Science Illustrated Issue 91

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Galaxy clusters are the biggest structures in the universe, held together by their own gravity. The Perseus cluster is the biggest of them all. The cluster, on which the Hubble telescope focused here, consists of thousands of galaxies – by way of comparison, there are some 20 galaxies in the Local Group to which our Milky Way belongs. In the foreground of the Hubble image you can see the UGC 2665 spiral galaxy from the side, while a lens galaxy, a cross between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy, illuminates the top left corner.…

Wasps consider bee hives delicious. Apart from stealing the sweet honey, they can kill the bees and feed them to their larvae. Individual bees don’t stand a chance against an attacking wasp, but in a group, they can become a lethal weapon. The bees collect into a ball around the wasp, vibrating their wings. The temperature at the centre of the ball reaches approximately 46 degrees Celsius, so that the wasp dies of a heat stroke. Bees can tolerate a slightly higher temperature, but sometimes the innermost bees also perish.…

ASTRONOMY Scientists are 99% certain that they have found a huge new moon in a solar system almost 5500 light years from Earth. The probable moon is only the second of its kind that astrophysicists have discovered so far. The scientists behind the study hope that the new discovery can teach us more about how planets and moons in other solar systems formed – and perhaps how Earth and our neighbouring planets originated. Kepler-1708 b-i, as the new moon has been named, resembles a small Neptune which is orbiting a Jupiter-like planet, say the scientists. The probable moon seems to have a high mass but a small radius – although it is probably still several times larger than Earth. The scientists are waiting for the results of more tests before they…

PREHISTORIC ANIMALS An entire family of mammoths has been discovered in a gravel quarry near the city of Swindon in England. The mammoth family is estimated to have lived during an ice age 220,000 years ago, and includes two adults, two juveniles, and an infant. They are all steppe mammoths, the largest of all mammoths, with adults that weighed around 10 tonnes, nearly double the weight of an average African elephant today. The preservation of the mammoths is unprecedented for this part of the world, say archaeologists and palaeontologists. And the excavation site has proven a ‘gold mine’ of other remains as well. Scientists have found remains of bisons and bears, fossils of plants, seeds and pollen, and Neanderthal stone tools, including a well-preserved hand axe. The different discoveries in the same…

TECHNOLOGY All smartphone users know the effect of battery-depletion fear – when heavy use of apps consumes so much power that you worry the phone may run out of juice before you’re able to recharge it, so that you’ll lose contact with the outside world. It’s one reason that some users still with ‘dumber’ phones that can hold their battery life for several days at once. The need for a nightly fix of fresh power could, however, soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a brand new type of computer chip that has a fundamentally different design to existing chips. The new chip design was developed by the tech giants IBM and Samsung, according to whom it will be able either to double the calculation power of a phone, or…