BBC Focus Magazine

This week's guide to science on the telly and radio…

Sun 28 April

Bill Bailey's Jungle Hero
BBC Two, 8.00-9.00pm

The comedian Bill Bailey concludes his look of the life of the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. This week, Bill meets birds of paradise in the Spice Islands, revealing how they inspired Wallace to independently come up with the theory of evolution by natural selection.


Mon 29 April

The Digital Human
BBC Radio 4, 4.30-5.00pm ...

Campaigners have called for an international ban on ‘killer robots’

Oooookaaaay...

Maybe I'm being uncharitable but this just strikes me as quite stunningly stupid and utterly pointless. Ban 'killer robots,' just like that? Perhaps we could ban nuclear weapons and genesis devices as well, anything else we should ban while we're at it?

Sorry but this sort of thing, it's such an empty contrivance not unlike Ireland's role in the charge to ban cluster munitions, ...

From transporters to tractor beams, Alice Udale-Smith discovers the space-age technology we’ve got today

This May sees the release of Star Trek Into Darkness. Directed by J. J. Abrams, trailers for this twelfth Star Trek film have been getting Trekkies very excited indeed...

Being the pedant that I am I have some issues with the five chosen and that any self-respecting Trekkie would be excited about the sci-fi actioner that calls itself Star Trek but ...

When faulty, a flourescent tube will often flicker.
Why?

Also the flickering is accompanied by a clinking noise.
What causes this?

A new article on LiveScience concerning entanglement theory and Einsteins "spooky action at a distance" caught me eye. What pops out is that the speed of entanglement is 10,000 faster than the speed of light. How is that possible if nothing moves faster than light?

The implications were that individual entangled particles don't exist in a particular state until they are measured, and that, once measured, the particles could somehow communicate their state to each ...

Hi,
Long time subscriber here.
Great to see Focus finally available for android in the play store.
I just wondered if there was any intention to make the digital version free to subscribers as I believe the iTunes content is?

It's getting some pretty lousy reviews at the moment because of this disparity.

Campaigners say the Brazilian government is failing to protect one of the world's most endangered tribes.

The Awa people are believed to number just 450, but their territory has attracted thousands of loggers and settlers.

Last year a judge ordered all outsiders should leave the area within 12 months.

But the deadline has passed and no evictions have taken place, says indigenous rights group Survival International.

The Awa live in north eastern Brazil and survive ...

A bit of advice, should this ever come up: be wary of dubious physics theories. They can lead to murder.

In 1952, Bayard Peakes submitted a 33-page manuscript to a publication of the American Physical Society (APS).

Peakes had an unusual idea. He didn't believe electrons existed, and he had what he thought was a good explanation of why.

But the APS rejected his paper, deeming it "pointless".

Evidently, Peakes was fairly upset by this. ...

Image Credit: ESA / PACS / SPIRE / N. Schneider

Europe's Herschel space telescope has imaged one of the most popular subjects in the sky - the Horsehead Nebula - and its environs.

The distinctively shaped molecular gas cloud is sited some 1,300 light-years from Earth in the Constellation Orion.

It is in a region of space undergoing active star formation - something Herschel has been most keen to study.

The Hubble space observatory ...

The search for a far-off twin of Earth has turned up two of the most intriguing candidates yet.

Scientists say these new worlds are the right size and distance from their parent star, so that you might expect to find liquid water on their surface.

It is impossible to know for sure. Being 1,200 light-years away, they are beyond detailed inspection by current telescope technology.

But researchers tell Science magazine, they are an exciting discovery. ...