BBC Science Focus Crossword solution #394

BBC Focus Crossword
BBC Science Focus crossword solution, issue 394


from BBC Science Focus Magazine https://ift.tt/nlAZ6sM

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is a coelacanth?

Image
For years, scientists thought it died out with the dinosaurs. The only known coelacanths were fossils . Then in 1938, a South African museum curator found a dead one in a fisherman’s catch. Live specimens were later caught, proving that this curious fish was never actually extinct. The well-preserved Coelacanth fossil displayed on a limestone slab © Alamy Living deep in the waters around Africa’s Comoro Islands and Indonesia’s Sulawesi, this big, bottom-dweller is unlike any other living fish. Weird True Fact 1: it has eight fins, including two pairs which stick out from the body like legs. It doesn’t use them for walking though. They’re more like the stabilisers you get on kids’ bikes. WTF 2: instead of a bony backbone, coelacanths have a hollow, oil-filled tube called a notochord . WTF 3: they are fatheads. The brain occupies just 1.5 per cent of its braincase and the rest is filled with fat. It also has thick scale...
Read more

Overcoming anxiety: How to use new ‘meta-cognition’ techniques to calm your restless mind

Image
To help relieve anxiety, you’ve probably heard of CBT – that’s Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which involves changing how you think about stuff in order to benefit your feelings and behaviour. For instance, if you see an upcoming work presentation as a banana skin and you begin catastrophising about all the ways it could go wrong and ruin your life, your CBT therapist might work with you to form a more realistic and less melodramatic interpretation of the challenge, which ought to lower your anxiety levels. However, there’s now an important new off-shoot of CBT called meta-cognitive therapy. Where CBT is largely concerned with what you’re thinking, meta-cognitive therapy focuses on what you think about what you’re thinking (hence the word ‘meta’ in its name). It’s not the thoughts themselves, but how your mind responds to them that’s the real focus here. For instance, when it comes to anxiety, the idea is that by changing what you think about your anxious thoughts, you’ll start t...
Read more

Are people with big heads smarter?

Image
At least based on the popular imagination, you’d think having a big head would be an indication of greater intellect. Just look at the ultra-intelligent, bulbous-headed character Megamind (pictured above), from the movie of the same name. As with many neuromyths, there is a grain of truth to all this – among humans, brain size and intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) are correlated, albeit modestly (estimates place the correlation at around 0.3 to 0.4, where 1 would be a perfect correlation). But of course, correlation does not imply causation and there are many reasons to be careful about how we interpret the link. For starters, the modest correlation is based on an average of many people, and head/brain size will tell you nothing about a particular individual’s intelligence (bear in mind that Albert Einstein’s brain size was unexceptional, perhaps even on the small side). Consider too, that many animals have brains that are dramatically larger than human brains and yet we do n...
Read more