New Scientist Magazine - 3 April 2010

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CONTENTS

Volume 205 No 2754

NE WS 3 4

COVER STORY

EDITORIAL Geoengineering must win our trust

Frontiers of the mind

UPFRONT Sustainable fish farming, Nan osate llite clears space junk

6

THIS WEEK Who decides when to hack the planet? Runaway

The mysteries

star sowed seeds of solar system, Co unting

of your brain are

swine flu's dead, Genetic mask could treat

being unravelled

wasting muscle, Howthe brain constructs moral ity, Asian pollution goes global 9

IN SIGHT Wh ere wil l US nuclear waste go now that the Yucca mountain plan is scrapped?

12 IN BRIEF Archoeopteryxeyes preferred dark skies, J unk food "addicts" are exactly that.

Cover image Bryan Christie

T rex had family down under 15 TECHNOLOGY Bionic control for paralysed l i m bs, Pointillistic computer graphics, Google undermines the great fi rewa ll's foundations

OPINION 20 All at sea? Exploiting Scotland's tides

38

Moon rivers Well, not quite, but it's a lot wetter

is not worth the energy, says Hans van Haren

than we thought

20 Searching secrets Even simple web queries cost the Earth, warns James Clarage 21 One minute with ... Francisco Ayala, geneticist and winner of the El million Templeton prize 22 LETTERS Accidental origins, Mi crobes are us 24 Novelist Ian McEwen Why climate change is at the heart of his new book Solar, and why men shouldn't pee at -40·C

FEATURES 26 Frontiers of the mind (see right) 34 Really smart cars Vehicles that drive themselves are safer, cleaner and make better use of precious road space - so where are they? 3B Damp side of the moon (see right)

Coming n ext week

REGULARS

Everything, explained

22 ENIGMA

O ne si mple i dea at the

42 BOOKS &ARTS Gallery exclusive Stephen Hawking, sketched

root of rea lity

by a robot artist for New Scientist 43 Reviews Tales of our relationship with insects, Approach happi n ess indirectly, Facts and frauds

Warmi ng, not melti ng

4B FEEDBACK It's all gravy

"Glacial plumbing" may be protecting

49 THE LAST WORD Moody booze

Greenland's ice against the onslaught

44 JOBS & CAREERS

of global warming

PLUS Trave l desti natio ns with a scie ntific twist

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3 Apri lZD10 I NewScientist 1 1

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EDITORIAL

To hack the planet, first win trust We u rg entl y n eed ro b ust pu blic d e bates on geoe n g i n eeri n g developing the technology. That would be SCIENCE sometimes produces world­ a mistake. If experiments begin without threatening technologies. Thirty-five years ago, genetic engineering was in its infancy, but consultation and debate, protesters will argue that the technology is being foisted upon us. dangers such as the creation of new viruses To be a workable plan B, geoengineering will were clearly visible. So the field's top scientists first have to gain public acceptance. That will headed to Asilomar in California to discuss be a tough sell. Faced with new technologies, how to regulate their work. They recognised people invariably ask: is it safe? Who will the need to pause and think before plunging govern it? Who will benefit? With a technology into action. The meeting has gone down in powerful enough to alter the climate, those history as setting the stage for a golden era questions are likely to be asked more loudly of biological research. Last week, Asilomar hosted another than ever. It is easy to envisage debates about the necessity of such a scheme, meeting with epoch-marking potential. worries about its consequences or rumours Leading researchers in geoengineering that it is a front for scientists or businesses gathered to debate how best to organise a mission to save the planet from dangerous "Faced with new technolog ies, the cl imate change (see page 6). The notion that we should fight global pub l ic invariably asks: is it safe? warming by firing particles into the Who will govern it? Who benefits?" stratosphere or placing mirrors in orbit was to cash in on the global warming "hoax". once seen as a distraction from the need to These possibilities must be taken seriously. reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the As the resistance to genetically modified pace of political action has been so slow, crops in Europe has shown, public objections and the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so relentless, that many scientists have the power to halt a technology in its tracks, however irrational those concerns and environmentalists now concede it makes may appear. Ifthat were to happen with sense to at least begin planning for a world geoengineering, our escape route would geoengineering project. turn into a roadblock. That, however, is a daunting task. How can the public be wooed? Consultation Geoengineering is by definition a global project and one that will affect every one is obviously part of the answer. If people feel they have had their say and have been listened of us. It is also a huge gamble, with the "law to, they are more likely to accept and trust of unintended consequences" looming large. geoengineering. There are signs that scientific Scientists' instincts will be to plunge into

organisations are aware ofthis. The U K's Royal Society is developing a set of guidelines for research into " solar radiation management" the suite of technologies that can be used to reflect sunlight back into space. The society has broadened the reach ofthe exercise by partnering with the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, based in Trieste, Italy. It is also asking all interested parties to attend a meeting this year. It's a good start, but a much broader process of consultation will be needed if people worldwide, particularly environmental groups and those representing citizens in the developing world, are to have their say. This consultation needs to be high-profile so that geoengineering, a concept that few people have currently heard of, becomes part of mainstream debate. And it must start soon. Some environmental groups are already on board. When geoengineering began to attract attention, environmentalists hated the idea. But most of the green groups at Asilomar were not there to protest, but to participate. That is a positive development. Legitimacy is also an issue. Geoengineering needs to be regulated by a global body with the United Nations behind it - something like the World Health Organization or, recent troubles notwithstanding, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Asilomar 1975 was important. Asilomar 2010was even more so. Geoengineering could help us dodge catastrophe, yet must only be implemented by democratic, global consent. That's why a long period of consultation is required. If citizens don't have their say, they may turn against a technology that could otherwise prove to be our saviour. •

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UPFRONT

Farming fish sustainably GREEN farmed fish may soon be on the

farms manage their feed supplies

ranks the sustainabi lity of fisheries

and so qualify for schemes which

by where the food for fish farms is

certify to consumers that their

sourced will help consumers assess

produce is sustainable. Several such

the environmental impact of seafood.

schemes are in the works, and the

Farmed fish are fed oils and meal

first could launch as early as 2012.

made from other fish, includ i ng

University of British Columbia

has led to declines in wild populations,

Fisheries Centre in Vancouver,

and growing criticism of salmon and

Canada, says that the partnership's

shrimp farms over the impact their

work, though commendable, does

Now the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, a non-profit group based in San Francisco, has published a

experiences as researchers, the team estimates that about one-sixth ofthe actual research was missing, leading to an overestimate of treatment efficacy of about 4 1 NewScientist 1 3 April 2010

not getto the heart ofthe issue. "It takes around 6 tonnes of wild fish to reduce to 1 tonne of fishmeal, and then anything from 1.5 to 3 tonnes

sustainabi lity league table for the

of meal to produce 1 tonne of farmed

22 fish stocks most harvested for

salmon:' she says. "Producing

fish oil and fishmeal. lt estimates that

fishmeal and fish oil for fish farming

67 per cent of the global catch of such fish is from sustainable sources.

is in itself a waste of tasty fish that

30 per cent (PLoS Biology, DOl : Space eye fuzzy 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000344). The solution, says Macleod, is EVEN negative findings tell a OUR best eye on alien worlds has for all animal trials to be registered developed a blind spot. NASA's story - but when experimental planet-hunting telescope Kepler drugs are tested in animals, at their start, so any " missing" has developed a fault that means studies can be chased up. Such a negative results are far less likely it sees the equivalent of static in registration system has operated to be reported than positive ones. some parts of its view. for human trials since 2007. This makes drugs appear more Kepler launched in 2009 to effective than they really are. As a Leading medical journals forced hunt for planets orbiting other result, expensive clinical trials can the issue in 2004 by refusing to publish results from unregistered stars. A host of giant planets on sometimes go ahead when they tight orbits has already been trials. "All the data should be are unlikely to succeed, diverting published on animal research too," found, but the telescope's main resources from better options, says Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief aim is to find Earth-sized planets says Malcolm Macleod of the orbiting their stars at distances of the BM!, which helped pioneer University of Edinburgh, UK. When Macleod's team analysed the registration process for that can support the presence of liquid water and potentially life. 16 reviews covering 525 published human trials. papers on animal tests of potential stroke treatments, they found that only 10 papers, or 2 per cent, reported that a treatment failed. Combining this with their own

"All animals tria ls should be registered before they start, so any 'missing' studies can be chased up"

But Jennifer Jacquet of the

anchovy, herring and sardines. This

use of feed has on marine ecosystems.

Bias in animal trials

The league table could help fish

supermarket slab. A league table that

could be eaten d i rectly."

A total of 42 light -detecting chips called CCDs are used to look for periodic dips in starlight when planets pass in front oftheir host stars. But one ofthe 21 modules­ containing two CCDs - is now malfunctioning, rendering the stars in its view invisible. Since the craft rotates its field of view by 90 degrees every three months, the fault means that four regions of the sky are only observable 75 per cent of the time. The good news is that the problem is not expected to spread, and it might be possible to repair it.

Green angels WHICH US city is the greenest of all, in terms of numbers of energy-efficient commercial buildings? The surprsing answer is Los Angeles, with 293, well ahead of Washington DC with 203 and San Francisco with 173, reports the US Environmental Protection Agency this week. The rankings are part of the agency's annual list ofthe top 25 US cities earning "energy star" ratings for their commercial

For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news

60 SECONDS

and municipal buildings. At 7 million square metres, LA also had the greatest amount of floor space in energy-starred buildings and the highest energy cost savings, at $94 million. Houston, which came sixth in the list, would be first based on total energy savings, with reductions in consumption equivalent to 53,400 homes. Overall, 3900 US buildings last year earned an EPA energy star, saving4.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Stars are awarded to nominees that are among the 25 per cent using energy most efficiently.

Achieving collisions at 7 TeV is a milestone, and marks the IMAGINE firing needles across the official start of the LHC physics Atlantic and getting them to collide programme. Experiments around halfway. That was the technical the machine will probe tens of challenge facing engineers at the trillions of high-energy collisions Large Hadron Collider this week as over the next 18 to 24 months. they prepared to smash together proton beams at the highest-ever "If successful, the Large recorded energies. Hadron Collider will have The first attem pt to achieve busted its own world collisions at 7 teraelectronvolts record for col l ision energy" 3.5 TeV in each beam - was scheduled for 30 March. If Yet CERN director general Rolf successful, the machine will have Heuer points out that just lining up the beams to smash together busted its own world record for collision energy, which was set is no mean feat. "The LHC is not at 2.36 TeV last December. a turnkey machine," he says.

Biggest smash ever

Violence stunts growth Children born in Iraq's mostviolent areas are on average 0.8 centimetres shorter than their peers born in more peaceful areas. A team led by Gabriela Guerrero-Serdan from Royal Holloway, University of London, say this indicates poor nutrition early on in l ife or before birth. This can lead to health problems and learning d ifficulties later.

Truffle trove Just unearthed are the genetic secrets of one of the world's most gastronomically prized foods, the Perigord black truffle. Amongthe truffle's 7500 genes are ones that make pheromonesattracting

Suicide satellites COULD defunct satellites and spacecraft do away with themselves once their life is spent? This is precisely the idea that a new craft called CubeSail will try out to stop space getting clogged up with junk. S pace debris in low Earth orbit has grown by 40 per cent in four years, and as the chunks strike each other, they fragment further- presenting a collision threat to working spacecraft. Little CubeSail, 30 by 10 by 10 centimetres and weighing just 3 kilograms, was unveiled this week at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. It has a solar sail that can harness the pressure of sunlight for propulsion but which can also act as an "orbital brake" to help it fall to a fiery death in the atmosphere. CubeSail will launch late next year. At an altitude of 700 kilometres, it will unfurl its 5-bY-5-metre sail, initially to test propulsion. But then the sail will turn away from the sun to become a brake. Even at this altitude there are rarefied molecules of the Earth's atmosphere, and their drag eventually slows satellites enough to bring them down. Instead of taking decades to de-orbit, the sail could help the craft do so in around two years.

Forget the ethics, it's great drama GREGORY HOUSE would never let a

informed consent came up, the

little thing like medical ethics stand in the way of curing a patient. But

show's doctors failed the ethics test. Patient confidentiality and the

animals such as boars and squirrels. They eat the fungus and spread spores in their faeces (Nature, 001: 10.1038/nature08867).

Shuttle lingers

how bad are the bioethical lapses and

use of experimental procedures also

unprofessional behaviour on medical

drew Czarny's attention. Sex raised

dramas such as House M.D. and Greys Anatomy? Matthew Czarny, a medical student and bioethics researcher atJohns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, decided to find out. He watched a total of 46 episodes from the two series and tal l ied up bioethical and professional breaches, as well as examples of good practice. The most common ethical issue, particularly in House, was obtaining proper consent from patients or giving them enough information to agree to a treatment. Half of the time

the biggest professional issues,

The final flight of the space shuttle will probably be postponed until

particularly on House, which

January 2011. So says a report by

included 5B instances of sexual

NASA's Office ofthe Inspector

misconduct between doctors or

General, the agency's watchdog.

nurses and 27 between these

NASA should make sure funding will

professionals and their patients

be available, says the report.

Uournal of Medical Ethics, 001: 10.1136/jme.2009.033621). Czarny now wants to explore how medical dramas affect how we perceive and behave towards doctors. "From my experience in the hospital, people will ask about things that they've seen on TV, anything that applies to their condition," he says.

Expensive eggs Women at us universities are routinely offered more fortheir eggs than the $10,000 limit suggested by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. One­ quarter of 300 advertisements in college newspapers offered more, according to Aaron Levine of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Exact sums depended on their university's academic rating.

Hyenas' ha ha The spotted hyena's signature giggle is more than a simple taunt. The pitch of the giggle reveals a hyena's age, while the frequency of notes can encode information about the giggler's social dominance (BMe

Ecology, in press). The researchers think this allows hyenas to establish feeding rights.

3 April 2010 I NewScientist 1 5

THIS WEEK

Hacking the planet: who decides? And if we're even th i n k i n g a bout a rtificia l l y coo l i n g Ea rth, sci ence n eeds to test th e pro posa ls pronto

50 years. This shift strengthens summit in Copenhagen, the ocean currents that bring Denmark, and the relentless warm, salty water to the surface, PLANS are taking shape for the rise in global CO2 emissions have persuaded many to reluctantly day when a global coalition may where it accelerates the melting of Antarctic ice. have to "hack the planet" in a consider geoengineering bid to reverse the ravages of Wingenter proposes seeding solutions (see diagram, far right). global warming. the Southern Ocean with particles Few argue against "artificial Proposals to cool the Earth by trees" that could suck CO2 directly of iron to boost phytoplankton deploying sunshades or sucking growth. Plankton release a from the atmosphere (see carbon dioxide from the "Artificial trees on the way", chemical called dimethyl sulphide into the atmosphere which helps atmosphere were considered right). But more controversial proposals - to bounce solar fanciful just a few years ago, but energy back out into space, for are now being considered by "The fa i lu re of c limate instance - split the conference, talks has persuaded many politicians in the US and UK. At to reluctantly consider a gathering of key scientists and with policy experts warning climate scientists that there policy experts held in Asilomar, g eoengineering solutions" California, last week, detailed would be a public backlash. Oliver Wingenter at the New cloud droplets form. More droplets debates began over who should Mexico Institute of Mining and mean whiter clouds that bounce control the development of a Technology in Socorro presented more solar energy away from planetary rescue plan. details of an ambitious plan to Earth. Wingenter calculates that it The sense at the meetingwas that drastic emissions cuts are the shift westerly winds. Temperature would be possible to cool regional temperatures by 0.5 ·C, which best way to limit the catastrophic and pressure changes over the droughts and sea-level rises that could push the westerlies back Southern Ocean are thought to global warming is expected to towards their original position. have pushed these westerlies Little is known about the side cause. But the failure of December's 3 to 4 degrees south over the last

Jim Giles, Asilomar, California

6 1 NewScientist 1 3 April Z010

effects, however. Cooling a small region by 0.5·C could dramatically change rain patterns. The impact of plankton blooms on ocean life is also poorly understood. Computer models can go some way to filling in these blanks, and Wingenter foresees at least 10 years of com puter studies before field tests could kick off. Other solutions could be field-tested sooner, raising the delicate question of whether such experiments should be allowed in the first place, and what forms they could take. Modelling has already shown that stratospheric clouds of sulphate particles could rapidly cool the planet. David Keith of the University of Calgary, Canada, has submitted a paper to Nature in which he outlines a proposal to release about a tonne of sui phate particles from a NASA plane at an altitude of 20 kilometres. The results would help researchers

In this section

• Why Greenland is warm i ng, not melting, page 8 • Brain damage skews our moral compass, page 10 • Counting swine flu's dead, page 11

refine their models, and the number of particles released would be far short of the number required to produce a significant cooling effect. Silver Lining, a non-profit organisation founded by Kelly Wanser, an entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California, has a team of 35 scientists working on a cooling process in which a flotilla

of boats fire particles of sea-salt into the atmosphere, where they would whiten clouds. The group is seeking funds for pilot research involving 10 ships and 10,000 square kilometres of ocean. Kelly Wanser says it could take place in three to four years. This study would not use enough particles to create a noticeable cooling effect. Many climate scientists in Asilomar thought regulations that govern other oceanographic experiments would probably provide sufficient oversight of this project. Wanser also argued extra regulation would create potentially dangerous delays, as governments might later be forced to deploy a technology that had not been properly tested. That view split delegates at Asilomar. Social scientists and policy experts took issue with the view that trials did not need further oversight. They warned of a popular backlash unless would-be geoengineers consult with the public before running such studies. Just running tests sends a signal that scientists are interested in a future for geoengineering, says Shobita Parthasarathy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "The intention is to expand the process. The path will have been set." If experiments progress to a larger scale, a second problem arises: which nations should decide whether a proposal has proved safe enough to implement? Most agreed that as some solutions

Options for cooling the planet There is a huge range of geoengineering proposals on the table. each with its own risks. costs and potential effectiveness

HIGH EFFECTIVENESS LOW COST

••

Space-based

refiectors

CO2 capture from air

Land-based

reflectors (desert)

It might, however, turn out to be

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•

6 �

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HIGH COST

L-______ HIGH ------->. LOW COST

could have a global impact, they could only be deployed after global talks,led by the United Nations, for instance. Talks would have to include plans to compensate people whose livelihoods could be damaged by side effects. Others argued that global negotiations could become im possible to manage, and cited UN-led climate talks as an example ofhow a1l­ inclusive efforts can fail to solve problems requiring decisive action. Richard Benedick, president of the US National Council for Science and the Environment and a former US government negotiator, circulated a document in which he argued that the princi pies

but said that it involves scaling up existing processes for capturing CO2,

2 009, David Keith, a climate and

which involve passing the gas over a

removed from the air and stored

energy researcher, founded Carbon

substance such as sodi um hydroxide.

safely underground, we might be

Engineering in Calgary, Alberta,

The gas combi nes with the chemical

ab Ie to stave off the worse effects

Canada. The firm aims to build a device

of climate change. The big problem

to capture CO2 at economically viable

and can then be removed and stored underground. Keith says Bill Gates

is that sucki ng CO2 out of the

prices. He claims his device will draw

has i nvested in Carbon Engineering,

atmosphere is expensive: many

down a tonne for US$100 to $250.

which plans to spend $3 million

He did not release detai ls of the

Forestation

•

see work. If carbon d i oxide can be

device at the Asilomar conference,

• •

Land-based

a lot cheaper than that. In October

estimates put the cost at close to

Cloud se e ding

reflectors (urban)

that almost everyone would like to

$1000 for each tonne captured.

sunshade

Ocean fertilisation

ARTIFICIAL TREES ON THE WAY There is one geoengineering solution

Stratospheric

( art ific i al trees)

•

lf1 lf1 W Z w > >= u w u.. u.. w

•

overthe nextfive years building a prototype device.

governing geoengineering research should be developed by a group of!4 nations, including the US, several European nations, India and China. His proposal garnered some interest, but at least one person New Scientist spoke to was disapproving. "I cannot imagine a few countries making a decision for everybody," says Pablo Suarez, who studies climate and humanitarian disasters at Boston University. "Participation is difficult, but that is not an excuse for not doing it." A lack of consultation could fuel campaigns against geoengineering similar to those that have derailed the use ofgenetically modified crops in Europe, Parthasarathy warns. Such protests seem to be taking off already. While delegates were talking in Asilomar, a body of over 70 environmental, health and social groups published an open letter attacking the meeting. "Such a discussion cannot happen without the participation ofthe full membership of the United Nations," it reads. "Determining guidelines for geoengineering research and testing in the absence of that debate is premature and irresponsible." • 3 April 2010 1 NewScientist 1 7

�

��

THIS WEEK

Is solar system the child of a runaway star? OUR solar system may have been born from the remains of a single star that ran away from its family, rather than from a tight-knit clan of stars. If so, similar systems may be a rarity. Clues to the solar system's origin lie in meteorites that contain bits of rock cal led calcium-alumi nium-rich i ncl usions. These inclusions contain the products of the decay of the isotope aluminium-26, which has a half-life of only 720,000 years. As most of the AI-26 was probably forged inside stars tens of times as massive as the sun, this shows Greenland's plumbing drains the water

then pours down the glacier s "plumbing" - its crevasses and moulins -to the ice sheet's base, where it flows out to sea. Had the meltwater pooled on an ice shelf, the water flowing into the cracks would have split the floating ice. The models suggest that apart in a whole lot oflittle slivers, says Richard Alley, a something similar could happen glaciologist at Pennsylvania State in Antarctica as it warms. Over time, as "plumbed" ice forms on University in University Park. In contrast, while Greenland land and flows down to the sea, the ice shelf could regrow. The has experienced summer plumbing would channel the temperatures of up to 11 °C over the past half century, many of water to the sea without forcing the ice shelves have held firm, apart cracks in the ice. despite some surface melting. However, Alley cautions that "Greenland ice shelves are the regrowth would be tern porary, as witnessed in Greenland, where surviving," says Alley. the ice shelfin front of the Now Alley, along with Byron Jakobshavn glacier finally fell apart Parizek, also of Penn State, and in the mid-lggos, as seawater eroded it from underneath "Warmer tem peratures a l low meltwater to pool on (Journal ofGeophysical Research, the ice sheet, where it can 001: 1O.102g/200gjfo0132 S). flow down the p lumbing" The idea could be put to the test by studying the glaciers colleagues have worked out behind the now-disintegrated Larsen A and B ice shelves. If these how the warmer temperatures themselves could explain why. ice sheets develop plumbing and Mathematical models suggest the push this ice towards the sea, then higher ternperatures in Greenland we may see the ice shelves regrow. cause lakes of meltwater to form "Whether the regrowth could on the ice sheet, rather than on slow down the ice loss, that's a the ice shelf as happens in question we have to go after next," says Alley. • Antarctica. This meltwater

Warm summers save Greenland's ice Anil Ananthaswamy

IF SOME of the spectacular calving of ice shelves in Antarctica is down to global warming, then why do we not see break-ups on the same scale in Greenland, which is much warmer? It turns out that, counter-intuitively, it's because Greenland is warmer. When the ice sheets that blanket Antarctica and Greenland eventually meet the sea, they don't immediately calve off and create icebergs. Instead, they extend out to sea as floating ice shelves while remaining joined to the ice sheets on land. In 2002, a gigantic section of the Larsen B ice shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula suddenly broke off. It had been an unusually warm summer, with temperatures rising to a balmy 4°C. As the ice melted, huge pools of meltwater formed on the surface of the ice, and as this water poured down crevasses it forced apart sections of the shelf. "It fell 81 NewScientist 13 A p ri l 2010

"

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the inclusions must have formed early in the life of the solar system, and relatively quickly (New Scientist, 30 October 2004, p 61). Such massive stars tend to form i n clusters, a n d roi ling winds around them d i sperse material that can cool down and seed planetary systems. But Vincent Tatischeff of the National Centre for Scientific Research i n Orsay, France, a n d h i s team suspect a cluster wou l d have been so hot that mostAI-26 would have decayed before i nclusions could congeal. Instead, they suggest the solar system sprang from a solitary star's ashes, which could have cooled more q u ickly (arxiv.org/abs/1003.3B56). To account for the AI-26 in meteorites, the star wou l d sti ll have had to be massive, meaning it probably formed in a cluster. At some point, it may have been flung out of its birth cluster by gravitational tussles with its siblings or the explosion of a companion. "The scenario may look complicated, but we think it is the most l i kely origin ofthe AI-26 in the solar system," Tatischeff says. He says most of the galaxy's planetary systems may not have formed as q u ickly as ours, si nce many probably arose from clusters. This makes them l i kely to have lower levels of AI-26, and as it generates heat as it decays, cooler ocean worlds rather than Earth-like planets coul d result. Rachel Courtland.

For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news

INSIGHT Let the Earth itself take care of US high-level nuclear waste

shields envisaged for Yucca mountain,

closer to the surface, As a result,

"Any repository will depend on its

water at depth - and any radioactive

geologic barriers to lastthe million

material it could transport - stays at

years that are required for the waste

depth, Samples so far taken from

THERE are times when letting go is

i nto hard, crystall ine basement rock

to d ecay," says Fergus Gi bb of the

basement rock show that water has

the best way to move forward, When

(see map) - meaning most of t h e us

University of Sheffield, UK, "Other

been stagnati ng there for hundreds

the US abandoned plans for a nuclear

and over a third of the U K would be

engineered barriers don't really matter,"

of thousands of years or more,

waste repository at Yucca mountain,

suitable, Canisters of spent fuel

N evada, there was no alternative in

lowered into the borehole would end

advantages over mined repositories

sight. Now, less than two months

up stacked one on top of t h e oth er,

such as Yucca mountain, which would

repositories in the 1970sand 19BOs,

after that decision to walk away from

fi lling the bottom 2 kilometres, This

have been about 300 metres below

deep boreholes were not an option,

a decades-long, multibill ion-dollar

stack would then be sealed i n place

ground, I n addition to the physical

as the dri lling technology was not

boondoggle, a promising solution is

with a cap of cl ay, asphalt and con crete,

barri e r offered by kilometres of rock,

avai lable, Once investment in shallower

The approach relies on the deep rock

deep boreholes ensure that waste is

repositories such as Yucca mountain

coming i nto view,

Deep boreholes offer distinct

When the US and other countries started looki ng i nto nuclear

What is bei ng proposed is not

and geological features to conta in the

unlikely to seep to the surface i n

was under way i ne rtia took hold, as

another Yucca mountain-style set

waste - doing away with the need for

groundwater, Water found below

governments were understandably

of tun nels in an even more remote

the carefully engineered corrosion­

2 kilo metres or so is hig hly sa line,

reluctant to take the financial and

location, but hundreds of boreh oles

resistant canisters and protective

and t herefore far heavier than water

pol itical risks of switching,

that could be spread nationwide,

If the US moves ahead with

wh ere waste would be sealed several

deep boreholes, Yucca mounta i n

kilometres down in i m permeable

may n o t b e t h e only centralised

rock, The approach was discussed

repository to be abandoned, Studies atthe Aspo Hard Rock Laboratory

by the world's lead i n g experts on deep borehole repositories at a

in Sweden suggest that the

brainstorming meeting in Wash i ngton

copper-en capsulated canisters

DC on 15 March, The meeting was

Sweden and Finland plan to use

organised by geochemist Patrick

in their shal low mine repositories

Brady of San dia National Laboratories

will corrode much faster than

and was sponsored by Sandia and t h e

previously expected, "It now seems that all m i n ed

Massachusetts Institute o f Technology, The borehole approach wou l d

repositories with e n g i n eered barriers

adapt technology already used by

will fail and that deep boreholes

the oil a n d gas industry, to drill holes

may be a better a lternative," says

roughly half a metre i n diameter and

Johan Swah n of M K G, a Swedish

5 kil ometres deep, Repositor ies could

NGO charged with reviewing the

be at any location where the bore

cou ntry's plans for storing nuclear

would pen etrate 3 kilometres or more

waste, Phil McKenna.

Gene bandage to rejuvenate wasted muscle AN RNA "bandage"that masks

and die of cardiac or respiratory

corresponding to the D M D mutations.

failure before they reach 30.

If injected, these bandages cause the

last week, Wi lton told the World Congress of Internal Med icine in

mutations, which normally prevent

Melbourne, Australia, that tissue

identified 24 years ago, there were

dystrophin prod uction, to be skipped

biopsies suggest dystrophin is being

very high hopes that gene therapy

over during protein-making,

produced throughout the bodies

would correct the condition," says

In 2003 the approach seemed to work in mice, In 2009, injecting the

the bandage,

"When the dysrrophin gene was

Steve Wilton of the University of

of boys who received high doses of

genetic mutations has prompted boys

Western Australia in Perth. But hopes

snippets into the foot muscle of

with Duchenne muscular dystrophy

fell when the gene's complexity and

seven boys with DMD triggered

will i ncrease the boys' muscle

It is not yet clear if the dystrophin

(DMD) to make a missing, muscle­

size became clear - it is the largest

dystrophin prod uction there. Now

strength, but Wi lton points out it did

strengthening protein throughout

known in humans. "Reintroducing a

the team has injected the snippets

their bodies for the first ti me.

healthy gene was not as simple or

into the blood of 20 boys with DMD.

in animals, The protein resembles the version found in men with the milder

Around 1 in 3500 boys are born

straightforward as anticipated."

with D M D, the result of mutations in

Rather than trying to correct

a gene on the X chromosome for the

the genetic defects, W i lton's team

protei n dystrophin, Boys with DMD

created nucleic acid sni ppets that

tend to need wheelchairs by age 12

bind to sections of messenger RNA

Becker's M D, who l ive into their 60s,

"Reintrod ucing a h ealthy gene was not as simple or strai ghtforward as anticipated"

''This is the most promising therapeutic option for Duchenne's," says David Allen of the University of Sydney, Wendy Zuke rman .

3 Ap ri l 2010 1 NewScientist 1 9

THIS WEEK another by deliberately poisoning their coffee. Participants ranked the moral acceptability of each scenario on a scale Of1 to 7. The volunteers with brain damage gave failed attempts at intentional harm a 5, rating it consisting offour different twice as permissible as the other scenarios ofvarying accept ab iiity. volunteers, who opted for 2.5. In one, for example, someone kills And the impaired group all rated another by mistakenly adding accidental harm to someone as being less morally acceptable poison to their coffee instead of sugar. In another scenario, a than failed attempts at deliberate person tries but fails to kill harm (Neuron, 001: 10.1016/

Brain damage skews our moral compass Andy Coghlan

IS IT more morally acceptable to kill someone accidentally, or intend to kill them but fail? Most people would go for the first option - unless their brains are impaired in regions key to feeling emotion or divining the intentions of others. This discovery is hel ping to unravel how we make moral judgements and has implications for people's fitness to serve as jurors or judges.

"They judged attempted harm, including murder, as permissible as lon g as no actual harm was d one" To probe emotion's role in moral decision-making, Liane Young and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology turned to nine people whose emotional responses were impaired due to damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Young presented these people with 24 moral dilemmas, each

j.neuron.2010.03.003). "They would judge attempted harm, including murder, as permissible as long as no actual harm was done," says Young. Perhaps without intact emotional responses, a failed attempt to kill just doesn't seem upsetting. "Normally, intention always trumps outcome," she adds. But emotion isn't all that's required to make moral judgements. You must also be able to divine the intentions of others. So Young's team temporarily disabled a brain region considered indispensable for this - the right temporoparietal junction - in 20 volunteers using transcranial magnetic stimulation. This time, volunteers rated failed attempts at harming others as 15 per cent more acceptable than when their brains were not undergoing TMS (Proceedings ojthe National Academy ojSciences, 001: 1O.1073/pnas.og14826107). Young concludes that both emotion and recognising intent in others are key to moral judgements. Owen Jones of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, highlights the findings' relevance to the law. "They reveal regions that simply must be intact and functioning for people to make important moral and legal decisions," he says. •

12 kilometres up, above the troposphere where weather systems

rethi n k about the state of the stratosphere. "Received wisdom has

raises key questions. "How much will the transport of pol lution change in

l i ke the monsoon develop. Most

been that gases like sulphur dioxide

the future, as emissions i ncrease

pol lution stays below the boundary

and nitrogen oxides don't make it into

or the monsoon changes?" he says.

between the two. However, by using

the stratosphere," says Peter Bernath

It's unclear whether climate change

satellite instruments to track hydrogen

of the University of York, UK, a

will weaken or i ntensify monsoons.

ASIAN pol lution is a global problem.

cyanide, a minor but telltale ingredient

member of the research team.

Mill ions of tonnes of soot, sulphur

of the pol l ution, Randel and his

"Nitrogen oxides in particular are of

In the lower atmosphere, pollutants l i ke sulphur dioxide "rain

Monsoons send Asian pollution round the world

dioxide and other pol lutants are fast­

colleagues found "pipes" of pol luted

concern," he says, because they can

out" of the air within days. But i n the

tracked into the stratosphere each

air moving through the boundary.

destroy ozone. Sulphur d ioxide can

stratosphere they can stay aloft for

They think that the exceptional

shroud the planet in a cooling haze.

year by the summer monsoon. "The monsoon is one of the most

updraughts of air inside the monsoon's

John Pyle, a specialist on the

years, spread by fast winds known as jets, meaning the threat is global.

powerful atmospheric circulation

giant clouds can bust through and

ozone layer at the University of

The effects may have already been

systems on the planet, and it happens

send pollution deep into the

Cambridge, agrees that the research

unwittingly detected: researchers

to form right over a heavily polluted

stratosphere (Science, 001: 10.11261

region," says William Randel of the

"The monsoon is extremely planet's ozone layer sits, filtering out powerful, and it happens ultraviolet radiation from the sun. to form right over a heavily The findings will trigger a radical polluted region"

US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The stratosphere begins about 10 1 NewScientist 1 3 April 2010

science.llB2274). This is where the

recently noted an increase in sulphate particles in the stratosphere around the globe, which could be li nked to China's rapid ind ustrialisation over the past decade. Fred Pearce .

Fordaily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news

Swine flu no big deal? Look at years of life l ost AS THE dust settles from the swi ne fl u pandemic, the notion that i t was

deaths are not recognised as such. Because better official counts of

no worse than seasonal flu persists.

deaths due to swine flu will not be

But it seems that while the number

avai lable for another two years,

of deaths in the US was comparable to

Simonsen turned to the number of

a bad seasonal flu, swine flu claimed

deaths from "flu·like illness", which is

three times as many years of life

measured in 122 US cities every year

because the victims were so young.

to gauge the severity of the flu

In Paris, France, this week, the

season. She used the relationship

Two views of flu Counting the years of life lost d u e to fl u in 2009 reveal s swine fl u's true i m pact

N U MBER OF US DEATHS FROM FLU (adjusted to 2000 population)

175,000

YEARS OF LIFE LOST DUE TO FLU IN US (adjusted to 2000 population)

3,000,000

1,500,

sao,

1957

1968

Pandemic

2009

1957

Severe seasonal"

1968

2009

Pandemic

Severe seasonal"

(ouncil of Europe held further hearings

between these deaths and all flu

on allegations that health agencies

deaths in previous years to estimate

fl u was 37. So Simonsen also decided

life are lost on average to seasonal flu.

"faked" the pandemic to make money

total US flu-season deaths in 2009.

to calculate years of life lost to swine

Her work appears in PLoS Currents:

on vaccines. Such accusations irk flu

Her figure of 44,100 deaths is slightly less than for pre-2009 flu

flu, a common measure for the impact of disease. She used the ages of people

Influenza (bit.ly/di s6p7). The pandemic is not over yet.

Washington University in Bethesda,

seasons that were caused by the

who died in 2009 and their life

With autumn, swine flu has now

Maryland. "I got angry when I saw

worst non-pandemic virus, which she

expectancy to calculate that the US

returned to the southern hemisphere.

people trying to claim this was

calculates ki lled 47,800 on average.

lost nearly 2 million years of life to the

Simonsen warns that most people

pandemic - more than in the 1968

ki lled in the UK by the 196B pandemic

pandemic (see graph). By contrast, she calculates that 600,000 years of

died in its second wave, and advises vaccination. Debora MacKenzie .

researcher Lone Simonsen of George

ordinary flu," she says, pointing out that official death tolls so far are "only the tip of the iceberg" as many flu

While seasonal flu deaths are in people aged 76 on average, the average age of people killed by swine

New Scientist video the list keeps getting longer

Search from h u n d reds of the most a m a z i n g , m i n d b l ow i n g and coo l est videos. Ta ke your seat and p repa re to be a m azed! So what are you wa iting fo r? Watch exclu sive videos today.

www . N ewSc ient i st.com/video

NewScientist 3 Apri l 2010 I NewScientist 1 11

IN BRIEF

T. rex relatives lived down under A FOSSIL found in Victoria, Australia, is the first piece of evidence showing that Tyrannosa u rus rex s relatives once lived in the southern hemisphere. Tom Rich of Museum Victoria in Melbourne says the fossil, a pubic bone, once belonged to a member of the tyrannosauroid group. Its prominent bulge, the length ofthe bone's shaft and shape of its tubercle - a fan-like protrusion at the end of the bone- is distinctive of the tyrannosauroid lineage (Science, DOl: 10.1126/science.11874s6). "As the fossil record im proves it's becoming more the case that the major dinosaur groups were just about everywhere," says Rich. "It's interesting to find that tyrannosauroids were definitely here in the south," says Adam Yates, a palaeontologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who was not involved in the study. '

With heels like these, we were born to run

the muscles to contract at differenttimes. After thousands of iterations, a fairly lifelike running motion developed. To see how important elastic tendons are to this gait, Sellers then made all tendons in his model 100 times

IN THE Greek myth, the heel was Achilles' fatal flaw, but

stiffer. This more than tripled the legs' energy use

it may prove to be a key asset for fi nding out when our

per metre and nearly halved thei r top speed. He then

ancestors first ran on two feet. A well-developed Achilles

restored normal elasticity to the Achilles tendon only.

tendon, it turns out, is crucial for this d i stinctively human

"Even if the only tendon you have working is the Achilles

mode of locomotion.

tendon, the model is capable of fairly competent

The water's foul but bugs seem to like it

LIFE not only survives but thrives in Australian lakes where conditions may be as harsh as athletes can outrun a horse. Bill Sellers of the University of Tendons do not fossi lise well, but they leave traces those on ancient Mars. Manchester, UK, created a computer model of human hips where they attach to the bone. Sellers says these might be detectable in fossils of early humans, making it and legs, including the tendons and muscles. The "legs" In 2007, Melanie Mormile of Missouri University of Science were made to learn to run using trial and error, allowing possible to discover when we became runners. and Technology in Rolla and colleagues cultured a bacterium from water sampled from one of illusion of smooth movement. The future, predicted by your brain several salty, acidic lakes in For the unpredictable stimulus IT'S like remembering the future. again," says Lars Muckli at the it would appear out of sync. Western Australia. The lakes Our brain generates predictions of University of Glasgow, UK. fMRI scans showed that the may be the closest equivalents He and Arjen Alink at the likely visual inputs so it can focus unpredictable stimulus increased on Earth of the shallow ponds thought to have once dotted Mars. the activity in parts ofthe brain on dealing with the unexpected. Max Planck Institute for Brain A team led by Mormile has now Predictable sights trigger less Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which deal with the earliest stages turned up dozens more species in asked 12 volunteers to focus on a brain activity than unfamiliar of visual processing (Journal of stimuli, bolstering the view that cross on a screen, above and below Neuroscience, vol 30, p 2960). 11 of the lakes. The most acidic The finding supports the lake has a pH like that ofvinegar, the brain is not merely reactive, which bars flashed on and offto but generates predictions based create the illusion of movement. "Bayesian brain" theory, which sees yet it contains DNA evidence for 23 microbial species, most of on the recent past. "The brain To test a predictable stimulus, the brain as making predictions them new (Astrobiology, DOl: expects to see things and really a third bar would appear in a about the world which it updates 1O.1089/ast.2008.0293). just wants to confirm it now and position timed to fit in with the when new information comes in. Modern humans are unusually good long-distance

runners: over distances of tens of kilometres, well-trained

12 1 NewScientist 1 3 Apri l Z010

running:' Sellers says (Internationa/journa/ of

Primat% gy, 001: 10.1 007/510764-010-9396-4).

For new stories every day, visit www.NewScientist.com/news

Night skies suited dino-bird's eyes LIKE a modern owl, Archaeopteryx may have come alive at night. The shapes of eye sockets differ predictably in birds that feed during the day, night or twilight, according to a study that promises to spill the beans on the dino·bird's l ifestyle. When Lars Schmitz at the University of California, Davis, studied 77 bird species, he found he could predict the foraging lifestyle of any species simply by measuring the bones that their eyes are set in. Each bird pupil is surrounded by a ring of bony segments called the

Fight cancer by killing off cells before they turn rogue IMAGINE ifcancer could be kept at bay by killing off precancerous cells every few months, much as dentists scrape away plaque to prevent tooth decay. Now drugs have been identified that do the job in mice. Chemotherapy works by killing off cells that are already cancerous. Until now, attempts at the " chemoprevention" of tumours have not been particularly successful. Because the drugs are used to treat people who don't yet have cancer, only the mildest side effects are

acceptable. As a result, the drugs usually only inhibit the growth of precancerous cells, rather than killing them off. Now Xiangwei Wu, a molecular biologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, and his colleagues have found two compounds that kill precancerous polyps in mice. One ofthese com pounds is known to kill cancer cells, the other makes precancerous cells susceptible to the first compound. When injected together, they killed up to go per cent of polyps

and left normal cells unaffected. The same mixture also killed human intestinal polyps in the lab (Nature, 001: 10.1038/ nature08871). Ifthe drugs also kill polyps in people, they could be taken less frequently than drugs that merely inhibit growth, limiting side effects. While a go per cent success rate would be poor for chemotherapy, only a tiny fraction of precancerous cells ultimately become malignant. So just reducing their numbers can slash the risk of cancer, says Wu.

scleral ring. Schmitz found that the outer and inner diameter of this ring, combined with the depth of eye sockets, could closely predict when a bird forages ( Vision Research, 001: 10.1016/j.visres.2010.03.009). This opens up the tantalising possibility of discovering whether extinct birds were nocturnal. Schmitz is currently making detailed measurements, but a quick look at Archoeopteryx fossils reveals that it had wide scleral rings and deep eye sockets, says Derek Yalden at the University of Manchester. According to Schmitis findings, this would make the dino-bird nocturnal. "I don't think it had occurred to anyone to suggest this," says Yalden. lf he is right, all drawings of Archaeopteryx flying through the daytime skies of early Earth will need to be revisited.

Lonely stars born between galaxies MOST stars are gregarious, grouping together by the billions in galaxies like our Milky Way. Now evidence is mounting that stars may form in between galaxies. Vanessa McBride at the University of Southam pton in the UK and her colleagues looked at X-rays arriving from the space between two nearby galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic clouds. The energy spectrum and periodic fluctuations ofthe X-rays, recorded by the INTEGRAL satellite, suggest they are coming from young binary star systems in which a neutron star is stealing matter from its massive companion. One such system was already known in a stream ofgas called the Magellanic Bridge between the two galaxies. McBride identified two more and found tentative signs of three others (Monthly Notices ofthe Royal Astronomical Society, vol 403, p 709). The gas was probably stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud by its larger neighbour's gravity, providing fuel for star formation. The Magellanic Bridge is ideal for studying such violent interactions in detail because it is so near, says Nicolas Lehner of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Fast food 'addicts' may be exactly that JUNK food may seem like an addictive

activity. Some ate normal rat food

d rug because it is. In rats, at least, too

while others had limited or unlimited

much fatty food raises the threshold

access to junk foods, tasty to both rats

for feelings of satisfaction, sparking

and humans. After 40 days, the brains

a cycle of compulsive overeating.

of those that ate junk freely were

In people, addictive drugs desensitise the brain by raising the

groups. They were also obese.

threshold of "reward" activity that is needed to feel satisfied: more drug

less sensitive than those in the other All the rats learned that a flash of light led to a painful electric shock.

is needed to achieve the same effect.

Rather than try to avoid the shock

Paul Kenny and colleagues at the

when the light came on, "addicted"

Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter,

rats just carried on eating. Like drug­

Florida, wondered if fatty foods

addicted humans, they also had fewer

might also cause desensitisation.

receptors for the reward chemical

They used electrodes to measure the sensitivity of rats' brains to reward

dopamine (Nature Neuroscience, 001: 1O.1038/nn.2519).

3 Ap r i l 2010 I NewScientist 1 13

TECHNOLOGY

For da ily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology

tsu na m i powe r A TOOL that is the first to simulate a particular type oftsunami could improve our understanding of the devastating waves. With the hel p of piston-based simulators, researchers had been able to recreate so-called crest-led waves, where the wave peak hits the shore with no warning. But until now they had been unable to simulate a trough-led wave where water drains from the beaches first, such as the one that hit Thailand in 2004. Tiziana Rossetto, a geological engineer at University College London, and colleagues, have devised a water tank that can simulate trough-led waves. The pneumatic system does so by quickly sucking up water to form a watery trough that moves along the wave tank. The team aims to use the simulator to study the destructive power of such waves.

image have been checked by the viewer. On a second viewing, those areas are blacked out. of a seco n d l ook The system was tested by asking volunteers to identify specific IT SOUNDS straightforward: give objects in images containing staff a second chance to examine 300 confetti-like shapes. On a images, and you could cut error second viewing, those presented rates in medical image analysis with the partly blacked-out or improve airport baggage images found significantly more screening. But second viewings don't always work, because people shapes than people simply shown might focus on the same areas the original a second time. "I think the technique has they looked at first time around, potential for augmenting says Pernilla Qvarfordt ofthe FX Palo Alto Laboratory in California. inspection systems," says Andrew Duchowski at Clemson Now Qvarfordt and colleagues think they have found a way to University in South Carolina. uncover detail that may have been Qvarfordt presented the work missed. They devised a system at the Eye Tracking Research that uses eye-tracking technology and Applications conference to identify which areas within an in Austin, Texas, last week.

M a k i n g the m ost

Too l to test

7700 solar panels, featuri ng seven emerging tech nologies, will be trialled over the next th ree years by oil company Chevron

liTh e ch i l l i g re n a d e h a s been fou n d f i t for usell The Ind ian military intends to develop atear-gas-I ike weapon based on the bhut jolokia pepper- the world's spiciest chilli -fol lowing successful tests, says Colonel R. Kalia, a defence spokesmanforthe north-eastern state of Assam (Associated Press, 23 March)

3 April 2010 I NewSci entist 1 15

TECHNOLOGY

Paralysed limbs revived by hacki ng i nto nerves Devices that i nj ect electrica l s i g n a l s d i rectl y i nto n e rves m a y soon restore m ovement to people who have lost the use of an a rm o r l eg research into its effectiveness. is not enough. Schiefer's latest experiment uses a new method "We apply a little bit of pressure to to plug into a nerve to control the reshape the cross-section without "THE leg wasn't bouncing all damaging the nerve." four muscles needed to stand up over the table, but there were Recent tests validated that from a sitting position. substantial twitches," says Matthew Schiefer, a neural approach. The cuff was temporarily Motor nerves like this are in engineer at Case Western Reserve implanted on the femoral nerves of some ways like telephone cables: University in Cleveland, Ohio. seven patients undergoing routine they are made up of electrically Schiefer is describing an isolated bundles of nerve fibres, thigh surgery. Pulses of current 250 microseconds long were used each one of which connects to experiment in which pulses of to selectively and independently certain groups of muscle cells. electricity are used to control the muscles of an unconscious patient, In the 2006 trial, electrodes were activate the muscles that extend as ifthey were a marionette. the knee and flex the hip joint simply placed on the nerve's It represents the beginnings of surface using a spiral cuff, but this when a person stands up. The makes for a poor connection with pulses were not enough to bend a new generation of devices that the joints as much as they would he hopes will allow people with fibre bundles close to the nerve's future, a brain interface might when standing, but the results paralysed legs to regain control "The Utah slanted array, suggest that longer pulses should allow a person to control their of their muscles and so be able brist ling with up to 100 to stand, or even walk again. implant with their thoughts. stimulate the muscles to provide His is one of a raft of gadgets wires, is d esigned to be enough force to support the The traffic through our nervous being developed that plug into the gently pushed into a nerve" body's weight (Journal ofNeural system is not just one-way, though, Engineering, DOl: 10.1088/1741network of nerves that normally and for a device to restore function to paralysed arms or legs it needs core. The new solution, known as relay commands from the spinal 2560/7/2/026006). Longer trials to be able to detect feedback from are being planned, subject to cord to the muscles, but fall silent the flat interface nerve electrode when a spinal injury breaks the those limbs. The first commercial approval from the US Food and (FINE). is a cuff that squashes a chain. New ways to connect wires walking aid that plugs into nerves Drug Administration. nerve flat to bring fibre bundles closer to the surface- and to the to nerves (see diagram) allow demonstrates just that ability, and Future devices using FINE eight electrodes in the device's would likely be targeted at people goes on sale in Europe in a few artificial messages to be injected soft rubber lining. months. Neurostep, from paralysed from the waist down. to selectively control muscles A computer interface to the Neurostream Technologies of It makes for a much better just as if the signal had originated in the brain. Limbs that might Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures in implant could give them control connection, says Dustin Tyler, otherwise never again be Quebec, Canada, designed by Andy who invented the FINE and heads of their legs. Further into the controlled by their owners can be brought back to life. Three ways to plug i nto the nervous system The potential of this approach N e u ra l engineers are refi ni n g designs to connect a rtificial electrical networks with natural ones was demonstrated in 2006 when Electrodes (inside t h e cuff) placed A flat cuffforces bundles in the Spikes of varying lengths can be a different Case Western team around a nerve can inject signals centre closer to the electrodes pushed into the nerve for a more di rect i nto its bundles of nerve fibres for a better connection linkto individual nerve bundles enabled someone who was paralysed from the waist down to watch their usually motionless knees straighten at the push of a button. With a little support they even stood for 2 minutes while signals injected into nerves in their thighs kept their knees straight. But controlling one joint alone MacGregor Campbell

16 1 NewScientist 1 3 Ap ri l 2010

For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology

INSIGHT Now Google has gone, expect cracks in the great firewall of China F RO M a technical perspective, Google's exitfrom China in the early hours of 2 2 March was a l OW-key affair, Google simply disconnected

have done is going to have a very significant impact," says Jo Glanville,

Beijing, a n d rerouted its traffic t o an

who edits the journal of the

uncensored search engine i n Hong

campaigning group Index On

Kong, Google says attacks on the

Censorship in London. She thinks the

email accounts of dissidents, which

ethical spotlight will now fall heavily

it bel ieves came from the Chinese

on companies such as M i crosoft and

author ities, made it impossible for it

Yahoo, which continue to abide by

to continue operating there,

China's censorship laws,

Kong, where the censorship laws that

The greatfirewall i n cludes a thicket of content-fi ltering i nternet

apply to the rest of China are not

routers kn own as the Golden

enforced, Google has been able to

Shield, Strangely, though, content

continue provi ding a service without

sometimes gets through - hi nting

having to censor search results, "We

that the syste m has weaknesses,

are now censoring nothi ng," Google's

M i crosoft refused to comment

legal officer David Drummond says,

on what it censors on beha If of

That doesn't mean Chinese citizens

shout to someone watching a football match inside, he says. With colleagues, he is testing a device called the Utah slanted array that bristles with up to 100 wires designed to be gently pushed into a nerve. "They get up close and personal with nerve fibres," says Clark. The result is the most precise control yet of any of the limb­ activating devices, he says. Though not yet a pproved for human trial s, it has allowed previously paralysed cats to stand, and has been used ([ to control the movement of a a: � monkey's fingers individually. :'i More independent electrodes lead � to more graceful movement and II finer control, says Clark. It won't be perfect. Nerves contain tens ofthousands ofaxons, each capable of being controlled by the ultimate puppeteer: the brain. Learning to pull even a few of those strings, though, could restore partial function to a person's limb, restoring some control to an arm or leg that was previously paralysed . •

"One can be very cyn ical about Google's motivations but what they

its self-censored search engine i n

By moving its service to Hong

Hoffer at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, controls ankle movement for people with foot­ drop, a condition in which nerve damage makes one foot hang limply while stepping forward. Neurostep connects using just four electrodes, placed around a nerve inside a cylindrical cuff similar to the spiral one used in Case Western's 2006 trial. But the device not only injects current into the nerve, it also reads signals sent back by the foot to communicate the pressure it feels. A control unit implanted in the thigh uses that pressure information to time its signal to flex the ankle in a way that achieves a normal gait. Ultimately, though, realising the ambition of neuroengineers to control every muscle a nerve connects to requires plugging in more literally, says Greg Clark at the University of Utah's Department of Bioengineering in Salt Lake City. Placing electrodes outside a nerve is like standing outside a stadium and trying to

Google's anti-censorship move,

China - but Google has first-hand

can now get uncensored results,

experience of the great firewall and

Anyone accessing google,com,hk

some hope it may be persuaded to

from mainland China will encounter

reveal some of its secrets.

China's own "g reat fi rewa I I", which blacklists websites related to

Simon Davies, founder of London-based pressure group Privacy

controversial subjects, l i ke the Falun

International, is now challenging

Gong religious sect or the protests i n

Google to reveal the technology it

Tiananmen Square. Google has faced a barrage of

once used at China's behest "That way, we can u ndersta nd the nature of

criticism since it agreed to censor

the beast and, perhaps, develop

searches in China after setti ng up

circumvention measures so there can

shop there in early 2006, Now some

be an open ing u p of communications,"

campaigners think good may come of

"That would be a dossier of extraordinary importance to h u man

Who's censoring your search?

rights," Davies says, Google has yetto

At least it's not Google

respond to his call. Paul M arks .

3 Ap ri l 2010 I NewScientist 1 17

TECHNOLOGY

Po i nti l l ist style co u ld b ri ng l ife l i ke g ra p h i cs to pes AS THE artist Georges Seurat knew, a beautiful image can be created from a series of dots. Now an Australian firm hopes to use this trick to revolutionise computer graphics and make it possible to create stunning virtual worlds on relatively modest machines. Existing graphics software creates virtual objects for home computers and games consoles using polygons. The more polygons you use, the more detailed your object can be, says Bruce Dell, CEO ofu nlimited Detail in Brisbane, Australia. But that approach is inefficient because it renders some background detail hidden behind foreground objects. For the average home system, that unnecessary work affects the quality of graphics. Instead of polygons, Unlimited Detail's system uses dots - billions of them - to create a "point cloud" representation ofa virtual world. By selecting one point for every pixel on the display screen, it's possible to create an exquisitely detailed 3D snapshot in much the

same way as a Seurat pointillist painting. Change the selection several times per second and you can move smoothly through the virtual world. Dell claims to have developed an algorithm that identifies the million or so points needed to match the computer display's resolution quickly enough for smooth animation.

Texas o i l com pa n ies w i l l soon be locking away carbon

His system for transforming the detailed point cloud into an on-screen image is analogous to a search engine, says Dell. "Google has web pages categorised so it can quickly and easily find what it needs, and we have also found a way of categorising and easily accessing our data." Working on a laptop with a single core processor and without a dedicated graphics card, Dell claims his software can move through a 3D virtual world at 28 frames per second to produce

to transport CO2 from the Gulf coast

of oil extracted, we replace it with an

to its Hastings oilfield near Houston,

eq uivalent volume of CO2," he says.

Texas. Exhaust CO2 bought from a

pumped in than is released by burning the oil displaced. A barrel of oil emits around 0.4 tonnes of CO2, but around

THE industry most often accused

recovery, water and compressed CO2

flowing down the pipeline next year.

are pumped into wells to flush out oil

Denbury will also buy waste CO2

carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is,

that cannot otherwise be brought to

"By the time enhanced recovery is uneconomical, we'll have seq uestered

the surface. The CO2 stays buried

converts coal i nto the less polluting

buy more of the stuff.

when production ends.

syngas, and four simi lar plants in the

30 to 50 per cent more CO2 than that barrel of oil wi ll give off," Evans says.

The gas is in short supply because

"For every barrel of oil extracted, we replace it are looking to capture human-made with an equivalent volume CO2 instead, in an effort that parallels of carbon d ioxide"

source 6 million tonnes of CO2 from ExxonMobil's nearby LaBarge gas plant.

plants and natural gas processing

the natural gas fields it is sourced

facilities to bottle their waste CO2,

from have limited capacity. So firms

This is not an act of eco-altruism.

0.6 tonnes will be buried to get it out.

from a plant in Plaq uemine which

strange as it may seem, desperate to

and are then pumping it underground.

By weight, though, more gas is

Dow Chemical ethylene oxide plant in Plaquemine, Louisiana, will start

of being responsible for the excess

Oil companies are paying industrial

an animated sequence - selecting the 614,400 points needed to produce a 1024x6oo image for each frame. The result can be seen in the image below-left, created by Dell, although he points out that he is no computer artist and a professional would do better. The idea of point-based graphics has attracted increasing interest in recent years, says Neil Dodgson, a computer graphics researcher at the University of Cambridge. "What is surprising is that they claim they can search through billions of points to find exactly the right ones to display on your screen - and do this in software and in real time." To do that at speed, the point­ cloud data would have to reside in a computer's random access memory, where it can be accessed most quickly, says Dodgson. Even on powerful home com puters, the limited RAM space will affect the ability to produce images. Dell says he has got around this by findinga smart way to compress the points to cram a huge number into the RAM. However, until he has been awarded the patents covering the technology, he says he's not prepared to reveal more. Colin Barras .

Denbury is not alone in paying others not to pol lute. Anadarko Petroleum in Wyoming plans to

The goal for the oil companies is to

government-funded programmes

try and extract every last drop from

to develop methods of carbon

Midwest. Each tonne of CO2 will (ost

Meanwhile, Occidental Petroleum,

ageing oilfields. But an i ncidental

capture and storage (New Scientist,

around $10, depending on oil prices.

based in Los Angeles, is building a plant

result is that the oil ends up with a

12 December 2009, p B).

Company president Tracy Evans

to treat and (ompress CO2 from natural

smaller net carbon footprint than most, or even a negative one. In a process known as enhanced oil

18 1 NewScientist 1 3 April 2010

Next month, Denbury Resources,

says Denbury plans to use CO2 alone

gas provided by Sandridge Energy's

based in Plano, Texas, will complete

to flush out recalcitrant oil, rather than

plants in west Texas, due to come

the first 400 kilometres of a pipeline

mixing it with water. "For every barrel

on stream this year. Helen Knight .

OPINION

Tidal power? No tha n ks The n o rth of Scotla n d has been d escri bed as the Sa u d i Ara bia of m a r i n e power. I n truth there isn't m uch energ y t o be h a d , sa ys H a n s van Haren THE vastness of the ocean has always created the illusion of infinite resources, whether for food orwaste disposal. Yet despite its huge size, the ocean is vulnerable to exploitation. The ocean also seems like an attractive source of vast amounts of sustainable energy, including tidal power. Just last month, the UK's Crown Estate announced four tidal energy schemes off the north coast of Scotland with the aim of generating 600 megawatts of electricity. Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, described the waters as the "Saudi Arabia of marine power". Again, this is an illusion. In practice, only relatively small amounts of energy are available from tides, and extracting it will have devastating effects on the ocean ecosystem. Tides created by the moon and sun generate about 3.5 terawatts

of power in total. This may sound like a huge amount, but is in fact only about 20 per cent of global energy demand. The amount of this energy that can be used is necessarily lower: to make tidal power viable, the speed ofthe current has to be at least 1.2 metres per second. This rules out the vast majority of tidal energy because it is found in the open ocean where tidal currents are too weak to be useful, generally less than 0.1 metres per second. Viable speeds are only found in the shallow seas around the perimeter of oceans. In fact, there are only about 20 suitable sites in the world, including the north of Scotland and the Severn estuary in the UK. In the Netherlands a test plant is proposed for the Wadden Sea, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Unfortunately, these sites are all in extraordinarily rich and ecologically fragile straits and estuaries that are critically important spawning grounds for marine life. Strong tides are what make these waters so productive: their turbulence stirs up nutrients vital for life. In total, less than 100 gigawatts of power could be generated by the suitable sites, and it is debatable whether even this can ever be extracted efficiently. Tidal

A successful results page IT research firm Gartner brings clarity and order to your estimates Google's data centres corner of the universe, but down contain nearly a million servers, each drawing about 1 kilowatt of in the server farms things get messy. Thermal motion of silicon electricity. So every hour Google's atoms agitates air molecules engine burns through I million The whole wo rld pa ys when you run a si m pl e kilowatt-hours. Google serves up behind the CPU racks, heating w e b q ue r y, sa ys J a m es Clarage them up. More energy must be approximatelylO million search fed in to power the computer results per hour, so one search has fans and air-conditioning units HOW much does a web search cost? thermodynamics, and therefore the same energy cost as turning on a loo-watt light bulb for an hour. You don't pay up front, but there wastes energy. needed to remove this heat from This doesn't bode well. Even are costs nevertheless, and they The first law says it takes energy the warehouses. though the average American are not just measured in dollars. to dowork,even ifthat work is only Whatever you search for, it The term search "engine" is apt. to move electrons across silicon boils down to the same cycle: performs just 1.5 searches per day, Searches are powered by millions wafers. The second law says that move atoms, then cool atoms. of computers packed into no engine is perfect, meaning some Both these steps consume energy. "Whatever you search for, warehouses, all wired together to of the input gets lost as heat. This is How much? Let's run through it boils down to the same function as a single system. Like the entropy, or disorder, arising some numbers, using the leading cycle: move atoms, then any system, it obeys the laws of from your search. search engine as our guide. cool atoms"

Sea rc h/s d i rty secret

20 1 NewScientist 1 3 April 2010

Comment on these stories at www.NewScientist.com/opinion

currents vary greatly over time and maximum power-generating currents are only a minor part of a tidal cycle. Even small decreases in current speed have large impacts on electricity generation. Recent evidence also questions the efficiency of electricity generation once tidal barrages and turbines are in place (Renewable Energy, vol 33, p 2485). Obstructing 25 per cent of the area through which the tide flows alters currents so substantially that the potential power is no longer extracted efficiently. Thus permanently exploitable tidal power is reduced to a few tens of gigawatts. On top of that, turbines kill up to 80 per cent of fish passing through them, and changes in current affect nutrient supply, thereby altering the ecology of estuarine life. Tides are indispensable for life in shallow seas. Without them, ocean life would come to a halt. Extraction of their energy may seem attractive, but in reality there is very little tidal energy to be had - and what there is comes at high ecological cost. We should save the tides. •

One minute with ...

Fra ncisco Aya la The £1 m i l l i o n 2010 Tem pleton prize has gone to the g eneticist some call the "Rena issa n ce m a n of evo l ut i o n a ry b i ol ogy"

You won for arguing there is no contradiction between science and religion. Many disagree. They are two windows through wh ich we look at the world, Religion deals with our relationship with our creator, with each other, the mea n i n g and purpose o f life, and moral values; science deals with the make-up of matter, expansion of galaxies, evolution of orga nisms, They deal with d ifferent ways of knowing, I fee l that science is compati ble with re ligious faith in a personal, omnipotent and benevolent God, And yet conflict exists. Why? Religion and science are not properly unde rstood by some people, Ch risti ans particularly, Some wan t to interpret the Bible as if it were an

PROFILE

e l ementary textbook. It is a book to teach us

Evol utionary biologist and geneticist

about religious truths, At the same time, some

Francisco Ayala of the U niversity of California,

scientists claim they can use science to prove God

Irvine, was a science adviserto President

does not exist. Science can do nothing of the kind.

Bill Cl i nton, and was formerly a Domin ican pri est

You talk about mutual respect between science and relig ion. How c an we foster this?

What do you say to people like Richard

Hans van Hare n i s a n oceanographer

People of faith need better scientific education,

Dawkins, who argue that we don't need

atthe Royal Netherlands Institute for

As for scientists, I don't know what they can do:

religion to lead moral lives?

Sea Research in Den Burg

it is hard to imagine that this will not rise dramatically. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that data centres are responsible for 1.5 per cent of US energy use. How much more will that be when we, and our gadgets, are doing hundreds of searches per day? Orwhen the planet's 6 billion inhabitants all want equal access? We've all heard the future of information architecture is cloud computing. It just might be a cloud of carbon dioxide . •

not many argue in a rational and susta i n ed way

One can accept moral values without being

that religion and science a re incompatible.

religious, However, by and large, people get th eir moral values in association with their rel igion,

Why do you say c reationism is bad religion? Creati onism and i ntelligent design are not

Do you beli eve in God?

compatible with religion because they i m ply the

I don't answer qu estions on my personal beliefs,

designer is a bad designer, a llowing cruelty and misery, Evolution explains these as a result of

There are thousands of religions, many

natural processes, i n the sa m e way we explain

mutually contradictory. They c an't all be right.

earthqua kes, tsunamis or volcanic eruptions. We

Correct, It is a matter of faith. There is no way of

don't have to attribute them to an action of God,

demonstrating the superiority of one rel igion, True religion is what one person happens to bel i eve,

One area where religion and science seem to be at odds is homosexuality. Who is right?

I'm an atheist. Am I missing out?

There is now evidence that predisposition to

No, because you can have a meaningful life

ho mosexuality is genetically determined, so there

withoutfaith i n God, But most people live i n

is a biological component and denying it is not

poverty and mi sery, suffering from diseases,

right. Some religions condemn as i m moral sexual

The one thing that brings them some hope and

relations between people of the same gender,

meaning is th e i r faith, I don't wantto take that

J a mes Cia rage is a physicist at

That can bejudged as a moral matter, One has to

from them,

the University of StThomas i n

distinguish what belongs to the realm of morality,

Interview by Graham Lawton

Houston, Texas

3 Ap ri l 2010 1 NewScientist 1 21

OPINION LETTERS

Accidental origins From James Merryweather I found myself much less surprised than Bob Holmes that species can arise rapidly or even suddenly (13 March, p 30). The botanist Irene Manton and her students in the middle ofthe last century clarified the ancestry of several groups of British ferns, and showed just how easily a new species can emerge. Britain has three Polypodium fern species that do not often interbreed. The hybrid of diploid p. cambricum and tetraploid P. vulgare is usually a sterile triploid, but occasionally it becomes fertile after chromosome doubling. The offspring, the hexaploid species P. interjectum, is morphologically and ecologically distinct. It can backcross with either parent, but the product is a conventionally sterile hybrid. This is speciation in action and is probably happening all the time. Consider another case: the British whitebeam shrubs (Sorbus species) show rapid speciation and evolution progressing in real

time on cliffs in the Avon gorge, on the Devon coast and on the Isle of Arran. Creationists demand to be shown macroevolution in action. These are just two examples. Auchtertyre, Highland, UK From Michael Crick Could catastrophe theory explain the apparently random distribution of speciation events as sudden effects of fairly continuously varying causes? My concern would be whether the mathematics involved could handle the number of "dimensions" involved, but it should be possible to set up a simplified model to see whether its predicted distributions correspond to observation. Hexham, North um berland, UK

Hotel microbia From Graham Hodgson So the microbial flora that cloaks, occupies and infiltrates us also communicates with us (6 March, p 36). Do we need to rethink our

Coin-cidence PETER HARRISON

balance, I calculate that to be

I recently purchased a n u mber of

certa i n of findi ng the offending

seem i n gly i d entical anti q u e coins

coin and whether it is heavier or

knowing that an unspecified one

lighter than the others, I shall need

of them was counterfeit a n d

three weighi ngs.

sign ificantly different in weight By coi ncid ence, I have another

Had the number of coins I purchased been any larger, I would have needed at least one more

exactly si milar and authentic coin

weighing to be sure of achieving

already i n my coll ecti on.

the same outcome,

Using a sensitive two-pan

How many coins did I purchase?

WIN £15 will be awarded to the se n d er of the fi rst correct answer opened on Wednesday 5 May, The Editor's decision is fi nal. Please send entries to Enigma 1589, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald's Road, London WClX 8NS, or to enig [email protected] (please i ncl u d e your postal address), Answerto 1583 Have a good day: the dates were 4 March and 26 J u ly The winner Paul Sti llman of Wokingham, Berkshire, U K

22 1 NewScientist 1 3 April 2010

ET gone in a flash

place in the scheme of things? We are constructed of eukaryotic cells that function through an assemblage of organelles ­ nucleus, nucleolus, mitochondria, Golgi apparatus and so on - many if not most of which are believed to derive from the incorporation of free-living microbial predecessors into the evolving cell. Furthermore, human cells are outnumbered 10 to 1 in our own bodies by microbial cells. How many ofus are ready to face up to the fact that we may operate primarily to serve as ambulatory refectories for our microbial inhabitants? Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK

A place near the sun

Enigma Num ber 1589

from the others,

by surveying galaxies and clusters of galaxies is a long shot in terms of actually achieving its goal. I hope that Solar Orbiter gets a slot. Williamstown, Massach usetts, US

From Jay PasachofJ, Hopkins Observatory I am glad to see that Solar Orbiter, which would go unprecedentedly close to the sun, is on the European Space Agency's list of three missions being considered for two launch slots (27 February, p 7). From its unique vantage point, high out ofthe plane of Earth's orbit, the craft would be guaranteed to make high­ resolution solar images and measure the solar wind. It should allow us to see where the solar wind streams come from. In contrast, to a solar astronomer like me, PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars) is a relatively minor variation on the current Kepler mission, and the Euclid mission to search for dark matter

From Nicholas Sawyer Why have we never found evidence of aliens (27 February, p 46) ? The most obvious explanation is that civilisations capable of advertising their existence across the universe have very short durations. Ours only started inadvertently advertising its presence by radio broadcasts in the last century. Since then we have narrowly avoided extinction by nuclear war and now a ppear to be well on the way to rendering Earth uninhabitable by changing the com position of its atmosphere. Other civilisations may take very different forms, but the evolutionary pressures are likely to be similar everywhere: a certain level of technology is followed by exponential growth of population and resource use - pressures which lead inevitably to catastrophe by one meansoranother. Blink, and you missed us. South Hobart, Tasmania, Australia From Clive Page Ray Francis is unduly pessimistic in saying that the inverse square law renders the chances of aliens detecting our radio signals negligible (6 March, p 24). Signals from the 23-watt transmitter on Voyager 1, on the edge of our solar

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system, have been picked up by radio amateurs in Germany using a dish of medium size. Proxima Centauri is about 2400 times further away, so around 130 megawatts would be needed to give the same received signal strength on Earth. Luton, Bedfordshire, UK From Leslie Martin We are becoming more efficient with our broadcasts: line-of-sight transmission and satellite downlinks waste less energy into space. Any civilisation that does the same will appear dark to the sky, apart from a few decades during the development stages. Greenford, Middlesex, UK From Henry Harris I a m a retired NASA scientist who headed a project for creating the technology needed to reach a nearby star. Ifit turns out, as physicists such as Paul Oavies are insisting, that the universe has more dimensions than just four, perhaps there might also be short cuts that circumvent the speed of light using sufficiently advanced technology. My interstellar project proved that travel to a nearby star is possible, within current physics, if we are willing to invest the resources. If it is possible today, who is to say it might not be practical tomorrow? Pasadena, California, US

Coral clouded From Steve Martin Graham Jones worries that at sea temperatures greater than 26 'c coral ceases to release dimethyl sulphide (OMS) (27 February, p 17). Since OMS aids in the formation of clouds, Jones postulates that a reduction could dry out the north Queensland rainforests. The majority of rainfall over north Queensland is in the summer monsoon, when sea surface tem peratures off the coast of this region are in the range of

desire henceforth was not that we should do justice but that we should tell him often how From Philippa Pigache In their article asking where marvellous He is. atheists come from, Lois Lee and I'd have given it all up, but Stephen Bullivant suggest that a I was fortunate enough to go to the ecumenical liberation lack of belief is worthy of inquiry The editor writes: (6 March, p 26). I come from a line theology centre Sabeel in • Jones says that in winter, south­ of atheists. Our family could no Jerusalem and meet Christians, easterly trade winds may carry more suddenly discover a need for Jews and Muslims who are the OMS aerosol particles into an almighty than abandon deeply working together for peace and held beliefs like justice and rainforests, producing rain, and justice. I suggest that what Martin suspects that the lack of this could equality before the law, hard work Luther King called the moral dry them. More research is, as he and socialism, which we acquired universe, and the people who give says, required. during our upbringing. their lives to healing it, are fit Conceivably, childhood beliefs subjects for objective study alongside the material universe. that can be challenged by logic Crawley, West Sussex, UK might be shaken in adult life and Eyes ablaze by education, but beliefs that are supported by it - surely not. From David Marjot From Ivor Watts There is a very practical As the philosopher Immanuel Cross In Hand, East Sussex, UK application of knowing that Kant points out in Critique ofPure Reason, we may dismiss such decision-makers can be identified From Hugh Roddis by theirwide eyes (6 March, p 11). propositions as "God exists" as Everyone is a mixture of physical uninformative: "existence is not and mental heritage: genes and a predicate" as logicians would memes. Passing on the vast say.The implication is that the set mass of information between of all things that are not a part of generations requires belief- it is god is empty: that is, pantheism. impossible to personally test Tiverton, Devon, UK everything we learn. Like genes, memes do not need to be "right" to succeed; just to confer an advantage or be neutral. For the record As to a link between education and atheism: in the 18th century, • Green chemist Jim Hutchison is critical thinking was a major part at the U niversity of Oregon, not Oregon State University as we said of education. Today in many fields, even at graduate level, (13 March, p 34). I used to work as a consultant education is simply data • We said alkali-vapour lasers have "mass-to-power ratios thatfar psychiatrist in prisons and special transmission, and critical thinking is ignored or actively exceed other lasers"; we meant psychiatric hospitals, and I noted "power-to-mass" (27 February, p 22). that before a threatened or actual discouraged. Is anyone looking assault my patients' pupils would at links between atheism and • We referred to "Antonie dilate. I attributed this to the Leeuwenhoek" as "father of the field of study? fight-or-flight reaction. It also Falmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada microscope" (27 February, p 36). His applied to psychotic patients who family name was van Leeuwenhoek; were impulsively and therefore our dictionary calls him Antoni, though From Tony Graham many other spellings are also in use. more unpredictably aggressive. There are two sorts of religion, Rather than moving away, I as different from each other as found it better to stand shoulder­ science and alchemy. A faith that Letters should be sent to: to-shoulder - a very supportive starts by liberating people can Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, stance and not threatening. be hijacked. That happened to 84 Theobald's Road, London WClX 8NS A word of warning, though, if Fax: +44 (0) 20 7511 1280 Christianity in 312 when the Email: l [email protected] would-be Roman emperor you are ever in this situation: in some circles it is common practice Constantine kidnapped God to Include your full postal address and telephone in a fight to hit an opponent with support his bid for power. number. and a reference (issue. page number. title) Belief became a matter of a sideways jerk of the head - so to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the rightto believing unprovable things allow a little separation. use any submissions sent to the letterscolumn of before breakfast, and God's main Weybridge, Surrey, UK New Scientist magazine. in any other format.

29 to 30 'c. It would appear that Jones overestimates the effect of OMS on cloud and rainfall on the north Queensland rainforest. Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

Inheriting atheism

3 Ap ri l 2010 1 NewScientist 1 23

OPINION INTERVIEW

Fu n ny th i ng, cl i mate Ian McEwan 's new n ovel Solor is a bout cl i mate cha n g e. H e tel l s Jessica Gri ggs why n ovels without sci ence a re pla i n bori n g a n d why m e n m ust n ever pee a t -40 °C

YOUR descri ption of the experimental confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity was wrong, one of Ian McEwan's readers tells him. The reader refers to a passage in his book Enduring Love. McEwan isn't too worried. "My authority was Steven Weinberg, the Nobel prize-winning physicist. I think I'll just put them in touch with each other," he says. Given McEwan's penchant for using science in his novels, he's accustomed to receiving letters from readers, some pointing out tiny slips but most offering "generous advice". He'll no doubt get a few more letters on his latest offering, Solar, especially as it deals with that thorny subject, climate change. Solar also features a Nobel prize-winning physicist, although one not nearly as commendable as Weinberg. The novel is based around the central character's attempt to develop a technique known as artificial photosynthesis. Just like natural photosynthesis, light is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is then somehow converted into virtually carbon­ neutral electricity. McEwan describes his protagonist, Michael Beard, as "a terrible liar and a deceitful thief". With his best work behind him, Beard trades on a youthful flash of genius - but steals a post -doc's idea on how to harvest energy from photons efficiently, which he then applies to the problem of artificial photosynthesis. In between sessions at the lab he also manages to moonlight as a successful womaniser and frame another man for murder. We're sitting in McEwan's elegant living room on brown leather sofas, an open fire crackling between us. I tell him it is one of the funniest novels of his I've read and he looks genuinely pleased. McEwan has famously said he hates comic novels so I ask him ifhe 24 1 NewScientist 1 3 April 2010

intended to write a comedy. "I like novels with funny stretches, but comic novels can be rather laborious. I think that, like writing a symphony, in a novel you can shift moods and tempos, allow yourself set pieces, but then claw back some level of seriousness. But there's something funny about all really good writing; anything that seems deeply perceptive always has a little smile at its edge." McEwan is quick to say that he wasn't picking up on the zeitgeist surrounding climate change; rather it was an issue he's been interested in from the late nineties. Occasionally, he wondered how it might make its way into a novel: "I knew I had to be careful when writing a novel about climate change, it can be such a dull subject." McEwan found his way in during a trip to Tempelfjorden in the Arctic in 2005. Many of McEwan's experiences made it into the novel in am plified form rather than a polar bear chasing him on his faltering Skidoo, McEwan merely saw a footprint. He was preoccupied by the thought of having to urinate at -40 ·C but was never desperate enough to risk it, as Beard does, only to have his penis freeze to his zipper. As in so many of his books the science is a backdrop for exploring human nature. "As humans, climate change is uniquely difficult for us, partly because we're not used to thinking of long timescales, partly because it's not in our nature to perform favours for people that aren't born yet and partly because we have this double edge to our nature PROFILE I a n McEwan won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first work, a collection of short stori es, published i n 1975, a n d the Man Booker Prize for h is novel Amsterdam

For more interviews and to add your comments, visit www.NewScientist.comlopinion

ferociously clever and ingenious, which is what's got us into this mess, but also very tribal," he explains. From evolutionary biology inEndu ring Love to neurosurgery in Saturday, science has played a prominent role in some of McEwan's later novels despite his official science education ending with high-school (A level) mathematics, which he finished in his spare time. He wanted to do physics as well but his school was too tiny to accommodate it and English. Another one of McEwan's frequently quoted phrases is that most novels are boring and I wonder whether science is a way to help stave offthe boredom of his own plots. He's surprisingly forthcoming: "Absolutely. I think one of the reasons I find a lot of novels boring is that they're only about the emotions; they don't have enough muscular intelligence. I like novels that have got both. A good number of novels are just so timid, intellectually." McEwan says he's never abandoned a plot because the science became too im penetrable. "I work my way so slowly into a novel that I only really start to get fully immersed when I know it's the right thing:' For McEwan, full immersion means plenty of research. For Saturday he famously shadowed a neurosurgeon, and for Solar, he read up on Einstein's theory of relativity and had Graeme Mitchison from the Centre for Quantum Computation at the University of Cambridge check his physics and come up with the details of the "Beard-Einstein Conflation" which won Beard his prize. So what will come next once he's shaken Solar out of his system? First, he'll write a non­ science-themed novel, and then: "I think there's something unexplored, from my point of view, about chemistry. The 19th century was the great time for chemistry but chemists have rather faded from our sense of science. I think they'll be back. You're frowning because you're a physicist," he tells me. I'm frowning because as a journalist I know it's difficult to make chemistry captivating. "And the very word is so smelly, isn't it? As I say the word, I can smell the Bunsen burners and rubber tubes of the chemistry labs," he muses aloud. "Even after the summer holidays, stepping into the chemistry lab, the smell would still be there and my heart would sink. There's definitely something there." If ever there's a man to make those smelly labs ca ptivating, it's Ian McEwan . • For readers' q u est i o n s to Ian McEwa n and an essay on S% r by Graeme Mitchison see newscientist. co m/blogs/cu lture l a bl

3 April 2010 1 NewSci entist 1 25

WHAT ARE M EMORI ES MADE O F?

M EMORIES are the basic stuff of thought. We access our stores of knowledge every ti me we perform a task, commun icate through speech or form ulate the si mplest concepts, Yet the physical form of memory has long been mysterious, What changes occur i n the brain when a new memory is encoded? One thing we do know is that memory formation involves the strengthening of synaptic connections between nerve cells, Using sea slugs, which have a relatively simple nervous system, a team led by Kelsey Martin at the Un iversity of California, Los Angeles, last year became the firstto watch memories being made, in the form of new proteins appearing at the synapses

(Science, vol 324, p 1536), Where, though, is knowledge stored in the complex

The n e rvous system

bra i n s of mammals? Short-term m emories, such as a

has 10,000 different

telephone number about to be used, seem to be stored

types ot n e u ro n

in two small curled-up structures called the h i ppocampi, buried deep in the brain's two hemisphe res, In 2008 Cou rtney Mil ler and David Sweatt atthe University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa showed i n mice that during the first hour after a memorable event there were chemical changes to the DNA of neurons i n this area, altering the proteins produced, Over the subsequent week, there were simi lar changes to the genes of neurons in the cortex, These changes seemed to be perman ent, i ndicating that long-term memories are stored there (Neuron, volume 53, p 857), The pairthink they watched sh ort­ term memories form in the hi ppocampus, which then became long-term memories i n the cortex, The brain pays extra atte ntion to thi n gs that frighten us, as remembering them could mean the difference between life and death, A structure next to the hippocampus called the amygdala is known to play a role in stampi ng this indel ible mark, Last year, a team led by Sheena Josselyn atthe Hosp ital for Sick Chi ldren in Toronto, Canada, found that in mice they could erase a frightening memory of a noise by killing amygdala neurons wh ose synapses had recently been strength ened after exposure to the noise (Science, vol 323, p 1492), It was the first ti m e a specific memory had been traced to the nerve cells that encoded it It's still a far cry from see ing a memory in a h u man being, though, E m ma Young

28 1 NewScientist 1 3 April Z010

WHAT IS TH E FUNCTION OF M I RROR N E U RONS?

WILL WE EVER BE ABLE TO REGENERATE THE BRAI N?

YOU were born with all the brain cells

stud ies neurogenesis at the

you'll ever have, so the saying goes.

Massachusetts Institute of

So much for sayings. I n the 1990s,

reprogramming adult skin cells. And Macklis has found that even

decades of dogma were overturned by

Technology. By some estimates, the nervous system is made up of

in non-neurogenic parts ofthe brain, there are small numbers of

the d iscovery that mammals,

10,000 d ifferent kinds of neuron.

"progenitor cells" left over from brain

ind uding people, make new neurons throughout their lives. I n humans,

This complexity means you

development in the womb. These

can't just hijack any old cell produced

are not true stem cells, but they have some neurogenesis capabilities.

such "neurogenesis" has been seen in

by natural neurogenesis. However,

two places: neurons formed in the

there may be other ways of growing

olfactory bulb seem to be involved

new neurons to order.

in learning new smells, whi le those

Macklis has shown that in animals at least, these progenitors can be

Olle Lindvall at Lund University in

directed to form functional neurons.

born in the hippocampus are involved

Sweden has shown what might be

In mice, he has found chemical cues

in learning and memory.

possible. He transplanted dopamine­

that tip progenitors into becoming

producing neurons taken from

motor neurons, the cells damaged

aborted fetuses i nto the brains of people with Parkinson's, and showed

by motor neuron d i sease. "I'm a great optimist with respect

the process be harnessed to treat

the new neurons can improve brain

to regulating neurogenesis in normally

diseases of the brain, such as

function, although the treatment

non-neurogenic parts of the brain."

Parkinson's and Alzheimer's?

didn't work for everyone. Lindvall is

says Macklis. "But the nervous system

now looking for ways to make these

was built with precision, and we will

The d iscovery that new neurons can integrate into the adult brain raises i ntriguing possibilities. Could

The trick will be i n replacing diseased cel ls with just the right kind

specialised neurons from embryonic

have to rebuild it with that precision."

of neuron, says Jeff Macklis, who

stem cells or stem cells made by

James Mitchell Crow

'WHEN you're smilin', the whole world smiles with

Conve rsely, l ess activity in mi rror systems has

you," sang Louis Armstrong. H e could have been

been linked to autism and also with psychopathy ­

referring to what some consider one of the g reatest

different conditions that are both noted for low

recent discoveries of neuroscience : m i rror neurons. Discovered i n macaques in the 1990s, these cells were spotted when researchers made recordings

levels of em pathy, N i n a Bie n's team at Maastricht

traced to the nerve cells that encoded it"

inhi bition mechanisms that hint at how we can mentally imitate an action without actually

as they performed various tasks. While many neurons

performing it (Cerebral Cortex, vol 19, p 2338), Neverthel ess, some researchers question

also fired when the ani mals saw the researcher

whether mirror systems can take sole responsibil ity

perform the same action, with different groups

for empathy. "Understanding someone else's actions

of mi rror neurons for different actions. Neuroscie ntists have speculated that in people,

and e mpathy a re huge cognitive achieveme nts," says Ceci lia H eyes, a psychologist at the Unive rsity

m i rror ne urons could representthe neural basis of

of Oxford, "So to suggest that there's one discrete

empathy. They could also contribute to i m itation and

neural system responsible for it doesn't make sense,"

learning, and perhaps even language acquisition, It has been hard to find out if people have mirror neurons, but M RI scans have shown that certain

a memory had been

University in the Netherlands recently identified

from mi croe lectrodes placed i n the animals' brains fired when the a n imal performed an action, a subset

"It was the fi rst time

However, Ma rco lacoboni, a neuroscientist at the U n iversity of California, Los Angeles, claims to have seen individual brain cells behaving l i ke

areas of the brain - d u bbed mirror systems - "light

m irror neurons in people, He made his observations

up" when we perform and watch the same acti on,

when someone with epilepsy was u n d ergoing

Numerous studies have shown that people with

exploratory brain surgery to i nvestigate the cause

more activity i n their m i rror syste ms seem to be

of their seizures, The results are due to be publ ished

better at u nderstanding other people's emotions,

this month in

Current Biology. Helen Thomson

3 Ap r i l 2010 1 NewScientist 1 29

H OW MANY STATES O F CONSCIOUSN ESS ARE TH ERE?

YOU might think consciousness is

the cortex - involved i n

Cam bridge di scovered that i t was

Ii ke a light switch, either on or off,

awareness and consciousness -

possible to commun icate with a

But the true picture now seems

was offline, other brain areas

man in a vegetative state - in

rather murkier, chal l enging our

were active, including those

which someone has i ntact

notions of awareness and free

l i nked with emotion,

reflexes and can breathe u naided,

w i l l, as well as raising issues of consent in coma patients, People used to thinkj ust three

but seems comp letely u n aware

exp l ain other weird states of

of their surroundings, By asking

consciousness, I n dreaming

him to visualise playing tennis or

states of consciousness existed,

sleep - also known as REM sleep -

moving around his house as he lay

says Adam Zeman of the

we l i e still because an area of the

in a brain scanner, they were able to e l icit yes or no answers from

Peninsular Medical School i n

brainstem called the pons blocks

Exeter, U K, "You 're either awake

signals to the muscles, Peop l e

him, Such patients are cu r re ntly

or asleep - and if you're asleep

with REM behaviour d isorder lose

treated as unconscious, but if

you're either in dream or non-

this inhibition and physically act

they can understand questions

dream sleep,"

outtheir d reams, The opposite

and com municate, they might be

But brain imaging suggests

condition, known as sleep

able to express opin ions about

there are more, Take sleepwalking,

pa ralysis, occurs if people wake

their treatme nt - and whether

which affects as many as 1 in

up w h i le sti l l unable to move,

or not it should be withdrawn,

20

adu lts, "The sleepwalking brain is literally in a half-awake, half-

Yog a may boost

Similar ove rlaps might

There may also be some

We may not yet know how

hitherto unnoticed stopping-off

many states of consciousness

asleep state," says Zeman,

points in the twi light between

there are, butthe nature of

Researchers once manoeuvred a

consci ousn ess and coma, I n

consciousness is looking

sleepwalker into a brain sca nner,

Feb ruary, a team led by Adrian

increasingly l i ke a ladder rather

and while they saw that much of

Owen atthe University of

than a lightswitch, Linda Geddes

phys i ca l health via

IF YOU'RE unlucky enough to be staying in hospital. try to get a room with a view. You may recover quicker if

the i m m u n e system

you overlook a grove of trees ratherthan a brick wall. The study of the links between mind and body is as old as the practice of medicine. Wise doctors know, for example, to probe the mental state of a patient whose symptoms are hard to explain physically. And we have all heard of cases where a bereavement or divorce seems to have triggered the onset of i l l ness. Yet considering how much we take such links for granted, their mechanisms remain mysterious. Why are some diseases more infl uenced by mental state than others? What's behind the mind-boggling placebo effect? (ould we ever learn to thi nk ourselves well? Many of these effects seem to be mediated by the immune system. Severe stress has been shown to reduce immune cell activity, both in the test tube and in people. There seem to be several ways in which the brain influences the immune system, from chemical mediators to direct neural control. One branch of the vagus nerve connects the brain to a key regulator of immune functioning, says Kevin Tracey of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset,

HOW POWERFUL IS TH E M I N D- BODY CON N ECTION?

30 1 NewScientist 1 3 A p ri l 2010

New York. "Signals that origi nate in the brain travel down the vagus nerve where they change the behaviour of immune cells in the spleen," he says

(Nature, vol 420, p 853). Tracey's team has since found that electrically stimulating the vagus nerve decreases inflammation, a state of immune system high-alert implicated in a large number of d iseases, i ncluding cancer. They suspect there may be other nerve-immune links that have the effect of "turning up" inflammation. If we can't consciously control the immune system, we might at least be able to manipulate it with drugs or perhaps via the vagus nerve. Linda Geddes

AT EINSTEIN's autopsy in 1955, his brain was someth ing of a disappointment: itturned out to be a tad sm aller than the average Joe's. Indeed, later studies have su ggested a mini mal link between brain size and intelligence. It seems brain quality rather than quantity is key. One important factor seems to be how well

WHAT'S THE LI N K BETWEEN CREATIVITY AND M ENTAL I LLN ESS?

our neurons can talk to each other. Martijn van den Heuvel, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University Medical Center in the Netherlan ds, found that smarter brains seem to have more efficient networks between neurons - in other words, it takes fewer steps to relay a message between d ifferent regions of the brain. That could explain about a th ird of the variation in a popu lation's I Q, he says. Another key factor is the insulating fatty sheath encasi ng neuron fibres, which affects the speed of electrical signals. Paul Thompson atthe U n iversity of Cal ifornia, Los Angel es, has found a correlation between IQ and the qual ity of the sheaths (The

Journal of Neuroscience, vol 29, p 2212). We stil l don't know exactly how much genes contribute to intel l igence, with various studies com ing up with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 per cent. This wide range of esti mates m i g ht have arisen because genes contri bute more to IQ as we get older, according to a study published last year. By comparing the intelligence of 11,000 pairs of twins, Robert Plomin of Ki ng's Col lege London found that at age 9, genes explain 40 per cent of the variation, but by 17 they account for roughly two-thirds

(Molecular Psychiatry. 001: lO.l038/mp.2009.55). How could that be? Perhaps the genes affect how our brain rewires itself as we mature. Alternatively, they may dictate whether someone is l i kely to seek out sti mulating experiences to help their brain grow and develop. "If we are predisposed to have a talent we may actively seek out an environment to suit it;' says Thompson. David Robson

WHY ARE SOM E O F US SMARTER THAN OTH ERS? 3 Apri l 2010 1 NewScientist 1 31

SUBCONSCI OUS thought is the b rain's d u m b autopilot - t h e chump b e h i n d repetitive tasks, Fre u dian slips and all the oth er things we do "without thin king". That was certainly the prevailing view in the 20th centu ry, but the subconscious has lately gone u p i n the world. It takes centre stage in creativity, puts the "eureka!" into problem-solving, plays a crucial role in learning and memory, and it's even better at making tough decisions than rational ana lysis is (New Scientist, 1 December 2007, p 42). It was in the 1980s thatthe late neuroscientist Benjamin Libet saw a spark of brain activity 300 m i l l iseconds before subjects consciously chose to twitch a finger. We now know the u n conscious decision happens even earlier. In 2008, John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computati onal Neuroscience i n Berlin, Germany, found brain activity up to 10 seconds before a conscious decision to move (Nature Neuroscience, vol ll, p 543). Stanislas Dehaene, d i rector of the Cognitive Neuroimaging U n it at I N SERM, Fra nce, has elegantly revealed the subtle i nterplay between subconscious

WILL WE EVER B U I LD A SENTIENT MACH I N E?

and conscious thought. In his experim ent, volu nteers saw a word flashed onto a screen, followed almost immediately by a picture, which masks conscious perception of the word. As the ti m e i nterval b etween the two i n creases, the word suddenly pops into consciousness - accompanied by characteristic activity on a brain scan. This usually happened when the interval reached around 50 mill iseconds, but when emotional words such as "love" or "fear" were used, it happened a few mi lliseconds earlier. It is as though the decision about the word's i m portance and attenti on-worthi n ess was taken by the subconscious itself (PLoS Biology, vol 5, e260). Experim ents like these have changed our views about the re lationship b etween conscious and

Givi n g robots humanoid

CHALLENGES don't get much biggerthan

subconscious thought, putting the latter firmly i n

bod ies may help their

tryi ng to create artificial consciousness.

charge. T h i n k of consciousn ess as a spotlig ht, with

m i nds to become more

Some doubt if it can be done - or if it ever

the subconsci ous controlling when to turn it on a n d

l i ke ours too

should. Bolder researchers are not put off,

where to directthe b e a m . "The conscious m i n d is not

though. "We have to consider machine

free;' says Haynes. Whatwe thi n k of as "free will" is

consciousness as a grand challenge, like

actually fou n d i n the subconscious. Kate Doug l as

putting a man on the moon," says Antonio Chell a at the University of Palermo in Italy

H OW POWERFU L IS TH E SU BCONSCI OUS?

and editor of the InternationalJourna} of Machine Consciousness. The journal was launched last year, a sign of the field's growing momentum. Another landmark is the recently developed "Conscale", developed by Raul Arrabales of the Carlos III University of Madrid in Spain to compare the i ntelligence of various software agents - and biological ones too (see diagram, far right). Perhaps the closest a software bot has come so far is IDA, the Intelligent Distribution Agent built in 2003 by Stan Franklin at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. IDA assigns sailors in the US navy to new jobs when they fi nish a tour of duty and has to juggle naval policies, job requirements, changing costs and sai lors' needs. Like people, IDA has "conscious" and "unconscious" levels of processing. At the unconscious level she deploys software

32 1 NewScientist 1 3 April 2010

B ra i ny bats

The Conscale i s a rating tool that compares the intelli gence of different software programs, as well as that of h u mans and other creatures

Level l

Decontro l led Like a dead bacteri um. Presence of sensors and actuators but

ELIZA The first AI "chatterbot",

ELIZA uses simple strategies to sound intelligent, mainly

no connections

r e phrasin g messages that a

between them

human types into it. Some

Level

people who converse with

2 ------1 her find i t h ard to believe

Reactive

she isn't human

Like a virus. Primitive fixed responses to its environment

Level 3

U n real Tournament Bot

------1 To test Conscale, creator Raul

Adaptive Like a 1- month-old baby or an earthworm. Basic learning ability and sensing allow

Arrabales devised software to play the shoot -e m -up video game

Unreol Tournoment.

The bot can shoot at enemies and run away when chased

positioning beh aVi our

Level 4 Attenti onal Like a 5-m onth-old infant or a fish. D i rects attention to selected environm ental cues to alter be hav i o u r

Level S

Execut ive

I DA I ntel l i gent Distribution Agent. Built to assign US sailors to

new jobs when they finish a tour of duty, IDA juggles numerous conflicting

r e q u i re me nts by employing

both "unconscious" and "conscious" levels of

processi n g

Like a 9-m onth-old

agents to gather data and process

Along with an internal model. the robot

I

infant or a quadruped ma mmal. Can achieve

S I M I N OS/CRO NOS SIMI NOS is software that

information. These agents compete to enter

developed by Owen Holland's team atthe

multiple g oals

IDA's "conscious" workspace, where they

University of Sussex, UK, is also anatomically

Level 6

interact with each other and decisions get

human-like. "A robot with a body that is very

made. The updated Learning IDA, or LlDA,

close to a human's wi ll develop cognition that

Emotio nal Like a 1 -year-old

"imagined" self-image of

was completed this year. She learns from

is closer to the human variety," Owen claims.

child or a m onkey.

CRONOS, its humanoid

what reaches her consciousness and uses

None of these approaches solve what

Has backg round

robotic body

emotions that

this to guide future decisions. LlDA also

many consider to be the "hard problem" of

influence behaviour

has the benefit of "emotions" - high-level

consciousness: subjective awareness. No one

goals that guide her decision-making. Another advance emerged from designing

yet knows how to design the software for that. But as machines grow in sophistication,

Level 7

robots able to maintain their function after

the hard problem may simply evaporate -

being damaged. In 2006, Josh Bongard at the

either because awareness emerges

University of Vermont in Burlington designed

spontaneously or because we will simply

a walki ng robot with a continuously updated

assume it has emerged without knowing

internal model of itself. If damaged, this self­

for sure. After all, when it comes to other

Self-consci ous Like a l.5-year-old

Distribution Agent. An enhanced version of I DA,

make advanced plans

Level 8

Can make tools

Level 9

taking the robot closer to self-awareness.

While we may never know for sure if a machine is experiencing consciousness or

"You cannot prove that you're not the only self­ aware person in a world of unaware zombies"

only appears to, build ing such a machine would revol utionise our understanding of the brain. "My real goal is to figure out how minds work," says Frankl in. "You really don't

and "emotions" that bias

decisi o n- m a kin g

Empathic

humans, we can only assume they have

individual in a world of unaware "zombies".

with learning capabilities

Like a 2-year-old

subjective awareness too. We have no way of proving we are not the only self-aware

Learning Intelligent

Can use tools and

gait using its remaining abilities. Having an internal "imagined" model of ourselves is

L l DA

child or a m onkey.

knowledge allows it to devise an alternative

considered a key part of human sentience,

maintains an internal

child or a chi mpanzee.

Social Like a 4-year-old child. Has linguistic capa bil ities and advanced theory of mind

Level lO

Huma n - l i ke

know how something works until you can

Similar to a n

build it." Celeste B iever .

adult human

3 Apri l 2010 I NewScientist 1 33

34 1 NewSci entist 1 3 April 2D10

/

no

r ver

Ca rs that d rive themselves are safer, cleaner and make better use of precious road space - so whafs stopping us, asks Nic Fleming

W

ITH his jeans, white trainers and stripy top, Bob is every inch the well­ dressed 6-year-old. He's standing in the middle ofa hotel car park and, scarily, I'm driving straight at him. Instead of hitting the brakes, I put my foot down on the accelerator. With just 10 metres to go, a row of red lights flashes across my windscreen and there's an urgent, high-pitched beeping sound. An instant later, I am jerked forward as the brakes slam on automatically and the car screeches to a halt just short of Bob' s stomach. This is what Bob is for. The child-sized dummy has just helped me test the first in-car system that can sense an imminent collision with pedestrians and brake automatically if the driver doesn't. It is being put through final

"By about 2020 drivers w i l l be able to take their hands off the wheel completely"

trials before being launched in May by Swedish car maker Volvo in its new S60 model. The Volvo system is the latest in a line of developments made possible by sophisticated sensors based on cameras, radar and lasers. These sensors already provide drivers with adaptive cruise control, which alters a car's speed to maintain a safe distance from the vehicle in front, as well as technology such as semi-autonomous parking systems. Yet according to Jonas Ekmark, a researcher at Volvo near Gothenburg, this is just the start. Ekmark says we are now entering an era in which vehicles will also gather real-time information about the weather and highway hazards, using this to improve fuel efficiency and make life less stressful for the driver and safer for all road users. "Our long-term goal is the collision-free traffic system," says Ekmark. Ultimately, that means bypassing the fallible humans behind the wheel - by building cars that drive themselves. Alan Taub, vice-president for R&D at General Motors, expects to see semi-autonomous vehicles on the highway by 2015. They will need a driver to handle busy city streets or negotiate complex junctions, but once on the highway they will be able to steer, accelerate and avoid collisions unaided. A few years on, he predicts, drivers will be able to take their hands off the wheel completely: "I see the potential for launching fully autonomous vehicles by 2020." Road traffic accidents kill about 37,000 people a year in the US and 39,000 in Europe, with driver error a contributing factor in over 90 per cent of them. But a glimpse ofa safer

future has come from a trial, completed in Sweden in 2008, of the Slippery Road Information System (SRIS). The system used sensors and computers installed in 100 cars to gather information on the use of brakes, fog lights, windscreen wipers and electronic stability systems, as well as local weather conditions. Unlike the Volvo system, in which each car uses only information from its own sensors, the cars in the SRIS trial beamed the data they gathered to a central database every 5 minutes. The study suggested that this pooled data could give drivers a far more accurate picture of road conditions than local weather stations can. Researchers still have to find the best way to merge this information and broadcast it back to drivers. Nevertheless, the study concluded that networks such as SRIS could improve safety and save lives. A more sophisticated system involving shared data is being deployed in Japan this year. The country has become a world leader in the field thanks to the government's decision to fund a network of infrared, microwave and radio transmitters at the roadside. Around 2 million vehicles on Ja panese roads can already pick up news on congestion, roadworks, accidents, weather, speed limits and parking availability from these transmitters, broadcasting as part ofthe Vehicle Information and Communication System (VIC S). Over the next few months, cameras and sensors positioned around 20 major intersections in Tokyo and Kanagawa prefecture will begin alerting drivers of cars with VICS receivers to potential hazards > 3 April 2010 I NewScientist 1 35

such as vehicles attempting to merge into their lane, or traffic crossing an intersection ahead. The new Driving Safety Support System (DSSS), as the set-up is called, can also show alerts on satnav displays warning of traffic lights, stop signs and even pedestrians and cyclists on the road ahead. It will be in use at major intersections nationwide by the middle of 2011. By that time, a similar system designed to operate on major Japanese highways should have been running for a year. Called Smartway, it issues a warning when the driver gets too close to the vehicle in front, when vehicles are converging from the side, and when there is congestion ahead. Some new vehicles from Nissan, Toyota and other car makers are already equipped to use DSSS or Smartway. Older cars can access these systems too if their receivers and satnav displays are upgraded. From here it is just a small step - in technological terms, at least - to allowing cars to be controlled automatically.

journey. Called SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), it envisages up to eight cars as little as a metre apart driving in convoy, controlled by a lead vehicle operated by a professional driver. Ordinary drivers will book a place in convoys operating along major roads. As they approach the convoy, they will hand over control oftheir carto software on the lead vehicle. From then on, its steering, acceleration and braking are controlled by an on-board computer that uses data sent wirelessly from the lead vehicle, along with information from cameras and radar and laser detectors on the front and rear of the car itself. Drivers will be able work, read, watch films or even sleep while their cars are driven for them. " It will be like sitting on a bus or a train," says Ekmark. But when the convoy nears an exit at which drivers wish to leave, they can resume control and continue their journey. As well as being protected against collisions, cars in a convoy use less fuel than when they are travelling separately, and they take up less Calling all cars road space. At highway cruising speeds, In Europe and the US, vehicle manufacturers aerodynamic drag can be reduced by as much as 60 per cent when vehicles are separated by see direct vehicle-to-vehicle communication less than one car length. Overall, convoys are as a simpler and cheaper solution than predicted to cut fuel use and carbon emissions building elaborate roadside infrastructure. Their plans envisage using Wi-Fi links between by up to 40 per cent. vehicles to form ad hoc, reconfigurable Unlike a previous generation of car trains networks that will share information on road developed at the University of California, conditions, local weather and traffic accidents. Berkeley, during the 1990s, SARTRE convoys The most ambitious of these projects, a will run on public roads alongside ordinary traffic. The Berkeley project failed to get off collaboration between seven European the ground because it required specially built manufacturers and universities, aims to harness vehicle-to-vehicle networks to make roads, making the concept prohibitively the driver redundant, at least for part of the expensive. Ifthis year's trials of SARTRE

planned for test tracks in Sweden and the UK are successful, a full demonstration­ consisting of a lead truck followed by another truck and three cars - is planned for public roads in Spain towards the end Of2011. Before that can happen, however, the SARTRE consortium must work out how a convoy will interact with other road users. For instance, will it have to break up when overtaking, and then reform once all its members have passed the slower vehicle ? The long journey towards cars that will drive themselves began in 1971 with anti-lock brakes. "That was the first time we introduced the overriding of driver input," says Taub. Another step along the road came with electronic stability control, which governs

Self- d rivi n g cars

Sensors and computer chips are already used to control the steering and brakes on some cars. Soon itwill be

possible to put cars on the road that have little need for a driver

• Vehicle to i nf rastructure network

• Camera

• Adaptive cruise control

Roadside transmitters collate data on hazards

and broadcast information to all vehicles

Recognises road sig ns,

Radar data fed to controller that

o pe rates accelerator and brakes

and alerts driver to speed

I im it or potential dan ge rs

to ma i nta in constant separation and speed

Lane assistance Camera picks out white lines. Brakes adjusted on each side of vehicle independently to keep vehicle in lane

36 1 NewScientist 1 3 Apri l 2010

• Driver a lerts

V ib rati n g stee ring wheel alerts

qu i red

driver when attenti on re

• Col l ision Prevention system Forward- looking laser or radar

a pplie s b ra kes whe n colli sio n is li kely

EARLY ADOPTERS

Networked cars can warn d rivers of an i m pend i ng col l ision

Who wants to pay to be first with a

European Cooperative Vehicle-

technology that only works when lots

Infrastructure Systems (CVIS)

of other people already have it? That

consortium showed off its universal

is l i kely to be the big problemfacing

communications system. This allows

car-to-car networks once the technical

vehicles to swap information with

questions have been sorted out.

each other and with networks using

One way to minimise this problem

3G, GSM, infrared or wireless

is to make the equipment cheap to

protocols, and to switch seamlessly

retrofit i nto existing vehicles. General Motors has demonstrated a system

between these modes. CVIS is

called V2V, which costs less than

them create services to run on its

$200to install. It uses GPSand Wi-Fi

open-architecture platform.

to warn drivers of hazards such as vehicles in blind spots. Others see the cell phone network

providing developers with kits to help

Later this year CVIS plans to unveil an in-car touchscreen applications unit. CVIS coordinator Paul Kompfner

as the key. Cel l phone operator Orange

envisages a smartphone-like interface

is one of six UK organisations in a

that will offer drivers a range of apps

partnership called Sentience, which is

depending on their location. One app

developing a low-cost system based

under development communicates

on G PS-enabled smartphones. The

with traffic-light control systems and

system acquires and combines

tells drivers what speed they should

information from topographical maps

travel atto pass without hitting red.

and traffic data in order to control a vehicle's brakes and accelerator. In

Another app, to be tested later this year in Poland and the

Netherlands, allows trucks to take tests, the Sentience system reduced brakes, steering and throttle to prevent cars priority by controlling traffic lights fuel consumption by up to 24 per cent going off the road in an uncontrollable skid. as they get near. "If you give priority over that of a car driven normally. Top-of-the range cars are increasingly being Another approach was highlighted fitted not only with ada ptive cruise control to trucks it is not just the trucks that gain - overall traffic efficiency and but also with lane assistance, which gently at the Cooperative Mobility flow are improved," says project conference in Amsterdam, the a pplies the brakes to keep cars from straying manager Zeljko jeftic. Netherlands, in March, when the out of lane. Taub expects these systems to start a ppearing on cheaper models over the next few years. "We still have the driver in the loop control radar and laser sensors, allowing it to with eyes on the road, hands on the wheel, that are already fitted in production vehicles, navigate a parking lot, spot an empty space feet on the pedals," he points out. "But but the computing power it uses to handle and park perfectly, with or without a driver. increasingly the vehicle will be steering and all the data is a different matter. It currently requires the equivalent of 10 desktop Manoeuvring at low speed is one thing, but accelerating on its own." What fully autonomous vehicles will be like computers, and miniaturising the electronics are we ready to hand over control on the open is hinted at by an experimental car called Boss. so that it can be hidden away in a normal-sized road? How would you feel about being at the mercy of a machine barrelling along the Built by a team of engineering students at car remains a challenge. Another task will be highway at 100 kilometres per hour or more, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and backed by General Motors, "Automated manoeuvring at with your family in the back and you merely a passenger at the wheel? Confidence in the this robotic car scooped a $2 million prize by reliability of electronic drive-by-wire controls outperforming 10 other autonomous vehicles low speed is one thing, but took a knock in January when Toyota had to in a simulated urban environment created for are we ready to hand over recall millions of its vehicles. A few accidents the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. To win, involving autonomous vehicles could set the Boss had to execute complex manoeuvres such control on the open road? " whole idea back years. as merging into flowing traffic, overtaking, Though advances in communications and to develop the interfaces between car and parking and negotiating intersections, while connectivity have transformed our world, it is interacting with other autonomous vehicles driver and find simple ways to switch control still not easy to envisage a highway network from manual to automatic and back again. and 30 human-driven ones. Boss's computer builds a model of the populated by cars that drive themselves more Taub predicts that by about 2020 vehicles safely than any human can. Yet ifEkmark and immediate environment by processing data like Boss will start to appear on public roads; Taub are right, the next generation of vehicles drivers will be able to disengage totally and from radar, laser sensors, cameras and GPS. It then uses this model, along with information hand control over to the car. "You'll see a will be able to do just that. The real question such as local traffic rules, to plan the best route progression of subsystems, with costs coming may be whether we will have the nerve to take our hands off the wheel and let the machines down and increased robustness," he says. and provide the situational awareness the take over. • vehicle needs for manoeuvres such as At Stanford University in California, the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab has changing lanes safely, or to determine shown what might be possible. VAIL engineers Nic Fleming is a science and technology writer whether it has priority at an intersection. based in London Boss uses sensors and other components have fitted a VW Passat with cameras, cruise

3 April 2010 1 NewSci entist 1 37

38 1 NewScientist 1 3 April Z010

I

T IS the best oftimes and the worst oftimes for lunar scientists. "We've got a revolution going on in our understanding of the lunar surface," says Rick Elphic ofNASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Three recent missions have found an unexpectedly large supply of water on the moon that could both quench the thirst of future lunar dwellers and prod uce fuel for missions to other places in the solar system. Yet the prospect of astronauts getting there any time soon is receding fast. In February, President Barack Obama announced his intention to cancel NASA's Constellation programme, which included plans to get astronauts back to the moon by the early 2020s. His decision leaves the US without a reliable means of transport to low Earth orbit, let alone the moon. Even so, the 2010S are shaping upto be a boom time for lunar science. The Obama administration's plans give strong financial support to robotic exploration of the solar system, including the moon. NASA already has four robotic missions in the works, designed to explore the moon's atmosphere, gravity and seismology. And one of the three finalists to be NASA's next medium-sized mission is a robot called MoonRise, which would land in the vast South Pole-Aitken basin, dig up soil sam pies and return them to Earth. China and India, too, are planning follow-ups to their successful Chang'e and Chandrayaan orbiters, and Russia and Germany have missions in development. What has reinvigorated lunar science most of all are the discoveries of water made last year by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), as well as India's Chandrayaan-l. "Not only is there water on the moon," says Carle Pieters, the chief scientist for the Moon Mineralogy Mapper on Chandrayaan-1, "but there are three different kinds of water."

Pieters is referring to the discovery in 2008 of trace amounts ofwater in volcanic glasses from deep in the moon's interior, surface water detected by Chandrayaan-1, and buried water at the poles dug up by LCROSS. "They are all different, and they all have different sources and implications," she says. "This is not your father's moon," says Greg Delory, a space scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could be a very dynamic and interesting one." Support for a wet moon has ebbed and flowed throughout history. After Galileo's telescope proved in the early 1600s that the moon was another world, it was widely assumed it had water. The moon's dark blotches were named " maria", Latin for " seas".

"The moon is far from a dead and unchanging world" Yet by the end of the 17th century the evidence was already beginning to point towards a dry moon. More powerful telescopes discerned craters within the maria, which would not be visible ifthey were indeed oceans. Fast forward to 1969, and the consensus had swung firmly in favour of an arid moon. The two Apollo 11 astronauts who landed on one of those so-called seas found it to be a dry lava plain. Back on Earth, the Apollo rock and soil samples were pronounced "dry as a bone". In fact, they were a great deal drier, because living bone is never less than 10 per cent water by weight. But even then, there were cracks in the orthodoxy. Lunar soil contains hydrogen ions carried from the sun by the solar wind. Constantly bombarding the moon, these ions

can knock atoms loose from rocks, creating a plethora of oxygen atoms with dangling bonds. This could mean that hydrogen ions might attach to the oxygen to form hydrated minerals, hydroxyl ions (OR) or water (HP), one ion or molecule at a time. Everett Gibson of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, found evidence that this was more than a theory. In 1977, he showed that the Apollo rocks released water and hydroxyl when heated. Nevertheless, he failed to change the conventional wisdom that moon rocks were dry. There was a possibility that the samples had been contaminated by the supposedly dry nitrogen they were stored in on Earth. "The 'dry' nitrogen had about 20 parts per million of water," says Larry Taylor, who studies lunar rocks at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Alternatively, heating could have caused the hydrogen implanted by the solar wind to react with iron oxides in the rock, so that the water was actually formed in Gibson's lab, not on the moon. Around the same time, James Arnold ofthe University of California, San Diego, suggested looking for water near the lunar poles, which were not visited by Apollo. Because the moon's poles receive only grazing sunlight throughout the year, Arnold pointed out that the base of a deep crater near a lunar pole would never see any light. Such craters could act as "cold traps" forwater or any other volatile compounds in the tenuous lunar atmosphere. Taylor compares the cold traps to a glass of ice tea on a summer day: "You can sit there and watch it gather all the moisture out ofthe air, and start dripping water. That's what the poles are doing." It took 15 years before the "ice tea" theory was tested. In 1994, radio telescopes on Earth picked up radar waves bounced off the moon's surface by a satellite called Clementine. The results were tantalisingly inconclusive. Clementine got only one good look at the > 3 April 2010 1 NewScientist 1 39

Gas station in the sky south pole and while the radar did pick up what looked like the signature of water ice, the same type of signal could have been produced by the roughness of the lunar surface. In 1998, Lunar Prospector orbited the moon carrying a neutron spectrometer, an instrument widely used in oil-prospecting to look for water and hydrocarbons. It measures the amount of hydrogen present, which is a plausible proxy for the amount ofwater. Lunar Prospector definitely saw hydrogen ­ enough that the soil could contain 1.5 per cent water by weight. Of course, that depends on whetheryou believe the assumption that water accounts for the hydrogen. The hydrogen atoms could instead be unattached, or be present thanks to other hydrogen­ bearing compounds such as methane or ammonia. Also, Lunar Prospector could not resolve features smaller than 50 kilometres, so it could not tell whether the putative water was indeed concentrated in the permanently shadowed craters or spread out uniformly.

Lunar water and other volatiles

concrete, build a shelter against

will be essential ingred ients for

cosmic rays and grow plants.

month, Spudis estimated that there are 600 million tonnes of

any sustained human presence

For us to thrive on the

water in the moon's north polar

in space - if that presence

moon, water and volatiles are

region, which would be enough

ever materialises.

even more crucial. As Taylor

to launch one space shuttle a

says: "The moon is a gas station

day for 2000 years. While that's

and Planetary Institute i n

Paul Spudis of the Lunar

i n the sky." The economic value

a cute factoid, not all the water

Houston, Texas, d ivides space

of water - not to mention the

will be easy to extract. Spudis's

exploration into three stages:

frozen methane that was also

radar instrument on

"Arrive, survive and thrive."

detected by LCROSS - is as a

Chandrayaan found evidence

We have already arrived at the

propellantfor interplanetary

of water i n 40 different small

moon, thanks to Apollo. To survive, we don't necessarily

travel. The water can be converted for use as fuel by

craters near the north pole, with the best examples on the

need lunar water. "You can take

separating it into oxygen and

floors of the Peary and

your waterwith you and

hydrogen, while the methane

Rozhdestvensky craters. All of

recycle," says Taylor. But the

is useful as it is. Both of these

them do have permanently

availability of water makes

substances would be more

shadowed regions, but the

survival much easier, because it frees future astronauts from

expensive than gold if they had

presumed water deposits

to be brought from Earth; far

extend outside ofthe shadow.

umbilical dependence on Earth.

cheaper to mine them on the

Other nearby craters that look

With locally produced water,

moon, if at all possible.

simi lar do not have water

they can dri nk, create a

At the Lunar and Planetary

breathable atmosphere, make

Sciences conference last

deposits for reasons that are still unclear.

Lunar dew The real test would be to land on the lunar surface and dig up a sample of the soil. Lunar Prospector did the next best thing: it crash-landed near the lunar south pole in 1999. Mission controllers had hoped to blast enough water from the moon to be able to detect it from Earth -but none was seen. A similar attempt with a European Space Agency probe called SMART-1 in 2006 also failed to detect any signs of ice. Either the water didn't exist, or the two spacecraft were too small, hit the moon too glancing a blow, or simply hit the wrong places. The stage was now set for two discoveries that would radically change our picture of the moon. In October 2008, India launched Chandrayaan-1, equipped with an imaging

spectrometer, an instrument which had never gone to the moon before. It allows us to determine exactly which chemicals occur at which pixels in an image. Soon after Chandrayaan-1 began ma pping the moon, Pieters and her team realised that they were seeing large areas of hydroxyl and water. At first they couldn't believe their results, but team member Roger Clark remembered seeing something similarwhen he worked on the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons. Cassini also carries an imaging spectrometer. Like an athlete going through practice workouts before the real com petition, Cassini trained its spectrometer on the moon during a fly-by in 1999.

During a team discussion last year, Clark mentioned Cassini picking up hydroxyl and water on the moon. Then Jessica Sunshine, a Chandrayaan-1 team member who was also working on the Deep Impact m ission to visit comets, spoke up. " Deep 1mpact is going by the moon in June, so I'll be able to tell you what it sees." It also carries an imaging spectrometer. Sure enough, Deep Impact confirmed the Cassini and Chandrayaan-1 measurements. "Both of those instruments really helped us understand what was occurring there," says Pieters. In fact, Deep Impact added a new piece of information: the water and hydroxyl seem to disappear during the lunar day, only to reappear at sundown and sunrise,

Ti m e l i ne of l u n a r wate r Many missions have searched for water on the moon, with mixed results

• Apo ll o soil samples N o water

Lunar Prospector

but failed to throw up

imaging spectrometer

ice on impact near

Large areas of water

Possible water ice

south pole in

at south pole

I 1990

Cassini-Huygens

Clementine radar

I

1 999

40 1 NewScientist 1 3 Apri l 2010

SMART-1 i mpactor

� and hyd roxyl

�� . 1995

Deep I mpact

imaging spectrometer

Lunar dew

Large areas of water

Saw 1.5 per cent

water byweight in soil,

Ch a nd ray aa n- l

I 2000

LCROSS-LRO

and hydroxyl

At least 1 per cent

Apo l l o soil reanalysed

water ice at south pole Other volatiles

� �� 200S

2010

like dew. This "dew" is, however, only a few Wate r, wate r eve ryw h e re molecules deep, so the lunar soil is still The latest lunar map made by the Chandrayaan drierthan the driest desert on Earth. spacecraft shows water and hydroxyl are spread The discovery of mobile surface waterwas more extensively than anyone thought so unexpected that scientists are still debating where it comes from. One possibility is that individual molecules are created by the solar wind and hop around the lunar surface for a while, until they either get caught in a cold trap or escape out to space. Lunar scientists received another jolt when LCROSS crashed into a crater called Cabeus last October. LCROSS was designed to do what Lunar Prospector and SMART-1 could not. It walloped the moon head-on with a spent rocket engine the size of a large van, followed by a "shepherding satellite" that observed the impact from directly overhead before it, too, crashed into the moon 4 minutes later. It had the best possible vantage point for seeing whether the debris contained water. In choosing to switch the impact site to Cabeus, LCROSS's lead scientist Tony Colaprete had gone for a very deep crater with a very high ridge on its edge, which effectively blocked astronomers'view ofthe impact from Earth. It was a calculated gamble. From earlier satellite observations, Cabeus appeared to have the highest concentrations of water, and Colaprete was betting that the shepherding satellite would be able to see it without any help from Earth-based telescopes. "When Tony told us he was changing the excavated material was water ice, perhaps as lim pact1 site, we honestly thought we were much as several percent. To put it in simpler screwed," says Pete Schultz, a member ofthe terms, the LCROSS impact site was damper LCROSS team. Indeed, from Earth the impact than the driest desert on Earth. did at first seem to be a dud, but within days But the biggest surprise was an abundance the team knew they had hit a water-rich site. The spectra showed clear signs ofwater, and of other stuff in the debris plume, especially the team voted to go public with their findings volatile compounds like carbon dioxide, ammonia, sulphur dioxide, methane and in November, a month ahead of schedule. It is now certain that at least 1 per cent of the ethylene. "Maybe we can distil alcohol and make a little moonshine!" jokes Jack Bums at the University of Colorado, Boulder. While water can be created on the moon by the solar wind, these other compounds cannot. If they are present in Cabeus, it is likely that they came from an outside source - a meteoroid o r cometary impact. That could mean that localised deposits are far richer in water than the solar wind theory predicts. Since November, LCROSS's sister spacecraft, LRO, has continued to gather information. One of its instruments, Diviner, has measured the lunar temperature from orbit. Instead of guessing where cold traps a re likely to be on the basis of solar illumination maps, we can now measure where they are.

In many cases, they extend beyond the range of permanent shadow. Diviner has also found that the shadowed regions themselves are colder than anyone expected. In fact, some of them are even colder than Pluto, where temperatures of 30 to 40 kelvin are typical. Meanwhile, LRO's neutron spectrometer, called LEND, is refining Lunar Prospector's maps of hydrogen deposits. Already LEND has obtained results that are sharply at variance with the ice tea theory, identifying regions that are potentially as hydrogen­ rich as Cabeus but are not located anywhere near a permanently shadowed crater. It will take time for researchers to assimilate these results, determine how reliable they are, and develop new hypotheses to account for them. The discovery of water raises all sorts of scientific questions, which inevitably morph into questions about resource extraction. Clive Neal, chair of NASA's Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, checks off a few of them: "Where does the water come from? How long has it been there? How much is there? What form is it in? Is it a sheet, or is it patchy? What are the complications of extracting it from an environment that is around 30 or 35 kelvin? How much is it going to cosU" The best way to answer these questions, most lunar scientists agree, is to send robotic landers to the moon. Ideally, they would be rovers, like the ones that have been so successful on Mars. A rover could carry a neutron spectrometer, for instance, as a high­ tech dowser for subsurface water. Here the interests of science dovetail nicely with the proposed NASA budget, which includes a $3.2 billion programme of "robotic precursor missions". Though these will probably have various destinations, it is a good bet that one of the first will be the moon. Because the moon is only 1.3 light seconds away, scientists on Earth could operate a robot in near-real time - a distinct advantage when compared with the way the Mars rovers are controlled. Given the scarcity of money and the uncertainties of politics, it is still unclear how to get from here to a sustainable human presence on the moon. For the next 10 or 20 years, the only Earth creatures on the moon will have silicon brains. However, the year 2009 may well go down in history as the year we struck water on the moon. • Dana M ackenzie is a science writer based in Santa Cruz, California. You can read his blog at danamackenzie.com/moon/

3 April 2010 1 NewScientist 1 41

BOOKS & ARTS By Aikon for New Scientist

The nuts and bolts of creativity

FROM afar this image could be a

regions, subconsciously working out

Yeshiva University in New York have

creativity, But can creativity be

photograph of Stephen Hawking, Zoom

how to recreate those regions with his

fou n d thata person'seyes move in a

programmed? And is the work of a machine really a rt?

closer and you can see it's a pretty good

hand, The way his wristflexesand the

much more precise manner when

sketch, the kind a street artist m i ght

pressu re he applies to his pen lend the

drawing a n objectthan when sim ply

rustle up for tourists, Yet this is notthe

sketch his own particularstyle, The team

looking at it. Meanwhile, d ifferences i n

and the observer asit is about technique," says Leymarie, "A difficult

work of any h u man hand but of a robot. The Ai kon robot was created by Frederic Fol Leymarie and Patrick Tresset, computer sci entists at

"Art isas much aboutthe concept

has devised an algorithm that allows

the cognitive processes used by artists

the robot toa pproximateth ese steps

and n on - arti sts are being i nvestigated

question remains: can a machine

once its camera has detected a face,

atCamberwel1 Col leg e of Arts in London

recognise art?" One of the team's long­

using functional M R I brain scans, "[Our]

term goals i s to have Aikon develop its

Aikon completes its sketches in one

Goldsm iths, University of London,

go, but Leymarie says that feedback

focus of attentio n is very im portant

own critical sense and decide whether

It attempts to recreate the thought

mechanisms will be builti nto future

when we draw;' says Tresset. "We hope

to keep orerase its own pen strokes,

process thatTresset, a former

models to al lowthe robot to modify a

to incorporate recent research results

S a ndrine Ceu rste m o nt •

draughtsman, unconsciously moves

sketch as it draws, asa human would,

i nto the robot i n the nexttwoyears,"

through when drawing someone's

Research in visual percepti on is

The team hopes that by tweaking

For the chance to have Ai kon draw

face, First, Tresset identifies the face's

m ov i n g fast and should help make

their software theywill gradually reveal

you, enter your details on the Culture

orie ntation a n d looks for shaded

Aikon more sophisticated, A team at

the fundamental components of

Lab contact page, bit.ly/9xUozR

42 1 NewScientist 1 3 Apri l 2010

For more reviews and to add your comments, visit www.NewScientist.com/books·art

Six legs good An enterta i n i n g , if u n us u a l, expl oration of o u r relationsh i p with i nsects artwork documents deformity in insects collected near nuclear Pantheon Books, $29,95 power plants. She cites this as Reviewed by Claire A i nsworth evidence that much lower levels of radioactivity can trigger cell INSECTOPEDIA damage than mainstream science is an eclectic allows and says her ideas have collection of INSECT" 26 essays and been unfairly rejected by the OP E DIl\ vignettes about scientific establishment. Raffles 1DJ�"-Im{� insects and our accepts her assertions at face relationship with value and offers no significant analysis of why scientists might them. As a mix have objections to her methods. of travel writing, cultural observation and history, this is a In later cha pters, he talks about fine piece of work. Unfortunately, the limitations of scientific it has several shortcomings as a methods and the merits of using popular science book. art and subjective experience as a means to achieving knowledge. The essays are a rranged al phabetically, encyclopedia-style. Science should be open to critique from the humanities, It gets off to a great start with but Raffles's caricature of the "Air", an awe-inspiring account scientific method as entirely of the thousands of airborne insects that drift overhead each elitist, restrictive and reductionist is blinkered. He arrives at this day. However, things take a turn for the worse in cha pter C with viewpoint from the argument that all routes to knowledge, "Chernobyl", a profile of from science to mysticism, are entomological artist Cornelia equally valid. Ifyou share this Hesse-Honegger, who in her fnsectopedia by Hugh Raffles,

view, your only problem will be tripping over the humanities jargon. Ifyou reject it, you might be tempted to snap the book shut in frustration. This is a shame, because when Raffles moves on to our relationship with insects he shines. His account of Chinese cricket­ fighting, for example, is vivid and fascinating. Raffles transports us to modern-day Shanghai, where the art of cricket selection and training is still based on principles outlined in the 13th-century Book ojCrickets. In underground gambling dens, trainers imbue their duelling crickets with ancient warrior ideals of honour, while at the same time exchanging wads of cash. Raffles also examines our contrary attitude to insects. Why are we happy to marvel at dead specimens in museums, but recoil when we see living ones? We share a lot of our genes with insects, so why do we feel so little compunction about killing them? Shortcomings aside, this book will challenge your view of insects and make you see these wonderful creatures from a new perspective.

be a science of decision-making because the world is too complex, he appears to brush aside one of the hottest research a reas in psychology. Complexity is not immune to analysis. Kay writes engagingly and covers much ground, including the fallacy behind Le Corbusier's modernist urban planning and the flaws in financial risk models. But the more relentlessly he attempts to tie it all to a grand new theory, the more improbable it feels.

Bad behaviour On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary tales fram the front lines of science by David Goodstein, Princeton, $22,95 Reviewed by Jonath a n Beard

A TEXTBOOK on scientific ethics that begins with a primer on inductive reasoning and ends with university "----' guidelines for research conduct sounds dull, but David Goodstein has created an entertaining book studded with laugh-out-Ioud moments. After a careful explanation Approach ind irectly of what fraud is, and what it is not, he provides several case Obfiquityby John Kay, studies of both. The most Profile Books, E9,99 interesting concerns cold fusion, Reviewed by Michael Bond which he shows to have been bad -- THE message in science- but not fraud, because O�Ii�U" r John Kay's book is there was no deceit. His second . Il simple: you are study is of high-temperature Joh t;�r 1 J:t more likely to superconductivity, which was I ""\. IY achieve happiness, also not fraudulent, even though wealth and other it violated established beliefs :.�:�... goals by pursuing in physics and cannot be them indirectly. In completely explained. other words, it is better to focus on Goodstein provides several examples of out-and-out deceit the steps along the way than on what you hope to gain at the end. as well. The fascinating aspect Unfortunately this is not the to their stories is the epilogues: "brilliant new idea" his publishers some convicted fraudsters disappear from science, but one would have us believe, but rather an overstated attempt to rally has gone on to head a prestigious well-tried notions of behaviour institute. Goodstein's candour behind a fresh theme. It is also and humour make this book often misplaced. For example, a delight to read, and he's very in declaring that there can never good at explaining physics, too. _ _ _

j

___��_

3 April 2010 1 NewScientist 1 43

NewScientist Jobs

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BIOLOGY

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tissue/tumor resource covering

Monsanto Company is hiring a Field

cancer and mu lti p le other diseases,

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motivated individual who is excited

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genetic network modeling for gene

motivated individual to join our

a n d crop p rotection chemicals,

function prediction,

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is seeking a Ph D toxicologistto

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Th is team is responsi ble for a

join the Toxicology Team in its

broad setof activities including

Regulatory Product Safety Center,

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and characterization of the proteins in the company's products,

Chemistry Regulatory Affairs Manager (001D4)

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Monsanto

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MO - M issouri The Chem istry Regu latory Affairs Team is seeking a Regu latory Affairs Manage r w h o will work with a cross-functional team to bu ild regulatory approval strategies, data

Associate Professor or Professor - Anatomic Patholog ist - Alabama Un ivers i ty of Al a ba ma at

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Computational ADME (R6R7) Pfizer U S CA - Californ ia This role will be responsi ble for innovating new in sil ico/

Assistant Professor - Anatomic Patholog ist Alabama

computational methods, models, and strategies to improve the understanding of structure-ADME-

U n iversity of Alabama at

property relationships (QPKSAR)

B irmingham (UAB), Department

across PDM,

of Pathol ogy AL - Alabama

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and submission packages to obtain and maintain global approva l s for

Birm in g ha m (UAB), Department

UAB i s seeking a j u n ior level.

of Patho logy

non-tenure earning, Anatomic

Monsanto's chemical pesticide

AL - Alabama

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products,

UAB is seeking a senior level,

who has successfully com pleted

Computational Biolog ist

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tenured ortenure eaming,

his/her residency and who is

Genentech

Anatomic Pathologist faculty

interested in developing a research

CA - Californ ia

1400741198

member [Associate Professor

program in the translational

A programmer/analyst with strong

or Professor] to assume

research of epithelial cancer and/or

computational ski lls is wanted

responsibilities as the head of a

tissue resources,

to work on high throughput

Field Agronomist (OOlBY)

function ing laboratory focused on

Monsanto

translational research in cancer and

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IL - I l l inois

to lead an extensive NIH -funded

1400740458

process and develop analy sis

44 1 NewScientist 1 3 April ZD10

sequence data and data integration,

www.NewScientistJobs.com

Genome Atlas project, the ENCODE

Ph.D Investigator: Oncology Biotherapeutics

project and the modENCODE

N ovartis I n stitutes for

projects,

BioMed ical Research (US)

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MA - Massachusetts The successfu l candidate will

1400738630

be a key membe r of a dynamic,

paradigms for data from The Cancer

multidiscipli nary antibody therapeutic discovery team tackling

Computational Synthetic Biologist

We are cu rrently seeking a h ighly

Virg i n i a B i o informatics Institute

motivated research investigator

VA - Virg in i a

with an excellentfirst author

a n u mberof oncology targets,

Our laboratory investigates the mechanisms by which chemicals and nanoparticles interact with a nd adversely affect early life stage development. Our group primarily uses zebrafish as a vertebrate model to identify the molecular pathways that are perturbed by exposures that ultimately lead to lasting functional deficits, The cand idate must have a Ph.D. degree in molecular biology, biochemistry or a related field. Experience with gene expression ana lysis, qua ntitative

peR, automation, and bioi nformatics are preferred. Effective written a nd oral communication skills are essential. The projects involve the use of high throughput in vivo screening, global gene expression ana lysis, behavioral assessme nts, and transgenic a n imal use a nd p roduction. Sa lary will be based on

T h e Institute's mission i s to solve

publication record in high impact

Un iversity guidelines for postdoctoral fe llows.

some of society's most im portant

journals,

To apply for this position, please e · ma il a cover letter describing previous

problems in the life sciences through transdisciplinary research

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tra ining a nd research interests, career goa ls, a ev, representative papers, a nd

and education in the areas of

1400737007

i nfectious diseases, modeling and networks, and bioinformatics,

Post Doctoral Fellow

For m o re information visit NewScientistjo bs.com job 10:

Thomas jefferson U n iversity

1400738050

Applicant should have a recent PhD

Two postdoctoral positions are available at the UCSF School of Medicine in San Francisco I . Study Mouse Genetic Models of Cerebrovascular Disease. Interested individuals sAould Am

vascular biology or a relevant

a publisAed remrd in genetics, molecular biology or cell biology. Candidates witA experience in vasculor

disci pline with a good background

biol ogy, matrix biology or mouse genetics are especially encouraged.

in one or more of the following:

Henry M jackson Foundation

-training in cardiovascular

M D - Maryland

pharmacology -translational studies

Facil itates information flow between MHRP program members,

-signal transduction -lipid signaling

department chiefs, scientific

and/or eicosanoid metabolism

i nvestigators, overseas sites, the

Fo r more i nfo rmation visit NewScientistjobs.co m job 1 0 :

as project managerforvanous administrative efforts by organ izing

E ·mail: robert. [email protected]

PA - Pennsylvania in pharmacology, biochemistry,

USG and the Fou ndation. Functions

Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology, Oregon State University

1007 ALS, Corvallis, OR 97331

simulation of biological and other

International Program Manager (205274)

three letters of recomm endation to: Robert L. Tanguay

in platelet biochemistry or signaling

1400742534

I I . Study a novel mouse genetic model of retinal degeneration. Interested individu als sAould Aave a publisAed retord in geneti cs, molecular biology or cell bio logy. Candidates wit A experience in vision researcA, matrix biology or mouse genetics are especially encouraged. Interested individuals should email the following to [email protected]:

I) tAeir CV 2) a statement of researcA experience 3) a statement of career goals 4) mnta ct information for two references Doug Gould, PAD., Departments of 0pAtAalmology and Anatomy, I n stitute for Human Genetics UCSF SCAool of Medicine, 10 Koret Way, Room K235, San Francisco, CA, 9 4 1 4 3

and scheduling regular meetings and conference cal ls, Mon itors

Postdoctoral Positions

A postdoc position is ava i lable in

more than one discipline and apply

progress and directs, coordinates,

Un iversity of Alabama at

the lab of Drjiping Zha to study the

to complex problems requ iring

conducts actions and furnishes

B irmingham (UAB), Office of

pathogenesis oftriple negative

innovative tech niques,

g u idance and assistance as needed

Postdoctoral Education

breast cance� Cancergenome

to achieve p roject objectives,

AL - Alabama

projects have revealed m u ltiple

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The University of Alabama at

genetic alterations in this disease,

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Birmingham (UAB) is one ofthe

We would l i ke to determine

premier research universities

whether/how the genes with copy

in the US with internationally

n u mber gain may contri bute to tumorigenesis.

Project Scientist, Marshfield, WI USA

1400734731

recognized programs in AIDS &

PDM Research Project Representative (RS-R6)

bacterial pathogenesis, bone biology & disease, cancer, diabetes

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Children's Center for Rural and

1400738631

Agricu ltural H ealth and Safety

Marshfield Clinic, National

Pfizer US

& digestive & kidney diseases, free

CA - California

radical biology, immunology, lung

WI - Wisconsin

The department of

The National Chi ldren's Center

Pharmacokinetics, Dynamics

disease, neuroscience, tra u ma & inflammation, and basic & clinical

and Metabol ism (PDM) in pfizer

vision science among others,

Lajolla, California is seeking experienced ADME scientists with

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proven ab ilities in small molecules

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pharmacokinetics and metabolism to manage projects from early

Principal Scientist ­ Pharmacokinetics

for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, a fou ndation through

Clin Force

Marshfield Clinic, Marshfield,

I L - Illinois

Wisconsin, strives to en ha nce the

Provide broad knowledge of

health and safety of all children

advanced field or extensive

exposed to hazards associated

knowledge of theories/p ractices

with agricultura l work and rural

within pha rmacokinetics/drug

environ ments,

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Postdoctoral Research Fellow

metabolism and biD-a nalytical fields

Genentech

or related disciplines, Understand

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CA - California

and i ntegrate information from

1400740477

discovery through proof of concept

3 April ZD10 I N ewScientist 1 45

FOCUS ON ACADEMIA

Research Assistant (205158)

in clinical and pre-clinical studies

Henry M jackson Foundation

related to solid tumor cancers

Systems Pharmacologist ­ R5/R6

teaching responsibi lities,

encouraged to apply. Research and

U n ited States

and other intractable diseases

Pfizer US

Adj u n ct appointment(s)

Performs DNA extractions, genomic

that must be addressed with

CT - Connecticut

with physiology, biochemistry,

library construction, sequenci ng,

powerfu l biotherapeutic

Collaborate with a multidisciplinary

phanrnacology also

microanrays, genome-wide

strategies,

project team to develop

possible,

restriction mapping, in a genome

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and implement quantitative

seq uencing facility, Maintains clear

mechan istic mathematical models

For more i nformation visit NewSc i entistjobs.com job 1 0 :

a n d accu rate laboratory records,

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of pha nrnacology to aid in target

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Assists in maintaining databases

prioritization, modal ity selection, chemica l optimization, biomarker

for research projects, Maintains compliance with established laboratory safety and other

Senior Manager, Industrial Products Platform Development Research

characterization and early cl inical trial design

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Intrexon Corporation

Fo r m ore i nformation visit NewScientistjobs.com job 10:

MD - Maryland

1400733882

1400734696

Work closely with the strategic a nd

procedures,

C H E M I STRY PhD Medicinal/Synthetic Organic Chemist Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research ( US) MA - Massachusetts

operational leaders of the IPD to

Major responsibi lities will include

Research Associate Bioinformatics (205155)

needs and convert these needs

Technical Sales Specialist ­ Los Angeles, CA

assessments into distinct research

Thermo Fisher Scientific (US)

Henry M jackson Foundation

programs and tasks,

CA - California

individual must be proficient in

M D - Maryland

The Technical Sales Specialist (TSS)

identifying structure activity

This position involves routi ne

For more information visit NewSci entistjobs.com job 1 0 :

is responsib le for sel ling the full

relationships (SAR) to add ress lead

analysis of genomic sequencing

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Thenrno Fisher Scientific Genomics

optimization, potency, selectivity,

define the i r technology platfonrn

the design, synthesis, purification chemical entities, The q ua l ified

and characterization of novel

data including viral, p rokaryotic, and

portfolio wich includes ABgene

phanrnacokinetics a nd in vivo

eukaryotic genomes as well and/

(PCR), Open Biosystems (shRNA

efficacy.

cDNA and ORFs) and Dhanrnacon (si/mi RNA) branded products and

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services,

1400737008

ortranscriptomic or mi RNA data; assistance i n maintaining databases for research projects; assistance

Senior Scientist! Scientist (R3/R4), PET Radiochemistry, Biolmaging CoE

technologies, protocols, computer

Pfizer U S

Fo r m ore i nformation visit NewScientistjobs.com job 10:

scripts, databases

C T - Connecticut

1400736906

Fo r more i nformation visit NewScientistj obs.com job 10:

Perform routine radiotracer

1400733701

clin ical i maging studies, - Assist

in developing necessary new

CLINICAL Research Associate

production to support pre­

Pioneer H i - Bred

Senior Associate Scientist! Scientist (R2/R3), MRI Imaging, Biolmaging

su pervision, - Perfonrn quality

TENURE-TRACK FACULTY POSITION, Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Biology

control (OC) on PET radiotracers

Utah State University

using HPLC, rad ioTLC and/or

UT - Utah

at designated production locations,

Pfizer U S

other analytical techniques as

The Utah Science, Technology and

Assist in management of the

in development of new PET radiotracer syntheses under

WI - Wisconsin Managementof summer isolation and production of hybrid seed, Th is involves interaction with the janesville corn breeders and staff

C T - Connecticut

req u i red before release for in vivo

Research (USTAR) in itiative, along

janesville home nurseries,

Perform routine in vivo and ex vivo

experiments,

with the Departments of

This will include mapping and other

MRI experiments; Adapt imaging

Chemistry and Biochemistry and

n u rsery p reparation

protocols and standard operating

For more information visit NewSci entistjobs.com job 1 0 :

Biology at Utah State Un iversity,

responsibilities,

proced u res for MRI experiments

1400733885

invites applications for a tenure-track position at

For more i nformation visit NewSc i entistjobs.com job 1 0 :

any rank,

1400733989

u nder su pervision; Maintain collaborations with su pport lines to insure quality project

Staff Scientist (205154)

implementation; Provide preliminary

Henry M jackson Fou ndation

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analysis and summary of the results

MD - Maryland

1400736914

of MRI experiments

Th is position also i nvolves

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keeping a b reast of current scientific literature; assistance i n

1400733883

writi ng research p roposals and quarterly/annual reports; and providing collaborative assistance

Research Scientist Pioneer H i - Bred lA - Iowa

Tenure-track position, ASSISTANT or ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR level Tulane School of Medicine

Work across the multi disciplines including high throughput marker lab; breeding technologies group; and field and lab information

Senior Manager, Ag-Bio Platform Development Research

to other research scientists that

Tulane U n i versity School of

management groups,

requ i re the incumbent's

M ed icine

Develop novel statistical

expertise,

LA - Lou isiana

methodologies to perfonrn the

Intrexon Corporation

Section focus is on diabetes, Funded

genetic OC of the marker data,

MD - Maryland

For more information visit NewSci entistjobs.com job 1 0 :

candidates with molecular and/

taking into consideration the

The company is cu nrently engaged

1400733570

or clin ical pathophysiology are

popu lation structure and

46 1 NewSci entist 1 3 April 2010

FOCUS ON ACADEMIA l i n kage.

for Medical Affairs projects and

For m o re information visit NewScientistjo bs.com job 10:

statistical integrity, adequacy, and

1400733188

accuracy of the clin ical studies

is directly responsible forthe

in the project. As part of a clinical

GORDON

development or assessment team,

Scientist: HCV Clinical Virolog ist

collaborates in the preparation

N ovartis Institutes for

assessments.

Assistant or Associate Professor of Marine Microbiology

BioMedical Research (US) MA - Massachusetts

Fo r more i nfo rmation visit NewScientistjobs.com job 1 0 :

The Department of Biology at Gordon College i nvites applications for a tenure­

We are looking for a highly

1400740680

and review of clinical

motivated and innovative scientist

COLLEGE

track position to begin with the fall sem ester of 2010. The successful candidate will h ave a Ph.D. and a strong comm itment to scholarship, teaching, and mentoring of u ndergraduate students. The Biology Department offers outstanding colleagues­

to join ourvirology group with a

facu lty who are comm itted to excellence-and motivated students eager to engage in

basic science and drug discovery.

Director; Marketing; Commercial Operations; Commercial Insight Learning

The candidate will be primarily

AstraZeneca US

responsible fordeveloping in vitro

D E - Delaware

assays to identify and characterize

This Senior Director role is

viral resistance in responding to

responsible for the development

novel HCVtherapies.

and execution of the leaming

For m o re information visit NewScientistjo bs.com job 10:

strategyforthe commercial non­

atmosphereofopen i ntellectual inquiry and personal responsibility within theframework

sales learning programs,

of Christian faith. Gordon College is located in a classic New England town on Boston's

otherwise known as Academies in Commercial Insight (C I ),

North Shore. For more information, please visit our web page at www.gordon,edu.

unique opportunity to work on projects relati ng cli nical research to

1400733892

Commercial Operations (CO), and

Sr Statistical Scientist

Marketing.

Genentech CA - California

Fo r more i nfo rmation visit NewSc ientistjobs.com job 1 0 :

Provides statistics leadership

1400736883

ee l P

R

E

S

research and professional activities with facu lty. Principal teaching responsibilities incl ude marine science and mi crobiology, with additional teaching in non-majors science, general biology and the sum mer marine biology institute. Other responsibilities include coordinating the marine science program and being in charge of our research boat. The department is housed in the new Ken Olsen Science Center. Gordon College is a member of the elite Annapolis Group, a consortiu m of the nation's leading liberal arts institutions and among the prem iere Christian l i beral arts colleges in the country. Gordon offers excellent academics, a strong sense of community and an

Application review will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. P lease submit letter of application, CV, statement of planned future research, a sample of scholarly writing, and statement of educational philosophy.

Appl ications can be emailed to: [email protected] or sentvia U.S. mail to Dan Russ, Academic Dean, 255 Grapevine Road, Wenham, MA 01984.

_Ida�o Notionallaborotory ---

S

Scientific Editor, Cell C e l l i s seeking a scientist t o j o i n i t s editorial team. T h e minimum qual ification for this position is a Ph.D. in a relevant area of biomedical research, although

I d a h o Nati o n a l Laboratory is seeki n g a STAFF MEMBER OR

additional post-doctoral or editorial experience is preferred. This is a superb

POST-DOC who wi l l d eve l o p and d e m o nstrate s o l utions to a

opportunity for a talented individual to play a critical role in promoting science by helping researchers disseminate their findings to the wider community. As an editor, you would be responsible for assessing subm itted research papers a n d overseeing t h e refe reeing process and you would commission and edit material for

variety of m o d e rately la rge a nd/o r co m p lex problems related t o systems tec h n o l ogies, i n c l u d i n g m o d e l i n g a n d simul ation, t h ro u g h

the

ge n e r a l

use

and

a p p l ication

of d esign/

Cell's Leading Edge. You would also travel frequently to scientific conferences to

d ev e l o p m e n t p ra ctices, th eories, a n d tec h n i q u es . Typi ca l

follow developments in research and to establish and maintain close ties with the

R & D a reas of i nte rest m a y i n c l u d e , but n ot n e cessarily b e

scientific com m u n ity. You would have opportunities to pioneer and contribute to new trends in scientific publishing. The key qualities we look for are breadth of scientific i nterest a n d the a bility to think critically about a wide range of scientific issues. The successful candidate will be highly motivated and creative and able to work independently as well as in a team . This is a full-time, in-house editorial position, based at the Cell Press office i n Kendall Square near M IT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cell Press offers a n

l i m ited to, sensor n etworks/syst e ms, m o n itoring, d ecision, a n d control syste ms, system integrati o n and o p ti m ization, p ro b a b i l istic reas o n i ng, a n d o n - l i n e predictive co n d itio n i n g m o n itoring a n d

a n o m a l y d etection

and

i nte rpretation

t e c h n i q ues with d iagn ostic/prognostic capa bilities.

attractive salary a n d benefits package a n d a stimulating working environment that encourages innovation.

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language PHP (27 February). But has anyone, for example, replaced ASP on their website with plain old HyperText Markup Language (HTM or HTML)? Indeed they have: john Alderson has been digging around and has found not

Michael wants to know if five­ season sleeping bags are produced in the same factory that produced the guitar amps in the movie Th is is Spinal Tap, the ones that "go all the way up to 11".

only a punnet of "rphpberries" but

MANY readers have told us of their surprise, on receiving their subscription copy ofNew Scientist, that it comes in a polywrap described as "Oxo­ degradable". They have gone on to ask if this means that the wrap will dissolve in gravy (a question that may seem obscure to those who have never made culinary sauces with Oxo stock cubes). We asked New Scientist's production editor Mick O'Hare about this, and he asked our parent com pany's senior account manager Monica Baghi, and she asked Norman Billingham, professor of chemistry at the University of Sussex in the UK, who said: "Oxo biodegradable plastics are conventional polyethylenes modified by the use of an additive which promotes their oxidation ... The lifetime of the film, from manufacture to disintegration, is easily controlled by the ratio of prodegradant to stabiliser."

Monica also discovered that "lovely little Wikipedia" has a spiel about "Oxo biodegradable". It tells us: "OBD plastic will degrade when subject to environmental conditions to produce water, carbon dioxide and biomass. The process is shortened from hundreds of years to months for degradation and thereafter biodegradation depends on the micro-organisms in the environment." So now you know. Gravy, indeed.

NEWS reports of a road crash by

notes, is a googlewhackblatt - a word

the Irish broadcaster RTE incl uded

that produces exactly one result

the sentence: "Both vehicles were

when you type it i nto a famous web

travelling in opposite d i rections,"

search eng i ne (14 August 2004).

jerry Holt tells us. His i n itial

Or, as happened back then in regard

reaction, he says, was to scoff at the

to another example, it was a

tautology, but given the weirdness

googlewhackblatt until just now

of quantum mechani cs and the

when we published the fact online.

recent d iscovery of monopoles, he

john also finds a job advert specifying that some unfortunate

now commends the RTE newsroom staff for their circumspection and

person's "responsibilities shall

offers other scoffers this devastating

i nclude all htmects of developing ... ".

q uestion: "Suppose only one of the

Thi s is among hundreds of other

vehicles had been travel ling in an

htmects, or indeed htmlects, of

opposite d i rection?"

the matter. We wonder whether people are also replacing suffixes on web addresses, such as org, net, com and so on, but have found no orgpendi u m o f results, yet. W e did find the googlewhackblatt netprehend, which passeth all netprehension. john, thinking along the same lines,

FINALLY, studying the menu in a restaurant one evening while on holiday in the Austrian Alps, Maurice and Joy Bourne were surprised to be offered a choice of grilled lamb racks with rosemary sauce or "Grilled fish filet of

tracked down caring orgmunities and cO.ukmunities. These search-and-destroy word-replacing missions - which we shall call netplications - are not limited to the acronyms favoured by

PH PECTS - sorry, that shou l d

IT geeks. Some years ago, following

b e "aspects" - of spelling on the

the takeover of the M idlands

internet are growing wei rder. Readers recently explained the

Exami ning Group (MEG) by the Oxford Cambridge and RSA Exam inations

numerous web appearances of

board (OCR), physics students were

the non-word at the start of this

suddenly req uired to learn all about

paragraph by speculating that

"ocrawatts" and "ocrabytes" (14

website managers carelessly run

january 2006). We haven't yet come

a "find-and-replace word" macro

across any netplications using real

to expunge all references to the

words. Perhaps our mind is now too

Microsoft web-page-generating

d i scomanised to think of any to try.

language ASP, and replace it with the independently-prod uced

The i n g redients of the Kash i brea kfast cereal enj oyed by Ea rl Arnold i n Ca l iforn i a i ncl uded "eva porated cane j uice crysta l s", "A rose by a ny other na me;' comments E a rL sweetly 48 1 NewScientist 1 3 April 2010

also one "rhtmberry". The latter, he

PREPARING for a mountaineering trip, Michael Francis thought he was pretty well equipped for all climatic eventualities with his "four season" sleeping bag. But then his fellow travellers started bragging in a shared forum about their "five-season" equipment.

printer trolley". Had the Austrians discovered a previously unknown species offish frozen into a glacier, they wondered ? If so, they thought it was unlikely to be fresh, so they went for the lamb.

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disinhibition, and then mood swings, particularly involving anger, boisterousness or sadness. I know people who insist that The next stage, with BAC over certain types o f alcoholic d rinks put 0.21 per cent, brings general them in spec ific moods when d runk - such as emotional, violent or inertia and a reduced response to confident. Is there any scientific stimuli. If you carry on drinking reason why d ifferent beverages can you will end up in a coma (BAC above 0.35 per cent) or even in the have specific effects on mood? mortuary (above 0.50 per cent). The context in which alcohol is • Unfortunately, there is no straightforward evidence to consumed also plays a role. We support this claim, nor is there tend to drink particular alcoholic beverages in particular situations: any evidence against it. Whether you're drinking wine, fine wine is usually savoured over beer or spirits, the alcohol in your drink will be ethanol, which "Some people suggest the affects several neurotransmitters mood you end up in when you drink depends on the involved in determining mood. mood you started out in" For exam pie, alcohol inhibits glutamate receptors, which has a nice meal, for example, and the effect of relaxing muscles; hence is likely to put you in a it stimulates receptors that respond to gamma-aminobutyric mellow mood, while numerous shots of vodka may be consumed acid (GABA), reducing anxiety; at a party on an empty stomach and it increases the release of dopamine, a hormone associated and will make you feel drunk much quicker. with excitement. Some people suggest that the Mood and behaviour depend also on the degree of intoxication, mood you end up in when you drink depends on the mood you which can be quantified by are in when you start, and that measuring the volume of alcohol in a given volume of blood, better people tend to choose specific drinks for specific moods. known as the blood alcohol Joa nna Jastrzebska concentration. BAC depends not North Shields, Tyne and Wear, UK just on the amount of alcohol ingested but also on gender, weight and body fat. You cannot be When BAC is low (u p to 0.06 per serious cent), the effects usually manifest How accurate can the automated themselves as euphoria, tennis l ine-judging system called talkativeness and increased self­ Hawk-Eye be? Surely for the level o f confidence. With BAC between accuracy it seems t o offer, it would 0.06 and 0.2 per cent, you will need far more cameras than appear experience excitement and

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to be present at major tennis tournaments. Yet everybody happily accepts its rul ings. How does it work?

Briton Paul Hawkins created and named Hawk-Eye, a system which combined the expertise he gained for his PhD in artificial intelligence with his passion for sport, particularly cricket. In cricket, a batsman can be given out "leg before wicket". This ruling is applied when the umpire believes the ball would have gone on to hit the stum ps had the batsman's leg not been in the way. In this situation Hawk-Eye can be used to predict the ball's trajectory and is arguably more reliable than an umpire. Despite being invented with cricket in mind, it was tennis that was receptive to the technology much earlier, perhaps thanks to TV replays showing that um piring mistakes contributed to the defeat of Serena Williams by Jennifer Capriati in the 2004 US Open quarter-finals. Hawk-Eye provides an instant replay of crucial shots and has also proved an excellent tool for analysing the strategy and performance of players. For tennis, it relies upon a maximum of six cameras to provide data for sophisticated triangulation. The position of the ball is tracked via a succession of stills from each camera. Within a virtual recreation of the tennis court, a ray can be drawn from each camera through the centre of the ball. The intersection ofthese rays provides the position ofthe •

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ball in three dimensions and, with the passage of each frame, its velocity. This can be used to calculate the contact area of the ball with the court, taking into account the distortion ofthe ball after it is hit. Hawk-Eye also captures any skidding of the ball on the court, which can deceive the eye into believing a ball is out. Mike Follows WillenhaII, WestMidlands, UK

This week's questions CARRIERS O F DEATH

Do mosquitoes get malaria? Do rats catch bubonic plague? If not, why not? Years Christopher Hatton School, London, UK HIe... H Ie... H Ie...

The two people be/ow share a similar dilemma -Ed

If! eat spicy food such as a hot curry or a dish with chilli, I consistently get hiccups. Many people get hiccups after consuming carbonated drinks. Why are some foods more likely to cause hiccups? How is digestion linked with this involuntary contraction of the diaphragm? Richard Fisher London, UK Bread gives me hiccups, though only when I have it on its own; it's fine as part ofa sandwich. Why? Sally Manders London, UK

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