BBC Knowledge June 2017

PHOTOS: GETTY X2, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY ILLUSTRATION: ACUTE GRAPHICS so they must be playing an important role in controlling ge ...

62 BBC History Magazine THE RED PLANET In thrall to Eric Rabkin argues that depictions of Mars in literature and film – both as ...

Global unrest fed into HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Here the Boxer rebellion is depicted in a French illustration from 1900 ...

In 1976, Mars was back in the news once again, courtesy of the Nasa Viking 1 mission’s ‘discovery’ of what appeared to be an eno ...

Eric Rabkin is professor emeritus of English language and literature at the University of Michigan. His books include Mars: A To ...

They were once thought to summon lightning, and we still have lots to learn about stag beetles if we want to conserve these wood ...

T HE phone rings at 9.30pm on a Tuesday in June: “Guess what I’ve got in my hand?” Richard ‘Bugman’ Jones – entomologist and reg ...

Male stag beetles grapple with their ‘antlers’, trying to flip their rivals over or hurl them to the ground them easier to diges ...

Love and wood But stag beetles also have an army of dedicated fans. Richard tells me about the ‘Willy the stag beetle’ stories h ...

without digging up the habitat.” Deborah also sets traps for adults using ginger and mango as bait, but, even now, she’s still n ...

Your brain is the finely-tuned machine that controls all your actions and emotions, so it makes sense to keep it well-oiled. But ...

LEARN A LANGUAGE OR INSTRUMENT So far only two types of mental exertion have been shown to improve or preserve overall cognitive ...

The other thing you can do is to protect your brain from internal injury – and that means eating properly. The brain is a famous ...

ANTIDEPRESSANTS Depression is not just a mood disorder, it has profound effects on cognition generally blurring memory, slowing ...

BRAIN TRAINING Any mental exercise helps cognition by building, lengthening or strengthening the pathways that carry information ...

Devices that send a weak electrical current through your brain via head- mounted electrodes are marketed online as cognitive enh ...

SCIENCE t HISTORY t NATURE t FOR THE CURIOUS MIND Volume 4 Issue 6 October 2014 `^125 A Times of India publication R.N.I .MAHENG ...

ALAMY/GETTY Small sensation: PT Barnum with the three-foot-tall General Tom Thumb in c1850 (when Tom was about 12). Barnum pluck ...

Barnum tried to negotiate a price for a tree upon which Lord Byron had etched his name. He also put in a shameless bid to buy Sh ...

82 June 2017 ALAMY/BRITISH LIBRARY/BRIDGEMAN The Feejee Mermaid In July 1842, the PT Barnum marketing machine went into overdriv ...