Science

Remember Star Trek’s Replicator, where food was synthesized on demand? Maybe not, but earlier this year, NASA channelled funding into a new research project aimed at creating a 3D food printer curiously akin to the Replicator. Although this printer won’t yet be able to source the appropriate subatomic particles needed to build objects literally out of thin air, it will be able to combine specific powders needed to produce food with the structure, texture, and even smell of its intended form. Is this the food of the future? In 2013’s latest instalment of ‘life imitating Star Trek’, scientists in the

If, like many a disappointed Muggle, you were devastated when your Hogwarts acceptance letter did not arrive on your 11th birthday, you can rest safe knowing that you only have your parents to blame. The wizarding gene is almost certainly a non-Mendelian, dominant and autosomal gene.

Amateur astronomers in Russia made a discovery recently any profes­sional would envy – it seems they may have identified the remnants of the ill-fated Soviet Mars 3 lander, 30 years after it lost contact with Earth. Photos taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in 2007 show what appears to be the parachute, heat shield, and retrorock­et of the Mars 3 lander. But finding objects as small as an 11-metre-wide parachute on the surface of Mars takes a lot of work, especially as the most promising photo contains 1.2 billion pixels