How It Works

“First make people laugh, and then make them think” Since 1991, the Ig Nobel Prize has handed out awards for achievements in science and literature that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. Nominees for its debut ceremony included the medicine prize for the inventor of anti-gas liquids that prevent bloating and embarrassment, the biology prize for the man who developed a sperm bank exclusively for Nobelians and Olympians and the peace prize for the father of the hydrogen bomb for his efforts in changing the meaning of peace. You can discover more of these often ludicrously tongue-in-cheek experiments in this issue, and learn how some of them aren’t quite as frivolous as they first seem. Enjoy! FOR EXCLUSIVE HIW NEWS AND OFFERS, SIGN UP TO OUR MAILING LIST HOWITWORKSDAILY.COM/NEWSLETTER FOLLOW US: HOW…

There’s a frozen soup of viruses, bacteria and fungal spores lurking beneath the frigid Arctic soil. Unlike the icy leftovers in the back of your freezer, some of these microbes haven’t interacted with a cell since well before ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids of Giza. As climate change continues to cook the planet, however, these permafrost-locked germs are beginning to thaw. But can newly defrosted microbes ‘wake up’ and infect anything? And how much of a potential threat do they pose to human and environmental health? Those are the questions an international team of scientists began to probe in a recent study. The researchers isolated 13 newly described viruses from seven permafrost samples and two water samples taken from Siberian rivers. Three of the viruses, named Megavirus mammoth, Pithovirus mammoth and…

Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed stunning gold jewellery, including a ring depicting the ‘god of fun’, in a burial that’s more than 3,300 years old, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced. The burial is located in the northern part of the ancient city of Akhetaten, modern-day Amarna, about 186 miles south of Cairo. This city was built by the pharaoh Akhenaten, who tried to change Egypt’s polytheistic religion by focusing it around the worship of the Aten, the sun disc. He moved Egypt’s capital city from Thebes in modern-day Luxor to the newly built desert city of Akhetaten. Ultimately, Akhenaten’s religious reforms were undone by his son, Tutankhamun, and the new city was abandoned not long after Akhenaten’s death. The recently discovered jewellery includes three rings. One of them…

A special type of radioactive meteorite could have seeded life on Earth. Carbonaceous chondrites, a type of radioactive meteorite chock full of water and organic compounds, produce energetic gamma rays that can drive the chemical reactions to synthesise amino acids, the building blocks of life. Meteorites are leftovers from the formation of the young Solar System’s rocky inner planets, which first clotted from the hot clouds of gas and dust billowing near the Sun roughly 4.6 billion years ago. At the time, the planets were too close to the Sun to form oceans and so couldn’t harbour life, leaving scientists puzzling over how Earth transformed into an oasis of life from its initial barren state. A previous study suggested that water could have been brought to Earth by carbonaceous chondrite…

The British Museum and the Greek government are in talks about returning the Parthenon Marbles, also called the Elgin Marbles, to Greece. The marbles are a series of sculptures that once decorated the exterior of the Parthenon, a temple on the acropolis of Athens that was built between about 447 and 432 BCE and is dedicated to the goddess Athena. The 2,500-year-old sculptures were brought to Britain in the first decade of the 19th century by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which at that time included Greece. Bruce received permission from the Ottoman Sultan to investigate the Acropolis, although the Acropolis Museum in Greece disputes that he had permission to remove the Parthenon’s sculptures. Bruce shipped the artefacts to London, where they…

In the case of NASA’s GeoCarb mission, some good things must end before they really begin. NASA has cancelled the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory (GeoCarb), a collaboration with the University of Oklahoma and Lockheed Martin that intended to put a greenhouse gas–monitoring satellite into geostationary orbit. GeoCarb would have measured levels of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere about 4 million times per day. The mission was selected by NASA in 2016. “Decisions like this are difficult, but NASA is dedicated to making careful choices,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. “We look forward to accomplishing our commitment to state-of-the-art climate observation in a more efficient and cost-effective way.” The decision to end GeoCarb was due to “technical concerns, cost performance and availability of new alternative…