A new study has suggested that a gene variant thought only to increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease could actually be one genetic cause of the condition.The gene is called APOE, and the specific variant in question is called APOE4. The gene, present on chromosome 19, codes for a protein called apolipoprotein E that pairs up with fats like cholesterol and transports them through the bloodstream.Professor Jonathan Schott, Chief Medical Officer at Alzheimer’s Research UK (who was not directly involved in the new work), told the Science Media Centre (SMC) that “inheriting certain genes can increase an individual’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s. The best known of these is a gene called APOE. There are three different versions of this gene, APOE2, APOE3, and APOE4. Each of us carries two copies of APOE, one inherited from each parent – and this means there are different combinations people can carry. APOE2 decreases and APOE4 increases risk for Alzheimer’s disease.” The seemingly neutral and most common form is APOE3.There is a difference between genes in which a mutation directly causes Alzheimer’s disease and those that affect the risk of developing it. The genes APP, PSEN1, and PSEN2 have been placed in the first category, whereas APOE4 has been placed in the second – but this new research indicates that it could be in the first category instead, being a causal factor rather than a risk factor.“About 1 in 50 people carry two copies of APOE4, and we have known for some time that these individuals have substantially increased risk,” Schott said. However, it’s not exactly clear why those who carry APOE4 appear to be at a higher risk of Alzheimer’s. One 2021 study in yeast and human cells pointed towards a potential role in how the gene affects lipid metabolism.“In this [new] large well-conducted study, researchers showed that people who inherited two copies of APOE4 almost all developed Alzheimer changes in the brain by their mid 60’s. These individuals were more likely to develop dementia and tended to do so at a younger age than those with different APOE combinations,” Schott continued.Study author Dr Reisa Sperling told the Associated Press that “this data for me says wow, what an important group to be able to go after before they become symptomatic,” but stressed, “It’s important not to scare everyone who has a family history,” clarifying, “It’s not quite destiny.”The authors of the study examined how having two copies of the gene affected Alzheimer’s pathology and biomarkers. The team used data from 3,297 brain donors – 273 of which had two copies of APOE4 – from the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center (NACC), and 10,039 individuals from five multi-center clinical cohorts, 519 of which had two copies of the gene variant.The researchers found that, at the age of 55, those with two APOE4 copies had higher levels of biomarkers amyloid and tau compared to those with two APOE3 copies. By the age of 65, almost all subjects with two APOE4 copies had abnormal amyloid-β levels in their cerebrospinal fluid, and 75 percent had positive amyloid scans (although the hypothesis that amyloid-β is the major driver of Alzheimer’s has been called into question). However, during the dementia phase, there appeared to be no difference in amyloid-β or tau accumulation.Those with two APOE4 copies also started experiencing Alzheimer’s symptoms at an average (mean) age of 65.6 years old, which the researchers say is “approximately 7–10 years earlier” than those with two APOE3 copies.The researchers also propose that the number of copies of the gene variant has an effect, with subjects with one each of APOE3 and APOE4 showing “intermediate phenotypes” between those with two copies of the same variant.“This study adds compelling data to suggest that people with two copies of this gene are almost guaranteed to develop Alzheimer’s if they live long enough and that they will develop Alzheimer’s earlier than people without this gene,” Professor Tara Spires-Jones, President of the British Neuroscience Association and Group Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Edinburgh, told the SMC. “The increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease with inheriting the APOE4 gene has been known for over 30 years.”“This study has shown us that this particular gene might play an important role in Alzheimer’s disease development, suggesting its presence is not only a risk factor, but could also indicate a new form of Alzheimer’s disease,” Dr Richard Oakley, Alzheimer’s Society’s Associate Director of Research and Innovation, told the SMC. “The insights from the study suggest that in the future it could be important to take into account a person’s genetics when planning how to reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, or when considering their treatment if they already have the disease.”However, not everyone is convinced. “I do not see anything in this paper to justify the claim that carrying two copies of APOE4 represents some ‘distinct genetic form’ of Alzheimer’s disease,” Professor David Curtis, Honorary Professor in the UCL Genetics Institute, told the SMC. “It has been known for decades that APOE4 is a strong risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, that people carrying two copies are at high risk and that people carrying two copies are at substantially higher risk than those carrying one. No matter how many alleles of APOE4 one carries the underlying disease processes seem similar across cases of Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting that any effective treatment and prevention strategies, which have yet to be developed, would have broad applicability.”The researchers propose “a reconceptualization” of how we see the genetics behind Alzheimer’s, which they say will come with “profound consequences.” These include "the need for individualized prevention strategies, clinical trials and treatments", as well as counseling and screening those with cognitive complaints for APOE4. However, Schott said that genetic testing for APOE4 is not currently advised outside of research.“Moving forward, this study and others highlight the importance of more fundamental research into understanding how genes change the susceptibility of our brains to Alzheimer’s disease as we age,” said Spires-Jones.The study is published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Cometary globules have nothing to do with comets. They are nebulae with long tails of gas and dust being shaped and stripped by the hot ionized material around them – and the Dark Energy Camera has found a spectacular example of one.Located in the constellation of Puppis – translating in Latin to "poop deck" – the cometary globule has been given the name CG 4. It extends for about eight light-years and its head is 1.5 light-years across – we are saying "head" because we are seeing a resemblance to Shai-Hulud, the giant worms from Dune, but the astronomers in the team are calling this formation God’s Hand.Cometary globules are a special type of Bok Globules that have been known since 1976. But even after 50 years, they remain extremely difficult to observe. The reason for this is that the gas and dust are very dark. Your standard telescope gets these dark nebulae confused with the darkness of the universe – but a filter can reveal it.The Dark Energy Camera has a Hydrogen-alpha filter which picks the faint glow of ionized hydrogen. This emission is the red glow surrounding the cometary globule, the more distant background field, and the main nebula from which the globule is extending. Hydrogen atoms get excited by the energetic light of a hot massive star or stellar object. This energy can make them glow with the emission of a specific lightThe light of those stars is not only ionizing the hydrogen, but it is also sculpting the cometary globule. In particular, it is destroying the head/hand portion of it. There is enough material in the head to form several new Sun-sized stars, but it is a race against time as to whether that many will form before the head is destroyed as the head is being destroyed and heated but to make new stars you need a cool stable cloud.The cometary globules are found throughout the Milky Way, but this special region known as the Gum Nebula has 32 cometary globules. This is believed to be the expanding remains of a supernova explosion that took place about a million years ago. And it is a famous one: the Vela pulsar. All the cometary globules appear to have tails pointing away from it, probably sculpted by its intense radiation.Near the mouth of the giant worm, there is a distant galaxy that looks like it is about to be eaten. In reality, ESO 257-19 (PGC 21338) is more than 100 million light-years away from CG 4. The gum nebula is 1,470 light-years away.

Goliath beetles are among the heaviest beetles in the natural world and one of the strongest bugs on the planet.Where does the Goliath beetle live?Native to the many forests of Africa, Goliath beetles belong to a genus called Goliathus that includes at least five different species: G. goliatus, G. regius, G. cacicus, G. orientalis, and G. albosignatus. They are part of the wider scarab beetle family, which includes 30,000 species of beetle. One of the largest species of Goliath beetle is G. regius, aka the Royal Goliath, notable for its striking black-and-white appearance that’s reminiscent of a Rorschach test. Growing up to 10 centimeters (just under 4 inches) in length, they live in parts of West Africa, including Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. G. goliatus can grow to similar sizes but are located further south in western and eastern equatorial Africa around Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzanian, and Uganda. Goliathus regius on display at the Milan Natural History Museum.Image credit: Hectonichus/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)How much does the Goliath beetle weigh?There’s some dispute over how heavy they can grow. Some authorities have cited that some Goliath beetles can weigh up to 70 to 100 grams (2.5 to 3.5 ounces), although this is thought to refer to their sausage-sized grubs. As per Guinness World Records, adult Goliath beetles typically weigh between 40 to 50 grams (1.4–1.7 ounces).What do Goliath beetles eat?As you can tell by their size, Goliath beetles are big eaters. They live on an omnivorous diet that includes everything from tree sap and fruit – rich in sugars – to the remains of decaying animals – high in protein. How much can a Goliath beetle lift?Growing to the size of a modest avocado, these biblically big beetles can lift weights around 850 times heavier than their own body weight – that’s the equivalent of an average human lifting two sperm whales. What about Hercules?In the extremely diverse world of beetles, there’s stiff competition for record-holders. Actaeon beetle (Megasoma actaeon), elephant beetle (Megasoma elephas), and titan beetle (Titanus giganteus) can all grow to similar weights as Goliath beetles and there’s no consensus on who takes the crown. When it comes to length, the Hercules beetle is significantly bigger than the Goliath beetle thanks to its lengthy thoracic horn that allows it to reach lengths of up to 17.3 centimeters (7 inches). This species is, surprisingly, still capable of flying despite its colossal size. Some sources also suggest it can rival the Goliath in weight, although that is likely to refer to its larvae, which are also very, very large. You’re not going to see a Hercules beetle go head-to-head with a Goliath beetle, however. Hercules beetles fill a different ecological niche halfway across the globe in the Americas, inhabiting pockets of rainforest across southern Mexico, Central America, and South America.

Physicists might have found a glueball. This is not something you get by rubbing vinyl glue between your fingers. It is a curious interaction between the carriers of the strong nuclear force, called gluons – hence the name "glueball".Gluons carry the nuclear force between quarks, a force that is a lot weirder than the others. It doesn’t have only an attractive side like gravity or a positive and negative like electromagnetism. It is an interaction of three different charges that physicists in the 1960s called color. It is not really a color, but you will soon get the idea as to why it is called that.Let’s take, for example, the proton: the particle that is found at the center of atomic nuclei. It is made of three quarks, and it doesn’t have a net charge from the strong nuclear force. So, the charge of the three quarks needs to cancel out. Each quark has a different color charge: blue, green, or red. Together, they cancel each other out, like how lights of those colors can create white light.But there are also particles called mesons that are made of one quark and one antiquark. They too have no color, so it stands that there must exist an antiblue, antigreen, and antired. Gluons carry the strong nuclear force, and in a way, they are a mixture of colors. They do interact with quarks, but they can interact with other gluons as well. And this is where the physics gets interesting – the gluons can form a particle without the need for quarks.The theory is there, but finding it is another question altogether. Enter the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III), a particle collider great at forming a specific type of meson: the (J/psi) meson, also written J/ψ. It consists of a charm quark and charm antiquark and like all mesons, it is unstable and doesn’t last long. And in its decay, there’s fun stuff.We have previously reported that researchers in the collaboration are believed to have found a rare combination of a proton and an antiproton. From studying over 10 billion J/ψ decaying, researchers are also confident to have found a new particle dubbed X(2370).The number in the bracket represents its mass in megaelectronvolts over the speed of light squared. You get a lot of decimal points if you measure a particle's mass in grams or ounces. But 2370 was only the first estimate. The latest work places the actual mass around 2395 MeV/c2 and there is a theoretical expectation that a glueball should exist at that mass.Now, the observations are indeed consistent with this fabled particle and the results are likely the strongest ever result in favor of the existence of glueballs. But it is not incontrovertible proof of a glueball. Another interaction between quarks and antiquarks might create this particle, and there also seems to be a few too many produced by the J/ψ decay. More work will be needed to prove or disprove the glueball nature of this particle.The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.[H/T: Big Think]

Written on the walls of sites in the Atbai Desert in Eastern Sudan, prehistoric rock art tells the story of a very distant past. While the region today is achingly arid, the artwork implies it was once a lush, green land filled with water, pastures, and animal life. Remarkably, the artwork only dates to around 4,000 years ago, suggesting this part of the Sahara Desert underwent a rapid and radical change in just the past few millennia. In their new study, archaeologists at Macquarie University describe the discovery of 16 rock art sites in the deserts around Wadi Halfa, a city in northern Sudan near the border with Egypt.Among the many figures depicted in the art, the researchers found illustrations of humans, antelopes, elephants, and giraffes. There was also the recurrent appearance of cattle – which is pretty astonishing when you consider the current hyper-arid climate of the Atbai Desert.Today, this region receives almost no annual rainfall, making cattle pastoralism impossible. However, the rock art shows that cattle farming was a common theme of everyday life as recent as 3000 BCE. “It was puzzling to find cattle carved on desert rock walls as they require plenty of water and acres of pasture, and would not survive in the dry and arid environment of the Sahara today,” Dr Julien Cooper, a researcher who led a team of archaeologists in 2018 and 2019 on the Atbai Survey Project, said in a statement.Dry and desolate: today's view of the Atbai desert near Wadi Halfa.Image credit: Julian Cooper“The presence of cattle in ancient rock art is one of the most important pieces of evidence establishing a once ‘green Sahara’,” added Cooper.Between 15,000 years ago and roughly 5,000 years ago, Africa was doused by increased summer monsoon rainfall across the continent as a result of periodic variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Thanks to the downpours of rain, the continent was turned into a flourishing land of grassy pasture covered in freshwater lakes. When the wet period ended, however, a drastic change was brought to the region’s landscape, as well as the many people and other animals who lived here.“The Atbai Desert around Wadi Halfa, where the new rock art was discovered, became almost completely depopulated. For those who remained, cattle were abandoned for sheep and goats,” explained Dr Cooper. “This would have had major ramification on all aspects of human life – from diet and limited milk supplies, migratory patterns of herding families and the identity and livelihood of those who depended on their cattle.”The findings are published in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.

It’s often said that to know your enemy, you must become your enemy – and when that enemy happens to be fake news, a new study of a game where players become “fake newsmongers” suggests it really does help.The game in question is Bad News, developed by Dutch media platform DROG and scientists from the University of Cambridge as a way to “vaccinate” the public against disinformation. In pretending to be creators of fake news – the aim is to gain as many followers and as much ill-placed credibility as possible – players are exposed to real-life fake news strategies, such as political polarization, spreading conspiracy theories, and impersonating others.Back in 2019, a study of 15,000 participants indicated that the game was successful at improving people’s ability to spot and resist disinformation, but the team was keen to see if the same results could be achieved in a more traditional educational setting: a secondary school classroom.Coming from four different Swedish schools, 516 upper-secondary students aged 16 to 19 were first asked to complete a questionnaire that measured their ability to spot both manipulative and credible content, rating Twitter-like posts for how reliable they believed the post to be and providing a justification for it.Then, the students were tasked with playing Bad News, either individually, in pairs, or as a whole class group. After playing, they filled out a post-test questionnaire that again measured their disinformation-spotting skills, as well as what they thought about the game.Regardless of whether or not the student played the game by themselves, the study revealed that playing had a positive impact.“The students improved their ability to identify manipulative techniques in social media posts and to distinguish between reliable and misleading news,” explained study author Thomas Nygren in a statement, though students who already held positive attitudes towards credible news sources were the best at doing so.Many students were also better able to explain how they could spot the disinformation presented.But before people start demanding the game be immediately added to curriculums everywhere, the authors do note some limitations: the study was conducted on students from just one country and only tested their ability to spot disinformation in a social media post. Future studies, they suggest, should investigate the impact of the game elsewhere and on assessing the credibility of an entire news article.“This is an important step towards equipping young people with the tools they need to navigate in a world full of disinformation,” said Nygren. “We all need to become better at identifying manipulative strategies – prebunking, as it is known – since it is virtually impossible to discern deep fakes, for example, and other AI-generated disinformation with the naked eye.”The study is published in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

Astronomers using JWST report that a hellish super-Earth called 55 Cancri e might have a thick atmosphere made up of either of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide. If confirmed, it would be the first known rocky planet beyond the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere.  Earth is a rocky planet and its atmosphere is vital in allowing life to flourish, protecting it from the Sun's radiation and the harshness of space. Mars is also a rocky planet, however, its very thin atmosphere, just 1 percent of Earth's, may be part of the reason there is (as far as we know) no life on the Red Planet. An atmosphere isn't necessarily an indicator of a potentially habitable planet but it's a good place to start and though it's unlikely life exists on 55 Cancri e since its surface is a molten ocean of magma, the fact JWST can and has detected hints of a possible atmosphere there is a very promising sign in our ability to hunt for Earth-Like planets. 55 Cancri e has almost twice the radius of our own world and a mass 8.8 times Earth's own. It orbits a star smaller than our Sun but so closely that it goes around it in less than 18 hours, meaning the star-facing side has temperatures high enough to melt iron and the world is expected to be marked by volcanos and a magma ocean. It is that geological activity that might sustain the atmosphere that a team of astronomers believe they have observed.“The planet is so hot that some of the molten rock should evaporate,” lead author Renyu Hu from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement seen by IFLScience.55 Cancri e is tidally locked so its night side is in constant darkness and its day side constantly facing the scorching star. If the planet was without an atmosphere, the day side would be very hot and the night side very cool, but this is not what JWST found. The day side is cooler than expected and while lava flow to the night side can explain some of it, an atmosphere can better explain the cooling observed.“This is a very strong indication that energy is being distributed from the dayside to the nightside, most likely by a volatile-rich atmosphere,” Hu explained.However, more observations are needed to truly characterize what is going on around 55 Cancri e; the evidence is compelling but to solve such a conundrum as this planet, astronomers need more information. “55 Cancri e is one of the most enigmatic exoplanets. Despite enormous amounts of observing time obtained with a dozen of ground and space facilities in the past decade, its very nature has remained elusive, until today, when parts of the puzzle could finally be put together thanks to the JWST,” explained co-author Professor Brice-Olivier Demory from the University of Bern.JWST's ability to pick up this potential atmosphere bodes well for its ability to detect cooler, more likely candidates for potentially habitable planets. It should also lead to a better understanding of planets as a whole. “JWST is really pushing the frontiers of exoplanet characterization to rocky exoplanets,” Hu said. “It is truly enabling a new type of science,” said Hu.The study is published in the journal Nature.

In a world first, scientists have repurposed an existing drug and shown it could help fix faulty proteins thought to be involved in long COVID. The drug, naltrexone, is typically used to treat substance use disorders, but the team believe their research shows its potential to help millions of people living with long COVID and ME/CFS.As science has learned more about long COVID, many have drawn parallels between it and the chronic condition ME/CFS, which stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Sometimes referred to simply as chronic fatigue syndrome, this often misunderstood condition is associated with a catalog of symptoms beyond debilitating fatigue, with at least a quarter of patients becoming bed- or housebound for long periods of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.When people in recovery from COVID-19 began to report a similar constellation of symptoms, including exhaustion, brain fog, heart palpitations, and gastrointestinal issues, ME/CFS patients, clinicians, and researchers spotted the similarities between the two syndromes.A team at Griffith University’s National Center for Neuroimmunology and Emerging Diseases (NCNED) have now built on some of their previous findings in ME/CFS to show that an existing drug could have potential benefits for patients with long COVID too.The study centers on a type of protein called an ion channel. “Ion channels are integral membrane proteins that facilitate the passage of ions (charged particles) across the cell membrane,” explained first author Etianne Sasso, a PhD candidate at Griffith University, in a statement.Effectively, these are gateways by which ions that are essential for many bodily processes can enter and exit cells. The team had previously shown that in both ME/CFS and long COVID, some of the ion channels on immune cells don’t function effectively.The team discovered that naltrexone – a drug that was first approved in the US in 1984 as a treatment for substance use disorders involving alcohol and opioids – can restore the function of these ion channels in cells from ME/CFS patients. Now, they’ve repeated that finding in long COVID, using a technique called electrophysiology.“We found that by restoring the function of these ion channels, important ions such as calcium were again able to move in and out of immune cells, controlling many of the body’s biological processes,” Sasso explained.Effective treatment strategies are lacking for both long COVID and ME/CFS, so these results could be great news for a large, but underserved patient community.Following their discovery, the researchers are now planning two clinical trials to see how real patients respond to the drug.“We will be undertaking two clinical trials testing the efficacy of low dose naltrexone where the first will be in long COVID patients while the second trial will, for the first time, be in ME/CFS patients,” said Professor Sonya Marshall-Gradisnik, the senior author and director of NCNED.“Should these trials prove successful, it could mean a vastly improved quality of life for countless individuals struggling with long COVID and ME/CFS.”The study is published in Frontiers in Immunology. 

Black holes are strange objects which (though we have learned plenty about them) confound our understanding of physics. In an attempt to reconcile some of the paradoxes discovered when studying them, physicists have proposed stranger hypotheses still, with one suggesting that they imply we live in a holographic universe, where all of what we see and perceive is in fact encoded at our universe's boundary, a 3D (plus time) representation of a two-dimensional (plus time) universe. Further than that, some have suggested that it could imply that our universe is within a black hole of a larger universe.Black holes, formed when massive stars collapse, are areas of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. Their existence posed a problem when studying them in terms of thermodynamics. The final state of a black hole, when it reaches equilibrium, is dependent only on three parameters: its mass, angular momentum, and electric charge."In classical general relativity, a black hole prevents any particle or form of radiation from escaping from its cosmic prison," French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet explains in a 2016 review. "For an external observer, when a material body crosses an event horizon all knowledge of its material properties is lost. Only the new values of M [mass], J [angular momentum], and Q [electric charge] remain. As a result, a black hole swallows an enormous amount of information." Sounds simple doesn't it, or at least as simple as physics can get? But if a black hole has mass (and they have a lot of it) then they should have a temperature according to the first law of thermodynamics, and in line with the second law of thermodynamics, they should radiate heat. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes should emit radiation – now termed Hawking radiation – formed at a black hole's boundary."Hawking then pointed to a paradox. If a black hole can evaporate, a portion of the information it contains is lost forever," Luminet continued. "The information contained in thermal radiation emitted by a black hole is degraded; it does not recapitulate information about matter previously swallowed by the black hole. The irretrievable loss of information conflicts with one of the basic postulates of quantum mechanics. According to the Schrödinger equation, physical systems that change over time cannot create or destroy information, a property known as unitarity."This is known as the black hole information paradox, and – given how it appears to violate our current understanding of the universe – it has been the subject of a lot of study and debate. One proposed solution, of sorts, was found by looking at the thermodynamics of black holes in the context of string theory. Gerard ’t Hooft showed that the total degrees of freedom contained inside a black hole is defined in proportion to the surface area of its horizon, rather than its volume. This allows for looking at the entropy of a black hole."From the point of view of information, each bit in the form of a 0 or a 1 corresponds to four Planck areas, which allows one to find the Bekenstein–Hawking formula for entropy," Luminet continues. "For an external observer, information about the entropy of the black hole, once borne by the three-dimensional structure of the objects that have crossed the event horizon, seems lost. But on this view, the information is encoded on the two-dimensional surface of a black hole, like a hologram. Therefore, ’t Hooft concluded, the information swallowed by a black hole could be completely restored during the process of quantum evaporation."While this is reassuring in one way (black holes do not violate the second law of thermodynamics, yay) it lead to a pretty out there idea that the physics of a three-dimensional volume can be described at its two-dimensional boundary. While this is not true of space outside of a black hole, there are proposals that the universe itself could be a black hole, where all processes take place at the boundary and what we observe emerges from these interactions. It's a wild idea, with even wilder tag-ons. For instance, it has been suggested that gravity could arise as an emergent force from entanglement entropy at the boundary. The theory is not the most compelling idea out there to explain our universe, with standard physics still describing best the universe that we see. But there are reasons why people take it seriously. For one thing, for the model to work, the universe's Hubble Radius – the radius of our observable universe – must be the same as its Schwarzschild radius, or the size of the black hole that would be created if all the matter within it was condensed to a single point. These two figures are, in fact, surprisingly close, though this can also be put down to a cosmic coincidence. There are other reasons, such as this chart of everything, which suggests that we could be living within a black hole of a larger universe. But until such a theory comes up with compelling evidence and predictions beyond our current understanding of physics, we'd suggest not to plunge into an existential crisis just yet, whether you are a 3D object in conventional space-time or a holographic projection from a 2D boundary inside a larger universe.

CURIOUS Live is back for its first event of 2024. We'll be putting intriguing questions to the experts on some curious topics during IFLScience’s second-ever virtual event, delving into nuclear war, the connection between mental and physical health, insect detectives, and the search for life elsewhere in the universe. We’re speaking to experts in each of these fields to find out what science, history, technology, curious case studies, and experiments have taught us about everything from the devastation of atomic bombs to the ongoing search for extraterrestrials.What to expect at CURIOUS Live 2024Atomic BombsFirst up, IFLScience writer and producer Rachael Funnell sits down with Annie Jacobsen, reporter and Pulitzer-shortlisted author of Nuclear War: A Scenario. Jacobsen obtained exclusive interviews with military experts to ascertain just what happens minute-by-minute, second-by-second, following a hypothetical nuclear blast on Washington, and we wanted to know what such a scenario might look like, as well as what it would mean for the planet. ImmunopsychiatryNext, IFLScience content creator Eleanor Higgs teams up with Dr Monty Lyman, medical doctor and author of The Immune Mind, to unravel the emerging field of immunopsychiatry. Ever wondered why you get sick when you’re stressed? Or why being ill can make you feel depressed? It turns out the divide between our mental and physical health has been historically overstated. In fact, there are mechanisms that connect the two, and things like our gut microbiomes may even explain why some people get more of a buzz from exercise than others.Insect DetectivesReturning for our third talk, Rachael takes us into the world of forensic entomology alongside Dr Erica McAlister and Adrian Washbourne, authors of Metamorphosis: How Insects Are Changing Our World. Explore how insect detectives play a crucial role in forensic science, from estimating time of death to uncovering hidden clues.Alien LifeLastly, IFLScience’s space correspondent Dr Alfredo Carpineti leads an exploration of humans’ search for alien life in our final talk with astronomer Professor Lisa Kaltenegger, who recently penned Alien Earths. From labs filled with thousands of different worlds in miniature to questioning what really defines “life”, the search is a complex one. Some have even suggested that rather than finding “little green men”, we’d more likely stumble across some purple ones…Sign up to watch and you’ll receive a CURIOUS Live booklet ahead of the event with more background information on these curious topics, experienced experts, and even a quiz you can try out for yourself, test on your class, or take for a whirl in a pub quiz. So, join us on May 31, and you just might learn something you’ll never forget.