Bluesci

Why do we sleep? How is it that spending a third of our lives unconscious, vulnerable to predators and other threats, has survived the test of evolution? It seems so much more practical to rest while conscious, alert to our surroundings, and ready to react. Yet, despite this apparent disadvantage, sleep is a universal necessity for nearly every living creature. So, what’s really going on during those hours of inactivity?

Imagine the year 2075. As we look back on the 2020s, this decade would stand out as a pivotal moment in the history of science defined by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry and the exploding popularity of large language models are the smoking gun of this milestone.

Say you take the entire railway network of the UK, made up of thousands of miles of tracks, countless train stations, and complex crossings and junctions, just to compress the whole thing into a space similar to that of Trafalgar Square.

Eight mice look up at me, just a few weeks old. I’ve distracted them from their play and now they are curious, but wary. Fair enough, really - an alien in a lab coat just lifted the lid off their whole world. They give a few tentative sniffs before realising I am no threat and return to playing monkey bars with the food rack and chasing after their friends. But I am anthropomorphising. Are they really playing? Do mice have friends?

As I spend my days running from bench to bench, pipetting colourful liquids and looking at puzzling graphs on monitors, I sometimes idly stare at the stream of water falling on the glassware I am supposed to clean and recall how dedicated and tense I was cleaning those same pieces of glass in my early days in a laboratory. I recall the curiosity and hunger for every possible field of knowledge that unveils how nature works.

13.8 billion years of our universe’s history have been investigated in the past century by scientists looking at the sky. From the outside, it looks like theorists write models and equations to describe the Universe, astronomers point their telescopes at the sky – ‘magic’ happens - and eventually they compare findings to f ind the best model. This is pretty much what we call cosmology.

Each vertical stripe in Ed Hawkins’ art piece ‘Climate Stripes’ represents the average global temperature of one year. As icy blue lines shift to warmer reds, so does the planet’s climate. The image has become an icon of climate data and planetary change. Hawkins believes his data visualisations become artwork when they take on new meanings and contexts beyond traditional data presentation.

Evolutionary biologists often talk about the theory of natural selection first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, which states that the environment imposes selection pressures on individuals. A selection pressure is defined as ‘an agent of differential mortality’ i.e. a factor that influences which individuals survive and includes predator density, prey availability, and the climate. The most well adapted or ‘fittest’ individuals are more likely to survive.

Our brains contain billions of neurons. However, much like Lego, what truly underlies the power of our nervous system is the ability to use the same set of building blocks to create seemingly endless possibilities. Welcome to connectomics, the branch of neuroscience with the ambitious goal of finely mapping every connection, or synapse, of an entire nervous system (comprising the brain and spinal cord), of a specific region.

SOFT ROBOTS Most robots in use today are present in industry, where they perform the same repeatable automated tasks. Robots operate through two mechanisms. Firstly, they sense the environmental cues and encode these cues into an electronic current. Then, once the robot processes this signal, an actuator converts the response signal into physical motion so the robot can respond to the environmental cue.