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Each month BBC Focus magazine brings you a selection of the features to whet your taste buds for what you can expect from our current issue.
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 iDol
Forget talent shows like The X-Factor and Pop Idol. They’re being drowned out by the chorus of wannabes now going in search of stardom online. Bill Thompson charts the continuing rise of the technology that’s made it all possible...
Thanks to the internet, it’s never been easier to get famous without the backing of a large company promoting you. All you need to reach a phenomenally large audience is access and a degree of technical skill. When the web first started in the early 1990’s, it was mainly text-based and the network was too slow to cope with pictures. In less than 15 years, it’s become cheap and easy to provide audio, images and even video to the internet’s billion users. You can give your stuff away for free to generate interest, try to sell it on the web or in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, or pitch your videos and photos to news agencies and big players like the BBC. If it all gets too hectic, you can blog about the pressures and turn the result into a self-published ‘blook’.
Read more in issue 173 of Focus magazine...
 GETTING A GRIP ON CONSERVATION
Two scientists in Berlin have an unusual job on their hands. But it could save some of the world’s largest animals from extinction. Sally Palmer reports
Thomas Hildebrant is talking about elephant ejaculation. “Over three days, a breeding bull can produce up to a bucketful,” he says. “But elephants mate up to five times a day over three days, and he produces only 200-300ml per ejaculation.” Only? That’s still almost enough to fill a Coke can each time.
Hildebrandt and his colleague Robert Hermes are experts in animal reproduction management at Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. They are part of a small band of scientists across the world who are using the latest artificial insemination (AI) techniques to stave off the extinction of species driven to the brink by habitat encroachment and destruction, hunting and poaching.
Read more in issue 173 of Focus magazine...
 DEAD TO THE WORLD
New techniques are providing insights into the minds of coma patients. And it’s not all bad news, as Susan Aldridge reports
The stuff of horror movies, comas conjure up terrifying images of lifeless patients lying on hospital beds for months on end, unaware and as good as dead. But this stereotype is a long way from the understanding that researchers now have about comas, thanks to modern brain scanning techniques. In one recent highpro file case, a UK/Belgium team of researchers revealed a degree of awareness in a 23-year-old woman diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) following a brain injury sustained in a car crash. Although the team cautioned that this was a one-off case and that general conclusions about coma patients should not be drawn from it, the results were described as “startling”.
Read more in issue 173 of Focus magazine...
 HOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE
What if we could make a universe in the lab or create one using a computer? Robert Matthews investigates...
Last month, John Nelson witnessed the birth pangs of the Universe. No, he isn’t a hippy on some drug-induced trip; he is a professor of physics at Birmingham University. But he does spend his time doing something pretty out of this world: studying laboratory recreations of the early Universe. Prof Nelson is part of an elite group of scientists who have found ways of bringing the cosmos down to Earth. Some are doing it using super-powerful computers. Others, like Nelson, have turned to gigantic machines capable of recreating the extreme conditions that existed moments after the Big Bang. And some are even drawing up plans to create a baby universe in the lab.
Read more in issue 173 of Focus magazine...
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