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• Take me to the answer to the question I saw on Instagram

Hello friends! Great news for fans of looking up this week, as many of the listings and events take a bit of an astronomical bent. 🔭

For those who like things a bit more down to Earth, keep an eye out for bumblebees, among the first of the bee brethren to appear after winter, a nose out for magnolias, which are coming into bloom with their lemon-vanilla scent, or check out Sunday’s talk about the origins and impact of language.

What will you discover this week?

This week’s kicks

(Note: All listings are correct at the time of send but are subject to change, so please check before you travel! Prices exclude booking fees where they apply.)

Monday 1 April

🪺 What animal lays spiral shaped eggs? In lieu of my not yet finding out which scientist put a pencil up a chicken’s bottom, for Easter Monday, please enjoy Natural History Museum scientist Emma Bernard explaining why a certain animal lays eggs with a literal twist.

🤓 Throwback, 1948: Physicists Alpher, Bethe and Gamow do a funny. Ralph Alpher and George Gamow add colleague Hans Bethe to the author list of their paper, even though he’d made no contribution. Why? So that they’d sound like the first three letters of the Greek alphabet.

The paper was about how conditions in the early Universe explain abundances of hydrogen and helium, with Gamow hypothesising that most of the helium in the Universe today was produced “in less time than it takes to cook a goose”.

🎮 Get your fusion in on this game that invites you to create helium by smashing hydrogen atoms together and keep the Sun shining.

Tuesday 2 April

🚀 To Bennu and back: Using asteroids to reveal the geological history of the Solar System, hybrid event held by the Geological Society, 18.00, free: Dr Ashley King discusses what we’ve been learning about the early days of the Solar System from the pristine samples returned from asteroids Ryugu and Bennu by respective missions Hayabusa2 (see Friday’s entry) and OSIRIS-REx.

🎥 Relive the moment the sample return capsule landed in the Utah desert last September, containing just over 120 grams of Bennu and ending OSIRIS-Rex’s seven-year, seven-billion-kilometre journey to and from the asteroid.

Wednesday 3 April

🌟 Rock ‘n’ roll stars in memory of Simon Clark, hybrid event held by the Institute of Physics, 18.00, free: Professor Simon Goodwin discusses what makes massive stars so special, with stories of how astronomy research is done and the fun you can have on the way. The talk is in memory of Goodwin’s former colleague, Open University astronomy lecturer Simon Clark.

🌍 Custodians of the cosmos, hybrid event held by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 18.30, free: Astronomy professor Andy Lawrence and photographer Max Alexander explore the central role space plays in our everyday lives and the importance of protecting the fragile environment around Earth, as space debris increasingly threatens both space activity and astronomy.

Thursday 4 April

☄️ Say hello to comet 12P/Pons-Brooks... if you can. The comet, which visits the inner Solar System every 71 years, will be at its most visible for earthlings in the Northern Hemisphere in April. If conditions are good, you may get a naked-eye glimpse of it as it passes through the constellation Aries, though its brightness has proven... unpredictable.

Alternatively, see the Virtual Telescope Project’s livestream from earlier this month where Dr Gianluca Masi shared views of the comet and its “mind-blowing tail” from the observatory’s three telescopes.

Friday 5 April

💥 Throwback, 2019: Hayabusa2 fires an impactor at the asteroid Ryugu, creating a crater from which it could collect samples that were eventually delivered to Earth.

Saturday 6 April

🌙 Throwback, 647 BCE: Greek lyric poet Archilochus writes of a solar eclipse: “There is nothing beyond hope, nothing that can be sworn impossible, nothing wonderful, since Zeus, father of the Olympians, made night from mid-day, hiding the light of the shining Sun, and sore fear came upon men.”

Sunday 7 April

📞 Ethical matters: How did we talk our way out of the stone age?, hybrid event held by Conway Hall, 15.00, £6 to £9: Steven Mithen considers the latest discoveries in archaeology, linguistics, psychology and genetics to reconstruct how language evolved, also explaining how it transformed the nature of thought and culture.

🛰️ Throwback, 2001: Mars Odyssey launches, setting out on a mission to map Mars’ surface… and it’s still orbiting the red planet more than 22 years later. Just last year scientists shifted the orbiter’s position to look across the surface, rather than down, to get this view of the Martian atmosphere with its water ice clouds and dust.

We need answers

Last week I asked:

The answer is… Irn Bru. Ammonium ferric citrate, an acidity regulator, is a compound that contains iron. So the gloriously orange Caledonian nectar can be (playfully) said to be made from girders.

Until next week…

Every year, at around the same time, what begins a journey from the south to the north of the UK at an average speed of 1.9 miles per hour?

Answer comes next week. See you then! x