This month How It Works is packed with great articles, here are a few of our favourites:

Space planes – Discover the next-gen space vehicles set to take paying passengers into space.

Deadliest animals – Some use brute strength, others a lethal cocktail of venom and others still deploy clever traps. But which are the deadliest?

Diamond Synchrotron – We visit the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire to find out what goes on behind the scenes at the UK’s largest particle accelerator.

Neutrinos – These tiny subatomic particles can pass straight through the Earth with hitting a single other atom, so how can scientists detect neutrinos?

Monster trucks – What unique engineering makes these vehicles able to perform stunts and crush anything foolish enough to get in their way?

Brachiosaurus – Follow in the massive footsteps of this giant dinosaur that roamed the landscape during the Late Jurassic.

How It Works issue 48 is on sale from 20 June 2013 and is available from WHSmiths, Barnes & Noble, supermarkets and all good newsagents.

While wormholes are theoretically feasible according to the laws of physics, there’s no evidence that they exist. Tubes that provide shortcuts between different parts of the universe are a nice idea, but the concept presents a number of problems in practice. Even if they did exist they’d probably be very tiny, threadlike connections so in order to pass through you’d find yourself stretched out, or ‘spaghettified’, into a narrow stream of atoms. Keeping a wormhole open for practical travel would need some kind of antigravity force – and while that’s also a theoretical possibility, it might be easier to find another form of high-speed travel, or indeed just to take the scenic route.

Answered by Giles Sparrow

When fat is metabolised to release energy, the carbon and hydrogen atoms combine with oxygen to form CO2 and water. Fat is a mixture of hydrocarbons. Each gram of fat broken down in this way releases just over a gram of water. Surprisingly though, camels can’t make use of this H2O. The oxygen needed to break down the fat means they need to breathe more and overall they actually lose water via their lungs. A camel’s hump enables it to store food, but water is located in all the body’s tissues. Camels can withstand incredibly high levels of dehydration; they can lose 25 per cent of their body weight via sweating – half of that would be enough to cause heart failure in most animals.

Answered by Luis Villazon.

An epidural (meaning ‘above the dura’) is a form of local anaesthetic used to completely block pain while a patient remains conscious. It involves the careful insertion of a fine, long needle deep into an area of the spine between two vertebrae of the lower back.

This cavity is called the epidural space. Anaesthetic medication is injected into this cavity to relieve pain or numb an area of the body by reducing sensation and blocking the nerve roots that transmit signals to the brain.

The resulting anaesthetic medication causes a warm feeling and numbness leading to the area being fully anaesthetised after about 20 minutes. Depending on the length of the procedure, a top-up may be required.

This form of pain relief has been used widely for many years, particularly post- surgery and during childbirth.