Premiered 22 January 2021
An unknown virus, misinformation and uncertainty about the future. No, we’re not talking about coronavirus for once.
It’s a Sin, a new five-part miniseries on Channel 4, delicately tackles the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, with the backdrop of queer London.
Created by Russell T Davies, who was also behind the 1999 series
Queer as Folk, the show chronicles the lives of three gay men who set off from their hometowns to begin new lives at university. A seemingly light set-up, the story takes a turn for the worse as a deadly new virus is on the rise.
Eduardo E. Zattara
The number of bee species recorded worldwide has been sharply decreasing since the 1990s.
Eduardo Zattara and Marcelo Aizen at the National University of Comahue in Argentina analysed how many wild bee species are observed each year as recorded in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility – a publicly available platform where researchers and citizens can record sightings of bee species.
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They found that there were a quarter fewer species reported between 2006 and 2015, as compared with the records we have from before 1990.
The decline is especially alarming considering the number of bee records in this database has increased by around 55 per cent since 2000, so it isn’t down to a lack of observations.
Female praying mantises often attack their mates during a sexual encounter, but some males attack too - and if they fail to win the fight they end up as lunch
Jin Yang
Solar cells treated with capsaicin – the compound that makes chilli peppers hot – have been found to be more efficient at converting solar energy.
Ultra-thin solar cells made with lead-based materials can absorb light more efficiently than silicon-based solar cells, but they often can’t convert energy as efficiently because they lose some of it to heat. It turns out the solution is to add a bit of heat.
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Qinye Bao at East China Normal University in Shanghai and his colleagues added capsaicin to these ultra-thin perovskite solar cells during the manufacturing process. Bao and his team suspected that capsaicin might have an energy-boosting effect because it can free up electrons that can go on to carry charge.