On The Radar

The pick of the science news

The pick of the science news

Hubble toil and Hubble trouble

It was another big week in space. China celebrated its first spacewalk, while on Mars the Phoenix lander confirmed that snow falls on the surface of the planet. The progress of cheap spaceflights got a boost on Sunday when Falcon 1, built by SpaceX, became the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to go into orbit. It succeeded on its fourth attempted launch from an island 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii.

However, there was bad news for the Hubble space telescope which is currently unable to format or store data, or transmit it to Earth. Although a repair team will not now be dispatched until next year, a back-up unit will act as a stop-gap solution and could see the 18-year-old Hubble up and running again within days.

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Hot spot: The Hubble Space Telescope view of the NCG 3077 galaxy. Photograph: AP Photo/Nasa-ESA

Smell the colours

New research has suggested that we all have the ability to taste music, see smells and associate numbers with particular colours.

Previously, it was assumed that synaesthesia, a curious mix-up of the senses, was a rare condition, but separate studies in Hamilton, Canada and Texas have suggested that many people may experience mild versions.

The Canadian study showed that people associate certain odours with particular colours and textures. Alongside the most obvious ones, such as associating "lemon" with "yellow", oddities included how many people linked the smell of mushrooms to the colours blue or yellow.

By numbers

12,978,189

The number of digits in the largest prime number yet discovered. Credit goes to the computer of Edson Smith, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles

4.28

The age in billions of years of "world's oldest rocks" found in Hudson Bay, Canada. They beat the previous record, also in Canada, by approximately 250 million years.