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The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

Fossilised evidence has been found of dinosaurs fighting with each other.

Helen Scales: This is a wonderful way of recreating things, events that happened long before we were ever around. These are the triceratops, these wonderful nine-metre-long beasts that roamed the earth in the cretaceous period about 70 million years ago until around 65 million years ago, when, as we all know, the dinosaurs didn’t do so well and most of them disappeared, except for the birds.

A fossilised triceratops. [Image copyright: Jupiterimages]

Anyway, this is a wonderful study which was conducted by a team of researchers led by Andrew Farke who is curator of Raymond M Alf Museum of Paleontology in California, and what he and his team did was they went around scrutinising the lumps and bumps on triceratops skulls in museum collections, and in particular they were looking for calluses associated with healed or healing fractures and something called periosteal reactive bone, which is the upshot of when a superficial injury pulls the membrane away that lines the outside of bones and can lead to inflammation and then a scar on the bone, because what they were looking for was evidence that triceratops attacked each other.

We don’t know why they have these three wonderful horns, but now they think they’ve found some evidence that indeed triceratops did fight each other, and the key to understanding what these bumps and lumps they found on the skulls were was by looking at another group of dinosaurs, the centrosaurus, which in many ways are quite similar to triceratops, they too have three horns, and in fact they found that the centrosaurs had far fewer of these battle scars than the triceratops did.

Chris Smith: How do they know that the battle scars, these injuries on the bones were inflicted by triceratops? Is it because of the relationship of the scars to each other, they map onto the same sort of shape configuration of the spikes coming off the head so that’s how they know what made them?

Helen: Well they were actually, most of these scars were in fact on the frilly bone around the back and the neck, if you like, of the triceratops, which if you can imagine probably is where the triceratops horns would poke if they were wrestling with each other. We think what might have been going on is a bit like deer do now, and antelope with horns, they lock horns and wrestle with each other. Another thing they think could be that it’s unlikely to be other predators, other dinosaurs doing this because why weren’t the centrosaurs covered in scars as well, so that’s another piece of evidence that we think it really was these wrestling triceratops, which is a lovely idea I think.

Chris: Indeed. What do you think they were fighting over though?

Helen: Who knows? I mean they were probably fighting over mates to be honest. I mean that’s the main thing in life isn’t it, it’s passing on your genes, so it was probably the male triceratops fighting for ladies, fighting for territory. We don’t know what kind of social system they might have had but I think it probably was, they’re probably showing off, you know.

[Extracted from Breaking Science. Listen online to the whole programme, originally broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live, February 2009]

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Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

Apparently, eating too much is bad for your brain.

Helen Scales: It could be, yes. We have new evidence this week published by a team of researchers led by Veronica Witt and her colleagues from the University of Munster in Germany, and they showed that possibly by cutting down the daily calorie intake of elderly people it might actually have a link to improving their memory. Now statistics show that we are living in an aging population, and that’s thanks to modern medicine that in general people are living longer than ever before, but even if our bodies live longer our brains don’t always do as well, and there is an increasing incidence of all sorts of neurodegenerative diseases among elderly people.

A man eating cake [Image © copyright Jupiterimages Corporation]

So is there really a brain-healthy diet? Well, various studies in the past have shown both in people and in laboratory animals that have hinted, really, that restricting calories in the diet and cutting down on saturated fatty acids could help to protect the brain later in life.

Chris Smith: Is it just that if you eat a healthier diet you have better blood vessels and therefore you don’t have a stroke, or is there something biochemically going on that makes the brain fitter if you watch what you eat?

Helen: What these guys did, they actually wanted to see the link to the memory of restricting diet, and they took a group of volunteers, who were aged between 50 and 80, and put some of them on a diet that restricted their calories for three months, some of them they put on a diet rich in unsaturated fatty acids, and some of them they just left as a control, and what they found was by testing their memory before and after this time, the ones who were on the restricted calorie diet did in fact have a better memory before and after.

Chris: So it does look like there’s a real effect going on there, but what do we think in terms of hormones and chemicals and the biochemistry is causing that?

Helen: Well, what they also did was measure various things in their blood before and after, and one thing that seems to stand out is insulin, and there seems to be this link that essentially the people who were on the restricted diet had lower levels of insulin in their blood after this fast, if you like, this three months of lower calories, and it seems to be that insulin plays a very important role in our brains in terms of how connections are made between nerve cells in our brains, and that’s linked to learning. So when we’ve got this lowered sensitivity to insulin that could actually be through a series of steps leading to problems in forming memories.

[Extracted from Breaking Science:
Listen to the whole programme, originally broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live, February 2009]

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The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

There may be a gaping hole in your internet security.

Helen Scales: It’s hard to deny that having wireless access to the internet is incredibly convenient for all of us whether we’re at home or at work, but it seems Wi-Fi is actually putting our security at risk, and a group of scientists this week have published a paper in the journal PNAS, and they used computer models that are usually used to predict the spread of infectious diseases through people and animals, and they used these models to show just how susceptible we are because of our Wi-Fi networks, because they obviously can be susceptible to their own bugs. They now call them malware, which is this combination of viruses and worms that have become really malicious.

Chris Smith: So what are they arguing? That when you have lots of people who have Wi-Fi in their homes for example, because the range of my home Wi-Fi overlaps with my neighbour’s Wi-Fi someone could come along and write a bit of program which would go into my wireless network router and make it talk to the house next door, and the house next door talk to the house next door, and you could have this sort of conduit for naughty programs to spread, which doesn’t have to go through traditional routes where we’ve thought of protecting with things like virus software and stuff like that?

Helen: Absolutely. This particular model, which was built by Alessandro Vespignani from Indiana University, they used actual, real geographic distribution of Wi-Fi routers in some major US cities, in New York and in San Francisco and various places, and they’re so close to each other, they are like a network of kids at school, if you like, who are susceptible to a disease. All it takes really is a few kids to come in who will pass on diseases to those other kids that they come into contact with.

Chris: So what are they saying we should do about this, and why is this happening? Haven’t we got passwords?

Helen: Well we do have passwords, but I think the problem is a lot of people don’t actually change their passwords from the ones that they’re given when they originally get the software, and they don’t change them through time, and they make them really obvious things that people can guess. So one thing that they do recommend is that you change your password to something that no-one’s going to know and don’t tell anyone. The other thing is there is software that can actually encrypt and stop Wi-Fi routers from being able to talk to each other, but that isn’t used enough yet.

The interesting thing is, you don’t actually have to have every single router with this encryption technology, only - possibly, in the models they looked at - about 60 per cent, and if you do that then you really can stop this wildfire spread. Because what they found was, it’s 10,000 routers they think could be infected within a week with just a few being infected at the beginning, and most of the infection’s spread within the first day, so it really could happen extremely quickly if we don’t make steps to become a bit more secure.

Extracted from Breaking Science. Listen to the whole programme, originally broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live, February 2009

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