dots. url.ie/8sht

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