大象传媒

Last week NASA鈥檚 Osiris-Rex mission successfully touched down on asteroid Bennu鈥檚 crumbly surface. But the spacecraft collected so much material that the canister wouldn鈥檛 close. NASA systems engineer Estelle Church tells Roland Pease how she and the team back on Earth performed clever manoeuvres to remotely successfully shut the lid.

As winter draws on in the North, and people spend more time indoors, there鈥檚 considerable debate about the conditions in which SARS-Cov2 is more likely to spread. Princeton University鈥檚 Dylan Morris has just published research exploring the coronavirus鈥檚 survival in different humidities and temperatures.

Indian agriculture in some areas uses vast amounts of water. Dr Vimal Mishra of the Indian Institute of Technology in Gandhinagar has discovered that this irrigation, plus very high temperatures, is causing not just extreme discomfort amongst the population but also more deaths.

In the 1930s serious dust storms over several years ruined crops and lives over a huge part of Midwest America. The dustbowl conditions were made famous by the folk songs of Woodie Guthrie and in John Steinbeck鈥檚 novel Grapes of Wrath. Now a study in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that levels of dust have doubled in the past twenty years. Roland Pease asks researchers and farmers if they think the dust bowl is returning.

We鈥檝e probably all got a friend who sings along wildly out of tune - or maybe you are that person. But why are some of us apparently tone deaf, while others can hold a melody? Can you train yourself to sing in tune, or is it mostly down to raw talent?

These musical questions, from CrowdScience listeners Jenny and Anastasia, certainly struck a chord with us. Anastasia loves to sing but her friends tell her she鈥檚 off-key - or that 鈥渁 bear trod on her ear,鈥� as they say in her native Russia. Is it possible for her to improve her singing voice, and what are the best ways of going about it?

Both musicians and scientists help us tackle these questions, and explain what鈥檚 going on in our ears, brains and throats when we try to sing the right notes. We learn about congenital amusia, a condition which makes it almost impossible to tell if you鈥檙e in tune or not, and attempt to tease out the relative influence of our genes and our environment when it comes to musical ability.

(Image: Getty Images)