大象传媒

Rosetta Probe Awakes
The Rosetta space probe, which aims to land a robot on a distant comet and ride it, rodeo-style, around the sun, awakes from a 31-month sleep to begin its final approach. Jon Amos reports on the electric atmosphere at the European Space Agency when the probe responded after an agonising wait.

Mind Wandering
Some people find their minds wander more than others, but until the last decade, this attention to our own thoughts was not studied much. Now new research led by Sophie Forster, a lecturer in Psychology at Sussex University in the UK, has found that those people whose minds wander the most are also the most easily distracted by other things going on around them. They are also less happy than other people. Her research has been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Fungi and Biodiversity
Fungi, not viewed favourably by gardeners, can be good for rainforest biodiversity. Dr Owen Lewis from Oxford University tells Melissa Hogenboom that plots sprayed with fungicide soon become dominated by a few species at the expense of many others, leading to a marked drop in diversity.

Virtual Fitting Room
A growing number of people are shopping for their clothes online. But an absence of virtual fitting rooms means that often many off-the-peg items do not fit the customers when they eventually get to try them on. It has been said that almost a quarter of all garments that are bought online are returned. The majority are returned because they do not fit. A number of companies have taken note and with new technologies are designing virtual fitting rooms and bespoke tailoring for their online customers. Rich Preston reports on this growing trend.

After Higgs
The Higgs boson has been discovered, providing the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle for the Standard Model of particle physics, a description of how the universe works. But what physicists haven't found yet, which they should have, are supersymmetry or SUSY particles. Roland Pease attended a recent meeting of top physicists, and shares with Adam Rutherford the latest discussions about where to look next.

Larks and Owls
Are you a lark or an owl? Are you at your best in the morning or the evening? Linda Geddes meets the scientists who are exploring the differences between larks and owls. At the University of Surrey's Sleep Research Centre she talks to its director, Professor Derk-Jan Dijk, and finds out her own chronotype by filling in a questionnaire.

Linda discovers why we have circadian rhythms and why they don't all run at the same rate. Dr Louis Ptacek from the University of California, San Francisco, explains his investigation of the genes of families whose members get up very early in the morning and of those who get up very late.

Dance and Cognition
Learning complicated dance steps can be challenging, as the celebrities on the popular 大象传媒 programme Strictly Come Dancing discover every week. But one technique used by dancers known as marking, can improve performance, as illustrated in a new study conducted by Professor Margaret Wilson, a psychologist at University of California Santa Cruz. Claudia Hammond discusses this and challenges her two left feet with British Strictly Come Dancing star Robin Windsor.

(Image: Artist's impression of the European Space Agency (ESA) probe Rosetta with Mars in the background 漏AFP/Getty Images)