MAGAZINE ISSUE DATE: 14 MAY 2005 (Vol. 186 No 2499)
NEWS:
RAPID HEALING TRICK FALLS FOUL OF ANTI-DOPING RULESA rapid healing treatment, considered but rejected by the UK soccer team Chelsea, has been virtually outlawed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The procedure called blood-spinning, which is based on concentrating and re-injecting a person's own blood, can be applied as a gel to a wound to heal injuries faster. But WADA warned all national sports authorities last week that the treatment could introduce banned substances into the body. Page 7
THIS PILL WILL MAKE YOU SMARTERThe list of "lifestyle drugs" that aid performance grows further with the success of an experimental drug offering to improve your memory. A small clinical trial in the UK has shown that the class of drugs known as ampakines improved the wakefulness and cognitive ability of sleep-deprived volunteers. Pages 6-7
HAVE WE CRACKED SATURN'S WALNUT?Two mysterious features on Saturn's moon Iapetus could have been formed when the moon collided with the edge of one of Saturn's rings a long time. One hemisphere of the moon is much darker and has a huge ridge on the equator. According to a radio astronomer, debris from the ring smashed into a region of the moon's equator, creating a ridge " making the moon look like a giant walnut. He came to this conclusion after looking at pictures of Iapetus taken by the Cassini spacecraft. Pages 16-17
TEAMWORK WILL BEAT SPAMMERSThe social network that already exists in email could help foil spammers. American computer scientists propose adding anti-spam software to standard email programs that could collaborate behind-the-scenes. When you receive a message, your anti-spam software would check it against your own database of known spam. If no match is found, the message is forwarded to randomly selected email addresses in your contacts book, where similar software checks the message against its own spam database. And so on, until a match is found, or the message deemed original. Page 24
STARS ON THE EDGE OF A BLACK HOLEA small group of young stars have been spotted dangerously close to the edge of a massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. "You would think that the stars would be quickly torn apart," say the American astronomers who found the young stars using the Keck I telescope in Hawaii. Page 19
INSTANT MESSAGING FALLS PREY TO WORMSInstant messaging (IM) the popular alternative to email that allows friends to chat online in real time, is becoming the latest target for malicious hackers. IMlogic, a security company in the US, reports a threefold increase in the number of new IM worms released in the first three months of this year compared with 2004. Page 26
FEATURES:
THE MILKY WAY: NO PLACE LIKE HOMEIn the 1920s the picture began to emerge that our sun and stars surrounding it formed a giant galactic island: the Milky Way. Observations since then with some top-notch telescopes have unravelled stunning pictures of a spiral structure with billions of stars and a million black holes. And there could be many more planets orbiting stars other than our solar system which as yet are just too hard to see. In this special 10-page feature, Hazel Muir takes sightseeing trip of our home galaxy. Pages 31-40
WHAT THE HELL"¦?4.6 to 3.8 billion years ago, the surface of Earth was believed to be a molten ocean with no atmosphere and any water touching the surface would have boiled off immediately. This theory helped explain why no hard rocks had ever been found from this period. But recently, discoveries by geologists have provided evidence that Earth may not have been quite so hellish during this time " but mild and wet. Pages 41-43
GROWING OLD GRUNGILYAccording to a new theory on how we age, free radicals are only one part of a much bigger story. Some researchers believe that ageing is due to a breakdown of our routine garbage disposal system " resulting in the build up of a lot of harmful rubbish. Pages 44-45
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