New Scientist Magazine - 30 January 2010

HALF VIRUS You're less human than you think

Official government fuel consumption figures in MPG (Litres per 100km) for the E-Class Estate Range: Urban: 15.0 Model shown is a Mercedes-Benz E 350 CGI BlueEFFICIENCY

Avantgarde Estate with

optional metallic paint at £620.00, optional privacy glass at £350.00 and optional 18" alloy wheels at £775.00. Total Price:

(18.8)-38.2 (7.4), Extra Urban: 30.4 (9.3)-60.1 (4.7), Combined: 22.1 (12.8)-49.6 (5.7). CO2 emissions: 299-150g/km. £41,220.00 on-the-road (price includes VAT, delivery, maximum Road Fund Licence, number plates, new vehicle registration fee and fuel). Prices correct at time of going to print.

CO NTE NTS

Volume 205 No 2745

NEWS 5 6

T ime to rethink the IPCes future UPFRONT Calls for a global asteroid agency, Personal genomics for prospective parents

B

THI5WEEK

COVER STORY

EDITORIAL

Forget Mars...

Helping Haiti one text message at a time, Technicolor dinos, "Quantum spread" threat to Hawking inflation bet Young blood makes old mice youthful. Pill to make soldiers super-survivors 14 IN BRIEF Brain cells from mouse tails, Run like your ancestors, Jittery crickets transmit spider-senses, Crows bear grudges

Our next giant leap is here

17 TECHNOLOGY

Cover image NASNJPL

T he perils of e-banking, Fishy sensors could help subs navigate, Predicting the road ahead

OPINION 22 There's nothing in it An international protest will reveal the emptiness of homeopathy once and for al l, says Martin Robbins 23 One minute with... Matthieu Ricard, molecular biologist turned Buddist monk, on "mind science" 24 LETTERS T hat's life, Sustainable seafood 26 Burt Rutan The legendary engineer and space-tourism pioneershares his deep and sometimes u nexpected passions

32

Half VirUS

•

.. .

You're less

•

human than youthink

FEATURES 2B Forget Mars (see right) 32 Halfvirus (see right) 36 Nowwe know it... Knowledge is being stored in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms, Will we forget it all if catastrophe strikes? 40 The comedy circuit What happens when your brain gets the joke

• •

REGULARS 24 ENIGMA 44 BOOKS & ARTS Reviews Hunting for God among rationalists, Intellectual-property pirates, Rough guide to the elixirs of youth, Putting biogeography on the map, True cybercri mes 46 Gallery Transforming whale song into art 56 FEEDBACK Smart bombs and the White House 57 THE LASTWORD Can you solve the New Scientist/Discovery Channel challenge? 4B JOBS & CAREERS

Coming next week The strangest liquid Waters amazing properties revea led

Triumph of the commons Crowdsourcing has given a surprising boost to relief efforts in Haiti

PLUS When the oceans bri m med with wha les

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30 January 2010 I NewScientist 13

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EDITORIAL

Like it or not, its closed world of peer review is no longer possible, let alone desirable. The job of scientists is to test theories to The IPCC has done g reat work, but n eeds to move with the times destruction, which inevitably makes science adversarial at times. Dispute is good; consensus LET'S hear it for the Intergovernmental truth whose deliberations are open to scrutiny. stultifies. It is neither surprising nor disturbing There is plenty of new science to assess. But it that disputes about the science break out, Panel on Climate Change. A big round of makes little sense to have to wait six years applause, please. Really. It has done amazing, within the IPCC and outside it, and such disagreements need to be out in the open. between assessments: though reflection, Herculean work. The IPCC was tasked by the governments and time for the replication offindings, are Many scientists were unhappy about what essential, why not have an annual report? they saw as excessive caution in the last of the world to deliver an encyclopedic The organisat ionalso needs to be more consensus on the state of knowledge about assessment - reflected, for instance, in under­ focused on providing the science that will one of the most far-reaching yet divisive reporting of emerging science on how address emerging policy challenges. Its best questions of our time. And this grouping of disintegrating polar ice sheets might recent work is in its special reports on topics accelerate sea level rise beyond anything yet thousands of scientists, taking time out from such as aircraft emissions. A special report on revealed in climate models. Such argument their regular jobs has, for more than two geoengineering would be invaluable, as would should be open to public view. A wider decades, delivered. Thanks to the IPCC's work, a dispassionate assessment of how to measure discussion of the uncertainties here would the world's nations have come together to and verify national greenhouse gas emissions, have been more honest and avoided giving decide that we must prevent our planet a false reassurance. warming by more than 2°C - even if achieving "The wider review made possible So let the IPCC embrace such debates, rather that goal is proving difficult, to say the least. by the blogosphere can improve than retreat from them in the name of spurious The serious error, reported here two weeks science and foster public confidence" consensus. Climate scient ists have felt under ago, that led to the inclusion in an IPCC report of mistaken claims about how fast Himalayan siege from critics, as leaked emails last year amply demonstrated. But that is no reason to glaciers are melting is undoubtedly damaging and carbon sinks such as soils and forests. Should the IPCC remain as an dismiss all criticism as necessarily unwarranted, to the panel's reputation. But it does not in any way undermine the conclusion that human­ intergovernmental body - in other words, uninformed or politically motivated. answerable to national governments from Some argue that the views of an untutored induced climate change is happening, is around the world? Yes, it probably should. It dangerous and requires urgent action. blogger, or even a scientist from another was the US, during the Reagan presidency back discipline, should never carry the same weight However, the IPCe's heroic days are probably over. The case for anthropogenic in the lg8os, that insisted on this. Atthe time, as those of someone with a lifetime's expertise many scientists were dismayed, fearing climate change has been established; the in a relevant field. But if occasionally the political interference in the panel's published emperors of the lab have no clothes, someone Nobel prize is won. So it is time for a rethink of where the IPCC is going, and what its future reports. But these fears largelyfailed to has to say so. The wider review of science made possible by the blogosphere can improve role should be. Two years ago, in the aftermath materialise, and the fact that national of the last major assessment report, many governments all sign off each report has science and foster public confidence in its scientists argued that the task should have reinforced the IPCC's authority. But public methods. Scientists should welcome the begun then. It is no less urgent now. attitudes to science are changing. The IPCC outside world in to check them out. Their We still need the IPCC to serve as a seeker of was established before the internet revolution. science is useless if no one trusts it. •

Let the sunlight in on climate change

What's hot on NewScientist.com SPACE Earth calling: A short history of radio messages to ET

From carefully crafted binary code to the sound of vagina I contractions, we round up humanity's radio messages tothe stars •

TECHNOLOGY Google Earth

g gets real Three-dimensional maps like Google Earth usually show the world as it used to be, A way to use live webcams to update the latest changes to buildi ngs and streets lets them show it as it really is

BLOGMy Botox hell It's a threat to facial expressions in Hollywood actors, but could the wrinkle treatment also be used in a bioterror attack? Unregulated production of Botox, the toxin that causes the deadly food poisoning botulism, has prompted fears that it could be used asa weapon COMPUTING A step beyond multitouch

As gadget lovers awaitan expected tablet computer from Apple, we review a series of

patents for an interface like never before, It'll be a cinch to type without a keyboard, and you'll be able to activate buttons simply by hovering your finger overthem EVOLUTION Bats and dolphins separately evolved same sonar gene The finding is unusual, because most creatures that independently evolved characteristics such as eyes, tusks orwings generally took different genetic routes to get there, Bats and dolphins, however, trod an

identical genetic path to evolve a vital component of echolocation BLOGMaligned prion protein gets a new image

Prion proteins have a bad reputation, notoriously causing variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, buta new study suggests they are important in maintaining the myelin sheath that surrounds nerve cells, boosting the speed of nerve impulses For breaking news, video and online debate, visit newscientist.com

30 January 2010 I NewScientist 1 5

UPFRONT

How green's algal power? ALGAE have been touted as a solution

primary drawback." Clarens says.

to environmental worries over biofuels. but they may be a long way from providing a truly green option.

Using waste water instead of fertilisers helps. but not enough . he says. The only trick that tipped the balance in favour of algae i n h is models was to use nutrient-rich

Unlike maize. soya beans and oilseed rape (canola). algal farms don't take up valuable farmland. so algae-based biofuels don't threaten food supplies. However. Andres Clarens at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has modelled the

household waste like concentrated urine to fertilise the algae. but this would require new infrastructure

environmental impacts of algal farms and concludes that they require six times as much energy as growing land

are overcoming these challenges. For instance. bioreactors are being developed as more efficient

plants - and emit significantly more greenhouse gases (Environmental

alternatives to open-pond algae farms. To date. they have been

Science and Technology. 001:

10.10211es902838n).

prohibitively expensive. but a group atjacobs University i n

"You have to add a whole lot more fertilisers. and the environmental cost of producing these is the

Bremen. Germany. is developing affordable reactors that could slash the environmental impact of algal farms.

and so is no short-term fix. Others say recent advances

undersea telecommunications cables to detect its electric field. RECENT natural disasters have Such fields are created as made it all too clear that we need electrically charged salts in cheap and simple ways to prepare seawater pass through the for nature's wrath. That's the Earth's magnetic field. Computer modelling by Nair's thinking behind a novel approach to tsunami detection, which team shows that the electric field generated by the tsunami that would use the submarine cables that supply your broadband. struck south-east Asia in 2004 Existing warning systems use induced voltages of up to 500 pressure sensors on the seafloor millivolts. Their calculations show to detect the weight of a tsunami this is big enough to be detected by voltmeters placed at the end of in the water column above. Only five countries own such sensor the fibre-optic and copper cables arrays - the US, Australia, that carpet the floor of the Indian Ocean. The work will appear in the "The 2004 Indian Ocean journal Earth, Planets and Space. The idea has its limitations, tsunami created an electric field big enough to be though. Cables would not reveal detected by voltmeters" the exact location or direction of the ts unami, and you would Indonesia, Chile and Thailand have to subtract noise created partly due to the high cost of by fluctuations in the Earth's installation. This lack of coverage magnetic field, tides and the cable leaves many countries vulnerable itself to avoid misleading signals. to a tsunami strike. Still, "it seems promising", says Now a team led by Manoj Nair Bill McGuire of University College London. But he points out that it's at the National Oceanic and just as important to set up a system Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, have proposed to quickly pass on warnings to a cheaper way to detect an coastal towns after a tsunami approaching tsunami: use has been detected.

Tsunami tip-off

6 1 NewScientist 1 30 January 2010

Family planning THINKIN G of starting a family? There's now a screening service to enable you and your partner to check if you are carrying genes for serious genetic diseases. For $349, Counsyl of Redwood City, California, runs genetic tests on saliva samples to see if prospective parents carry mutations that lie behind more than 100 inherited conditions. Many of the mutations involved are "recessive" variants that cause disease only when

passed on by both parents - and so can lie hidden in families for generations. Counsyl is working with fertility clinics so that couples at high risk can have IVF with pre-implantation screening to select healthy embryos. Some geneticists fear that the results may cause unnecessary worry and subsequent medical costs. "Once you get up to about 100 conditions, the odds are that everybody's going to be a carrier," suggests Michael Watson ofthe American College of Medical Genetics in Bethesda, Maryland.

The mysterious shrinking babies 81RTHWEIGHTS in the US are falling

gestation. What's more. women in

but n o one knows why. according to a study of 36.8 mill ion infants born between 1990 and 2005.

the US now smoke less and gain more weight during pregnancy. which should make babies heavier. Oken

As2-gram d rop i n the weight of full-term singletons - from a n average of 3.441 to 3.389 kilograms has left Emily Oken's team at Harvard Medical School scratching their heads (Obstetrics Iii Gynecology. vol 115. p 357). It can't be accounted for by

suggests that u nmeasured factors. such a s diet or exercise. could explain why babies are being born lighter. "For your average baby. 50 g rams probably makes n o d ifference at all;' she stresses. Butthose born substantially lighter could be at

a n i ncrease i n caesarean sections or i n duced labours. which shorten

increased risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life.

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

60 SECONDS

Lead balloon

Asteroid agency

The US is facing a "helium crunch", and it's bad n ews for cryogenics researchers, the aerospace industry

FANCY working for the asteroid defence agency? You might get the chance if a report on the threat from asteroid impacts sinks in. A huge number of asteroids

and electronics manufacturers, says a National Research Council report. The reason? The US government's ill­ advised decision to sell off its helium reserves a decade ago. The panel

"The agency would spring into action and defend the planet if an asteroid is found on a collision course"

pass close to Earth's orbit. One such asteroid is Apophis, which has a small chance of hitting us in 2036. Last week a US National Research Council panel iss ued a report on how best to respond to this threat. It recommended Supersonic skydive setting up an international body that would s pring into action and THIS may be the ultimate defend the planet if an asteroid is extreme-sporting event. A "space found on a likely collision course. diver" will try to smash the record The agency could even organise for the highest jump this year, and become the first person to go a space mission to deflect the supersonic in free fall. rock. "It is the only natural In 1960, Joe Kittinger jumped disaster we know about where from an altitude of 31,333 metres. we could actually prevent it," His record has never been broken. says panel-leader Irwin Shapiro of the Harvard-Smithsonian Now one skydiver has announced plans to make an attempt. Center for Astrophysics in Felix Baumgartner will jump Cambridge, Massachusetts. from a balloon 36,575 metres The report also found that existing surveys probably won't reach the goal set by US Congress "You turn into a g iant fizzy; in 2005 to find go per cent of near­ oozing fluid from your eyes Earth asteroids that are 140 metres and mouth, like something out of a horror film" across or larger by 2020. A new space telescope could meet the above the US. He should reach goal by 2022, says the panel, but supersonic speeds after 35 seconds. it would cost over $1 billion. The resulting shock wave " is a big concern", admits Art Thompson, technicaldirector of Baumgartner's "Stratos" team, which is sponsored by energy-drink company Red Bull. " In early aircraft development, they thought it was a wall they couldn't pass without breaking apart. In our case, the vehicle is flesh and blood." The jump height is above a threshold at 19,000 metres called the Armstrong line, where atmospheric pressure is so low that body-temperature fluids start to boil. If your mask or suit were Born (smaller) in the USA breached above this line, says

worries that the US will become a net helium importer in 10 to 15 years.

Rotavirus vaccine An oral vaccin e against a major cause of diarrhoea, rotavirus, which kills 500,000 children each year, is to be i ntroduced in 44 poor countries by

Thompson, "all the gases in your body go out of suspension, so you literally turn into a giant fizzy; oozing fluid from your eyes and mouth, like something out of a horror film". Another worry is uncontrolled spin, which could knock Baumgartner out. Sensors will monitor for signs of this, as well as checking heart rate.

Swine flu extremes WE'VE long been warned of swine flu's split personality: mild in most cases, but severe in a few. Now the figures are bearing this out. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 282 people under 18 died in the HINI flu pandemic in the US, between its start in April 200g and 9 January 2010. This means that swine flu's death toll of under-18s is already four times higher than the average killed in recent years by flu during normal flu seasons. Yet blood antibodies analysed by the UK Health Protection Agency suggest that one-third of under-ISs in the parts of England hit hardest by the first wave of the pandemic caught flu. That is 10 times more thanwere estimated to have fallen ill based on the number that sought medical help. This suggests many cases were very mild (TheLancet, DOl: 1O.1016/S0140-6736(og)62126-7).

2015, says the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. The vaccine reduced i nfections by 65 per cent in Mexican i nfants and by 61 per cent in South Africa and Malawi.

Dark no longer A mission to catalogue the solar system's "dark" objects has found its first near· Earth asteroid. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Satellite Explorer tracked down 201 0 AB78 by its i nfrared glow - it had been missed by visible light telescopes. Roughly a kilometre wide, itfortunately poses no threatto Earth.

Spine stem cell first A man with the fatal neurodegenerative condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is the first person everto receive injections ofstem cells into the spinal cord. Neuralstem of Rockville, Maryland, plans to treat 18 more ALS patients with the stem cells, which are designed to repair damaged nerves. They are derived from spinal cells extracted from an 8-week-old fetus.

Tigercra sh According to a WWF report, habitat loss and a demand for body parts for Asian medicine has led to a 70 per cent drop in tiger n u m bers from the g reater Mekong, which includes Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. That leavesaround 350 i n the region and 3200 globally.

30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 7

THIS WEEK

Haiti gets help from net effect

not one of the volunteers was anywhere near Haiti. The 4636 texting service is part of a new generation of web-based efforts to help disaster relief that has emerged from the revolution in texting, social networking and crowdsourcing. Its impact on the A n ew g e n e ration of i nternet tools is l i nki n g u p ground is tangible. For example, a Haitian clinic texted 4636 that peo p l e i n n eed with those who ca n bri ng rel i ef it was running low on fuel for its generator. Within 20 minutes the t04636. Reports of trapped Red Cross said it would resupply. Justin Mullins people, fires, polluted water 4636 is run by a small organisation called UshahidLcom, 18 Jan 09:16: Please can someone sources, and requests for food, find some helpfor myfriend water and medical supplies. originally set up in Kenya to 2 children that are alive under Hundreds of volunteers translated gather reports of violence after their house at 4813 Ruelle Chretien them from Creole and French into the 2008 election. Within days English, tagged them with a ofthe earthquake on 12 January Lalu et Poupla Haiti. After the earthq uake, the text location and passed them on to that flattened Haiti's capital messages came streaming in Port-au-Prince and numerous aid agencies on the ground. Yet 8 1 NewScientist 1 30 January 2010

surrounding towns, it had set up a Haitian operation and recruited hundreds of volunteers to help translate messages, many of them Haitians living in the US. The service is free, courtesy of Digicell, Haiti's largest mobile network operator, which had 70 per cent of its network running within 24 hours ofthe quake. Nicolas di Tada, who helped set up 4636 on the ground in the first days after the disaster, says that was the easy part. "The challenge was making responders on the ground aware of us." A stroke of

"A Haitian clinic texted that it needed fuel for its generator. The Red Cross responded in 20 minutes"

In this section

• "Quantum spread" threat to Hawking bet, page 10 • Young blood makes old mice youthful, page 11 • Pill to make soldiers super -survivors, page 13

luck made a big difference. One of the first texts was from a hospital which had 200 beds, and doctors, nurses and medical supplies on standby, but no patients, because hardly any relief agencies knew they were there. Forwarding that message on told a large number of organisations about 4636. Now, radio stations help spread the word. As people generally don't send messages to say their request

the location of 4636 texters. LESSONS FROM KATRINA Specialist volunteers have also been recruited to analyse satellite Haitianquake.com began collectin g The key to crowdsourcing, or using information about missing people a dispersed, informal network of pictures. ImageCat, a company from sites such as Red Cross Family based in Southampton, UK, is people to collate information, is Links and koneksyon.com. Then, a centralisation. Without that, things being funded by the World Bank g roup of developers at Google offered can go very wrong. to assess the damage - a job that to centralise the i nitiatives into a usually takes weeks or months. When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, dozens of websites single data repository and produce The firm divided before and after a person-finder tool that anybody images released by remote­ rushed to help by settin g up person­ could embed o n their site. finder services. But the rush turned sensing satellite operators into Emails began circulating to ask into a disaster: the sheer n u mber of Soo-square-metre areas and organisations and websites to point distributed them to dozens of different databases made it almost impossible to track down individuals. to Google's site or host its person­ specialists at universities in the UK, US and Europe. Within a few "One project has built finder tool, which has since become I n the wake of the earthquake i n an online database to the de facto place to look for missing Haiti, the lessons seem to have been days, they had identified every friends or relatives in Haiti. learned. Within hours, a site called mon itor the capacity collapsed building in Port-au­ Prince, around 5000 in total. of hospitals in real time" The World Bank is using ground. That's crucial, says Vinay countries is now by text. New has been fulfilled, Ushahidi has the information to assess the no way of knowing how successful cost of rebuilding in the region. tools for using data transmitted Gupta, an energy policy analyst it has been. Still, "the system is in text messages have emerged and CrisisCommons volunteer in The volunteers are now working unprecedented", says Christopher on a higher resolution aerial London. CrisisCommons operates in developing countries, run by Csikszentmihalyi, director of around a wiki page where people relatively small companies like survey carried out last week to and organisations in Haiti post the Center for Future Civic Media categorise the scale of damage Ushahidi. These organisations are at the Massachusetts Institute able to work quickly using limited their needs. Requests are picked to each building. up by volunteers who answer resources in difficult conditions, ofTechnology. CrisisCommons is behind Other initiatives have harnessed many other projects, including making them well-placed to assist them according to their skills. A number of factors have one to build a Craig's List-style the power and multitude of in disaster relief. web users. CrisisCommons Then there's the social "we need, we have" website to link come together to make this a media revolution that allows has organised thousands of people offering resources to those defining moment for the web. crowdsourcing to take place. The volunteers to improve the map of that need them, and an online One of the most important, says translators on 4636, most of whom Haiti available on the open-source database to monitor the capacity Munro, is the spread of mobile have never met, are continually of hospitals in real time. site OpenStreetMap. When the communications infrastructure disaster struck, the map showed to the developing world, asking each other's advice in a Most impressive of all is that little more than three main roads the projects are the result of reflected in the fact that much chat room. Twitter has played a big and a small network of smaller communication in poorer requests from responders on the role in relaying news, and many aid agencies log their activities roads. The volunteers used a host of sources, such as satellite images Collective map-making on Facebook. But most of all, it is the knowledge that large-scale and information from people In the days after the earthquake volunteers around the world chipped in to d ramatically i mprove the resolution of online maps of Haiti on the ground, and ended up activities can be coordinated through online networks that constructing the most detailed PRE-EARTHQUAKE 25 JANUARY 201 0 map available, showing the has given individuals and organisations the confidence position of hospitals, triage centres and displacement camps. to collaborate in this way. None of this is to say that Government agencies are printing the maps to hand online collaboration has solved the problems of disaster relief. out in the field, and uploading Aid agencies still have a hugely them to mobile GPS units. difficult job to do on the ground. "The OpenStreetMaps have been our most important resource," says Robert Munro, a 4636 volunteer and a linguist at Stanford University, California, who analyses the role that text messages play in the developing world. U shahidi volunteers use them to pinpoint with an accuracy of a few metres 30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 9

THIS WEEK

Quantum threat to Hawking's bet NASA's Wilkinson Microwave A nisotropy Probe found STEPHEN HAWKING is something inflation's footprints in the of a gambler when it comes cosmic microwave background, to physics, placing bets on radiation emitted about 370,000 years after the big bang. But everything from the action of black holes to the discovery of WMAP was not sensitive enough gravitational waves. The bad news to s pot signs of gravitational for Hawking is that a touch of waves. The Planck satellite was "q uantum smearing" could launched in May 2009 to get a significantly lower his chances much more detailed picture ofthe of winning his latest wager. CMB. It is looking for the imprint of such waves by studying the tiny In 2002, Hawking bet his University of Cambridge variations in temperature of the colleague Neil Turok that CMB from point to point in the cosmologists would soon discover sky. Hawking is betting that primordial gravitational waves the strength of the waves will be and so verify the theory of above a certain value. If he is right, inflation. Our universe is thought Planck should spot them. to have undergone inflation - a However, the chances of Planck period of exponential expansion­ seeing signs of gravitational a fraction of a second after the big waves depend on exactly what modelled inflation using the Higgs potential, and also added bang, generating ri pples in the happened during inflation, fabric of space-time called one more variable, which dictates according to Qaisar Shafi of the gravitational waves. University of Delaware in Newark. just how much the inflaton "There is a chance that Planck interacts quantum mechanically with other fields when inflation may miss it," says Shafi. ends. This "coupling" would have Inflation was triggered by a HAWKING 'S WAG ERS transferred energy and created field in the early universe called • In 1975, Stephen Hawking bet Kip the radiation that led to the the inflaton, whose energy Thorne that the X-ray source Cygnus density fell slowly, like a ball formation of matter, argues Shafi. X-I does not harbour a black hole. The calculations show that the rolling down a gentle slope. Thorne was to get a subscription to According to Einstein's equations Penthouse if he won, while Hawking of general relativity space-time In the beginning . . . asked for a subscription to British expanded exponentially, the The evolution ofthe "inflaton" field that satirical magazine Private Eye if he process only stopping when the caused the universe's rapid expansion won. Hawking lost the bet. inflaton reaches the bottom of the can be descri bed with different slopes slope. The simplest models • Hawking a nd Thorne betJohn � Evolution of inflaton field Preskill in 1997 that black holes assume that the slope- also called Potentia I energy destroy everything that falls i nto the inflaton potential - resembles of inflaton field them, and that no i nformation can a very shallow parabola. escape black holes. Hawking Now Shafi is arguing thatthe SIMPLE conceded he was wrong in inflaton potential should be 2004, giving Preskill a baseball modelled on another field that encyclopaedia. Thorne has not physicists think exists in nature: admitted defeat. the Higgs field, which gives all • In 2000, Hawki ng bet Gordon elementary particles their mass. Kane $100 that the Higgs boson will The Higgs potential is shaped like not be discovered by the Tevatron a Mexican hat (see diagram). collider at Fermilab in Batavia, "If nature chose it for the Higgs Illinois. The collider is still searching. field, then maybe it also chose it En ergy density of inflaton field for the inflaton," says Shafi. He Anil Ananthaswamy

10 1 NewScientist 1 30 January 2010

higher the degree of coupling, the lower the strength of the gravitational waves generated by inflation. Also, the possible values for the strength of gravitational waves will be spread out over a much wider range than predicted in simpler models. That may mean that their actual strength may turn out to be below the threshold that the Planck satellite is capable of detecting. "The quantum [couplings] smear the predictions," says Shafi, who will present his work at the Dark Matter 2010 conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, in February. Hawking, however, remains optimistic. In August 2009 at a meeting in Cambridge he reiterated his prediction that gravitational waves will be observed at strengths Planck can observe. Hawking has yet to name his stake though. "So far, Stephen hasn't named an amount," says Turok, now at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. �

30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 29

TH E MARTIAN N IGHT SHIFT Scott Maxwell works the Martian night shift. He is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and is one of the drivers of the two venerable Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Being

signals is never shorter than 8 minutes. "By the time you see the cliff coming, you would have driven over it;' says Maxwell. So everything is planned out and programmed with safety margins built in. For example, if

protecting the planet from human biological contamination until a thorough search for life had taken place. They could then go on

solar powered, the rovers shut down every timethe sun sets on Mars, which has a "day"

the rover tilts more than expected or begins slipping in the fine dust, it shuts itself down

to scout the best places for the eventual crewed landing.

of 24.6 hours. The last thing the rovers do before going to sleep is send back pictures of where they are, so that Maxwell and colleagues can figure out what to tell them to do the next day. When they do move, their

and the operators reassess the next day. Such a laborious process would be u nnecessary if the rovers were operated

As for whether Maxwell would wantto do his job from Phobos ratherthan Earth, the shout of "yes" is so emphatic that it causes his cell phone to cut outtor a moment. "Would I go - are you kidding?"

cautious daily creep is measured in metres. Driving the rovers interactively from Earth is impossible. Even at Mars's closest approach, the round trip travel time for

by astronauts living on Phobos. Because of its close proximity to Mars, the command signals would take just hundredths of a second to reach the rovers. "It would be more like the navy controlling robotic submarines; it would be a much more

average density to be calculated using the ultra-precise mass figure. What emerges is the most interesting paradox of all. "The mean density is unexpectedly low. It must be a porous body," says patzold. So rather than being a single chunk of solid rock, there are probably vast caverns inside the moon, which could shelter future visitors from the ravages of space radiation.

Phobos landing Without actual samples from the moon, though, its composition remains largely unknown. If it is a captured asteroid, the material it is made from will be less dense than ordinary rock, making the hollow fraction likely to be around 15 per cent. If the moon is made of the equivalent of Martian rocks, however, then the Phobos's void must be much higher: upt0 45 per cent. This in itself is a headache for planetary scientists. If Phobos turns out to be made of Martian rock, the size ofthe voids means that the moon is unlikely to have formed from tiny dust grains building up in orbit as Mars formed beneath it, as this would lead to a solid body. Instead, Patzold and Pascal Rosenblatt of the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels favour a sequence of events in which a giant impact on Mars threw large chunks of debris into orbit. These then settled against one another at haphazard angles to form the conglomeration we now call Phobos. To test this suggestion, Mars Express will be revisiting the moon in March for its closest fly-by yet. The spacecraft will close to within a mere 60 kilometres ofthe barren surface, supplying the team with the first inklings of Phobos's gravity field. "The gravity field is related to the internal distribution of mass," says Rosenblatt. So, when Mars Express is over a void it will not be pulled as hard as when it is over solid rock. 30 1 NewScientist 1 30 January 2010

efficient way of operating," says Maxwell. Legions of rovers could scour the surface,

he continues when the line comes back. "It would be amazing. And you know what, if NASA wanted to send me to Mars, they wouldn't even have to bring me back."

They will also be using the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSlS) instrument to probe inside Phobos. During previous fly-bys, the MARSlS team learned how to bounce their radar off the moon. Now they plan to use ground-penetrating radar to peer inside. "We hope to see subsurface structure in March but there are a lot of factors in play," says Andrea Cicchetti of the Italian Institute of Physics of Interplanetary Space in Rome who is part of the MARSIS team. The team is especially keen to nail down the composition of the moon whose spectrum suggests it is a captured asteroid. Rosenblatt thinks there is a get-out clause, however. "The surface spectrum could be the result of billions of years of space weathering," he says. Without an atmos phere to protect them, the Martian rocks that coalesced to form Phobos could

Ma rs Express has been orbiting the Red Planet since December 2003

have been altered superficially by the charged particles they have been soaking up from the s un for billions of years, disguising their true identity and fooling the spectrometers. The solution? Land on Phobos and bring samples back for us to study here on Earth. This is exactly what Russia plans to do in late 2011 with the Phobos-Grunt (Phobos-soil in Russian) mission. "We cannot understand the origin of Phobos without knowing what the moon is made from, and Phobos-Grunt will tell us that," says Rosenblatt. Phobos-Grunt may even provide planetary scientists with crucial information about Mars itself. During the last four billion years, meteorite impacts with Mars will have blown debris into orbit. Phobos must have ploughed through these debris streams, some of which contained large chunks, as demonstrated by the moon's g-kilometre-wide crater, Stickney. Most of the impacts would have been much smaller, the probable explanation for the grooves that line the surface of phobos. Recent mapping by Mars Express has shown that the grooves originate from the leading apex of Phobos, the point that always faces in the direction of the moon's motion and so is the natural bullseye for incoming debris. The exciting fact is that nature has been collecting samples of Mars for billions of years and storing them on Phobos - one ofthe easiest places in the entire solar system for us to reach. All we have to do is go and get them. "Phobos is the Library of Alexandria for Mars," says Lee. "Samples from early Mars may be much better preserved on Phobos than on Mars itself' They may even contain the chemical signature of Martian life, though Lee puts a heavy emphasis on the " may" in that statement. And Phobos-Grunt could just be the first in a line of increasingly ambitious missions to Mars's largest moon. "Mars should remain the ultimate destination for manned

B o u n d fo r P h o bos Many missions heading to Mars have studied Phobos from afar, Phobos-Gruntcould be the firstto land on the largest Martian moon

Mars 5 1973 Viking orbiters 1 and 2 1975

Mariner 9 1971

MUUN

Mariner7 1969

DIMENSIONS: 3476 km dia meter GRAVITY: 1.62 ms" ESCAPE V ELOCITY: 2380 ms·1 DISTANCE FROM EARTH: 384,000 km

Imaging and spectrometry

Viking landers 1 and 2 1975

exploration," says former astronaut Leroy Chiao and member of the Augustine committee, "But if we [the committee1 had asked outright for the money reqUired to land on Mars, we would have lost credibility," To bridge the gap, Lee envisages Phobos as an ideal stopover while techniques and equipment are developed by NASA to allow us to land on Mars. He has already studied the feaSibility of a hypothetical Canadian mission to Phobos. So successfully did he make his case that Lee is now involved in a similar study for NASA.

Home from home

Phobos 2 1988 Infrared im a g i n g

ever before, Now they are realising that there could be an enormous fringe benefit: Phobos

Once the technique is perfected, it will tell us ifthe core of Mars is molten and help us monitor the planet's seasons. Up to 30 per cent of the Martian atmosphere is locked into the polar icecaps during winter but returns during the summer, which affects Phobos's orbit. Tracking the seasons wil l help us

itself could become a proxy space probe, By watching the q uirks in its orbit. we can i nfer the distribution of mass inside Mars.

u nderstand the past climate of Mars and give important clues about the nature of its watery history. It could also tell us about

For example, when Phobos passes over the titanic Tharsis bulge on Mars it dips a little

p resent weather patterns and point to regions future landers should steer clear

lower because it is being pulled downwards by the mountainous mass beneath. Existing Martian spacecraft are not so well positioned to do this work because they orbit overthe planet's poles. Revealing the internal

of to avoid ferocious dust storms. But there is still a lot of work to be done. "It is possible to do these things but very challenging:' says Pascal Rosenblatt of the Royal Observatory of Belgium i n Brussels.

He points out that just getting to Phobos would allow astronauts to practise key techniques for reaching Martian orbit, such as aerobraking, in which a spacecraft loses speed by surfing the planet's atmosphere, What's more, the moon could host a warehouse of rocket parts and other equipment, built up over time by passing robotic exploration missions. When astronauts arrive, any worn-out or malfunctioning equipment could quickly be replaced. If the NASA mission goes ahead, it would target an amazing structure on Phobos known as the monolith. This solid slab of rock sticks upwards from the surface and extends go metres into space. "It's the Empire State building ofPhobos," jokes Lee, The spacecraft would land close to the monolith, so that it could study the exposed rock, then hop to another part of the moon and collect some more samples. It would then take off and fly to Deimos, to collect samples from the smaller moon, Finally, it would return to Earth. "It would be an exciting mission," says Lee, "We could fly within five years of getting a budget." It is now in the hands of the White House, as they consider the Augustine Report. Not even Chiao has an inside track on the likely outcome of those deliberations. "Like everybody else, I'm just waiting for the administration to make up its mind about how it wants to respond," he says. Landing on Phobos is a way of getting close to Mars, But surely it would feel like driving all the way to your destination and then not daring to knock on the door? Not according to Lee, "There are plenty of people who would go, including me," he says. "The view of Mars alone would be staggering." Chiao, however, says he would find it tough being on a Phobos-only trip, "It's hard for me to imagine going all that way and not getting to the surface of Mars," he says. "But ifit were a choice of that or nothing, I'd take Phobos any day!" •

distribution of Mars's mass is best achieved from the equatorial orbit Phobos follows.

Our measurements of Phobos's orbit need to be five or 10 times more accurate yet, he says.

Stuart Clark is the author of Oeep Space and Galaxy

and spectro metry

Mars Pat hfi nder

1996

Mars Global Surveyor 1996 Mars Express 2003

f-lHUtlUj

First high resolution map of Phobos, Subsurface measurem ents, Mineralogical mapping

DIMENSIONS: 2 6 , 8 x 2 2 . 4 x 1 8 . 4 km G RAVITY: 0,002 - 0,008 ms" ESCAPE VE LO CITY: 11,3 ms·1 DISTANCE FROM MARS: 9380 km

Mars Exploration Rovers 2003 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter 2005 Phobos-Grunt 2011 First lander and samp l e return mission

PROBING MARS The Mars Express spacecraft has repeatedly taken pictures of Phobos from all d istances so that researchers can better understan d its orbit Their plan was to measure the mass of Mars's largest moon more accurately than

(Quercus), His blog is atstuartclark.com 30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 31

I nvaders have been infi ltrati n g our genome for m i l l ions of years. You're less human than you th ink, says Fra n k Rya n

,

• •

• HEN, in 2001, the human genome was sequenced for the first time, we W were confronted by several surprises.

origins of the human genome - a story more fantastic than anything we previously

One was the sheer lack of genes: where we

imagined, with viruses playing a bigger part

had anticipated perhaps 100,000 there were

than you might care to believe.

actually as few as 20,000. A bigger surprise

Around

15 years ago, when I was Virus X, I came to the

came from analysis of the genetic sequences,

researching my book

which revealed that these genes made up

conclusion there was more to viruses than

a mere 1.5 per cent of the genome. This is

meets the eye. Viruses are often associated

dwarfed by DNA deriving from viruses, which

with plagues - epidemics accompanied by

amounts to roughly 9 per cent.

great mortality, such as smallpox, flu and

On top of that, huge chunks of the genome

AIDS. I proposed that plague viruses also

are made up of mysterious virus-like entities

interact with their hosts in a more subtle way,

called retrotransposons, pieces of selfish DNA

through symbiosis, with important

that appear to serve no function other than

implications for the evolution of their hosts.

to make copies of themselves. These account

Today we have growing evidence that this is

for no less than 34 per cent of our genome.

true (New Scientist, 30 August 2008, P 38 ) , and

All in all, the virus-like components of the human genome amount to almost half of our DNA. This would once have been

overwhelming evidence that viruses have significantly changed human evolution. Symbiosis was defined by botanist Anton

dismissed as mere "junk DNA", but we now

de Bary in 1878 as the living together of

know that some of it plays a critical role in our

dissimilar organisms. The partners are known

biology. As to the origins and function of the

as symbionts and the sum ofthe partnership

rest, we simply do not know.

as the holobiont. Types of symbiotic

The human genome therefore presents

relationships include parasitism, where one

us with a paradox. How does this viral

partner benefits at the expense of the other,

DNA come to be there? What role has it

commensalism, where one partner profits

played in our evolution, and what is it doing

without harming the other, and mutualism,

to our physiology? To answer these

in which both partners benefit.

32 1 NewScientist 1 30 January 2010

•

questions we need to deconstruct the •

• •

.•

'*

•

•

Symbiotic relationships have evolutionary implications for the holobiont. Although selection still operates on the symbionts at an individual level since they reproduce independently, it also operates at partnership level. This is most clearly seen in the pollination mutualisms involving hummingbirds and flowers, where the structure of flower and bill have co-evolved to accommodate each other and make a perfect fit. When symbiosis results in such evolutionary change it is known as symbiogenesis.

Vi ruses as partners

• t

•

•

Symbiosis works at many different levels of biological organisation. At one end of the spectrum is the simple exchange of metabolites. Mycorrhizal partnerships between plant roots and fungi, which supply the plant with minerals and the fungus with sugars, are a good example. At the other end are behavioural symbioses typified by cleaning stations where marine predators line up to have their mouths cleared of parasites and debris by fish and shrimps. Symbiosis can also operate at the genetic level, with partners sharing genes. A good example is the solar-powered sea slugElysia chlorotica, which extracts chloroplasts from the alga it eats and transfers them to cells in its gut where they supply the slug with nutrients. The slug's genome also contains genes transferred from the alga, without which the chloroplasts could not function. The slug genome can therefore be seen as a holobiont of slug genes and algal genes. This concept of genetic symbiosis is crucial to answering our question about the origin of the human genome, because it also applies to viruses and their hosts. Viruses are obligate parasites. They can only reproduce within the cells of their host, so their life cycle involves forming an intimate partnership. Thus, according to de Bary's definition, virus-host interactions are symbiotic. For many viruses, such as influenza, this relationship is parasitic and temporary. >

IIGenetic sym biosis is crucia l to u nd e rsta n d i n g t h e o ri g i n of t h e h u man g e n o m e, because it a l so a p p l i es to vi ruses"

30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 33

But some cause persistent infections, with the virus never leaving the host. Such a long­ term association changes the nature of the symbiosis, making the evolution of mutualism likely. This process often follows a recognisable progression I have termed "aggressive symbiosis". An example of aggressive symbiosis is the myxomatosis epidemic in rabbits in Australia in the 1950S. The European rabbit was introduced into Australia in 1859 as a source of food. Lacking natural predators, the population exploded, leading to widespread destruction of agricultural grassland. In 1950, rabbits infected with myxoma virus were deliberately released into the wild. Within three months, 99.8 per cent of the rabbits of south-east Australia were dead. Although the myxomatosis epidemic was not planned as an evolutionary experiment, it had evolutionary consequences. The myxoma virus's natural host is the Brazilian rabbit, in which it is a persistant partner causing no more than minor skin blemishes. The same is now true of rabbits in Australia. Over the course ofthe epidemic the virus selected for rabbits with a minority genetic variant capable of surviving infection. Plague culling was followed by co-evolution, and today rabbit and virus coexist in a largely non­ pathogenic mutualism. Now imagine a plague virus attacking an early human population in Africa. The epidemic would have followed a similar trajectory, with plague culling followed by a period in which survivors and virus co­ evolved. There is evidence that this ha ppened repeatedly during our evolution, though when, and through what infectious agents,

pressure on HIV-1, while HLA-B gene frequencies in the population are likely to be influenced by HIV (Nature, vol 432, p 769). This is symbiogenesis in action. How does that move us closer to understanding the composition of the human genome? HIV-1 is a retrovirus, a class of RNA virus that converts its RNA genome into DNA before implanting it into host chromosomes. This process, known as endogenisation, converts an infectious virus into a non-infectious endogenous retrovirus (ERV). In humans, ERVs are called HERVs.

discoveries are anticipated, perhaps explaining the origin of some of that mysterious half of the genome. The ability of viruses to unite, genome-to­ genome, with their hosts has clear evolutionary significance. For the host, it means new material for evolution. If a virus happens to introduce a useful gene, natural selection will act on it and, like a beneficial new mutation, it may spread through the population. Could a viral gene really be useful to a mammal? Don't bet against it. Retroviruses have undergone a long co-evolutionary relationship with their hosts, during which they have evolved the ability to manipulate Germline invaders host defences for their own ends. So we might E ndogenisation allows retroviruses to take expect the genes of viruses infecting humans genetic symbiosis to a new level. Usually it is to be compatible with human biology. an extension of the normal infectious process, This is also true of their regulatory DNA. whena retrovirus infects a blood cell, such as a A virus integrating itselfinto the germ lymphocyte. But if the virus happens to get line brings not just its own genes, but also regulatory regions that control those genes. incorporated in a chromosome in the host's Viral genomes are bookended by regions germ line (sperm or egg), it can become part of the genome of future generations. known as long terminal repeats (LTRs), which Such germ-line endogenisation has contain an array of sequences capable of happened repeatedly in our own lineage controlling not just viral genes but host it is the source of all that viral DNA in our ones as well. Many LTRs contain attachment sites for host hormones, for example, genome. The human genome contains thousands of HERVs from between 30 and 50 which probably evolved to allow the virus different families, believed to be the legacy of to manipulate host defences. epidemics throughout our evolutionary Retroviruses will often endogenise history. We might pause to considerthat we are repeatedly throughout the host genome, the descendents of the survivors of a harrowing, leading to a gradual accumulation of anything ifbrutally creative, series of viral epidemics. up to 1000 ERVs. Each integration offers the E ndogenisation is happening right now potential of symbiogenetic evolution. in a retroviral epidemic that is spreading Once an ERV is established in the genome, among koalas in Australia. The retrovirus, natural selection will act on it, weeding out KoRv, appeared about 100 years ago and has viral genes or regulatory sequences that already spread through 75 per cent ofthe impair survival of the host, ignoring those that have no effect, and positively selecting the rare ones that enhance survival. /lI n 1950, rab bits infected with myxo ma v i ru s were Most ERV integrations will be negative or have no effect. The human genome is littered rel eased i nto th e w i l d , W i th i n thre e months 99,8 p e r with the decayed remnants of such cent of rab b its i n south-east Au stra l ia were dead/l integrations, often reduced to fragments, or even solitary LTRs. This may explain the origin is unknown (Proceedings ofthe National koala's range, culling animals on a large of retrotransposons. These come in two types: Academy ofSciences, vol 99, p 11748). scale and simultaneously invading the germ long and short interspersed repetitive elements (LINEs and SINEs), and it now Even today viral diseases are changing line of the survivors. the course of human evolution. Although the Retroviruses don't have a monopoly on appears likely that they are heavily degraded plague culling effect is mitigated by medical fragments of ancient viruses. endogenisation. Earlier this month intervention in the AIDS pandemic, we researchers reported finding genes from As for positive selection, this can be readily a bornavirus in the genomes of several nevertheless observe selection pressure on confirmed by looking forviral genes or humans and virus alike. For example, the mammals, including humans, the first time regulatory sequences that have been conserved human geneHLA-B plays an important role in a virus not in the retrovirus class has been and become an integral part ofthe human the response to HIV-1 infection, and different identified in an animal genome. The virus genome. We now know of many such sequences. variants are strongly associated with the rate appears to have entered the germ line of a The firstto be discovered is the remnant ofa mammalian ancestor around 40 million years retrovirus that invaded the primate genome of AIDS progression. It is therefore likely that ago (Nature, vol 463, p 84). Many more such a little less than 40 million years ago and gave differentHLA-B alleles impose selection 34 1 NewScientist 1 30 January 2010

•

• •

the action of LINE retrotransposons by administration of the drug nevirapine causes an irreversible arrest in development in mouse embryos, suggesting that LINEs are somehow critical to early development in mammals (Systems Biology in Reproductive Medicine, vol 54, p 11). It also appears that HERVs play important roles in normal cellular physiology. Analysis of gene expression in the brain suggests that many different families of HERV participate in normal brain function. Syncytin-l and syncytin-2, for example, are extensively expressed in the adult brain, though their Virus genes functions there have yet to be explored. Other research groups have found that There are many more examples. Another gene producing a protein vital to the construction of 25 per cent of human regulatory sequences the placenta, syncytin-2, is also derived from a contain viral elements, prompting virus, and at least six other viral genes contribute suggestions that HERVs make a major to normal placental function, although their contribution to gene regulation (Trends in precise roles are poorly understood. Genetics, vol 1g, p 68). In support of that, HERV LTRs have been shown to be involved There is also tentative evidence that HERVs play a significant role in embryonic in the transcription of important proteins. development. The developing human embryo For example, the beta-globin gene, which expresses genes and control sequences from codes for one of the protein components two classes of HERV in large amounts, though of haemoglobin, is partly under the control of an LTR derived from a retrovirus. their functions are not known (Virology, The answer to our paradox is now clear: the vol 2g7, p 220). What is more, disrupting

rise to what is known as the W family ofERVs. The human genome has roughly 650 such integrations. One of these, on chromosome 7, contains a gene called syncytin-l, which codes for a protein originally used in the virus's envelope but now critical to the functioning of the human placenta. Expression of syncytin-l is controlled by two LTRs, one derived from the original virus and another from a different retrovirus called MaLR. Thus we have a quintessential viral genetic unit fulfilling a vitally important role in human biology.

human genome has evolved as a holobiontic union of vertebrate and virus. It is hardly surprising that researchers who have made these discoveries are now calling for a full-scale project to assess the contribution of viruses to our biology (BMC Genom ics, vol g, p 354). It is also probable that this "virolution" is continuing today. HIV belongs to a group of retroviruses called the lentiviruses. Until recently virologists thought that lentiviruses did not endogenise, but now we know that they have entered the germ lines of rabbits and the grey mouse lemur. That suggests that HIV-1 might have the potential to enter the human germ line (Proceedings of the NationalAcademy ofSciences, vol 104, p 6261 and vol 105, p 20362), perhaps taking our evolution in new and unexpected directions. It's a plague to us - but it could be vital to the biology our descendants . • Frank Ryan is a writer, medical doctor and biologist based in Sheffield, U K. His book Viro/ution is published by HarperColl i ns. He is the authorof a series of five review articles on the impact of viral symbiosis on medical genetics, published in the

Journa/ of the Roya/ Society of Medicine (va 1 102, p 272, p 324, p 415, p 474 and p 530) 30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 35

36 / NewScientist / 30 January 2010

We are storing our knowledge i n ever more fra g i l e and ephemera l forms. If anyth i n g goes wrong, we cou ld lose much of i t warn Tom S imonite and M ichael Le Page

f Now we k now It ... ·

L

I II I I

"

I

I I

N MONTH XI, 15th day, Venus in the west disappeared, 3 days in the liky it stayed away. In monthXI, 18th day, Venus in the east became visible." What's remarkJ:�!c: "tum these oDservations of Venus is that they were made about 3500 years ago, by Babylonian astrologers. We know about them because a clay tablet bearing a record of these ancient observations, called the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa, was made 1000 years later and has survived largely intact. Today, it can be viewed at the British Museum in London. We, of course, have knowledge undreamt of by the Babylonians. We don't just peek at

Venus from afar, we have sent spacecraft there. Our astronomers now observe planets round alien suns and peer across vast chasms of space and time, back to the beginning of the universe itself. Our industrialists are transforming sand and oil into ever smaller and more intricate machines, a form of alchemy more wondrous than anything any alchemist ever dreamed of. Our biologists are tinkering with the very recipes for life itself, gaining powers once attributed to gods. Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive? Of course, in the event ofa disaster big enough to wipe out all humans, such as a colossal asteroid strike, it would not really matter. Even if another intelligent species evolved on Earth, almost all traces of humanity would have vanished long before. Let's suppose, however, that something less cataclysmic occurs, that many buildings remain intact and enough people survive to rebuild civilisation after a few decades or centuries. Suppose, for instance, that the global financial system collapses, or a new virus kills most ofthe world's population, or a solar storm destroys the power grid in North America. Or suppose there is a slow decline as soaring energy costs and worsening environmental disasters take their toll. The increasing complexity and interdependency of society is making civilisation ever more vulnerable to such events (New Scientist, 5 April 2008, p 28 and p 32). Whatever the cause, if the power was cut off to the banks of computers that now store

much of humanity's knowledge, and people stopped looking after them and the buildings housing them, and factories ceased to churn out new chi ps and drives, how long would all our knowledge survive? How much would the survivors of such a disaster be able to retrieve decades or centuries hence? Even in the absence of any catastrophe, the loss of knowledge is already a problem. We are generating more information than ever before, and storing it in ever more transient media. Much of what it is being lost is hardly essential - future generations will probably manage fine without all the family photos and videos you lost when your hard drive died ­ but some is. In 2008, for instance, it emerged that the US had "forgotten" how to make a secret ingredient of some nuclear warheads, dubbed Fogbank. Adequate records had not been kept and all the key personnel had retired or left the agency responSible. The fiasco ended up adding $69 million to the cost of a warhead refurbishment programme. In the event of the power going off for an extended period, humanity's legacy will depend largely on the hard drive, the technology that functions as our society's working memory. Everything from the latest genome scans to government and bank records to our personal information reside on hard drives, most ofthem found inside rooms full of servers known as data centres. Hard drives were never intended for long­ term storage, so they have not been subjected to the kind of tests used to estimate the lifetimes offormats like CDs. No one can be sure how long they will last. Kevin Murrell, a trustee of the UK's national museum of computing, recently switched on a > 30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 37

- 1

- fincreasingly commonplace are even less 456 megabyte hard drive that had been powered down since the early 1980s. "We had resilient than hard drives. How long they will no problems getting the data off at all," he says. preserve dad is not clear, as no independent tests have been performed, but one maker Modern drives might not fare so well, warns users not to trust them for more than though. The storage density on hard drives 10 years. And while some new memory is now over 200 gigabits per square inch and still climbing fast. While to day's drives have technologies might be inherently more stable than flash, the focus is on boosting speed and sophisticated systems for compensating for the failure of small sectors, in general the capacity rather than stability. Of course, the conditions in which media more bits of data you cram into a material, the are stored can be far more important than more you lose if part of it becomes degraded or damaged. What's more, a decay process that their inherent stability: drives that stay dry and cool will last much longer than those would leave a large-scale bit of data readable exposed to heat and damp. Few data centres are designed to maintain such conditions for "A centu ry or so after the long if the power goes off, though. A lot are power goes off, l ittl e "fi l l located in ordinary buildings, some in areas vulnerable to earthquakes or flooding. And if rema i n of the di gital age civilisation dlid collapse, who knows what uses except what's on paper" the resource-starved survivors might find for old hard drivbs? The physical survival of stored data, however, is jUlst the start of the problem of could destroy some smaller-scale bits. "The jury is still out on modern discs. We won't retrieving it, as space enthusiasts Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing have discovered. know for another 20 years," says Murrell. Most important data is backed up ob They have been leading a project, based at formats such as magnetic tape or optical discs. NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Unfortunately, many of those formats cannot California, to retrieve high-resolution images be trusted to last even five years, says Joe Iraci, from old magnetic tapes. The tapes contain raw data sent back from the five Lunar Orbiter who studies the reliability of digital media at the Canadian Conservation Institute in missions in the 1960s. At the time, only low-resolution images could be retrieved. Ottawa, Ontario. Iraci's "accelerated ageing" tests, which The tapes were wrapped in plastic, placed in magnetically impervious metal canisters and typically involve exposing media to high remain in pristine condition. "It is a miracle heat and humidity, show that the most stable optical discs are recordable CDs with a from my experience with similar commercial tapes of a similar age," says Wingo. reflective layer of gold and a phthalocyanine dye layer. "!fyou go with that disc and record it But to get the raw data off the tapes, the well, I think it could very well last fOr loO years," team first had to restore old tape drives saved by a former NASA employee. That was the he says. " If you go with something else you could be looking at a 5 to 10 year window." biggest challenge, says Cowing. "There was a lizard living inside one of them." Once they The flash-memory drives that are

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began to retrieve the raw data, converting it into a usable form was only possible after a three-month search uncovered a document with the "demodulation" equations. If today it takes a bunch of enthusiasts with plenty of funding many months to retrieve the data from a few well-preserved magnetic tapes, imagine the difficulties facing those post-catastrophe. Even with a plentiful supply of working computers to read hard drives, recovering data would not be easy. Much data nowadays is encrypted or readable only using specialised software. And in a data centre left untouched for 20 or 30 years, some drives would need disassembling to retrieve their data, says Robert Winter, a senior engineer with Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery in Epsom, Surrey, UK, which in 2003 rescued the data on a hard drive from the space shuttle Columbia. Indeed, rescuing data if things go wrong can be tricky, even in today's fully powered world.

STO R E IT F O R M I LL E N N I A The current strategy for preserving important data is to store several copies in different places, sometimes in different digital formats. This can protect

Part of the trouble is that there is no market i n eternity. Proposals to make a paper format that could store digital data for centuries using symbols

02008, holds descriptions and texts of 1000 languages. The nickel discs are etched with text that starts at a normal size and rapidly shrinks to

against localised disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes,

akin to bar codes have faltered due to a lack of commercial

microscopic. At a size readable at 1000 times magnification, each

but it will notwork i n the long run. 'There really is no digital standard that could be counted

interest and the challenge of packing the data densely enough to be useful.

disc can hold 30,000 pages of text or images. The institute is considering creating a d igital

on in the very long term, in the scenario that we drop the ball,"

Perhaps the only data format that comes close to rivalling

version using a form of bar code. If we did have a way to store

says Alexander Rose, head of The Long Now Foundation, a California-based organisation

paper for stability and digital media for data d ensity is the Rosetta Disk. The first d isc, made in what its creators call

digital data long-term, the next question would be what to preserve, and h ow to keep it

dedicated to long·term thinking.

safe but easily discoverable.

help ofa retired engineer who had worked on similar systems. Without expert help like this, retrieving data from the tapes would have taken a lot longer, Cowing says. A century or so after a major catastrophe, little of the digital age will remain beyond what's written on paper. "Even the worst kind of paper can last more than 100 years," says Season Tse, who works on paper conservation at the Canadian Conservation Institute. The oldest surviving "book" printed on paper dates from AD 868, he says. It was found in a cave in north-west China in 1907. Providing books are not used as a handy fuel, or as toilet paper, they will persist for several hundred years, brittle and discoloured Top of the pops but still legible. Again, though, the most What's more, what is likely to survive the popular tomes are the most likely to survive. longest from today's digital age is not Imagine risking your life exploring dangerous ruins looking for ancient wisdom only to find necessary the most important. The more a long-hidden stash of Playboy magazines. copies - backups - there are of any piece of It is not just what survives but the choices of data, the greater the chances of its survival, Last year, for instance, after some servers discovery and retrieval. Some data is much those who come after that ultimately decide a civilisation's legacy, however. And those doing malfunctioned, it took Microsoft many weeks copied because it is so useful, like operating the choosing are more likely to pick the useful to recover most of the personal data of users systems, but mostly it is down to popularity. That means digital versions of popular than the trivial. A culture of rational, empirical of Sidekick cellphones. enquiry that developed in one tiny pocket of music and even some movies might survive Post-catastrophe, the lack of resources ­ of people, expertise, equipment - might be the ancient Greek empire in the 6th century many decades: Abba might just top the pop a far bigger obstacle than the physical loss BC has survived ever since, says classicist Paul charts again in the 22nd century. However, of data. And resources are likely to be scarce. there are far fewer copies of the textbooks Cartledge ofthe University of Cambridge, despite not being at all representative of the and manuals and blueprints containing the Restarting an industrial civilisation might be period's mainstream culture. kind of distillation of specialised knowledge a lot harder the second time round, because that might matter most to those trying to we have used up mostofthe easily available As long as the modern descendant of this culture of enquiry survives, most of our rebuild civilisation, such as how to smelt resources, from oil to high-grade ores. iron or make antibiotics. Would the loss of most of the data stored scientific knowledge and technology could be Perhaps the most crucial loss will occur rediscovered and reinvented sooner or later. on hard drives really matter? After all, much of If it does not survive, the longest-lasting what we have inherited from past civilisations after half a century or so, as any surviving legacy of our age could be all-time best-sellers engineers, scientists and doctors start to is of little practical use: the Venus Tablet of succumb to old age. Their skills and know-how like Quotationsfrom Chairman Mao, Scouting Ammisaduqa, for instance, consists largely of astrological mumbo jumbo. Similarly, an would make a huge difference when it comes for Boys and The Lord of the Rings. • to finding important information and getting awful lot of what fills up the world's servers, Tom S i m o n ite is a technology news editor, and key machinery working again. The NASA tape from online shops to the latest celeb videos, Michael Le Page a features editor, at New Scientist seems dispensable too. drives, for instance, were restored with the Even the value of much scientific data is questionable. What use would it be knowing the genome sequence of humans and other organisms, for instance, without the technology and expertise needed to exploit this knowledge? With some scientific experiments now generating petabytes of data, preserving it all is already becoming a major challenge. The vast quantity of material will be a problem for anyone trying to recover whatever they regard as important: while it is relatively easy to find a book you are after in a library, there is usually no way to be sure what's on a hard drive without revving it up.

30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 39

Why d o some jokes leave us rol l i n g i n the a i sles, wh ile others have us rol l ing our eyes? Da niel Elkan looks for h i s sense of hu mour

40 1 NewScientist 1 30 January 2010

T

wo

polar bears are perched on a block offloating ice. One says to the other: "Do you know, I keep thinking it's Thursday. . . " To some, this kind of surreal humour is side-splitting. Others are baffled by it and can't even raise a smile. Yet despite the importance of humour to human psychology, it is only the advances in brain imaging during the past decade that have enabled neuroscientists to pin down how the brain reacts when a joke tickles us. Armed with this knowledge, they are now solving the puzzle of why some jokes are funny to some people but leave others cold.

So what is a joke, exactly? Most theories agree that one condition is essential: there must be some kind of incongruity between two elements within the joke, which can be resolved in a playful or unexpected way. Take the following exchange from the classic British sitcom Only Fools and Horses, when an anxious "Del Boy" Trotter visits his doctor for a heart check-up. "Do you smoke, Mr Trotter?" asks the doctor. "Not right now, thank you doctor," he responds. The joke's incongruity, of course, lies in the unlikely offer of a cigarette by a doctor to a patient concerned about his heart. It is only

once we understand the mismatch that we get the joke. "Humour seems to be a product of humans' ability to make rapid, intuitive judgements" about a situation, followed by "slower, deliberative assessments" which resolve incongruities, says Karli Watson of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But which parts of the brain carry out these processes? To find out, Joseph Moran, then at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, used functional MRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they watched popularTV sitcoms. The experiments revealed a distinct pattern of neural activity that occurs in response to a funny joke, with the left posterior temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus seeing the most activity. These regions are normally linked to language comprehension and the ability to adjust the focus of our attention, which would seem to correspond to the process of incongruity-resolution at the heart ofagood joke (Neurolmage, VOI Zl, p lOSS). Further research, conducted by Dean Mobbs, then at Stanford University in California, uncovered a second spike of activity in the brain's limbic system - associated with dopamine release and reward processing­ which may explain the pleasure felt once you "get" the joke (Neuron, vol 40, p 1041). Examining one particular part of the limbic system - the ventral striatum - was especially revealing, as its level of activity corresponded with the perceived funniness ofa joke. "It's the same region that is involved in many different

"Humour is a far more complex process than pri m eval pleasures l i ke sex or food"

Humour i s a u n iversal

human characteristic. It may even define u s

types of reward, from drugs, to sex and our favourite music," says Mobbs, now at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK. "Humour thus taps into basic rewards systems that are important to our survival." Yet humour is a far more complex process than primeval pleasures like sex or food. In addition to the two core processes of getting the joke and feeling good about it, jokes also activate regions of the frontal and cingulate cortex, which are linked with association formation, learning and decision-making (Cerebral Cortex, vol l?, P314). The team also found heightened activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the frontoinsular cortex - regions that are only present in humans and, in a less developed form, great apes. Indeed, the fact that these regions are involved suggests that humour is an advanced ability which may have only evolved in early humans, says Watson, who conducted the research. > 30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 41

H u m o u r i n yo u r head

These are the regions ofthe brain involved i n our appreciation of jokes, and even the areas associated with specific types of humour

Primary regions • Left posterior temporal gyrus

Left i nferior frontal gyrus • Temporoparietal junction These regions are fundamental in grasping the relationship between the incongruous elements atthe heart of ajoke

VISUAL PUNS

• The ventral striatum

extrastriate cortex

Associated with the pleasurable feeling we get once we appreciate ajoke. The greater the activity observed, the funnier the joke is perceived to be

NONSENSE H UMOUR prefrontal cortex

SOCIAL HUMOUR frontoinsular cortex

NONSENSE HUMOUR

SOCIAL H UMOUR

hi ppocampus

anterior cingulate cortex

What your sense of humour says about you Most types of humour, including jokes

scripts and integrating this

it's through art, travel, music or

and cartoons, rely on some kind of incongruity between two elements

information seems to be a more complex process than simply laughing

an unconventional living style. When processing any type of funny

that needs a second's thought before it can be understood. The extent to which this mismatch can be resolved

about nonsense." she says. The degree to which Samson's volunteers "got" the joke was reflected

cartoon. experience seekers showed greater activity in the TPJ, hippocampus and prefrontal areas of

differs between jokes, however. Some have a clean punchline that

in one small region of the brain called the temporoparietal j unction (TPj),

the brain than their fellow subjects. which might reflect their adventurous

ties up all the loose ends. while in "nonsense" h umour the incongruity can only be partially resolved, leaving

with the most activity occurring when the resolvable cartoonswere viewed but no activity for the unfunny control

mindset. says Samson. "The hippocampus is an area known to p rocess novel stimuli."

a gap in the person's u ndersta nding. The cartoons to the right should give some idea of the difference between the two styles of joke. For years, nonsensejokes

she says. "It could be that humorous stimuli give experience seekers an opportunity for mental exploration of novelty. and this 'lights up' the hippocampus."

have been considered to be more sophisticated and philosophical than classic. resolvable humour (known technically as "incongruity-resolution humour") - consider the reputation

images (Neuropsychologia. vol 47. p 1023). The surreal cartoons fell somewhere in between. "Although the attempt to resolve the incongruity is present with nonsense humour. this effort does not lead to a complete resolution of the incongruity and therefore to less activation of the TPJ." says Samson. What's more, if someone failed to

of Monty Python's Flying Circus compared with that of Friends, for

get the joke. the rostral cingulate zone of the brain became more

(NeUropsychologia. vol 45. p 2874).

example. "It was previously thought that nonsense h umour was more complex in terms of thought process,"

active - a region thought to pick u p on errors in the way we behave and monitor conflicts.

when the experience seekers viewed the surreal cartoons. Importantly. unlike the other subjects. their brains

EXPERIENCE SEEKERS

responded most strongly to the nonsense h umour ratherthan the

Indeed. a previous study at the U niversity of Kentucky in Lexington found that experience seekers have greater hippocampal vol ume. which would seem to fit with this result The d ifference was most marked

says psychologist Andrea Samson at the University of Fribourg. Switzerland. Samson's recent work suggests otherwise. When comparing MRI scans of people as they viewed both straight and nonsense humour. she found that straight humour evoked

Not everyone reacted more strongly to resolvable h umour, however; those with one particular personality type found the surreal cartoons more rewarding. These people, dubbed

significantly more brain activity than a surreal joke in most volunteers.

"experience seekers". are defined by a desire to pursue novel sensations,

incongruity-resolution humour. Samson reckons that the nonsense h umour may allow the experience seeker's inquisitive brains even more opportunity for exploration than the resolvable humour, which could explain

"Making sense out of opposed

stimulation and experiences. whether

their preference.

42 1 NewScientist 1 30 January 2010

"Nor ItQrgl�·. ClUJrl�e - ndrrow boars. "

Resolvable cartoons (top) and "nonsense" ones ( bottom) appeal to people with different personality types

No two brains are the same, however, and how these differences are reflected in our sense of humour is the subject of much research. Men and women, for example, seem to process jokes slightly differently. Although both sexes laugh at roughly the same number of jokes, women show greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex than men (Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences, vol 102, p 16496). "This suggests a greater degree of executive processing and language-based decoding," says Mobbs. As a result, women take significantly longer

The mechanics of ajoke

"Women take sign ificantly longer than men to decide whether or not they find someth ing funny than men to decide whether they find something funny, though that doesn't seem to spoil their enjoyment ofthe joke. Indeed, women show a greater response in the limbic system than men, suggesting they feel a greater sense of reward. Perhaps unsurprisingly, personality also appears to play a key role in humour. Mobbs has shown that people who are classed as extrovert and emotionally stable have increased activity in reward areas of the brain during exposure to funny stimuli. Neurotic The cartoon below people, in contrast, have less ofa reward represents a visual pun, while below-right is a response compared with the average person "theory-of- mind" joke (Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences, vol 102, p 16502). "This suggests that personality style may be important in how we process humour," Mobbs says.

Twisted logic Whether our neural circuitry can explain specific preferences for certain types of humour remains an open question. To investigate, Andrea Samson at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland used MRI to scan volunteers' brains while they looked at 90 different non-verbal cartoons reflecting various styles of humour. As a control, the volunteers also viewed pictures that could not be interpreted in any meaningful or funny way. Surprising results emerged from that experiment. Although you might expect the subject matter- music or politics, for example - to determine joke preference, Samson found that it is the way a joke is solved that is most important. "The logic by which the incongruity is resolved matters most, in terms of what kind of person a joke appeals to," she says (see "What your sense of humour says about you", left). There is a serious note to this work. The researchers hope that pinning down the brain processes involved in understanding jokes

Most jokes can be divided into certai n "logical mechanisms" that determine

impaired ability to empathise with other people. Some previous studies

which cognitive process your mind goes through before it understan ds the h umour.

had found that people with autism have trouble understanding jokes, b ut since these studies hadn't

Many cartoons, for example, rely on our u nderstanding of other people,

considered different styles of humour, it wasn't clear whether they were

playing on the fact that one character doesn't understand what the other is thi nking. To get the joke you need a

unable to understand all kinds of humour, or whether itwas simply theory-ot-mind style jokes that

"theory of mind", allowing you to understand the d ifferent state of

had them stumped. Samson decided to investigate.

mind of each character. Perhaps unsurprisingly, brain scans have shown that a reas involved in social cognition are activated when viewing this kind of cartoon.

She found that while volunteers with Asperger's syndrome had difficulty understanding and appreciating theory-of-mind-based cartoons, they enjoyed visual puns, which do not rely

The degree to which we empathise with others has a profound impact on our appreciation at this kind at joke.

on empathy, to the same extent as a control group. "Visual puns are much more abstract than theory-at-mind

Andrea Samson at the U niversity of Fribourg, Switzerland, showed this

cartoons;' says Samson. "To understand the joke, you have to

when she compared the responses at people with two different personality

realise that one visual element reters simultaneously to two meanings."

types. It turned out that "empathisers", who identify emotions and thoughts in others and respond appropriately,

Some researchers had suspected that an element of empathy is needed for all kinds of humour - notjust

found the theory-at-mind jokes much funnier than "systemisers", who

theory-ot-mindjokes. But the tact that people with Asperger's syndrome

preterto thinkaboutthings in logical, abstract terms. At the far end of this scale are

get these visual puns shows that they don't lack an overall sense of humour, says Samson, just that they are poorly

people with autism, who have an

equipped to "get" a certain type ot joke.

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could shed light on a number of medical conditions. Mobbs, for example, hopes that studying humour will provide insights into depression. "It is believed that the reward system is disrupted in depression and it would be interesting to see if this deficit extends to more complex social processes such as humour," he says. Samson, meanwhile, hopes it could contribute to our understanding of autism. Previous research has suggested that people with autism have difficulty understanding comedy, but her work shows that they can understand and appreciate

certain types of jokes as well as anyone (see "The mechanics ofa joke", above). This could change the way we interact with autistic children, she says. More than anything, the recent research confirms the fact that humour, an oft-neglected trait when considering our cognitive skills, requires a tremendous amount of brain power. "Getting a joke would seem - on the surface­ to be a very trivial, intuitive process. But brain imaging is showing us that there is more going on than we might think," says Samson. • Daniel Elkan is a freelance journalist based in London 30 January 2010 1 NewScientist 1 43

BOOKS & ARTS

compelling technologies emerge only for us to discover that their Piracy: The intellectual property wars poor, early-stage design has some fram Gutenberg to Gates by Ad ri a n unattractive side effects. For johns, University of Chicago Press, $35 example, technologies like Google's search-term-sensitive Reviewed by Tom Simonite Adwords system treats people as little more than a distributed YOU might think that prior to the array of dumb revenue-generating Piracy 20th century, machines, matching people to � -" ads in the same soulless way "piracy" only referred to nautical that Midi music software only shenanigans. But picks out stark notes, with no A,M" J" .' English stationers harmonic nuance. This is good knockabout in the 17th century stuff, and Lanier clearly enjoys labelled colleagues who printed unauthorised versions of other rethinking received tech wisdom: people's work "land-pirats". his book is a refreshing change Adrian Johns's weighty history from Silicon Valley's usual hype. fills the years since with quotable anecdotes and lively portraits of Unifying biology wily information thieves who copied everything from telephone Here be Dragons: How the study network codes to an entire of animal and plant distributions electronics company. Along the revolutionised our view oflife on way he assembles a good body of Earth by D e nn i s McCarthy, Oxford evidence to support the idea that University Press, $29.95/£15.99 the urge to "borrow" information Reviewed by Adrian Barn ett is a core part of human nature, THIS book's even ifthe means of doing so have changed over the years. aim is to put Now, Johns sees Google's move biogeography the study of the to digitise the world's books and distribution of the growing open access movement in science publishing biodiversity over time - centre stage as hints that we are on the brink of an intellectual-property as a unifying revolution. Plus