ODONTOPHOBES
Fear of the dentist stopping you from getting
your toothache sorted? Researchers at the
University of São Paulo have come up with a
way for dentists to administer anaesthetic
using a small electric current instead of a
needle. Now, lie back and say ahhh...DOG OWNERS
Mutts might have won the battle between cats
and dogs. Following research that appears to
show that dogs love their owners more than
cats do, a study carried out by New York’s
Manhattanville College suggests dog owners
are happier, more satisfied and less neurotic
than cat owners.GYM BUNNIES
Gym trips might make it harder to lose weight,
according to research by Hunter College, New
York. The study found that our bodies adapt to
the demands of exercise by lowering our
resting metabolisms. While a lunchtime run
may burn calories, your body responds by
clinging on to the calories lef t in your body for
the rest of the day.MEN
The female hormone oestrogen may help fight
off infections of the flu virus, according to
research at Johns Hopkins University in the
US. The study indicates there may be a basis to
man flu after all...BAD MONTHGOOD MONTHTOP: There is no evidence for
what Planet Nine
might look like – this
visualisation represents
exoplanet Kepler 20f
ABOVE: The Kuiper Belt lies
beyond Neptune’s orbit and
contains dwarf planets along
with various
other bodiespictures of Pluto using the New Horizons spacecraft was a
major achievement. Pluto is 40 times farther away from the
Sun than the Earth, and the light that illuminates Pluto’s
landscape is almost zero. Now translate that to Planet
Nine, which is about 20 times further away.
We don’t know exactly where Planet Nine is, and it’s
moving extremely slowly. The information we have is that it
may take 20,000 years to go around the Sun. In other
words, you have something that looks like a very faint star
in the sky, and in order to see it moving you’d have to wait a
long time. You’d need to dedicate a lot of telescope time to
scanning the sky to this low level of brightness, and time
on these telescopes is very expensive.So it could be years before we know for sure?
Yes, unless they find it by chance. But as time goes by,
astronomers will gather more information on
disturbances on other objects, and this may pinpoint it
more accurately. Neptune was found by the
disturbances it made to the position of Uranus. Its
position was predicted quite accurately by Urbain Le
Verrier and John Couch Adams. Astronomers pointed
telescopes at it and it was found in 1846. The same
could happen again with Planet Nine but the challenge is
ILLUSTRATION: JAMES OLSTEIN far bigger than it was over a century ago.