Thumb-thing to think about!
QUESTION What percentage of adults suck their thumbs? Is there a scientific term for this?
A 2017 survey of 1,451 men and women aged 18 and above found that 12 per cent suck a thumb or finger for comfort. similar surveys suggest one in ten adults suck their thumbs, mostly in private, with two-thirds of them women.
Famous celebrities who have been snapped sucking their thumbs include rihanna, susan Boyle, Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Winehouse.
Thumb-sucking behaviour is based in primate biology, but it doesn’t have a specific scientific name.
Its persistence is partly due to the fact that sucking is the first reflex we learn. A survival instinct developed in the womb, it becomes the sucking reflex responsible for breastfeeding.
This behaviour can persist when some children discover it is a way to attract parental attention. Past this stage it becomes habit-forming.
Prolonged thumb- sucking is not recommended by dentists. It may cause teeth to become improperly aligned (malocclusion) or push them outward. This usually corrects itself when the child stops thumb-sucking.
The longer thumb-sucking continues, the more likely that orthodontic treatment will be needed.
Ian Parsons, Welwyn Garden City, Herts.
QUESTION What is the hottest temperature that has been created artificially on Earth?
AnALysIs in 2010 from the relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator at the u.s. Department of energy’s Brookhaven national Laboratory, established that collisions of gold ions travelling at nearly the speed of light have created matter with a temperature of four trillion ( 4,000,000,000,000) degrees Celsius — 250,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun.
In August 2012, scientists at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva claimed
Thumb sucker: Amy Winehouse they had achieved temperatures in the order of 5.5 trillion degrees Celsius by smashing together lead ions at close to the speed of light. However, this result has been contested.
The experiments aimed to recreate matter at the extreme temperatures and densities following the Big Bang — the event that created the universe.
The super-hot substance formed is known as a quark-gluon plasma, a liquidlike state where conditions are too hot to form atoms. It’s made up of quarks and gluons, elementary particles that combine to make up protons and neutrons.
scientists measured the temperature of this hot matter by looking at the colour, or energy distribution, of light emitted from it — similar to the way you can tell an iron rod is hot by looking at its glow.
The incredible temperatures have not caused a meltdown in labs that created them because the quark-gluon plasma state lasts shorter than the time it takes light to travel across a single proton.
Dr Ken Bristow, Glasgow.
QUESTION Is it true that most British railway lines and franchises are owned by foreign governments?
LInes, routes and stations are managed by network rail on behalf of the uK government that owns them.
none of the franchises are owned in the strict sense of the word — they are in effect leased out by the government via a complex bidding arrangement with a variety of different lease periods.
To a strict criteria laid down by the government, a franchise holder operates the trains (but not the signalling) to a timetable agreed by the government that regulates the size of the trains and the rolling stock used. The franchise holder manages small to medium-sized stations on a day-to-day basis; mainline stations are managed by network rail.
The franchise holder does not own the trains they operate — overseen by the government, they have to be leased from a rolling stock leasing company. nevertheless, the leased vehicles carry the franchise holder’s corporate livery.
This is a pseudo privatisation process because there is now more government control exercised through the civil service via the Department for Transport and the Office of rail and road than there ever was for British rail.
The government seems obsessed with trying to drive costs out of the industry and ensure maximum utilisation of the national train fleet.
Any shortage of capacity or seats is more the government’s doing than the train operating company. But companies don’t complain for fear of being excluded from franchise bidding. C. E. Sayers-Leavy, retired senior rail industry engineer, Broadstairs, Kent. The national network is state-owned. When Jeremy Corbyn’s train from the party conference in september was delayed by signalling faults, he was being disingenuous when he tweeted: ‘Couldn’t make this up. We need public ownership of our railways.’
Train operators are commercial franchises mostly run by state- owned european railway companies. Govia runs Thameslink, southern, Great northern and Gatwick express. The firm is a joint venture between the Uk’s Go-Ahead group and the French company Keolis, which is 70 per cent owned by the French national railways Corporation.
Arriva Uk Trains runs Chiltern, CrossCountry, London Overground, Grand Central and northern — a quarter of all British train operating companies. It’s part of Deutsche Bahn, in which the German state is biggest shareholder.
Abellio is wholly owned by the Dutch national railways company and runs four franchises: Merseyrail, Greater Anglia, scotrail and West Midlands Trains.
Trenitalia, the primary train operator in Italy, runs c2c in essex and next month will take over the West Coast Mainline from virgin in conjunction with the uK’s FirstGroup.
Tfl rail is run by Hong Kong’s MTr, a public company. It also runs south Western railway with FirstGroup, which has the remaining franchises — GWr, Heathrow express, Hull Trains and TransPennine express.
Henry Taylor, Swindon, Wilts.
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