Why does skin stick to frozen metal?

If you put your tongue on any frozen metal, the high conductivity of the metal removes the heat from your tongue much faster than your body can supply it. This makes the saliva freeze into ice very quickly. This ice creates hydrogen bonds between the metal and your skin, just like water does, so the whole surface bonds together and resists as you pull away. This same thing will happen with your fngers because your fingerprints provide the roughness needed and your fingers always have some moisture due to sweat. However very smooth, dry skin won't stick. 

Why does a mint make ice cream even colder?

All mints contain the chemical menthol, which binds to the TRP-M8 receptors in your skin which sense cold, the temperature doesn't change it's the menthol that causes false cold signals to be sent to your brain. This feeling is intensified because the ice cream also sends cold signals to your brain and this increases the number of cold receptors that are firing at once. This is similar to the reaction caused by chilli which is caused by the chemical capsaicin which binds to the TRP-V1 receptors for heat. 

Can animals be allergic to humans?

Yes, they can. Scientist's don't know much about allergies with wild animals but it has been known that dogs and cats develop allergies to their owners. Like when humans are allergic to animals, the main culprit is the dander or dandruff that falls of us. Around us everyday there's dust that contains varying amounts of dead skin. When cats are allergic they show symptoms such as coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. Dogs show symptoms such as itching, sores and skin infections. This problem is increasing a lot because we are steadily domesticating our pets where they are continuously exposed to human allergens. 

How do scientists communicate with deep space probes?

Communicating with something over 11.2 billion kilometres (7 billion miles) away is no mean feat. It involves a huge network of worldwide radio antennas. These are strategically placed across the Earth so there will always be one that the probe can send signals to, 

Likewise space probes (e.g Pioneer 10) need radio antennas to send pictures, weather information and much more to. However power constraints mean the the probes transmit very weak signals that get weaker the further away the probe gets. Antennas have very large dishes to capture the probe's signal. Yet greater amplification and noise reduction is needed to boost the signal to a readable level.   

How do gorillas raised in captivity know what's safe to eat in the wild?

By instinct. Similar to how we have evolved to enjoy the taste of the safe foods and dislike the poisonous ones, gorillas have done just the same. In the wild mountain gorillas eat leaves,shoots and stems so much so an adult male can chomp through a massive 18kg of vegetation in a day. In experiments gorillas were given over 2000 pairs of foods and they then had to choose between them. Throughout the experiments they demonstrated consistent food choices in high sugar fruits with a high ratio of sugar to fibre, this is even the same using pictures of the fruit! 

Why can cold drinks give us a headache?

We may finally have an explanation of this phenomenon, that you may have referred to as "brain freeze"  which is a cold stimulus headache, officially know as sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia A team of researchers led by Havard Medical School asked 13 brave volunteers to sip ice water through a straw aimed at the roof of their mouth while an ultrasound captured the flow of blood to the brain. Their findings have shown that just before the headache hits blood rushes through the anterior cerebral artery in the brain (a front region of the brain). The evidence isn't conclusive but it's likely that the headache is in response to the extra pressure in that region of the brain, and this is our way of warming up the blood to keep our brain at the optimal temperature, 

Do carrots help you to see in the dark?

Yes and no. Carrots contain vitamin A or retinol which is needed for your body to make rhodopsin which is a pigment in your eyes which operates in low light conditions. If you had a vitamin A deficiency you would develop nytalopia or what we might call "night blindness". Eating carrots would correct this, but only to the point of an ordinary person's vision at night - it won't ever let you see in complete darkness.

This idea first came about because of the Air Ministry in WWII. To prevent the Germans finding out that Britain was using radar to intercept bombers on night raids. They issued press releases stating that the British pilots had been eating a lot of carrots to give them exceptional night vision which fooled the entire British public as well as the German High Command, there an old wive's tale was born! 

Britain: The Isle of Wonder

The British population makes up just one per cent of the world’s population. Yet our small collection of rocks poking out of the Northern Atlantic has thrown up beaters in virtually every field of human endeavour.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Science and Engineering. Edward Jenner came up with vaccines, Sir Charles Darwin came up with the Origin of Species, Sir Isaac Newton pioneered the basic laws of motion, Sir Tim Berners-Lee who pioneered the world-wide web, Michael Faraday and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the list is gloriously long.

Why do so many great minds emerge and flourish from Britain? This is an extremely important question to ask ourselves, not only our past, but our future economy hangs on further technical advances being made and developed. Our successes can be traced back almost 800 years ago when The University of Oxford and Cambridge were founded.

In 1660 The ‘Royal Society’ was formed, backed by Sir Christopher Wren who was a Professor of Astronomy and an architect at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. The aim was to pursue a radical idea for the time, that the workings of nature can be best understood by observations and experiment. So any theory about the world should be tested and if it disagrees with the observations, then it is wrong. Even today that is radical the theories of powerful and important people could end up being undermined by science. So central to science is this idea that it is enshrined in the Royal Society’s motto: “Take nobody’s word for it”

Shortly after the Royal Society was formed, Sir Isaac Newton developed this approach in his work of “The Principia” which contains of his laws of gravity and the foundations of what we now call classical mechanics, the tools you need to calculate things from the forces on bridges and buildings to the paths of artillery shells, arguably the first modern work of physics. 

Scientists grow a heart

Scientists at the University of Pìttsburgh, PA have managed to grow a functioning mouse heart from pluripotent stem cells. These are adult stem cells that act like embryonic stem cells. The team achieved this by stripping the mouse heart of its cells and replacing them with human cells.  The heart then began to beat just as before. This could then lead to stem cells being used in the future for human organ transplants. Although there are a number of ethical issues surrounding the use of stem cells.  This technological advance could be used to replace heart tissue damaged during a heart attack.