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Editorial–

Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Webb Editor Roger Highfield Associate Editors Liz Else, Stephanie Pain News Editor Shaoni Bhattacharya Editors Helen Knight, Celeste Biever, Richard Fisher, Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Priya Shetty Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1206 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1250 Reporters LONDON Andy Coghlan, Paul Marks, Linda Geddes, David Shiga [email protected] BOSTON US Bureau Chief Ivan Semeniuk SAN FRANCISCO Bureau Chief Peter Aldhous [email protected] Jim Giles [email protected] TORONTO Alison Motluk BRUSSELS Debora MacKenzie MELBOURNE Australasian Editor Rachel Nowak [email protected] Features Editors Ben Crystall, Kate Douglas, Clare Wilson, David Cohen, Graham Lawton, Valerie Jamieson, Michael Le Page, Caroline Williams, Richard Webb Features Contacts Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1201 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 [email protected] Opinion Editor Jo Marchant Editors John Hoyland, Amanda Gefter, Alison George, Eleanor Harris Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1240 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 [email protected] Researcher Lucy Dodwell Editorial Assistant Amy Galloway Production Editor Mick O’Hare Asst Production Editor Melanie Green Chief Sub John Liebmann Subeditors Vivienne Greig, Julia Brown, Sean O’Neill Art Director Alison Lawn Design Craig Mackie, Ryan Wills Graphics Nigel Hawtin, Dave Johnston Pictures Adam Goff, Kirstin Jennings Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1268 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1250

A new enlightenment Obama has to signal that rationality, not faith, is now in the driving seat AMERICA has a new and charismatic leader. The expressions of hope and optimism that followed the US presidential election are without equal in recent memory. Among those cheering the election of Barack Obama are many US scientists and policy-makers, who are anxious to repair a damaging rift between science and the federal government that has seen America’s climate policy stall, environmental regulations relaxed and draconian and ideologically driven restrictions placed on stem cell research. But can Obama deliver? One way to get things moving would be the speedy appointment of a science adviser, upgraded to the president’s inner circle. The adviser would lead a revamped Office of Science and Technology Policy. Who should get the job? During his presidential campaign Obama consulted a diverse team, including prominent biologists such as Harold Varmus, former director of

the National Institutes of Health. The appointment of a life scientist would be a switch from previous administrations. Up till now, the job has traditionally been held by physicists, a legacy of the atomic age. At a time when global pandemics and environmental catastrophe are at least as likely a threat as nuclear war, it would signal that the Obama administration sees the world differently. Perhaps a more conspicuous way to herald a new era would be to appoint a woman or someone from a minority group. While expertise and ability remain the factors by which any candidate should be judged, the right person could inspire a generation. The clearest sign of change, though, is to show that the White House will respond in a cool, rational way to ideologically and religiously motivated views, whether on creationism, abortion or the roots of homosexuality. What matters most is to signal the birth of a new enlightenment. ●

Careers Editor Helen Thomson [email protected] Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1248 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1280

…and what it means for stem cells and climate

Consultants Alun Anderson, Anil Ananthaswamy, Stephen Battersby, Michael Bond, Michael Brooks, Marcus Chown, Rob Edwards, Richard Fifield, Barry Fox, Mick Hamer, Jeff Hecht, Bob Holmes, Justin Mullins, Fred Pearce, Helen Phillips, Ian Stewart, Gail Vines, Gabrielle Walker, Emma Young

EVEN before the appointment of a presidential science adviser there are signs of a key policy change. During a television interview, John Podesta, co-chair of the Obama transition team, made it clear that stem cell restrictions are among the Bush-era executive orders that Obama is now reviewing (see page 11). Such orders do not require congressional approval, so a momentous change for US stem cell researchers could come at the stroke of a pen. This could ramp up the US competition faced by rival teams abroad, not least those who have benefited from the brain

Press Office and Syndication UK Claire Bowles Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1210 Fax 7611 1250 US Office Tel +1 617 386 2190 NEWSCIENTIST.COM Online Publisher John MacFarlane Online Editor Rowan Hooper Editors Maggie McKee, Tom Simonite Reporters Catherine Brahic, Colin Barras, Sandrine Ceurstemont, Michael Marshall, Ewen Callaway, Rachel Courtland Online Subeditor Dan Palmer Web team Neela Das, Cathy Tollet, Ruth Turner, Ken Wolf, Edin Hodzic, Vivienne Griffith, Rohan Creasey, Matteo Giaccone

Long live sci-fi OUR cover story this week underlines how science is increasingly stranger than fiction. This has led some to wonder whether the days of sci-fi are numbered (see page 46). We ran a poll to investigate, and found that most of those who replied do indeed prefer vintage sci-fi – such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1951) – to more recent works from the likes of Iain M.

www.newscientist.com

drain of disenchanted American talent. However, there has been little word yet about who in the new government might deal with climate change. Obama promised to introduce a scheme to limit carbon emissions, but it seems improbable that a US team will be in place in time to prepare for next month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference. Given the state of the US economy, it will be no surprise if action comes slower in this arena compared with stem cells. The world can wait a little, so long as the outcome is action and not more hot air. ●

Banks or Neal Stephenson (see page 52). But the comments showed that sci-fi can still invoke passionate feelings, reveal the world in a new light, and even change the course of someone’s life. Despite the claims of the doomsayers, sci-fi provides a way to explore our deepest desires and fears. Long may it provide the history of the future and a captivating glimpse of imaginary worlds. ● 15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 5

News in perspective

DAMON WINTER/NYT/REDUX/EYEVINE

Upfront– HISTORIC DAY FOR FORECASTERS Barack Obama’s win was as much a triumph for mathematicians. For all the inherent uncertainties in electoral outcomes, the 2008 contest may be the one that established election forecasting as a powerful predictive science. Even pollsters who predicted Barack Obama’s smooth ride to the White House were aware of a possible fly in the ointment: the so-called Bradley effect, in which white voters say they will vote for a black candidate for fear of seeming racist if they admit otherwise. Statisticians are still crunching the data, but say that only a weak effect has emerged. Pollsters say this is because voters could cite valid reasons for preferring John McCain – such as Obama’s relative lack of experience. Harvard historian Allan Lichtman predicted Obama’s win back in 2006

on the basis of previous election trends, such as a tendency for voters to favour the opposition in hard economic times. It is the seventh consecutive election that Lichtman has correctly forecast, though he admitted that since Obama was the first black presidential candidate there was no precedent with which to assess the effect of race. Meanwhile Nate Silver, a baseball statistician turned political pundit, called the result to within 1 per cent. Silver relied on poll data, using a variety of statistical techniques to smooth out the errors that plague survey results. The winning statisticians? The PollyVote website combined Lichtman’s and Silver’s methods, plus predictions made by political scientists, to produce a perfect 53 per cent forecast.

Flu hits

Google Flu Trends can detect an outbreak days before it shows up in the weekly CDC reports, says Ferguson. The extra warning time won’t stop outbreaks altogether but could play an important role in helping hospitals prepare for a surge in patient numbers, he suggests. “Even outside of pandemics, just with seasonal flu the severe years can really stress healthcare systems.” If Google’s approach is successful in combating flu, it could be applied to other diseases around the world. It might help to prevent new infectious diseases from taking root, says Larry Brilliant, head of Google.org.

–Obama effect trumps Bradley effect–

AFTER global markets were hit by what may be the worst financial crisis of our times, environmental groups pointed out that an “ecocrunch” would hit even harder. Just how hard is the subject of a new report. Estimating the cost of environmental crises is difficult. In 2006, economist Nicholas Stern rocked the world by putting a £2.3 trillion price tag on the consequences of ignoring climate change. “He may have been right – who knows? – but Stern had a huge effect” in communicating the scale of the problem, says Nick Johnstone, an economist at the OECD, which produced the new report: Costs of Inaction on Key Environmental Challenges. Johnstone and his team

“Mismanaging natural disasters costs the poorest countries 13 per cent of their GDP” compiled research on air and water pollution, climate change, groundwater management, industrial hazards and natural disasters to estimate the costs of inaction for each problem. 6 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

But, unlike the Stern review, their report gives no global figure of predicted financial doom. Instead, it calculated the economic damage on a countryby-country basis. Mismanaging natural disasters costs the poorest countries more than 13 per cent of their GDP, for example, and air pollution costs China about 3.8 per cent of GDP in poor health. Johnstone says the report gives environment ministers bargaining chips. For example, attempts to reduce air pollution would be more compelling if the treasury can be persuaded that the initiative will cut national health bills and other costs. NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

Costly eco-crunch

WHEN the next flu outbreak begins, the first alert may come from a flurry of Google searches. Google Flu Trends, created by the company’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, provides daily estimates of the number of flu cases in the US, based on trends in flu-related internet searches such as queries about symptoms. The estimates made by Google’s new software match the weekly flu statistics compiled by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from doctors’ reports, says Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.

End of a lander “I CAME, I saw, I dug.” That was the most popular epitaph for the now-defunct Phoenix Mars lander in an online poll last week. On Monday, NASA said that it had lost contact with the lander, bringing the mission to an end. Despite attempts to contact it using two orbiting spacecraft, Phoenix has been silent since 2 November. “We’re pretty much convinced that the vehicle is no longer available,” says NASA’s –The sun has set on Phoenix– Barry Goldstein. www.newscientist.com

60 SECONDS Phoenix’s end came three weeks earlier than anticipated. The craft’s solar power had been dwindling as the Martian winter approached, and a dust storm late last month accelerated decline by darkening the skies. Phoenix is not expected to survive the Martian winter, when temperatures will drop below -150 ˚C. The solar arrays “will likely crack and fall off the vehicle”, says Goldstein. Still, the team plans to check again in October 2009, when enough sunlight returns to power the lander. “This vehicle has been so superlative in the way it’s been behaving since it landed, nothing would surprise me,” says Goldstein.

Animal lab opens

‘Invisible’ organs

MURRAY’S MOUTH TURNS TOXIC

PIGS really could save our bacon. Organs that are invisible The health of Australia’s Murray-Darling to our immune system and so river system, already shockingly poor, won’t be rejected when they has just taken a turn for the worse. In are transplanted could be ready the past month, tracts of wetland at the within 10 years, thanks to a mouth of the Murray have become as faster way of genetically corrosive as battery acid, forming a engineering pigs. yellow crust of sideronatrite, a mineral Progress towards these that only forms in extremely acid soil. “xenotransplants” has stalled This latest indicator of the river’s through lack of funding and decline is detailed in reports to be problems with the cloning released this week by the CSIRO technique used to engineer the Land and Water research institute in pigs. Now there is a simpler way. Adelaide, South Australia. For years The new technique will alter the drought and mismanagement have DNA in a boar’s sperm cells, and reduced water flows in the Murraytherefore in any future offspring, Darling system, altering salinity, by injecting a virus into its temperature and nutrient levels. But testicles carrying the desired in July last year, a team led by Rob genes – such as those used to Fitzpatrick, who wrote the new reports, “disguise” pig organs. When found a new problem: falling water the boars breed naturally, they should pass on the genetic changes to their piglets. Robert Winston of Hammersmith Hospital in London, who is developing the technique with Carol Readhead of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, revealed at a press conference in London last week that they have got their technique to work in six boars. The pigs’ sperm carried a jellyfish “marker” gene that glows green. The plan is to test tissue from piglets sired by the boars to see if they inherited the gene. –Acid wash– www.newscientist.com

Paying for polio shots Billionaire Bill Gates has said he will help pay for injectable polio vaccines in India, one of the last countries where the disease persists. The current oral treatment has not been successful due to the prevalence of chronic diarrhoea, which prevents the vaccine from working.

“We would not describe this as a victory, as we never sought a battle”

Obesity drug heartbreak Many people who took the anti-obesity drug fenfluramine before it was banned in 1997 carried on developing damage to their heart valves long after stopping the medication, a study of 5743 former users reveals (BMC Medicine, DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-6-34). Of these, 20 per cent of women and 12 per cent of men were affected. For all ex-users, the chances of needing surgery for valve damage was seven times normal.

firebomb attack in August on the homes of two researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It is critical that the FBI apprehend the people who committed these felonies,” said FBR president Frankie Trull.

In a lather over hair

levels in Lakes Alexandrina and Albert at the Murray’s mouth in South Australia were exposing the surrounding soils, rich in iron sulphide, to the air. This has led to the production of 240,000 tonnes of sulphuric acid, says Fitzpatrick. “Acid dissolves aluminium, arsenic, zinc and lead, which could contaminate water supplies,” he adds. The discovery of sideronatrite will fuel fears that the acid will seep into the lakes, killing aquatic life. Fitzpatrick says a proposal to flush out the acid with seawater would only be a short-term fix, making the river even saltier than the sea. Two alternatives are being tested around Lake Albert: spreading lime and growing acid-resistant plants to neutralise the acid in the soil.

The evolution of hair needs a rethink. Hair proteins called keratins have been found in chickens and lizards, indicating that they did not evolve after mammals had diverged from reptiles and birds, as was thought. Lizards have the highest concentration of the proteins in their toes, suggesting that they are important for claw formation.

India circles the moon

JEAN PAUL FERRERO/ARDEA

AFTER years of often violent opposition, a controversial British medical research lab opened this week, but few were celebrating. The University of Oxford’s Biomedical Sciences Building suffered a series of setbacks due to threats and criminal damage until new laws stifled violent protests in 2005. It opened on Tuesday, but the university has cautioned against triumphalism. “We would not describe this as a victory, as we never sought a battle,” it says. Meanwhile, the violent element of the anti-vivisection movement is growing in the US and mainland Europe. Figures

from the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR) in Washington DC show that US animal activists have committed 508 illegal acts since 2003. In the previous five years, the number was 138. The most recent was a

India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft entered orbit around the moon last Saturday. On 15 November, it will send a mini-probe plummeting towards the surface to beam back video and other observations during a 25-minute descent. Once over, the plan is to turn on the main spacecraft’s instruments, including cameras, spectrometers and radar.

Test nanomaterials now More and more nanomaterials are creeping into consumer products and need urgent testing for safety and environmental impact, says the UK’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. For example, bactericidal nanosilver used in clothing may affect aquatic life. The commission wants Europe’s regulatory rules for chemicals to be extended to such materials.

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 7

International news and exclusives

This Thisweek– week–

Born to fight, evolved for peace IT’S a question at the heart of what it is to be human: why do we go to war? The cost to human society is enormous, yet for all our intellectual development, we continue to wage war well into the 21st century. Now a new theory is emerging that challenges the prevailing view that warfare is a product of human culture and thus a relatively recent phenomenon. For the first time, anthropologists, archaeologists, primatologists, psychologists and political scientists are approaching a consensus. Not only is war as ancient as humankind, they say, but it has played an integral role in our evolution. The theory helps explain the evolution of familiar aspects of warlike behaviour such as gang warfare. And even suggests the cooperative skills we’ve had to develop to be effective warriors have turned into the modern ability to work towards a common goal. These ideas emerged at a conference last month on the evolutionary origins of war at the University of Oregon in Eugene. “The picture that was painted was quite consistent,” says Mark Van Vugt, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Kent, UK. “Warfare has been with us for at least several tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years.” He thinks it was already there in the common ancestor we share with chimps. “It has been a significant selection pressure on the human species,” he says. ZIn fact several fossils of early humans have wounds consistent with warfare. 8 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

Studies suggest that warfare accounts for 10 per cent or more of all male deaths in present-day hunter-gatherers. “That’s enough to get your attention,” says Stephen LeBlanc, an archaeologist at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum in Boston. Primatologists have known for some time that organised, lethal violence is common between groups of chimpanzees, our closest relatives. Whether between chimps or huntergatherers, however, intergroup violence is nothing like modern pitched battles. Instead, it tends to take the form of brief raids using overwhelming force, so that the aggressors run little risk of injury. “It’s not like the Somme,” says Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard University. “You go off, you make a hit, you come back again.” This opportunistic violence helps the aggressors weaken rival groups and thus expand their territorial holdings. Such raids are possible because

humans and chimps, unlike most social mammals, often wander away from the main group to forage singly or in smaller groups, says Wrangham. Bonobos – which are as closely related to humans as chimps are – have little or no intergroup violence because they tend to live in habitats where food is easier to come by, so that they

need not stray from the group. If group violence has been around for a long time in human society then we ought to have evolved psychological adaptations to a warlike lifestyle. Several participants presented the strongest evidence yet that males – whose larger and more muscular bodies make them PATRICK AVENTURIER/GAMMA/EYEDEA

BOB HOLMES

JP LAFFONT/SYGMA/CORBIS

Not only is warfare as old as humanity itself, it may even be the driver behind cooperative behaviour

THE MINDSET FOR MODERN WARFARE Modern warfare with its complex strategies, and advanced, long-distance weapons bears little resemblance to the hand-to-hand skirmishes of our ancestors. This may mean we’re left with battle instincts unsuited to our time, suggested several participants at the Oregon conference. Overconfidence in the strength of numbers is one example, says Dominic Johnson of the University of Edinburgh, UK. He found that in a simulated war game, men tended to overestimate their chance of winning, making them more

likely to attack (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 273, p 2513). Thus, a dictator surveying his soldiers on parade may vastly overrate his military strength. “In the Pleistocene, nobody would have been able to beat that,” says John Tooby at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Soldiers going into battle today don’t make the decisions, says Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, which may make them more fearful fighters. “In primitive warfare, men were fighting because they wanted to.”

–Overconfident?– www.newscientist.com

In this section ● Broken nerves fixed in a flash, page 10 ● Don’t look for love in a crowd, page 13 ● Quantum effects no solace for physicists, page 14

HOW WAR SPREAD LIKE THE PLAGUE The threat of disease could have driven the evolution of war – at least within a nation. This controversial idea is the brainchild of Randy Thornhill, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He argues that cultures become more insular and xenophobic where diseases and parasites are common, preferring to drive away strangers who may carry new diseases. In contrast, cultures with a low risk of disease are more open to outsiders. Thornhill thinks these attitudes to outsiders colour each culture’s propensity for war. Sure enough, when Thornhill and his colleagues gathered data from 125 civil wars, they found that such wars were far more common in nations with

better suited for fighting – have evolved a tendency towards aggression outside the group but cooperation within it. “There is something ineluctably male about coalitional aggression – men bonding with men to engage in aggression against other men,” says Rose McDermott, a political scientist at Stanford University in California. Aggression in women, she notes, tends to take the form of verbal rather than physical violence, and is mostly one on one. Gang instincts may have evolved in women too, but to a much lesser extent, says John Tooby, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This is partly because of our evolutionary history, in which men are often much stronger than women and therefore better suited for physical violence. This could explain why female gangs only tend to form in same-sex environments such as prison or www.newscientist.com

conscious mental strategies, but anthropologist Mark Flinn of the University of Missouri at Columbia has found that grouporiented responses occur on the –Gangs of New York– hormonal level, too. He found that cricket players on the high school. But women also have Caribbean island of Dominica experience a testosterone surge more to lose from aggression, after winning against another Tooby points out, since they bear most of the effort of child-rearing. village. But this hormonal surge, and presumably the dominant Not surprisingly, McDermott, behaviour it prompts, was absent Van Vugt and their colleagues when the men beat a team from found that men are more their own village, Flinn told the aggressive than women when conference. “You’re sort of playing the leader of a fictitious sending the signal that it’s play. country in a role-playing game. You’re not asserting dominance But Van Vugt’s team observed more subtle responses in group bonding. For example, male “The interesting thing about undergraduates were more war is that we’re focused on the willing than women to contribute harm it does. But it requires a money towards a group effort – but only when competing against super-high level of cooperation” rival universities. If told instead over them,” he says. Similarly, the that the experiment was to test testosterone surge a man often their individual responses to group cooperation, men coughed has in the presence of a potential mate is muted if the woman is in up less cash than women did. In a relationship with his friend. other words, men’s cooperative Again, the effect is to reduce behaviour only emerged in the competition within the group, context of intergroup says Flinn. “We really are different competition (Psychological from chimpanzees in our relative Science, vol 18, p 19). amount of respect for other Some of this behaviour could males’ mating relationships.” arguably be attributed to

higher rates of infectious disease, such as Indonesia and Somalia. Participants at the conference at the University of Oregon in Eugene greeted Thornhill’s theory with interested scepticism. It is “a very different way of thinking that has to be taken seriously”, says primatologist Francis White who works at the university. John Orbell, a political scientist also at the university, says the idea is “pretty persuasive”. Thornhill admits his ideas are hard to test, because countries with high disease levels are often poor, multiethnic and authoritarian, all of which can drive civil unrest. However, he says, when infectious disease fell in western nations in the 20th century thanks to antibiotics and sanitation, those same societies also became less xenophobic.

The net effect of all this is that groups of males take on their own special dynamic. Think soldiers in a platoon, or football fans out on the town: cohesive, confident, aggressive – just the traits a group of warriors needs. Chimpanzees don’t go to war in the way we do because they lack the abstract thought required to see themselves as part of a collective that expands beyond their immediate associates, says Wrangham. However, “the real story of our evolutionary past is not simply that warfare drove the evolution of social behaviour,” says Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the University of Siena, Italy. The real driver, he says, was “some interplay between warfare and the alternative benefits of peace”. Though women seem to help broker harmony within groups, says Van Vugt, men may be better at peacekeeping between groups. Our warlike past may have given us other gifts, as well. “The interesting thing about war is we’re focused on the harm it does,” says Tooby . “But it requires a super-high level of cooperation.” And that seems to be a heritage worth hanging on to. ● 15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 9

DENNIS KUNKEL/PHOTOTAKE INC/OSF

This week–

SOUNDBITES consequently in the damaged side of the diaphragm. The big breakthrough came when they extended the treatment to three 5-minute cycles of 1-second light pulses followed by 5 minutes of rest. “A bizarre seizure activity started,” says Silver. When the seizure ended, normal breathing resumed and lasted for about a day and a half (The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.337808.2008). Surprisingly, the two sides of the diaphragm were working in tandem. In uninjured animals, the two sides are synchronised by the brain – raising the question of how they could remain in sync when the nerve to one side was still severed. Silver reckons that in his rats, the light activates a latent –All the right connections– network of neurons that span the spinal column, allowing the two sides to communicate independently of the brain. Boyden sees Silver’s discovery as a powerful proof of principle. “It opens up the investigation on how you can recruit existing circuits to compensate for lost ones.” Silver says the light-switch technique could one day be used University in Cleveland, Ohio. to treat people with breathing Silver has now taken things problems resulting from nerve a step further with a study to investigate how this light-operated damage. Patients could be given neuronal switch might be used to an implant that would shine light restore function lost as a result of nerve damage. His team cut part “Patients with breathing way through the spinal cords of problems could one day be rats at the second vertebra from given an implant that would the top, where the neck pivots, shine light on damaged nerves” severing the connection between the spinal cord and the nerves that control one side of the diaphragm. on damaged nerves, eliminating This prevented messages from the the need for repeated surgery. A similar device might be brain getting to the diaphragm, leaving the animals with problems used to relieve constriction of the breathing. Similar injuries are the bladder caused by nerve damage. Boyden is working on a device leading cause of death in people that would achieve this without with spinal cord damage. the need to surgically expose the The researchers then injected a virus containing ChR2 just below neurons. Samarendra Mohanty at the Beckman Laser Institute in the injury. Four days later they Irvine, California, is developing cut into the animals again to expose the spinal cord and shone an infrared light source that can be piped into nerves through light onto the damaged section. fibres about 50 micrometres A 1-minute sequence of halfthick, also with the aim of second pulses produced some activating nerves remotely. ● activity in the neurons, and

Broken nerves are fixed in a flash ALISON MOTLUK

RATS with breathing problems caused by damage to their nerves have had normal breathing restored by bursts of visible light aimed onto the spinal cord. This achievement raises hopes that a miniature light source implanted near the spine might one day allow people with similar injuries to breathe normally. In 2005, Ed Boyden at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology infected neurons in Petri dishes with viruses carrying the ChR2 gene, which codes for a light-sensitive protein called channelrhodopsin-2. The neurons started expressing the protein, and this allowed the researchers to use pulses of light to control when the neurons fired (Nature Neuroscience, vol 8, p 1263). “The nerve cells think they are photoreceptors,” says neuroscientist Jerry Silver at Case Western Reserve 10 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

‹ This is perhaps the most important study in the last decade in terms of reducing risk of heart disease.› Daniel Rader of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine on the finding that statins, which are prescribed to cut cholesterol levels, reduce the chance of heart attack and stroke even in healthy people with low cholesterol (ABC News, 10 November)

‹ It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome.› The Maldives’ newly elected president Mohamed Nasheed plans to buy up land in Sri Lanka, India or Australia to create a new homeland for the island state’s 300,000 people if rising sea levels flood them out of their homes (The Guardian, London, 10 November)

‹ People will continue to expect a conversation, a two-way relationship.› Thomas Gensemer of Blue State Digital, the company that built US presidentelect Barack Obama’s influential online social network, warns that voters will want their online dialogue with him to continue when he is installed in the White House (The New York Times, 9 November)

‹ We are living on the edge. This kind of disaster can strike at any time.› Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of Indonesia, issues a reminder of why his country needs the tsunami early warning system it launched this week. The network of buoys can detect an earthquake and predict within 5 minutes whether it has caused a tsunami (Australian Associated Press, 11 November)

‹ Maybe it’s just a good place to pick up girl sharks.› Great white sharks travel huge distances to visit an isolated spot between California and Hawaii, but why they do it is a mystery. Ron O’Dor of the Census of Marine Life project suspects mating rituals are involved (The Daily Telegraph, London, 10 November)

www.newscientist.com

Obama to sweep away stem cell restrictions BARACK OBAMA’S election victory is putting a smile back on the faces of American stem cell researchers. They foresee a quick end to the restrictions on their work introduced in August 2001 by President George W. Bush. Bush used an executive order to limit federally funded researchers to working on embryonic stem cells from just a few sources. ESCs are seen as having huge potential for repairing organs and tissues. Now those restrictions are likely to be among the first of Bush’s executive orders to be swept away. The news emerged on 9 November in an interview on Fox News with John Podesta, head

www.newscientist.com

of the transition team managing the White House switch-over. “There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” said Podesta, who was chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and founder in 2003 of the Center for American Progress think tank. Obama spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said this week that a decision to scrap the current stem cell policy had not been finalised but confirmed that all Bush’s executive orders would be reviewed. The aim is to quickly dismantle

the legacies of the Bush era that Obama judges to be holding back progress. Bush’s opposition to stem cell research has been widely seen as a concession to conservative Christians who oppose all research on embryos. The prospect is being greeted with delight by many researchers. “Hallelujah – at last,” says Robert Lanza, chief scientist at Advanced

“This will end a sad chapter in American scientific history… We’ve been operating with one hand tied behind our back” Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts. “This represents the end of a sad chapter in American scientific history… We’ve been operating for the past decade with one hand tied behind our back.” Biomedical scientists have also

welcomed two “pro-research” victories in state ballots on 4 November. Michigan voters passed by 53 to 47 per cent a proposal allowing researchers there to derive new ESC lines from embryos left over after fertility treatment. “This outcome means that critical medical research can proceed in Michigan without political or ideological interference,” says George Daley of the Children’s Hospital in Boston, a past president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research based in Deerfield, Illinois. In Colorado, voters rejected by 73 to 27 per cent a proposal to endow newly fertilised embryos with the rights of a person. If the proposal had been approved, any researchers flouting the law to derive ESCs could have been “charged with murder and possibly locked away for life”, says Lanza. Andy Coghlan ●

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 11

This week–

Drug protects mice from heart failure A DRUG seems to protect mice from heart failure even when enormous pressure is placed on their hearts. If the results can be replicated in humans, it could help millions of people avoid some of the long-term consequences of a heart attack. Heart failure is a chronic condition in which the heart is unable to pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs, leaving people tired, breathless and at high risk of subsequent heart attacks. It affects more than 20 million people worldwide and often occurs as a result of a heart attack or long-term stress on the heart from high blood pressure. The new drug targets a micro RNA – a molecule that inhibits the expression of a network of genes. Researchers recently discovered that a micro RNA called miR-208 is implicated in heart failure and that mice engineered to lack the gene for miR-208 are protected against heart failure (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1139089). So William Marshall at

One step closer to a personal cancer treatment IT IS usually impossible to tell whether someone’s cancer will respond to therapy. That could change with the discovery of a genetic signature that predicts whether a variety of cancers will respond to the most common treatments. This could help identify which patients need drugs and radiotherapy, and which can be treated less aggressively. Andy Minn at the University of Chicago and his colleagues 12 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

Miragen Therapeutics in Boulder, Colorado, and his colleagues developed an injectable “antagomir” – a string of nucleic acids designed to bind to miR-208 and block its action. They injected the antagomir into the hearts of healthy mice then severely stressed them by tying a band around the major blood vessel that carries blood BLOCKING HEART FAILURE

Gene expression within a cell is usually controlled by micro RNA (miRNA). When miRNA antagomirs, such as miR-208, bind to miRNAs and block their action, more messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are translated into protein, protecting against subsequent heart failure NORMAL ROUTE

mRNA

miRNA Less protein made

mRNA

LINDA GEDDES

away from the heart. Blocking the inhibitory effects of miR-208 caused an increase in gene expression and the hearts did not develop the usual signs of heart failure, which include enlarged muscle cells and a switch towards a fetal form of heart protein that makes the heart beat less efficiently (see diagram). “This is the first time that a drug has been able to reverse the switch [to the fetal protein] and take it back to the [adult] form,” says Marshall, who presented the results at a meeting in Cambridge, UK, last week. He is now trying to replicate the results in sheep and hopes

PROTEIN

More protein made DNA

mRNA PROTECTED ROUTE

discovered that many cancers show abnormalities in 49 genes, collectively known as the IFN-related DNA damage resistance signature (IRDS). They then analysed 34 different cancer cell lines and several hundred primary human cancers. The IRDS was associated with resistance to radiotherapy among the cell lines from certain cancers, while in breast cancer patients it correctly predicted which cancers would be resistant to radiotherapy and drugs that work by causing DNA damage in dividing cells – although not other cancer drugs (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.0809242105). “This moves us one step closer to

miRNA with antagomir attached

personalising cancer treatment, and points towards ways to improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiotherapy,” says a spokeswoman for Cancer Research UK (CRUK). In a separate study, Jason Carroll at CRUK’s Cambridge Research Institute and his colleagues discovered how breast cancers become resistant to the drug tamoxifen. This could lead to the discovery of new drugs and ways of screening patients who are unlikely to respond to tamoxifen.

“Among breast cancer patients, the signature correctly predicted which cancers would be resistant to chemotherapy”

that the drug could eventually be injected into human hearts, perhaps alongside surgery after a heart attack in order to protect people against heart failure. “If the data are reproducible in humans, there will be vast clinical potential for applying miR-208 antagonists in the treatment of a number of cardiac diseases,” says Hasse Brønnum, a researcher in molecular cardiology at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense – although he cautions that Marshall has not yet shown that the antagomir is protective after heart attacks. Sakari Kauppinen of Santaris Pharma in Hørsholm, Denmark, agrees. “miR-208 is a very exciting target for the treatment of heart disease,” he says. “What’s remarkable is that the effect of antagonising micro RNAs is so long-lasting.” In the case of the miR-208 antagomir, a single injection appears to inhibit the micro RNA for up to 90 days. Santaris is currently conducting the first human trial of an antagomir against a different micro RNA, which is implicated in hepatitis C. The development of antagomirs “represents a paradigm shift in the development of novel drugs”, Kauppinen says, not just in heart disease but also in some cancers that are linked to micro RNAs. ●

Around 75 per cent of breast cancers are fuelled by the hormone oestrogen. Tamoxifen works by blocking oestrogen receptors, but cancers can get around this problem by expressing an alternative receptor called Her2. Carroll discovered that a cancer cell’s ability to express Her2 receptors is dependent on the relative amounts of two proteins called Pax-2 and AIB-1. If Pax-2 is missing, or AIB1 is present in large quantities, the cancer cell will activate Her2 and become resistant to tamoxifen (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07483). Drugs designed to target these proteins could prevent the expression of Her2 and allow further treatment with tamoxifen. Linda Geddes ● www.newscientist.com

LONELY hearts beware: looking for love at a speed-dating event may leave you feeling unlovable. In big groups, people judge on looks so much that the less stunning may as well forget their clever chat-up lines. In primates and birds, the larger the group, the better the chance that non-dominant individuals have of being chosen as a mate. Alison Lenton at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and her team looked at whether this is true for people too. Speed-daters race through a series of “mini dates” of about 5 minutes then invite whoever catches their fancy to get in touch

www.newscientist.com

again later. Lenton and her team studied 118 sessions with groups of between seven and 36 people, and found to their surprise that as the size of the group grew, the offers became skewed towards just a few individuals, while the least popular ended up with fewer or no offers (Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav. 2008.08.025). So why do humans seem to differ from other animals? In smaller groups, says Lenton, people trade off different qualities in prospective mates – physical attractiveness for intelligence, for example. Faced with too much choice, however,

SVEN HAGOLANI/ZEFA/CORBIS

Speed daters go for crowd-pleasing looks

we resort to crude approaches such as choosing solely on looks. When we have to make a quick decision like this, we don’t have much else to go on – and that’s because of our largely monogamous nature, say the team. Monogamous species have fewer secondary sexual characteristics such as peacocks’ colourful tail feathers. Does it matter? Not if what

–Easier with tail feathers–

you’re looking for is a quick fling, says Lenton. Research suggests that we don’t look too hard for signs that a short-term partner is our ideal mate. Psychologist David Perrett from the University of St Andrews, UK, cautions that the study did not look at follow-up meetings. “It gets at the mechanics of speed-dating rather than of mate choice,” he says. Dan Eatherley ●

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 13

This week–

MICHAEL BROOKS

ONE of the grandest visions of physics could be a mirage. Conventional thinking has it that all the fundamental forces of nature diverged from one single force soon after the big bang. Now it seems that quantum effects may make it impossible to prove if this idea is correct. In the 1970s, data from the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN near Geneva hinted that the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces were beginning to converge at the energies created during particle collisions. By

extrapolating this convergence to much higher energies, physicists speculated that the forces would become indistinguishable at around 1016 gigaelectronvolts. The universe was in this energy state soon after the big bang, which suggests that all the forces may once have been unified. Now Xavier Calmet of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and his colleagues argue that it may be impossible to prove if this theory is right via any conceivable experiment in a particle accelerator. The problem is that the high energy levels at which unification

“We will never find out whether unification of all the forces happens by doing measurements at the Large Hadron Collider” energy measurements made at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. “We have shown that this is virtually impossible,” he says. “We’ll never find out whether unification happens by doing low-energy measurements.” Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the paper provides a “salutary warning” but thinks that there is no reason to panic just yet. Calculating quantum effects at high energies is mainly guesswork, he says, and they may turn out not to be as strong as expected. Results from the LHC will put us in a better position to judge, he adds. ● 14 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

Why we love to hate the humble spider MOVIES starring the superhero Spiderman may rake in millions at the box office, but the humble spider inspires fear and loathing quite unlike that of other creepy-crawlies. A third of women and a fifth of men admit to being scared of spiders. And an obvious explanation is that we have evolved a dread of spiders because they can be poisonous. However, psychologist Georg Alpers at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and his team believe that if this theory is correct, we would be just as afraid of stinging insects such as bees and wasps. To find out if this was the case, Alpers’s team asked 76 students to rate photos of spiders, wasps, bees, beetles, butterflies and moths on three counts: how much fear and disgust they inspired and how dangerous the students felt they were. It transpired that spiders triggered far greater fear and disgust than any of the other creatures and were believed to be more dangerous (Evolution and Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav. 2008.08.005). Stuart Hine, an entomologist at London’s Natural History Museum, thinks fear of spiders is probably a learned behaviour. You only have to see someone standing on a chair screaming “Spider! Spider!” to pick up on that fear, he explains. “It stems back to the days of plagues when people suspected anything that crawled out of the thatch as carrying disease.” Paul Marks ●

SPIDERS ARE SPECIAL People are more wary of spiders than other creepy-crawlies Spiders Beetles

Bees/wasps Butterflies/moths

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None

Fear

Disgust

Danger

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Quantum brings no solace to physicists

of all the forces is thought to occur is close to the “Planck scale”, at which quantum fluctuations in space-time become strong. These fluctuations may create huge uncertainties in the strengths of the forces at this scale, says Calmet. If true, it would mean that all bets are off as to how the forces will actually behave at high energies – no matter what the data from particle accelerators might suggest in the future. The researchers’ calculations explored whether the existence of “supersymmetric” particles would make a difference to the Planck scale. Supersymmetry models, devised to tackle inherent problems with standard theories of unification, suggest that every particle has a high-energy partner. The existence of all these extra supersymmetric particles reduces the Planck scale, causing enough uncertainty to make it impossible to tell if unification does occur at higher energies. The results will appear in Physical Review Letters (www.arxiv.org/ abs/0809.3953). Calmet admits all this is “a bit depressing”, because it dashes hopes of a grand unified theory emerging from the relatively low-

www.newscientist.com

Research news and discovery

TONY BASKEYFIELD/NHPA

In brief– Avoid plastic

Bristling skin is the secret of the high-speed shark THE shortfin mako shark’s petrifying ability to slice through the ocean at up to 80 kilometres an hour relies on a trick of its scaly skin. The scales can reduce drag by bristling to create tiny wells across the skin’s surface – just like the dimples on a golf ball. Grooves on the 200-micrometre-long enamel scales of the fast-swimming shark are known to reduce drag slightly even when lying flat. Because the indentations on a golf ball reduce drag as it moves through the air, Amy Lang and her team at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa tested

whether a similar effect could be seen with shark skin when the scales are erect. The team made artificial shortfin mako skin with scales that bristled at 90 degrees to the surface. They then put the artificial skin in a steady stream of water moving at 20 centimetres per second. The water contained particles that showed the flow patterns around the scales. The team found that whirlpools formed in the cavities between the scales. These vortices would buffer the shark from the water and prevent the formation of a turbulent wake, which would exert a backward pull (Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/3/4/046005). The team say the findings could inspire the design of more effective torpedoes or underwater vehicles.

Why thalidomide spared mouse pups ONE OF the big questions about the drug thalidomide was why the birth defects that affected thousands of babies in the 1950s did not show up in tests on mice. Now the compound that protected mice has been identified, and could lead to safer versions of the drug, which has been rehabilitated as a powerful anti-cancer agent. Jürgen Knobloch, now at the 16 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

University of Cologne in Germany, and his colleagues wanted to know what made mouse embryos immune to the harmful side effects that plague human and chicken embryos. They discovered that chicken and human embryos exposed to thalidomide produce superoxide, a powerful oxidising agent which causes cell death and birth defects. It turns out that mice are

protected from superoxide because they also make the antioxidant glutathione, which mops up the superoxide before it can damage cells. Human and chicken embryonic cells treated with glutathione had reduced levels of superoxide and less cell death (Molecular Pharmaceutics, DOI: 10.1021/mp8001232). The researchers hope their findings will lead to modified versions of thalidomide that don’t produce superoxide, but retain the ability to fight cancer.

IF YOU’RE planning a lab experiment, be wary of using plastic equipment. Plastic test tubes and pipettes leach compounds on contact with water that may alter your findings. While testing experimental Parkinson’s drugs, biochemist Andrew Holt of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, noticed that measurements of the enzyme MAO-B were all over the place. When his team investigated, they found that water stored in plastic microcentrifuge tubes blocked MAO-B and contained traces of an antimicrobial compound added to the tubes by the manufacturer (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1162395). Plastic pipette tips leached chemicals that block reactions, and plastic plates made MAO-B more active. “It’s inevitable that a lot of data that’s in the public domain will be skewed,” says Holt, though he has not yet identified erroneous data or conclusions in published work.

If it wobbles, look for Earth 2.0 HIDDEN alien moons that could harbour life can be revealed by the wobbles of their planets. Almost all the 30 known exoplanets that sit within the habitable zone of their stars are gas giants. “But they might have rocky, possibly Earth-like moons,” says David Kipping of University College London. His calculations, which will appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, show that such moons would reveal their presence when the planet passes in front of its star as viewed from Earth. A moon would induce a wobble in the planet’s orbit, so the planet’s position and velocity would differ slightly on each transit. Existing telescopes could detect an Earth-mass moon around a Neptune-mass gas planet, he says. www.newscientist.com

In brief– Harmless virus harnessed to attack tumours

THE way birds can sing the same song at the same speed day after day has long been a mystery. Now it has emerged that an area in the brains of zebra finches acts as a kind of music box, controlling the speed at which the birds sing. A similar mechanism may also help to control the speed of human speech. Michale Fee and Michael Long at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology investigated by implanting small coolers at various sites in the finches’ brains. The devices cooled that part of the birds’ brains by up to 6.5 °C. When the cooler was implanted into an area called the HVC, which is involved in both learning and producing birdsong, they found that the birds sang the same song, but more slowly (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature07448). The equivalent area in human brains controls movement. The HVC contains several groups of neurons that are activated at different points during a song. Fee and Long’s finding suggests that the timing of these bursts of activity is regulated by the HVC. Fee likens the action of the HVC to that of the rotating drum in a wind-up music box. Cooling the HVC “is like slowing the rate at which that drum rotates”, he says. A similar mechanism may work in humans, with each word or common phrase having its own chain of neurons, Fee suggests.

Global warming saved the day

LENA JOHANSSON/WORDIC/GETTY

The music box in a finch’s brain

18 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

THE planet’s climate was on the brink of entering a permanent ice age before humans intervened. The ice caps at Earth’s poles formed only in the past 30 million years, as levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fell. Then around 2.5 million years ago, as the overall cooling trend continued, something strange happened: the climate began seesawing ever more wildly between conditions like today and ice ages every 20,000 to 50,000 years (New Scientist, 6 September, p 32). According to a simple climate model developed by Thomas Crowley at the University of Edinburgh, UK, these oscillations were a sign that the climate was set to flip to a new stable state: a permanent ice age lasting tens of millions of years or more. This flip could have occurred in about 100,000 years from now, or possibly earlier. “It’s not proven, but it’s more than just an interesting idea,” he says (Nature, vol 456, p 228). However, by pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere we have delayed this transition indefinitely. “We are probably very comfortably away from it happening now,” says Crowley.

paclitaxel and carboplatin. Cancers stopped growing in four people and shrank in another four, staying that way for at least seven months after treatment. The patients had failed to respond to other drugs. The second trial took place at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, UK. Eleven patients with a variety of cancers received Reolysin plus the drug docetaxel. Nine had positive responses. Because Reolysin was used with other drugs in these trials, some researchers caution that the results don’t show that the virus

definitely helps. In a third trial, though, cancers were stabilised in six out of 29 people with an untreatable type of lung cancer who were given only Reolysin. However, larger trials are needed. Reovirus works because it infects cells that have a defect in a gene called Ras. This defect causes cells to multiply uncontrollably, making them cancerous, but it also prevents cells fighting viral infection, so the reovirus can kill them. About 60 per cent of primary tumours and 90 per cent of secondary ones have the Ras defect. SIMON/CORBIS JARRAT

INJECTIONS of reovirus, a harmless virus that infects most people at some point but rarely causes symptoms, appears to boost the action of cancer drugs. At a meeting last week of the International Society for Biological Therapy of Cancer in San Diego, California, Oncolytics Biotech of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, reported positive results from two trials of its drug Reolysin, which contains reovirus. In one, at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, nine patients were given Reolysin plus the standard anti-cancer drugs

How mouth bugs make food tastier GARGLING, sucking and spitting are the unsavoury actions that serious wine lovers say a proper tasting demands. But the full complexity of taste may come from something even more distasteful: mouth bugs. These bacteria help give us the rich flavours of wine, onions and peppers. It has long been known that smell plays a big part in the perception of flavour, and Christian Starkenmann and his team at Firmenich, a flavour company in Geneva, Switzerland, had previously found that saliva can turn odourless sulphur-containing compounds from fruit and vegetables

into aromatic chemicals called thiols. Now they have shown that bacteria in saliva are responsible. The team’s sniffing panel could detect odours from the compounds only when extracts were dissolved in saliva. The aromas wafted up after 30 seconds and faded after 3 minutes (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/jf801873h). At least one species of mouth bacteria, Fusobacterium nucleatum, is responsible for the conversion. The team showed this by adding the bacterium to otherwise sterile saliva containing the odourless starting substances. Only when the bacterium was added were the thiols created. Starkenmann says the compounds could be used to flavour food.

www.newscientist.com

Comment and analysis–

The only way is up How can the International Space Station live up to its name if a major contributor doesn’t have the means to get astronauts up there, asks Piers Bizony LOOK into the night sky at the right time and place and you will catch a flash of sunlight reflected from the International Space Station. The public perception around the world is that this sprawl of modules is basically an American project. In fact, the ISS – perhaps the world’s most impressive piece of engineering – is also a product of European industrial and diplomatic expertise, matched in ambition only by the CERN particle accelerator. The major European component in the ISS is the Columbus laboratory module, which is kitted out with experiments in fluid dynamics, biology and materials processing, and built to operate for at least a decade. The European Space Agency’s flight computers help to deliver navigation and environmental control for the entire station. The various modules interconnect and share power via a pair of ESA-built docking nodes, while ESA’s Cupola observatory module, scheduled for launch next year, incorporates the largest viewing windows ever built for space. Outside the station, the European Robot Arm, also scheduled for launch in 2009, will manoeuvre heavy pieces of kit with the delicacy of a surgeon wielding a scalpel. There is one area, however, in which Europe is missing out: getting its astronauts up to the station and bringing them home again at the end of their missions. For this, ESA has to do deals with NASA and the Russian space agency Roskosmos in which expensive European equipment is exchanged for occasional astronaut trips. But probably not for much longer. NASA’s space shuttle is due to be retired in 2010, and its replacement, the Orion capsule, will not fly until at least 2014. With the US facing the grounding of most of its own astronauts for at least four years, frustrated Europeans may not be able to fly at all. The Russian Soyuz capsule is available for hire, but this old workhorse, although reliable and reasonably cost-effective, is a cramped 22 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

three-seater, dependent on finance from NASA and fee-paying space tourists for its continued operation. There has been much talk over the past few years of combining European, Japanese and Russian hardware to create a hybrid crew vehicle. However, recent military events in Georgia have reminded ESA that Russia may not yet be a fully tamed member of the international community. China also has a spacecraft, the Shenzhou, but political tensions and the secrecy surrounding this craft leave no more than a faint hope that it will ever dock with the ISS. That just about exhausts the options for European astronauts, unless the new generation of space entrepreneurs can pull off a quick miracle in rocket transportation. With seats for a ride into orbit so scarce, the European nations that have contributed so many elements to the space station are entitled to wonder what’s in it for them, when so few of their citizens actually get to use those costly modules. There is, however, one machine that

“Both NASA and ESA appear to be banking on the hope that something will crop up”

could offer Europe independent access to orbit for its astronauts. ESA’s 20-tonne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is one of the most sophisticated spacecraft ever developed. Its main task is to deliver 8-tonne loads made up of crew supplies, propellant and scientific equipment to the ISS every 15 months or so. The ATV begins its mission at the Kourou launch site in French Guiana, from where Europe’s powerful Ariane 5 booster hurls the craft into orbit at an altitude of around 300 kilometres. Three days later, when the ATV is about 30 kilometres behind the space station and 5 kilometres below it, the docking approach begins. The closing velocities during final approach are just a few centimetres per second, and the final docking is wonderfully precise and delicate. It is also completely automatic, guided by on-board laser rangefinders. NASA has nothing remotely as advanced as this among its ageing fleet of rockets and modules. There are dozens of safety features built into the ATV, and once it is docked astronauts from the ISS can climb aboard. All it needs for people to be able to fly inside is a re-entry capsule that can survive right down to the ground, instead of burning up on re-enty as the craft does now. The ATV could be turned into a people carrier by reinforcing its pressurised cargo section with heat shielding, albeit at the expense of some cargo capacity. This possibility has not escaped its designers, but ESA’s senior managers seem unwilling to commit Europe to the obvious next step in its human space-flight programme. Both NASA and ESA appear to be banking on the hope that something will crop up to fill the gaps in their astronaut launch requirements over the coming five or six years. When ministers from ESA’s member states meet at The Hague in the Netherlands on 25 November to decide Europe’s future in space, the prospects of economic recession may tempt them to cut back on space activities. This would be a mistake. An assertive commitment to the space programme would help to inspire confidence in the European aerospace and technology sector just when it is most needed. ● Piers Bizony is a writer and broadcaster specialising in the history of space travel www.newscientist.com

Letters– Sustainable economy From Bill Johns Planners always use growth curves, just like the ones you show (18 October, p 40), and they are always wrong. No growth is indefinite. In the early 1930s telephony growth was phenomenal. There were published concerns that by the 1950s every female in the UK would have to be a telephonist, just to keep up with the growth. Declines happen naturally, however. Video-conferencing, for example, will improve to the extent that substantial travel will become unnecessary. We are now building roads and airports that will be redundant in 50 years. Even population growth is drawing to an end: for the most prosperous countries, the decline is dramatic. If the trend were to continue, within 200 years the number of births per annum would be less than 10 per cent of current levels. Reduced use of carbon-based fuels will follow, and we will be in a better state to survive global warming. We should not be complacent, but we must be certain that any short-term measures we take, to fight climate change, for example, do not compromise rising living standards, particularly standards in developing countries. You blame economists for having a growth mentality. Current economic theory strictly applies only to nearly static societies (see www.ns-johns. notlong.com for details). It does not properly deal with time. The less numerate and more political an economist, the more faith they have that free market trade leads to an “efficient point” at which the welfare of society is maximised. It is easy to show, however, that in fact the redistribution of wealth can benefit society. And economists omit “externalities”: if after a trade someone not trading feels worse, that is ignored. But it was a politician who coined the oxymoron “sustainable growth”. Reading, UK 24 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

From Caroline Lucas, Green Party of England and Wales Congratulations on your special issue on the folly of growth, which offered a much-needed antidote to the idea that, as the economic crisis deepens, our priority must be to kick-start the economy back in the direction it was heading before the crash. Tim Jackson asserts, however, that there are no politicians today who dare to acknowledge that mindlessly chasing after ever-increasing economic growth is not compatible with sustainability. Green Party politicians have been saying exactly that for over 30 years, challenging the received wisdom that the way to achieve well-being is to accumulate ever more “stuff”. Green members of the European Parliament, the London Assembly and local councils continue to advocate alternative indicators of progress, propose ambitious policies to improve the durability and efficiency of products, promote alternatives to “free trade”, and encourage a redistribution of work and incomes. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt’s New Deal helped the world emerge from economic depression through a massive public works programme. We now urgently need to update that programme, and introduce a Green New Deal –

which would re-regulate the national and international finance systems, encourage fair and green taxation, close down tax havens and generate a transformational economic programme to substantially

decarbonise our economy. As more and more people recognise that the relentless march of free-market capitalism is both environmentally and economically unsustainable, perhaps politicians of other parties will have the courage to say so too. London, UK From John Thorn I was very disappointed with the “graphs” on the opening of your issue on economic growth. A mass of ascending coloured lines with no hint of the scale on the y-axis could have come straight out of How to Lie with Statistics. Cardiff, UK

Placebo advantage From Christopher Whitfield Feedback revisits the placebo effect (18 October) that you discussed earlier (23 August, p 36). Doctors used to visit patients in their homes: the request to call on a very sick toddler was common enough. Not infrequently one was greeted by a lively toddler and a very relieved if somewhat apologetic mum. Yes, the patient had showed signs of rapid

The editor writes: ● That was an illustration of the pattern of the rise: the exponential growth is important, not the individual scales. The full data and sources are available at www.excess.notlong.com

Fly-by anomalies From Andrew Hicks Eric Solomon asks whether the anomalies described in Marcus Chown’s article (20 September, p 38) might be explained by approximation errors in iterative calculations (18 October, p 21). Not only is approximation error unlikely to be the explanation for a discrepancy so consistent that it can now be predicted in advance with a degree of optimism, but the effects of such errors can also be easily detected by adjusting the iteration algorithm. A more likely explanation is that the Earth’s core is spinning faster than assumed in mission planners’ calculations. This may be testable using some form of Doppler seismology. Sydney, Australia The editor writes: ● The core spin has been measured using the timing of detection of pairs of earthquakes (3 September 2005, p 15).

improvement shortly after the phone call was made. If it could be shown that the ability to believe, however illogically based, was genetically advantageous this would explain all sorts of phenomena – placebos, religions, flat Earthers, cults and politicians for a start. London, UK The editor writes: ● Having recently had an ill toddler at home, it seems more likely that the children were excited by the visitor and thus merely appeared to have recovered – nothing to do with placebos at all. But, yes, it seems entirely plausible that propensity to believe could have a genetic basis – see, for example, our issue on belief (28 January 2006, p 30).

Fears for food From Duncan Campbell, West Yorkshire Analytical Services Paul Collins, reviewing Bee Wilson’s excellent book Swindled, concludes that “our Accums will always be busy” (13 September, www.newscientist.com

See newscientist.com for letters on: ● Sustainable economy ● Steam car safety

p 47). As a public analyst I could lay claim to being a present-day Friedrich Accum: my job is to direct the chemical analysis of food to see whether it is safe, is as described and meets the requirements of the law. The few of us that remain are very busy, but I’m not sure for how much longer. Every year the local authorities that take samples for enforcement purposes spend less on having food analysed. One London borough has a budget of £7000, which is 2.1 pence per inhabitant per year. Although the borough doesn’t have many food manufacturers, it has a large number of catering outlets that are capable of supplying food with high levels of artificial colours, or kebabs containing pork and 17 grams of salt per portion. To check a sample for pesticide residues may cost £150; to quantify an undeclared genetically modified component £250. With the discovery of melamine in chocolate following hot on the heels of the dyes Sudan I and Para Red being detected in spices, and of organised criminals selling industrial alcohol as vodka, the agencies responsible for this vital service need to secure its future, not allow it to disappear through neglect. Morley, West Yorkshire, UK

Nobel endeavour From Marc Kramis I was stunned by your recent article announcing that 61 Nobel

laureates endorsed Barack Obama for president (11 October, p 50). If 61 such august people could get together for something as meaningless as a presidential election, I would hope their efforts would yield something more beneficial than just an endorsement for someone else to spend their money for them. The problem with politics is not the person in office. The problem is the office. Creating a vast pool of money and assigning someone – or even a congress of 535 – to spend it, creates so many variables and improbabilities that it is unreasonable to expect anything good to come of it. It is a concept that has been tested for thousands of years and that has never yielded satisfactory results. Spending part of your money on community interests is not only noble, it is an essential social responsibility. Deciding how much you spend and how, however, is the sovereign responsibility of each individual. If 61 Nobel laureates actually assembled for the purpose of making a difference in the world, I would guess they would design a web-accessible global database through which each contribution to church and state could be earmarked for the specific purpose designated by the person who made the contribution. That one concept would not only eliminate tithes and taxes, I predict it would obviate war and entitlement. Boise, Idaho, US

Sacred sound spaces

of colours of any square of four slabs is unique, however viewed. If Joe had needed to make the path any longer, then colour patterns would have had to be repeated. How many slabs make up the path?

Please send entries to Enigma 1520, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to enigma@ newscientist.com (please include your postal address). The winner of Enigma 1514 is Peter Gatenby of Warwick, UK.

From Robert Halliday It was intriguing to read Michael Brooks’s interpretation of how people may have been affected by visiting a temple in preColumbian South America (6 September, p 37). He describes being led through a dark, confusing building, where limited light illuminates distorted images, while being bombarded with unearthly music that seems to come from everywhere. As a regular church-goer and a history graduate who specialised in the study of church architecture, that does not sound much different to a visit to a church. In medieval western Europe churches and cathedrals were packed with brightly gilded statues (often of martyrs being tortured). Their walls were

No. 1520 Bob Walker AROUND the edge of the rectangular fish pond in Joe’s back garden is a path twopaving-slabs wide. The square slabs are coloured light brown, grey or light green. Joe has arranged them so that the pattern www.newscientist.com

£15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on Monday 15 December. The Editor’s decision is final.

Monkey see… From Quentin Macilray If tools maketh the monkey, by extending the self and thus creating an awareness of self (11 October, p 42), then surely by extension the same would be true of clothing and self-adornment, another crucial phase in human development. Could this be the next stage in Atsushi Iriki’s investigation: macaques in lipstick? Limassol, Cyprus

For the record

elaborately painted and their windows filled with stained glass, impairing visibility. A choir chanted, possibly accompanied by an organ, performing music composed so that each note echoed and reverberated around

Enigma Just pondering

the building. Much of that medieval decoration has been lost, but it survives in Orthodox churches. It also strikes me that the ancient Greeks’ sacred rituals the Eleusinian mysteries were performed in underground caves. Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, UK

Answer to 1514 Six a-Leaping (a) 42 (b) 7

● We mistakenly reported that all 59 people who received a new treatment for their inoperable brain cancer had died (4 October, p 16). We are pleased to report that several patients in the trial by Transmolecular of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are still alive. ● We said “marine organisms use dissolved CO2 in the ocean to build external skeletons and calcium carbonate shells. After death, these sink to the seabed and over time form new carbon-rich rock. The rate of this process increases if atmospheric CO2 rises, causing an increased drawdown of CO2 into the ocean” (27 September, p 34). In fact, the formation of calcium carbonate releases CO2 into seawater. Only the formation of sediments containing organic matter removes CO2. ● We apologise for misspelling the name of Habibollah Razmi of the University of Qom, Iran. (1 November, p 16). Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Fax: +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 Email: [email protected] Include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 25

SMC IMAGES/IMAGE BANK

Technology STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART

ANTIFREEZE could help take the twinkle out of stars viewed through ground-based telescopes. Atmospheric disturbances can blur astronomical images, so the best telescopes have systems that continuously measure these distortions and adapt the shape of their mirror slightly to keep the image sharp. Such systems are expensive, however, and cannot always deform the mirror into an ideal shape. Now Anna Ritcey of Laval University in Quebec, Canada, has made a liquid adaptive mirror. It contains magnetic particles suspended in ethylene glycol, a syrupy liquid widely used in antifreeze. The fluid supports a film of silver nanoparticles to form a stable reflective surface that can be reshaped by applying a magnetic field (Chemical Materials, vol 20, p 6420).

330 thousand pounds. The grant to repair the dilapidated second world war code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park in the UK

–Every beat boosts the battery–

Air traffic control for super Wi-Fi

SOURCE: BBC ONLINE

Liquid mirror banishes blur

required to power a pacemaker. “This is a fraction of the total energy produced by the heart, so it’s unlikely to produce any extra strain,” says team member Paul Roberts, who presented the device at a heart conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, this week. He claims improvements to the polymer used to make the balloons could more than double the efficiency of future models. Using this energy to recharge the batteries powering a pacemaker or defibrillator will make them last longer, and so increase the intervals between the invasive surgical procedures needed to replace them. Heart implants typically communicate details about their performance to other medical equipment via a wireless link, so the new generator could also allow them to transmit more data.

More Americans are willing to pay extra for fuelefficient cars compared with Brits and Germans Italy

38%

US

30%

Germany UK

Last year, 73 manatees in Florida were killed by collisions with boats, despite speed restrictions designed to protect them. Edmund Gerstein at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton found that the animals cannot hear the low-frequency sound boats make, so he has developed an alarm that emits a high-pitched sound in front of the boat. When he tested it at a wildlife reserve, he found manatees always avoided a boat fitted with the alarm, compared to only 3 per cent of the time for a boat with no alarm.

42%

France

22% 9% April to June 2008

THE contest to exploit the airwaves freed up when the US switches over to digital TV next year has now got some rules. These so-called white space frequencies are valuable because they travel further through the atmosphere and so could hugely extend the range of Wi-Fi services such as mobile broadband and gaming networks. The downside

is that signals from distant devices operating at the same frequency within this band are more likely to interfere than existing Wi-Fi networks do. That could mean trouble for digital TV. The solution, says the Federal Communications Commission, is to let souped-up Wi-Fi devices detect which frequencies are free. In addition, the FCC says the new devices must have GPS receivers so they can avoid the frequencies used by licensed TV broadcasts in their area.

GIZMO

THE PRICE OF GOING GREEN

SOURCE: STRATEGY ANALYTICS

Pacemaker batteries may one day be kept topped up by the beating of the heart – the very thing that the pacemaker is there to regulate. The generator, developed at Southampton University Hospital in the UK, consists of two small liquid-filled balloons placed at separate locations within the heart and connected by a silicone tube containing a moveable magnet. As the heart beats, it squeezes each balloon in turn, pushing liquid through the tube. This forces the magnet to move back and forth past a coil embedded in the tube, generating electricity that can be used to recharge the battery. When tested on a pig’s heart, the generator was able to harvest 4.3 microjoules with each beat, which is roughly one-sixth of the energy

By bouncing ultrasound off insects, researchers at Pennsylvania State University in University Park hope to gather detailed information about how they fly. When they zapped a gypsy moth with a 200-kilohertz ultrasonic beam and analysed the signal bouncing off it, they were able to detect its wing beat frequency and body vibrations.

“We’ve been well and truly Rickrolled” Richard Godfrey of the MTV Europe Music Awards, after “Rickrollers” hijacked a vote for best act ever, crowning 1980s singer Rick Astley the winner. In Rickrolling, people are tricked into clicking on a link to the video of Astley’s hit single Never Gonna Give You Up (The Times, London, 7 November)

www.newscientist.com

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 27

Technology

Humans set to fold as poker bots raise the stakes Computer software that can beat top poker players could bring advances in financial markets and biology NIC FLEMING

A DOZEN men wearing dark green T-shirts and wide grins whoop, shake hands and high-five, while another group in navy blue baseball caps do their best to look magnanimous in defeat in front of several dozen onlookers. In most respects this was a low-key event, but the scene, at a nondescript booth of a Las Vegas convention centre in July this year, may to be a pivotal moment for the development of artificial intelligence. That’s because at the Gaming Life Expo at the Rio AllSuite Hotel & Casino, a computer program called Polaris became the first to beat a team of worldclass poker players, each of whom had previously won more than $1 million. Some may see the victory as the latest dismal step in silicon’s march towards superiority over humans. Others will view it as an exciting move forward in artificial intelligence – a foretaste of the sophisticated tasks computers should be able to perform for us in years to come. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to defeat a human chess world champion in a full match when it beat Garry Kasparov. Then, last year, researchers announced the development of a program that had mastered draughts 28 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

(checkers) – meaning it could never lose a game no matter how skilled its opponent. These games have a crucial factor in common: they favour players with the mathematical ability, or processing power, to calculate the consequences of choices many moves down the line. So it is perhaps hardly surprising that in this area computers have become pre-eminent. Poker is different. It is a game of cunning, bluff and deception – not attributes we traditionally associate with motherboards, logic gates and processor chips. So does Polaris’s success mean human poker players like Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott and Phil “The Unabomber” Laak are now busted flushes? The answer is no, not yet. The version of poker at which Polaris excels is heads-up (twoplayer) limit Texas hold ’em. For the uninitiated, Texas hold ’em is the popular form of the game in which players are initially dealt two cards. They can elect to either bet or fold in a series of rounds before and after three open “community” cards are dealt, and after fourth and fifth community cards are dealt. If more than one player remains at the table at the end, the winner is the one who can make the best five-card hand from the seven cards he or she has available. The “limit” in the game’s name

means players can only bet certain fixed amounts. In short, it is a simple version of the game, with fewer permutations, than the more popular multiplayer pot-limit or no-limit forms, in which bets can be as large as the value of the chips on the table at any one time, or are completely unrestricted. Computers do not yet hold all the aces in these more complex incarnations of the game. However, Polaris’s developers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, believe it is only a matter of time before machines get the upper hand. They have a new version of the software, updated to play headsup no-limit hold ’em, now under test. If the program performs well enough, they hope to pit it against top human players next year. “If I were a betting man, which I’m not, I’d be willing to bet a poker program will be able to surpass all human players within two years at heads-up no-limit Texas hold ’em,” says Darse Billings, a founder member of the university’s Computer Poker Research Group. Michael Bowling, who leads the Alberta group, is hedging his bets. “It’ll happen within my lifetime. It could be five years, or 50.” In a poker game, players must decide on their next move despite being unable to see their opponents’ cards. This makes it a much tougher challenge for computer programs than, say,

chess or draughts, where all the pieces are on the board when decisions are made. When enough processing power is available, an optimal strategy for games such as chess and draughts can be worked out by creating a “decision tree” – a map of all possible future plays in which each branch of the tree represents a possible play. This allows the consequences of each play to be broken down into manageable sections and evaluated to determine how likely the play is to lead to a win.

Imperfect information With poker this approach is problematic, and not only because there are so many potential permutations of cards and bets. One of the fundamental problems for any poker player is that the best strategy varies, depending on your opponent’s style of play. “Everybody knows that computers are really fast and excellent at doing well-defined calculations,” says Billings. “But we’re moving into territory where the information can be unreliable, can be imperfect, can be the result of deliberate deception.” The larger the number of possible states in a game, the more memory a computer needs to run its calculations. In 2005 the Alberta group developed new algorithms capable of handling 10 billion game states, up from the previous best of 100 million. The latest algorithms can

TOP BOTTERS EARN WHILE THEY SLEEP Hundreds of online poker players use fully automated bots in the hope of making money without lifting a finger, even though this is against poker websites’ rules. Most are crude, off-theshelf programs bought online, designed to evade the sites’ detection systems. They generally lose money for their owners. It is estimated by industry and leading botters that only around 1 in 10 players using bots make a profit, mainly in low-stakes games. Those “botters” who do make money are understandably secretive. Being

identified can lead to their accounts being frozen and funds seized. One London-based botter told New Scientist his program made in the region of $35,000 per year. The online poker industry recognises the threat from increasingly sophisticated bots. “It is a growing problem,” says Darse Billings of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who acts as a security consultant for the Full Tilt Poker site. “It is becoming easier for people to produce a poker-playing program and to plug it in to play online.” www.newscientist.com

NICK KOUDIS/GETTY

–Bluffing isn’t a computer’s strong suit–

handle 1000 billion states. But even heads-up, limit hold ’em has around a billion billion (1018) permutations. To simplify the calculations a computer has to do, researchers bracket certain combinations of cards and game states together. For example, the software might be instructed to act in an identical way if dealt two cards both lower than 7 that are not of the same suit, in sequence or a pair. As improved algorithms appear, fewer states need to be grouped together, reducing the potential for errors. The new, no-limit version of Polaris will band together bets of different sizes, so it might react identically to an opponent raising by 10 or 12 chips, for example, further simplifying the computational task. The program has been trained to “learn” optimal www.newscientist.com

game strategies by examining a database derived from simulations of 800 million two-player hands. These strategies are embodied in a series of software bots with names such as Mr Blonde, Mr Pink and Agent Orange, each one tailored to counter particular styles of play. The research has attracted a great deal of interest because it

products, and biologists have used a similar approach to examine decision-making in the animal kingdom. The fundamental idea that the strategy of one individual depends on the strategies of others in a population has helped researchers uncover the forces at work in shaping behaviours such

“The program uses bots with names such as Mr Blonde, Mr Pink and Agent Orange” illustrates how computers might in future be used to solve problems in fields where there are similar uncertainties to those encountered at the poker table. Large companies are already using game theorists to help with tasks such as bidding for contracts and setting prices for their

as contests, reciprocal altruism and habitat selection. Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield in the UK, says the new work will help computer systems make inroads into new areas. “This type of technology might be

very successful in the financial markets,” he says. “The markets are more like poker than chess because there is incomplete information about the state of play at any time.” Billings warns against judging the value of the research purely in terms of its immediate practical applications. “When mathematicians began working out how to solve quadratic equations, they were not thinking about how they could be used in industry, they were just solving a problem,” he says. “When you are pushing the boundaries of what can be done, you are opening doors to applications that don’t even exist yet and we can’t possibly imagine what those might be. I’m a firm proponent of solving things for the sake of solving things.” ● 15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 29

Technology

WHILE NASA’s Phoenix lander slowly dies of power loss in the darkening Martian arctic, the space agency is weighing up the pros and cons of nuclear and solar power for a human mission to Mars. Vocal protests accompanied the launch of the deep-space probes Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons, which all contained nuclear power generators, with anti-nuclear groups saying any disaster could rain radioactive debris on Earth. Off-planet colonies powered with fission reactors are likely to raise similar concerns. The question is whether solar power can generate the 100 kilowatts that Martian explorers will need to power their life-support systems and to make the fuel needed for the journey back to Earth. To find out, NASA commissioned a study by energy specialists from the Massachusetts

Digital cameras that put you in the frame

IF YOU thought your digital photos could not be traced back to you, think again. It turns out that digital cameras leave a telltale fingerprint buried in the pixels of every image they capture. Now forensic scientists can use this fingerprint to tell what camera model 30 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

power from every kilogram of energy-generating equipment they take to Mars, but always have adequate back-up too. While nuclear is the clear winner because it can produce a constant supply of power, a large solar array with fuel cells to store power matches its performance – but only if it is sited at a latitude between 0 and 40 degrees north of the Martian equator. “Southern latitudes have much less solar energy available most of the year,” says Hofstetter. Assuming a mission can take several 2-metre-wide rolls of thin-film solar panel material to Mars, a 100-metre by 100-metre surface array would provide the 100 kilowatts needed at 25 degrees north. The team calculates that it –Start unfurling the solar panels– would take two crew members 17 hours to lay out the array and get it working, though robotic International Astronautical rollout is also a possibility. Congress in Glasgow, UK, last Of course, Mars is no benign month, comparing nuclear fission environment – dust storms are reactors, solar arrays that track a major hazard and degrade solar the sun, non-tracking thin-film arrays. But planetary scientist solar arrays laid on the Martian surface, and radioisotope thermal Colin Pillinger of the Open generators (RTGs), which use a University in the UK says they decaying chunk of radioisotope shouldn’t be a problem: “Dust to create heat that is used to storms tend to start in wellgenerate electricity. known places in the southern The MIT team’s main aim, says hemisphere as it warms up, so it Hofstetter, was to ensure that shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid astronauts squeeze the most them,” he says. Paul Marks ● PETLEN VAN RAVENSWAAY/SPL

Mars colonies could live on solar power

Institute of Technology. It was generally thought that the sun’s rays would be too weak on Mars to supply a significant amount of energy. However, the MIT team concludes that with a careful choice of location, solar energy can provide all the power a colony would need – even in the teeth of the Red Planet’s infamous dust storms. The team assessed 13 energygeneration systems, MIT engineer Wilfried Hofstetter told the

was used to take a shot. To capture an image, digital cameras use a light-sensitive microchip called a charge-coupled device, or CCD, made up of millions of bucket-like wells filled by electrons. The total charge of each well depends on the amount of light that hits it. Each well is topped by a lens and a colour filter – either red, green or blue – so that a mosaic of three of them provides the information needed to generate one pixel. To translate this into a usable colour and brightness signal, every camera has built-in “demosaicing” software. This software has to be tailored to a particular camera type to cater for the many peculiarities of each model, including colour filter

arrays, CCD chips and lenses. One of the algorithm’s tasks is to work out the colour a screen pixel should adopt without jarring with the colours of neighbouring pixels. Nasir Memon and his team at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn,

“If we can identify the camera, we might be able to identify a kidnapper” New York, have discovered how to work backwards from neighbouring pixel values in a photo to identify the model-specific demosaicing algorithm that created it. Early tests have shown the technique can identify cameras with 90 per cent accuracy (Digital Investigation,

DOI: 10.1016/j.diin.2008.06.004). If it proves viable in further tests, the idea could make a big difference to detective work, says Mark Pollitt, a former FBI crime lab scientist who is now at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He gives the example of a photo of a kidnap victim being emailed to a press agency: “If we can identify the camera, then there is a possibility that we can identify who bought it and where.” While many people own the same camera models, Pollitt believes that this technique can still be used forensically. He says that because digital cameras have a shelf life of only 18 months, this can help to narrow down when and where it was sold. Paul Marks ● www.newscientist.com

Our special place Could Earth be smack bang in the centre of a vast cosmic void? Copernicus would turn in his grave, says Marcus Chown

●

IT WAS the evolutionary theory of its age. A revolutionary hypothesis that undermined the cherished notion that we humans are somehow special, driving a deep wedge between science and religion. The philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for espousing it; Galileo Galilei, the most brilliant scientist of his age, was silenced. But Nicolaus Copernicus’s idea that Earth was just one of many planets orbiting the sun – and so occupied no exceptional position in the cosmos – has endured and become a foundation stone of our understanding of the universe. Could it actually be wrong, though? At first glance, that question might seem heretical, or downright silly. But as our cosmic horizons have expanded over the centuries so too has the scope of Copernicus’s idea. It has morphed into the Copernican, or cosmological, principle: that nothing distinguishes the position of Earth’s galaxy from any other place in the entire universe. And that idea, some cosmologists point out, has not been tested beyond all doubt – yet. That could be about to change. A new generation of experiments might shore up the cosmic orthodoxy – or blow it out of the water. That unexpected alternative, some people go so far as to say, might be no bad thing at all. The modern-day Copernican principle amounts to two assumptions. First, that averaged over large enough scales the universe is homogeneous, having essentially the same properties in all locations. Second, that the universe is isotropic, or appears to have the same properties when viewed in any direction from every location. These two 32 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

ideas are intimately related, but logically separate (see diagram, page 34). They were introduced into cosmology not because of any observational evidence, but to save face. In 1917, Albert Einstein had applied his theory of gravity – general relativity – to the dynamics of the universe. Without the simplifying assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy, Einstein’s fiendishly complex equations proved impossible to solve. Even with those assumptions, Einstein’s initial insistence that we live in an unchanging universe led him to the wrong solutions. By dropping the “unchanging universe”

“Copernicus’s principle has not been tested beyond doubt – yet ” requirement a few years later, cosmologists created the picture that became the kernel of today’s phenomenally successful big bang model. In this picture, the universe started out as a single, infinitely hot and dense point in space, and has since been expanding – initially rapidly, but gradually more slowly as gravity has exerted its pull on the mass of the cosmos. All seemed well, with evidence in support of the big bang model piling up throughout the 20th century. Then, in 1998, astronomers studying stellar explosions known as type 1a supernovae made a sensational discovery. These supernovae are thought to be uniformly bright, so that the fainter they appear to us, the farther they must be away. But

measurements showed that the most distant supernovae did not fit in: they were a lot fainter than they should have been, and seemed impossibly far away. Some time over the past few billion years, they must have begun to race away from us ever faster. Rather than the universe’s expansion slowing down, it looked like it was speeding up. This startling possibility can be accommodated by the standard cosmological equations, but only at a price. That price is introducing dark energy – an unseen energy pervading space that overwhelms gravity and drives an accelerating expansion. Dark energy is problematic. No one really knows what it is. We can make an educated guess, and use quantum theory to estimate how much of it there might be, but then we overshoot by an astounding factor of 10120. That is grounds enough, says George Ellis, a leading cosmology theorist based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, to take a hard look at our assumptions about the universe and our place in it. “If we analyse the supernova data by assuming the Copernican principle is correct and get out something unphysical, I think we should start questioning the Copernican principle.” On the face of it, homogeneity and isotropy are unlikely assumptions. Just take a look at the night sky. It is anything but uniform, with most stars concentrated in a band across the sky – the Milky Way. Of course, that’s not the full picture. In 1924, Edwin Hubble discovered that certain diffuse sources of light in the night sky, called spiral nebulae, are actually groups of stars far beyond the Milky Way. The realisation www.newscientist.com

33RPM AT DUTCH UNCLE

Cover story |

www.newscientist.com

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 33

came that the broad swath of the Milky Way is just our own galaxy – the bright lights of downtown seen from our distant suburb – and that it is merely one among countless others splashed across the heavens. Since then, surveys have shown how galaxies are distributed more or less isotropically – evenly in whichever direction we choose to look. What’s more, the cosmic background radiation – the afterglow of the big bang fireball, discovered in 1964 – has pretty much the same intensity and temperature whatever direction we look in. So while the case for isotropy seems virtually sewn up, the evidence for homogeneity is much less convincing. It is also harder to come by. To create a threedimensional picture of how matter is distributed in the universe, we need to know how far away different galaxies are. That would mean identifying galaxies that, like type 1a supernovae, are uniformly bright at all distances – a near impossible task, as most galaxies are dynamic, ever-changing bodies. According to Ellis and others, our uncertainty about galaxy distances allows an interesting possibility. The distribution of matter could look the same in all directions, but vary with distance from us. In particular, we might be sitting in the middle of a “void” – a vast spherical bubble in an otherwise homogeneous universe. This bubble is not devoid of matter. In fact, most of the stars and galaxies we can see from Earth would be contained within it. It’s just that everywhere beyond it, which is too far away to see, the density of stars and galaxies is much higher. How would such a bubble help? In such a low-density region, the braking pull of gravity is weaker, and so the region would quite naturally be expanding faster than the more dense area enveloping it. A bubble surrounding us, covering the volume from which light emitted over the past few billion years is just reaching us, would be just the thing to explain the supernova observations. Observing from within such a bubble, but using distant supernovae as yardsticks, we would see a universe whose expansion seems to be occurring faster than it used to – without the need to invoke dark energy (see diagram, opposite page). “Dark energy is a necessity if we assume the supernova acceleration is due to a change in the entire universe’s expansion rate over time,” says Ellis. “But it’s equally possible, and 34 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

no more radical, to say that it reflects a change in the universe’s expansion – in space.” But here’s the rub. For things such as the cosmic background radiation to appear isotropic to us from within a void, we would have to be at or extremely close to its centre – which is not only anti-Copernican, but also highly unlikely. Ellis is unperturbed. “We live in an improbable universe,” he says. “You can shift around the improbability – for instance, substituting an Earth-centred void for dark energy – but you can’t remove the improbability.” The problem is to find ways to tell a homogeneous from an inhomogeneous universe. “Without being able to move from our location, that’s very hard.” Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire agrees. “It would great if there were someone out there who could look back at us and tell us if we’re in a void,” he says. “Or if we could look in a distant cosmic mirror and see ourselves.” Remarkably, that just might be possible. Caldwell and his colleague Albert Stebbins have been on the case, developing a voidtesting idea dreamed up by Jeremy Goodman of Princeton University in 1995 (Physical Review D, vol 52, p 1821). Their scheme involves exploiting the effect that a void would have on the well-travelled photons of the cosmic background radiation (Physical Review Letters, vol 100, p 191302). The story of these photons starts about 400,000 years after the big bang, when the universe, previously a dense ionised soup of charged nuclei and electrons, had cooled down enough for neutral, uncharged atoms to form. Photons had got stuck in the charged soup, but could now suddenly travel unimpeded through the neutralised cosmos. Obstacles to the photons’ progress began to reappear after some 200 million years, as the first stars or quasars began to re-ionise neutral atoms. Nevertheless, most of these photons continued on untroubled, slowly losing energy as they journeyed through the expanding cosmos. In some cases, they made their way into our telescopes more than 13 billion years down the line. So what happens to these photons in a void? When they pass by matter, they receive an energy boost. In a void, this gravity assist is less pronounced, and the photons lose energy. They regain the energy on leaving the void again. In fact, because the void itself is expanding and becoming emptier while

the photons cross it, they gain a tiny bit more energy on crossing back into a denser region than they lost on entering the void. As a result of this energy boost, a void would stand out like a sore thumb to most observers, as a colossal “hot” patch in a cosmic background distributed otherwise uniformly across the sky. The only observers not able to see the void in this way would be us earthlings living in the centre of the bubble: all the photons that come our way will have passed through the same amount of void, and so our cosmic background will look completely isotropic. As indeed it does. But here comes the clever part, say Caldwell and Stebbins. Some of those hotter photons that have passed completely through our void will scatter off ionised gas floating about on the other side and be reflected back our way, as off a mirror. So what we would actually see is a mixture of photons, most of which have come to us directly, but with a smattering of these hotter, reflected ?D
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photons. As a result, the hotspot in the cosmic background obvious to observers outside our bubble should also be visible to us as a slight distortion in the energy distribution of our cosmic background radiation. The bigger the void, the hotter the reflected photons and the greater this distortion would be. Current measurements of the cosmic microwave background exclude the effects of voids bigger than about 3 billion light year, as well as voids smaller than about 300 million light years. Caldwell is a sceptic. “We need better data to rule out all possible voids,” he says, “but my suspicion is that we don’t live in a void and that the Copernican principle will survive.” Ellis, on the other hand, thinks we need more direct ways of distinguishing between a homogeneous universe and an inhomogeneous universe with a void. Three colleagues of his at the University of Cape Town, Chris Clarkson, Bruce Bassett and Teresa Hui-Ching Lu, have something in mind. Their idea exploits gargantuan ripples in the density of matter across the universe, known as baryon acoustic oscillations (Physical Review Letters, vol 101, p 011301). These ripples arose because acoustic waves in the hot matter-and-photon fluid sloshing about in the early universe created regions of higher density, whose greater gravity in turn dragged in yet more matter as the universe expanded. The researchers propose measuring how the ripples vary in size with distance from us, and therefore at different periods of the universe’s evolution. Combined with supernova results, which tell us the rate of expansion of the universe at a particular time, this will tell us the universe’s geometry – www.newscientist.com

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a property known as curvature – at different epochs. The standard, homogeneous cosmological model predicts that this curvature evolves smoothly, making it an easy matter to calculate the geometry of space today from measurements taken at any distance. This results in a simple consistency check: take measurements at two or more distances, and see what value for today’s curvature pops out in each case. If the values do not agree, something is wrong with the homogeneous model. “If the measurements at different distances imply different curvatures today,

“The only people not to see the void would be us earthlings” then the assumption on which the standard cosmological model is based – the Copernican principle – is wrong,” says Ellis. Ellis himself, together with Clarkson and Jean-Philippe Uzan of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, France, has developed a variation on this type of consistency check. It involves taking measurements over about a decade of how fast single cosmological objects, such as quasars, are moving away from us with the universe’s expansion, and how that motion changes at different distances – and therefore at different epochs. The results will tell us how the universe’s rate of expansion has changed over time, and this can be checked against the predictions of the homogeneous cosmological model (Physical Review Letters, vol 100, p 191303).

The observational sensitivity required to record such tiny motions – the change in distance over 10 years is typically less than a billionth of the distance of the objects from us – is currently beyond astronomers’ capabilities. But it should become feasible, the researchers suggest, with a new generation of ultra-sensitive telescopes, such as the Extremely Large Telescope planned by the European Southern Observatory. The barrage of new work on testing the Copernican principle has certainly stimulated interest, with a flurry of papers in the past year proposing refinements or completely different tests. So what would it actually mean if, against the expectation of Caldwell and the majority of cosmologists, the outcome were that the Copernican principle is wrong? It would certainly require a seismic reassessment of what we know about the universe. Our big bang model is particularly simple, characterised by universal quantities such as matter and energy densities and the rates of expansion and acceleration, whether negative or positive. If the Copernican principle fails, all that goes out of the window too. In that case, quantities we measure in our own rather special corner of the universe will turn out to have only parochial significance, with no deeper universal meaning. We would no longer be sure what, if anything, we can conclude about the wider universe, its origin, evolution and fate. Cosmology would be back at the drawing board. If we are in a void, answering how we came to be in such a privileged spot in the universe would be even trickier. But regardless of how uncomfortable the philosophical implications might be, for Ellis it is a matter of scientific principle to test cherished but untested assumptions. “Whatever our theoretical predilections, they will in the end have to give way to the observational evidence,” he says. The Copernican principle might survive the tests, leaving us with the known unknown of dark energy. Or it might fall, leaving us with the unknown unknown of an entirely new cosmological model. Either way, cosmologists will still have plenty of explaining to do. ● Marcus Chown is the author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You (Faber, 2008) Read previous issues of New Scientist at www.newscientist.com/issues/current

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 35

JIM BERRY/ZUMA/EYEVINE

Reduce, reuse, recycle. In principle, doing the right thing by the planet is fairly straightforward. In practice, however, you may have noticed that everyday eco-dilemmas raise some pretty silly questions. That’s why New Scientist has compiled the definitive guide to everything you wanted to know about being green, but were too embarrassed to ask

36 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

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Cover story |

Can I recycle window envelopes? And other dumb eco-questions If I switch the light on and off every time I enter and leave a room, does this use more energy than leaving it on all evening? Switching the light on and off does saves energy, but there is a catch. Every time you flip the switch, the bulb takes a jolt of electricity, which shortens its life. Studies by the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, found that turning low-energy compact fluorescent bulbs on and off at frequent intervals can shorten their lifespan by as much as 75 per cent. The institute’s director of energy utilisation, Tom Reddoch, suggests leaving energy-saving bulbs on if you will be out of the room for less than 15 minutes.

Why can’t the machines in my gym be used to generate electricity? They can. The Green Microgym in Portland, Oregon, which opened in August, is the first in the US to convert the efforts of gym bunnies into electricity. Its three specially adapted bikes and the fourperson “Team Dynamo”, which combines cycles with hand cranks, can generate up to 1000 watts. What’s more, you can emulate them in your own home by investing in a Pedal-A-Watt. When hooked up to a normal bicycle on a stand, this device allows a cyclist to generate up to 200 watts of electricity. That’s enough to power a large TV while you go. Or you can store the energy you produce in a battery and use it later. An hour’s worth of cycling could power a low-energy light bulb for 8 hours.

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15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 37

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How clean does the pizza box have to be for it to be recyclable? Likewise cans and bottles

Are laminated juice cartons recyclable? Yes – but only if you separate them out. Placing cartons lined with polyethylene or aluminium foil into your ordinary paper recycling devalues the load and, depending on the mill it reaches, may mean it ends up in landfill. However, the drinks carton industry has taken steps to recover their product for recycling. In the UK, manufacturers have funded a local collection scheme. The empty drinks cartons are shipped in bulk to a processing mill in Sweden, which turns the fibre into plasterboard lining while burning the plastic and aluminium to fuel the plant.

Does switching from bus to bike really have any effect? After all, cycling isn’t completely carbon neutral because I’ve got to eat to fuel my legs You are much better off cycling. A 12-kilometre round commute on a bus or subway train is reckoned to generate 164 kilograms of carbon per commuter per year. Somebody cycling that distance would burn about 50,000 calories a year – roughly the amount of energy in 22 kilograms of brown bread. A kilo of brown bread has a carbon footprint of about 1.1 kilograms, so switching from public transport to a bike saves about 140 kilograms of carbon emissions per year. Although this only really works if enough people cycle to allow public transport providers to reduce the number of buses and trains they run. ROSS ANANIA/DIGITAL VISION/GETTY

According to the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), based in Banbury, UK, pizza boxes are often not recyclable. That’s because grease from the toppings contaminates the cardboard, making it useless to paper mills – though it can still be composted. Such impregnation is not a problem when it comes to cans and bottles. Nevertheless, they should be rinsed to remove food remnants so as not to attract vermin. Plastic should also be clean, and lids removed from bottles so they can be squashed flat. WRAP recommends rinsing waste items in old washing-up water to save energy.

What’s the most fuel-efficient way to drive? Smoothly. Avoid dramatic braking and acceleration and use cruise control if you’ve got it. Move through the gears as quickly as possible, changing up before you hit 2500 revs per minute (2000 rpm for a diesel). Where possible, drive at a steady 55 miles per hour (90 kilometres per hour). It is up to 20 per cent more fuel-efficient than driving at 75 mph. Check your tyre pressure once a month because underinflated tyres can raise fuel consumption by 6 per cent. Don’t carry excess baggage. Each extra 25 kilograms decreases fuel efficiency by 1 per cent. And avoid short trips – a cold engine uses twice as much fuel as a warm one. 38 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

How environmentally damaging is barbecuing? Tristram West from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has calculated that on 4 July – when over half of all American households fire up their barbies – the grills release 225,000 tonnes of CO2. The emissions from these estimated 60 million barbecues would still be less than 1.5 per cent of the nation’s daily output. Not too high a price to pay for a whole lot of fun, you might think. However, West also points out that this is

equivalent to burning 2300 acres of forest. He says that if you do choose to barbecue, the most eco-friendly method is to use charcoal as opposed to the propane burners favoured by most Americans. Food grilled over charcoal made from locally grown coppiced wood may actually have a smaller carbon footprint than if it were cooked conventionally, since sustainably grown wood is carbon neutral and transport is minimised.

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Is it worth recycling when stuff gets shipped to China and back in the process? Given the carbon footprint of all that, maybe we should just let the stuff rot

Is a full commercial plane more fuel-efficient over long distances than a car?

With recycling rates going through the roof, some countries don’t have the capacity to process all their waste. In the past 10 years, for example, waste paper exports from the UK have risen from 470,000 tonnes to 4.7 million tonnes per year and exports of used plastic bottles have gone from under 40,000 to 500,000 tonnes. China has a big demand for both materials, and its trade imbalance with Europe and the US means container ships would be heading home empty if they didn’t carry waste. According to a recent study by WRAP, shipping waste to China in this way uses 10 per cent of the carbon saved by recycling.

Not if the car is also full. Consider this. EasyJet, which claims to be 30 per cent more fuel efficient than other carriers, largely because it packs in more people, calculates that on an average flight each passenger accounts for 95.7 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, compared with 164 grams for someone travelling by car. That flight will be around 80 per cent full, so the figure would fall to 76 grams per person if every seat were taken. What’s more, most EasyJet flights are either short or medium haul, making them one-third less efficient than long-haul flights (over 4000 kilometres). Long-haul flights could bring the figure down to around 50 grams per passenger. However, using EasyJet’s own figures, a full car would produce just 41 grams of CO2 per kilometre for each of its four passengers. So cars win no matter what the distance – although clearly planes have the edge when travelling over water.

Can I save the planet by staying slim? It’s unlikely. In May, Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine did link obesity and global warming (The Lancet, vol 371, p 1661). They argued that obese people consume around 18 per cent more calories than the average and their greater mass means their vehicles require more fuel, so policies to encourage walking and cycling would not only improve people’s health but also be good for the planet. Perhaps such policies would

The frost in your freezer forms when warm air condenses and freezes on the cooling coils. Self-defrosting fridges generally use more energy than manual models because their coils are automatically heated every few hours to melt any frost that forms on them. But a manual-defrost fridge is only better if you defrost it before the frost starts to take over, because the coils have to work

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harder to cool the air if they are covered in ice. How often you need to defrost depends on how often you open the door and the humidity of the air. As a general rule though, you should defrost when the ice gets to 5 millimetres thick. The best way to do this is to turn off the freezer, put pans of hot water inside to speed up melting, and then remove the big bits of ice with a plastic scraper.

BEN LÉ/ZEFA/CORBIS

When and how is the most energy-efficient way to defrost my fridge-freezer, and is a self-defrosting fridge more eco-friendly?

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 39

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Cover story |

provide short-term benefits, but in the long run they would be more than offset by the fact that people who stay in shape are likely to live longer, emitting tonnes of CO2 for every extra year of their lives. So being slim may be good for you, but is unlikely to benefit the planet.

What’s worse, the CO2 put out by a gas-fuelled car or the environmental effects of hybrid-car batteries? According to the UK-based Environmental Transport Association (ETA), the most efficient conventionally powered cars are slightly less 40 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

What does the circling-arrows logo on European packaging mean? Hands up everyone who thinks the small, round symbol of two arrows circling each other means that packaging can be recycled. Wrong! In fact, this so-called “green dot”, or “grüner punkt” – which is often printed in black – originated in Germany and indicates that the manufacturer has paid into a scheme to meet the general costs of recycling under the terms of European Union legislation. So particular packaging bearing the logo may or may not be recyclable. In countries such as the UK that have not

adopted the system, the logo is especially perplexing, as its use appears quite arbitrary. “We typically deal with multinational suppliers that often sell the same product in multiple countries and therefore include things on packaging that may be irrelevant in one of those markets,” explains Katherine Symonds of the supermarket chain Tesco. Recognising that this can lead to confusion, she says Tesco has now established a working group with other retailers to make labelling “clearer and more intuitive”.

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detrimental to the environment than hybrid models. However, it points out that the current crop of hybrids won’t evolve without customers willing to invest in what is still frontier technology.

If I turn my appliances off but don’t unplug them will they still use up some electricity? No. And that applies even if the plug is switched on or if the socket has no on/off switch. The exceptions are appliances with a standby mode, which include most battery chargers. As a rule of thumb, if there is a light on, a clock ticking or the transformer feels warm, it is using electricity. And that can be a substantial proportion of the amount the appliances consumes when in use. A television set-top box, for example, uses around 18 watts while it is on and almost 17 watts on standby.

What is recycled organic waste used for? There are three main uses. Treated aerobically, organic waste is composted to produce soil conditioner or landscaping mulch, returning carbon to the soil. Under anaerobic conditions, it can be digested by bacteria to produce methane, used to generate electricity. Through a combination of biological and mechanical processes, it is also turned into fuel that can substitute for coal or coke in power stations or cement kilns.

If I offset my flights, can I fly as much as I want? Yes. And no. Offsetting can work but it is based on a series of untestable assumptions. One of these is that offsetting activities, such as planting trees or installing energy-efficient light bulbs, wouldn’t have happened otherwise. “We can’t prove that,” says Paul Hooper of the Centre for Air Transport and the Environment at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Another problem is the huge variability in the schemes. Different carbon calculators cough out wildly different

What’s greener, paper/cardboard or plastic packaging? Many people choose paper over plastic, figuring that being renewable, degradable and recyclable, it is probably the greener option. In reality it’s not quite that simple. Paper is heavier and bulkier to ship than plastic, takes more energy to produce and uses damaging chemicals in its manufacture. Overall, the best packaging choice is the one that has the least total impact over its life – from raw materials and shipping emissions to toxicity and waste – and that depends on where it comes from

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and what you plan to do with it. Consumers often don’t have the required information to work out this trade-off but there are some things to keep in mind. Check whether the paper or plastic has already been recycled, and whether you can reuse or recycle it. Also, if you tend to avoid packaging altogether, consider this: if it reduces the chances of a product perishing or breaking before it can be used then it is almost always better to have packaging than not. Just choose products with the smallest amount possible.

emissions figures for the same flight, and the cost of offsetting a tonne of CO2 ranges from about £2 to about £18 depending on how it is done. “It’s a minefield,” says Hooper. His advice is to use the carbon calculator provided by the International Civil Aviation Organization and then offset your flight with a UN-certified scheme. Better yet, he says, don’t fly in the first place.

If I’m stuck in a stop-start traffic jam, do I use more petrol turning my car on and off repeatedly or leaving it running? Unless you are certain you won’t have to pull away at short notice, the inconvenience and tiny amounts of fuel involved make stopping and restarting the engine hardly worthwhile. The UK Automobile Association (AA) recommends switching off if you are likely to be stopped more than 3 minutes. Technology is already providing a better solution, though. Recognising that many hours of urban driving are spent at a standstill, several car manufacturers have started to introduce so-called “stop-start” technology. In fact, Volkswagen recently mothballed plans for a hybrid car, preferring to invest in stop-start technology on its standard models to achieve fuel efficiency savings of between 10 and 15 per cent in urban traffic.

Can I put window envelopes in the paper recycling? Envelopes are tricky devils to recycle because of their transparent plastic address windows and sticky seals. Latex gum from self-sealing envelopes clogs machines, and plastic degrades recycled paper quality. Both have to be extracted. However, different paper mills have different tolerances to contaminants, depending on their cleaning equipment, the product being made, and the grade of recovered paper being recycled. That’s why recycling agencies have differing standards. In the UK, you can check whether your local authority will accept any type of envelope by using the postcode checker at recyclenow.com. Otherwise, you’ll have to remove the window and the gum before recycling – or simply reuse your envelopes. 15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 41

Cover story |

Does it really take more energy to recycle an aluminium can than to make a new one?

FANCY/PLAINPICTURE

No, absolutely not. According to Alcoa, the world’s third-largest aluminium producer, manufacturing a can from recycled aluminium uses only 5 per cent of the energy of making one from scratch – an energy saving that could power a 100-watt bulb for 4 hours.

That depends on where you live and what you mean by paying for itself. Last year the UK Building Research Establishment compared the payback times of different turbines in different locations. In inshore urban settings, it found wind turbines produce such puny amounts of juice that they struggle to recoup their cost and, after allowing for manufacturing and distribution, end up costing more carbon than they save. On the coast it’s different. The study showed a turbine at Wick in the Scottish Highlands generated 3000 kilowatt-hours a year, about 40 per cent of an average household’s needs. Payback time for the investment could be as little as a year.

Is it better to buy an eco-friendly car, with all the energy that is needed to produce it, or just run my old one into the ground? According to the ETA, when the average new car leaves the showroom, its manufacture, design and marketing have accounted for up to 6 tonnes of CO2 emissions. “Nevertheless, swapping a thirsty and polluting older car for a lighter, more fuel-efficient model makes 42 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

environmental sense,” says Yannick Read of the ETA. But, he adds, gains made from exchanging a five-year-old family car with a similar-sized, brand-new model are likely to be negligible. ANTHONY MARSLAND/STONE/GETTY

How long does it take for a micro-windmill to pay for itself?

while only 2 per cent of UK households were washing at 30 °C in 2002, five years later that figure was up to 17 per cent. Meanwhile in Germany, where people have traditionally used lower washing settings than in the UK, they are turning down to 20 °C, and in North America growing numbers are doing their laundry in cold water. Unfortunately, there are some nasties that low temperatures may not remove. Researchers from the University of Seoul, South Korea, found that washing with biological detergent at 30 °C only killed 6 per cent of dust mites, compared with 100 per cent at 60 °C, and leaves traces of other allergens, including pollen grains and dog skin cells. The global detergent manufacturer Unilever, which has been keen to promote the eco-message, still advises customers to run one wash per week at 40 °C to ensure bacteria don’t have a chance to grow in the machine and cause unpleasant smells.

What’s the best way to charge my laptop – little and often or let the battery run down completely? In energy terms you use the same amount of electricity either way. However, charging a battery little and often reduces its capacity to hold charge, and eventually it will lose its capacity to charge altogether. If you kill your battery you’ll need a new one – and batteries take a lot of energy and materials to produce. So charge your battery fully and let it run down completely to get the longest possible life out of it.

Will washing my clothes at 30 °C really get them clean? If the reaction of consumers is anything to go by, washing powders formulated for use at lower temperatures do work. In a 2006 study by the UK’s Energy Saving Trust, 89 per cent of families who had been asked to test Ariel at 30 °C said they would continue using it. Likewise,

What is the single most effective thing I can do for the environment? Over a 75-year lifespan, the average European will be responsible for about 900 tonnes of CO2 emissions. For Americans and Australians, the figure is more like 1500 tonnes. Add to that all of humanity’s other environmentally damaging activities and, draconian as it may sound, the answer must surely be to avoid reproducing. ●

Read previous issues of New Scientist at www.newscientist.com/issues/current

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The

matrix Secret networks could be the key to life – and death. Anil Ananthaswamy investigates

●

HAD Amin Rustom not messed up, he would not have stumbled upon one of the biggest discoveries in biology of recent times. It all began in 2000, when he saw something strange under his microscope. A very long, thin tube had formed between two of the rat cells that he was studying. It looked like nothing he had ever seen before. His supervisor, Hans-Hermann Gerdes, asked him to repeat the experiment. Rustom did, and saw nothing unusual. When Gerdes grilled him, Rustom admitted that the first time around he had not followed the standard protocol of swapping the liquid in which the cells were growing between observations. Gerdes made him redo the experiment, mistakes and all, and there they were again: long, delicate connections between cells. This was something new – a previously unknown way in which animal cells can communicate with each other. Gerdes and Rustom, then at Heidelberg University in Germany, called the connections tunnelling nanotubes. Aware that they might be onto something significant, the duo slogged away to produce convincing evidence and eventually published a landmark paper in 2004 (Science, vol 303, p 1007). At the time, it was not clear whether these structures were anything more than a curiosity seen only in peculiar circumstances. Since their pioneering paper appeared, however, other groups have started finding nanotubes in all sorts of places, from nerve cells to heart cells. And far from being a mere curiosity, they seem to play a major role www.newscientist.com

in anything from how our immune system responds to attacks to how damaged muscle is repaired after a heart attack. They can also be hijacked: nanotubes may provide HIV with a network of secret tunnels that allow it to evade the immune system, while some cancers could be using nanotubes to subvert chemotherapy. Simply put, tunnelling nanotubes appear to be everywhere, in sickness and in health. “The field is very hot,” says Gerdes, now at the University of Bergen in Norway. It has long been known that the interiors of neighbouring plant cells are sometimes directly connected by a network of nanotubular connections called plasmodesmata. However, nothing like them had ever been seen in animals. Animal cells were thought to communicate almost entirely by releasing chemicals that can be detected by receptors on the surface of other cells. This kind of communication can be very specific – nerve cells can extend over a metre to make connections with other cells – but it does not involve direct connections between the interiors of cells. The closest animal equivalents to plasmodesmata were thought to be gap junctions, which are like hollow rivets joining the membranes of adjacent cells. A channel through the middle of each gap junction directly connects the cell interiors, but the channel is very narrow – just 0.5 to 2 nanometres wide – and so only allows ions and small molecules to pass from one cell to another.

Nanotubes are something different. They are 50 to 200 nanometres thick, which is more than wide enough to allow proteins to pass through. What’s more, they can span distances of several cell diameters, wiggling around obstacles to connect the insides of two cells some distance apart. “This gives the organism a new way to communicate very selectively over long range,” says Gerdes.

Travelling by tube Soon after they first saw nanotubes in rat cells, he and Rustom saw them forming between human kidney cells too. Using video microscopy, they watched adjacent cells reach out to each other with antenna-like projections, establish contact and then build the tubular connections. The connections were not just between pairs of cells. Cells can send out several nanotubes, forming an intricate and transient network of linked cells lasting anything from minutes to hours. Using fluorescent proteins, the team also discovered that relatively large cellular structures, or organelles, could move from one cell to another through the nanotubes. The first clue to how membrane nanotubes, as some researchers prefer to call them, might be used by cells came from the US. Simon Watkins of the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his colleagues were studying dendritic cells, the sentinels for the immune system. When a dendritic cell detects an invader, it gets ready to sound the alarm. One sign of this activation is 15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 43

It pays to network The discovery of tunnelling nanotubes (see main story) has led to speculation about just how far their influence extends. Some think they might play a crucial role in development. One of the key outstanding questions in biology has to do with how cells communicate with each other as an embryo develops. We know that some cells release molecules called morphogens, which diffuse through the intercellular medium. The resulting concentration gradient tells cells where they are in the embryo and they can then develop accordingly. But this does not explain everything. For instance, two very distant cells can show similar patterns

of gene expression while other cells nearby do not. If a morphogen gradient is responsible, then surely the cells closer to the one releasing the morphogen should also be responding. Such observations could be explained if morphogens are distributed directly to certain cells through a network of nanotubes, speculates Hans-Hermann Gerdes of the University of Bergen in Norway. “It would be much more appealing for nature to have this direct line,” he says. Plants cells are known to use their version of nanotubes, called plasmodesmata, to transfer microRNAs that influence gene activity from one cell to another during embryogenesis. “These

a change in calcium levels in the cell. While Watkins was poking a dendritic cell with a micro-needle filled with bacterial toxins, he noticed a calcium fluctuation in a dendritic cell far away from the one that was touched. “Wow, that’s pretty cool,” thought Watkins. Information about the toxins was somehow being passed from the cell being poked to a distant cell. Nothing in his experience could explain the phenomenon. When Watkins dived into the literature, he discovered Gerdes’s paper. His team then took another look at the dendritic cells. Sure enough, they found the cells were connected by a network of tunnelling nanotubes. Watkins thinks that the dendritic cells could be using nanotubes to recruit other cells. Conventional wisdom says that once a dendritic cell is activated, it migrates to the lymph nodes to alert the immune system. Sometimes, it might have to travel from the tip of one’s finger to the armpit – a long and perilous journey that could result in failure. But if a dendritic cell first recruits other sentinels, and all of them march towards the lymph nodes simultaneously, there is much less chance of the message being lost. “It allows you to amplify the response,” says Watkins. “That’s all hypothesis really. We have to prove it.” Meanwhile, Stefanie Dimmeler of the University of Frankfurt in Germany and her team have been studying how so-called progenitor cells can be transformed into heart muscle cells. In mice at least, progenitor cells injected after heart attacks seem to turn into 44 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

microRNAs lead to certain expression patterns in adjacent and also very remote cells,” says Gerdes. Mammalian cells could also be doing the same. Even more speculative is the idea that the development of organs could be influenced by tunnelling nanotubes. It is not well understood how organs “know” how big they should get, or the exact shape to take. “These are all open questions,” says Gerdes. He speculates that if the cells in a given organ were connected by nanotubes, then these connections could help establish a feedback mechanism that provides the necessary information for the organ to grow to the right size and shape.

new heart muscle cells, replacing dead tissue. When Dimmeler’s team mixed heart muscle and progenitor cells in a dish, they found that the two populations established connections via nanotubes. They even observed the transfer of organelles such as mitochondria (Circulation Research, vol 96, p 1039). Dimmeler suspects that the transfer via nanotubes of signalling molecules and proteins called transcription factors helps to transform the progenitor cells. The best way to prove this would be to show that without nanotubes, progenitor cells mixed with heart muscle cells do not turn into heart muscle cells as well. The trouble is that no one has yet found a way of destroying nanotubes without also damaging the cells that they are attached to. While the evidence for the normal roles of tunnelling nanotubes remains circumstantial, it is becoming clear that the networks they form can be hijacked. In a study published earlier this year, Daniel Davis’s team at Imperial College London infected some immune cells with an HIV modified to express a fluorescent protein, and mixed the infected cells with healthy ones. “We could literally see clumps of that protein moving from the infected to the uninfected cell, along the strand of the nanotube,” says Davis. This strongly suggests that the infection may spread from cell to cell in this way (Nature Cell Biology, vol 10, p 211). This might help to explain why some HIV-infected people, though they carry antibodies to the virus, cannot seem to

get rid of it. “Somehow viruses are avoiding immune-system recognition, and one way they could do that is if they could get from one cell to another through direct cell contact,” says Davis. Another infectious agent that could spread via tunnelling nanotubes are prions, the cause of mad cow disease. “One of the key unresolved issues in prion-disease research is how prions pass from one cell to another, as they have to do to spread throughout the nervous system and cause disease,” says Byron Caughey of the US National Institutes of Health in Hamilton, Montana.

The prion connection? Caughey’s team has already uncovered one mechanism unrelated to tunnelling nanotubes by which certain prions spread, but it is probably not the only way. “At this point, we are very intrigued by the possibility that tunnelling nanotubes are partly responsible for the spread of prion infectivity from cell to cell,” he says. “Once you know the mechanism of cell-to-cell transfer, hopefully it opens up new therapeutic targets.” Nanotubes may also play a role in tumours becoming resistant to chemotherapy. Much of this resistance is due to a class of proteins called ABC transporters, which pump the anti-cancer drugs out of cells. It was recently discovered that tumour cells without these proteins can acquire them from other tumour cells. But how? Prostate cancers cells have recently www.newscientist.com

PAUL MCMENAMIN/UWA

“It is a previously unknown way in which cells can communicate over a distance”

been spotted swapping material via a network of tunnelling nanotubes. It is possible to imagine cancer cells using tunnelling nanotubes to exchange ABC transporters and spread drug resistance throughout the tumour, says Gerdes. “If this were to be true, and if I could find a drug which inhibits the growth of these nanotubes, I could reduce the resistance to chemotherapy.” That is easier said than done, though, because so little is known about these nanotubes. They seem to come in many shapes and sizes, of varying thickness and lengths, and differ from cell type to cell type. Precisely how they function is not yet clear. There are some hints, however. Gerdes’s team, for instance, discovered that the nanotubes they studied contained myosin Va, a type of motor protein. Elsewhere in cells, objects attached to myosins move along tracks made of proteins called actins, so Gerdes thinks that this kind of process might help move things through nanotubes. Characterising exactly what these nanotubes are made of will be crucial. Gerdes’s team, for instance, is trying to find proteins that are specific to nanotubes. Once identified, such proteins can be tagged with fluorescent markers, making it much easier to see nanotubes. Such work could also make it possible to destroy or manipulate these structures, and thus provide solid proof

of their importance – and a lot of researchers still need convincing. If tunnelling nanotubes really are ubiquitous, the critics ask, how come they managed to evade discovery until so recently? And why have they only been seen in cells grown outside the body? There may be several reasons why nanotubes have eluded notice for so long. For starters, they are extremely fragile: merely shaking a dish of cells or changing the medium – as Rustom failed to do – can rupture these tubes, as can certain chemicals used to fix cells for observation, including those used with electron microscopes. Even prolonged exposure to light can destroy them. (This extraordinary susceptibility to chemicals and light may one day provide a means to selectively destroy nanotubes.) In addition, when biologists observe cells in culture, they usually focus on the bottom of the dish or slide, where delicate structures such as nanotubes will be obscured by debris. Finally, although nanotubes are elusive, many researchers have spotted them over the years without realising it. At the University of Western Australia in Crawley, for example, Paul McMenamin’s team has been studying dendritic cells in mouse corneas. McMenamin’s graduate student Holly Chinnery kept seeing something unusual. “She kept noticing

these cells with big, long processes,” says McMenamin. “She’d show me the pictures, and I’d say, ‘Gosh, I haven’t seen anything like that before’.” And so it went until a colleague told Chinnery about nanotubes. “That immediately set us off,” says McMenamin. “We realised that we had the first evidence of them in vivo.” Their work, published in May, shows that nanotubes are not just an artefact of the methods used to grow cells in culture, as some have suggested. And what they have seen is spectacular: some of the longest tunnelling nanotubes ever observed, more than 300 micrometres long, connecting dendritic cells in the cornea (The Journal of Immunology, vol 180, p 5779). “We can see them their whole course, spindling all the way through the cornea,” says McMenamin. “It’s fantastic.” “I’ll bet you that within weeks to months, people will start noticing them in other tissues. It’s just a case of how you look,” he adds. “You’ve got to know what you are looking for. It’s a bit like being a good birdwatcher. A hundred people will see a flock of seagulls, and it’s only a very good bird-watcher who will spot this one tern flying in that flock.” Gerdes, meanwhile, continues to marvel at what is unravelling before his very eyes. “Whatever one can think of has been done by nature,” he says. “It is unbelievable what the cell is able to do.” ●

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15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 45

Opinion Science fiction The furious pace of scientific discovery is making the future ever harder to predict. Meanwhile, sci-fi themes are increasingly found in mainstream literature. Does this mean the genre’s days are numbered? We asked six leading writers for their thoughts on the future of science fiction – plus we review the latest sci-fi novels, highlight the writers to watch and reveal the results of our poll of your all-time favourite sci-fi films and books

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changing so fast that it is impossible for science fiction to keep up. In the past, science fiction notably failed to predict the transistor, whose year-on-year miniaturisation has enabled computers to conquer the modern world. In the future, goes the argument, it is going to be even harder for science fiction writers to predict the technological developments which will transform our lives. Science fiction, claim the doomsayers, is dead – or, if not dead, in terminal decline. “The discussion of whether science has made science fiction obsolete has been going on at science fiction conventions as long as I have attended them,” says John Cramer, a science fiction writer and a physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “I even recall, perhaps 15 years ago, a prominent editor of science fiction novels asserting that the space programme had made science fiction based on space travel unnecessary.” Such claims seem reminiscent of the perennial claims that science is dead or dying, most famously expounded by the prominent physicist Lord Kelvin in 1900, when he declared: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that

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YEARS ago, on one of my first assignments for New Scientist, I was sent to London’s Dorchester Hotel to interview Carl Sagan, the American astronomer. Sagan was famous for his popular science books, the blockbuster TV series Cosmos, and his science fiction novel Contact, which was turned into a film starring Jodie Foster. Rather overawed by Sagan’s palatial suite and by meeting the man himself, I asked him which he preferred – science or science fiction? “Science,” he replied without hesitation. “Because science is stranger than science fiction.” That was two decades ago. Since then, we have discovered that 73 per cent of the mass-energy of the universe is in the form of mysterious “dark energy”, invisible stuff whose repulsive gravity is speeding up cosmic expansion; we have discovered micro-organisms surviving in total darkness kilometres down in solid rock and even around the cores of nuclear reactors; and we have seen the rise of superstring theory, which views the ultimate building blocks of matter as impossibly small “strings” that vibrate in a 10-dimensional space. If science was stranger than science fiction at the time Sagan spoke to me, it is even more strange now. This has led some to claim that science – and its handmaiden, technology – are

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Is science fiction dying?

Stories of bug-eyed aliens and scantily clad heroines gave science fiction a bad name in the 1950s www.newscientist.com

William Gibson The future of science fiction? We’re living in it. Those “Future History” charts in the back of every Robert A. Heinlein paperback, when I was about 14, had the early 21st century tagged as the “Crazy Years”. He had an American theocratic dictatorship happening about then. I hope we miss that one. Otherwise, I’m assuming these are those years. The thing called science fiction that we do with literature will always be with us. The genre we’ve called science fiction since about 1927, maybe not so much. That’s something to do with the nature of genres, though, and nothing to do with the nature of science fiction. The single most useful thing I’ve learned from science fiction is that every present moment, always, is someone else’s past and someone else’s future. I got that as a child in the 1950s, reading science fiction written in the 1940s; reading it before I actually knew much of anything about the history of the 1940s or, really, about history at all. I literally had to infer the fact of the second world war, reverse-engineering my first personal iteration of 20th-century history out of 1940s science fiction. I grew up in a monoculture – one I found highly problematic – and science fiction afforded me a degree of lifesaving cultural perspective I’d never have had otherwise. I hope it’s still doing that, for people who need it that way, but these days lots of other things are doing that as well. A few years out from discovering Heinlein’s Future History chart, I adopted, as a complete no-brainer, J. G. Ballard’s dictum that “Earth is the alien planet”, that the future is pretty much now. Outer space (as far as science fiction went) became metaphorical. Became inner space.

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NEW L/H CREDIT

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To read the full version of this article visit www.newscientist.com/article/dn14757 William Gibson’s latest book, Spook Country, came out in paperback in June

Ursula K. Le Guin It’s daunting to try and talk about “the future of” any kind of fiction, even the future of books themselves, when publishing is in such a tumult of technological change. Will print-on-demand save the book? Will we all soon be reading novels on our cellphones like the Japanese? R U redE AT4 INDIA’S prose to devolve largest into burns interactive centre in Victoria Hospital, Bangalore, ten texting? Or is the letter dead? Nobody knows. But I’d guess that some interesting science fiction will turn up in such forms as the graphic novel and the animated film. “Live” sci-fi films with expensive effects got stuck in the dumbo blockbuster mode, but graphics and animation are as supple and free – almost – as writers’ and readers’ imaginations, and we’ve barely begun to see the intelligence and beauty those forms can embody. Science fiction that pretended to show us the future couldn’t keep up with the present. It failed to foresee the electronic revolution, for example. Now that science and technology move ever faster, much science fiction is really fantasy in a space suit: wishful thinking about galactic empires and cybersex – often a bit reactionary. Things are livelier over on the social and political side, where human nature, which doesn’t revise itself every few years, can be relied on to provide good solid novel stuff. Writers like Geoff Ryman and China Miéville are showing the way, or Michael Chabon, who foregoes the future to give us a marvellous alternate present in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The distinction between science fiction and realism was never as clear as the genre snobs wanted it to be. I rejoice to think that both terms are already largely historical; they are moulds from which literature is breaking free, as it always does, to find new forms.

Name Here

Ursula K. Le Guin’s most famous work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, was much loved by voters in our sci-fi poll

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 47

Science fiction remains is more and more precise measurement.” This, of course, was just before the atom came apart, the quantum genie burst free and all scientific hell broke loose. In the case of science fiction, the premise of the doomsayers’ claims is that the genre is about predicting the future. In fact, very little of it is. The question “What is science fiction?” is often the subject of heated debate. However, at its most basic level, science and the extrapolation of science simply provide alternative worlds in which to set a story. Storytellers have invoked different worlds ever since hunter-gatherers regaled their companions with tales that took them out of themselves and gave meaning to the events of their daily existence. As well as a mere storytelling device, science fiction often articulates our presentday concerns and anxieties – paradoxically, it is often about the here and now rather than the future. As Stephen Baxter points out (see page 49), H. G. Wells’s ground-breaking 1895 novella The Time Machine – famous for popularising the idea of time travel – was more concerned with where Darwinian natural selection was taking the human race than with the actual nuts and bolts of time travel. In the 1968 novel Stand on

Zanzibar, John Brunner imagined the dire consequences of overpopulation. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Lion of Comarre explored the terrible allure of computer-generated artificial realities, which – god forbid – people might actually choose over the far-from-seductive messiness of the real world. All of these books are about imagining where present-day, often worrying, scientific and technological trends might be leading us.

“As long as change is an integral part of our lives, sci-fi is likely to survive” They can act as a warning or, at the bare minimum, cushion us from what American writer Alvin Toffler so memorably described as “future shock”. Science fiction is the literature of change. It is no coincidence that it emerged as a recognisable genre with writers such as Jules Verne in the late 19th century, an era when, for the first time in history, children could expect to grow up in a world radically different from that of their parents. As change accelerated in the 20th century, science fiction mushroomed.

As long as change is an integral part of our lives, science fiction is likely to survive. Even the fact that science may be stranger than science fiction should not deter writers. “We simply have to keep our thought processes lubricated so as to avoid imagination atrophy,” says Cramer. “It’s something we ‘hard’ science fiction writers do as a matter of course.” There is, though, a sense in which science fiction, rather than dying, is changing. From the 1930s to the 1950s, science fiction existed in the ghetto of the lurid pulp magazines, with their covers depicting bug-eyed aliens pursuing scantily clad heroines. Thereafter it managed to break free of these shackles, and the modern, semi-respectable science fiction novel was born. Latterly, we have not only seen sci-fi novels hit the mainstream best-seller lists, the genre has reached truly gargantuan audiences through gaming and films such as Star Wars and The Matrix. Sci-fi themes have infiltrated mainstream fiction too. Malorie Blackman, in her bestselling Noughts and Crosses trilogy for teenagers, explores a world in which the situations of black and white people are reversed. Kazuo Ishiguro, in his beautifully written novel Never Let Me Go, recounts a heartbreaking tale of people who have been

Kim Stanley Robinson

Nick Sagan

Science fiction is now simply realism, the definition of our time. You could imagine the genre therefore melting into everything else and disappearing. But stories will always be set in the future, it being such an interesting space, and there is a publishing category devoted to them. So there is a future for science fiction. It will get harder to do, though, because it needs to spring from the realities of the time, not from some past decade’s ideas. These days rapid technological change, volatile global politics and inevitable climate change all combine with contingency to make imagining our real future impossible. Something will happen, but we can’t know what. One solution is to jump past the next century to the familiar comforts of space fiction. If we survive we’ll get out there, and it’s a great story zone. Without the next century included, though, the imagined historical connection between now and then will be broken, and space fiction will become a kind of fantasy. We need to imagine the whole thing. So we have to do the impossible and imagine the next century. The default probability is bad – not just dystopia but catastrophe, a mass extinction event that we will have caused and then suffered ourselves. That’s a story we should tell, repeatedly, but it’s only half the probability zone. It is also within our powers to create a sustainable permaculture in a healthy biosphere. The future is thus a kind of attenuating peninsula, running forward with steep drops to both sides. There isn’t any possibility of muddling through with some good and some bad; we either solve the problems or fail disastrously. It’s either utopia or catastrophe. Science fiction is good at both these modes. Will it be fun too? Fun, entertaining, provocative. Yes.

For a genre that’s about looking to the future, science fiction has sure been looking backwards lately. Nostalgia is what sells best, with readers spending their money on movie tie-in novels and sequels to long-running series. Yes, there have been trailblazing new sci-fi books (as a look at the past few years of Hugo winners will attest), but more readers seem to prefer established universes like Star Wars and Dune. Even the writers who have broken through have benefited from a sense of nostalgia – John Scalzi’s magnificent Old Man’s War series is unapologetically Heinleinian, a touchstone to the glory days of sci-fi. We’re snacking on comfort food. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as some of it is excellent. But it does raise the question of where science fiction is going. British and Canadian sci-fi strikes me as more forward-looking than its American counterpart, as evidenced by the success of Iain M. Banks, Charlie Stross, Robert Charles Wilson and Cory Doctorow. American sci-fi has fallen into the doldrums in part because of the anti-science sentiment that’s so prevalent in our culture lately. We’ve been pushed to care more about aesthetic engineering than the wonder of science (“How cool is the new iPod Touch?”). We have not been asking the serious questions about the future of our species, questions sci-fi regularly explores by showing us the best and worst of what could be. When the world is inspired by a bold new scientific initiative on the scale of an Apollo programme, say, renewable energy to protect our planet from climate change, or a crewed mission to Mars where we actually set foot on another world – then a sweeping resurgence in science fiction will usher in a fresh generation of readers, and the genre will move in exciting, unexpected new directions.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s next novel, Galileo’s Dream, will be out next year

Nick Sagan’s latest book is Future Proof: The greatest gadgets and gizmos ever imagined

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cloned specifically to donate their organs, one by one. And what of Nobel-prizewinner Doris Lessing and the “space fiction” of her wonderful Shikasta novels, and Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most famous novelist, to whom critics attribute science fiction themes in novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle? The lines between what we define as science fiction and “mainstream literature” may be increasingly blurred, but the genre will no doubt always have its own a section in the bookstore, even if only for the mind-bending stuff – aka “hard” sci-fi – that isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Like the dinosaurs that, far from vanishing from the Earth, changed into the birds which still populate the length and breadth of the planet, science fiction has morphed into a multitude of forms, many of which are alive and kicking. The speed of change, highlighted by Sagan, has simply raised the bar for the imagination of the current generation of writers. There is no reason to believe that they will not rise to the challenge. Marcus Chown ● Marcus Chown is the author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You (Faber & Faber, 2008) and the children’s science fiction book Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil (Faber & Faber, 2008).

Stephen Baxter

Margaret Atwood

It’s true that many of the old dreams of science fiction have been fulfilled, or bypassed. And it does feel as if we’re living through a time of accelerating change. But science fiction has – rarely – been about the prediction of a definite future, more about the anxieties and dreams of the present in which it is written. In H. G. Wells’s day the great shock of evolutionary theory was working its way through society, so Wells’s 1895 classic The Time Machine is not really a prediction of the year 802,701 AD but an anguished meditation on the implications of Darwinism for humanity. As science has moved on, a whole variety of science-fictional “futures” has been generated. In 1950s and 1960s we had tales of nuclear warfare and its aftermath, like Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz. The 1980s saw an explosion of computing power that led to “cyberpunk” fantasies such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Today we have the possibilities of a trans-human future opened up by information technology and biotechnology – see books like Paul McAuley’s The Secret of Life as a response. And the great issues of climate change are explored in, for instance, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol series and my own Flood. Science fiction is a way of dealing with change, of learning about it, of internalising it – not so much prophecy as a kind of mass therapy, perhaps. Of course nowadays you get a book like Maggie Gee’s The Flood, a disaster story of the near future, published without any reference to the genre at all. I don’t particularly think this is bad. In fact it shows the success of sci-fi and its methods. Science fiction has been assimilated, but it’s still there, still serving the same function. In the coming years, whatever else we run out of – oil, fresh water, clean air – change itself will not be in short supply. So there will be no shortage of raw material for science fiction, and a need for it, however it’s labelled in the bookshops.

Is science fiction going out of date? No point asking me – I’m too old – so I had a talk with Randy-at-the-bank, who looks to me to be about 25. (That may mean he’s 35: as you get older the young look younger, just as when you’re young the old look older. Time is relative. I know that from reading sci-fi.) I knew he was a sci-fi fan because he said he liked Oryx and Crake. So as he was setting loose the key I had somehow got stuck in my own safety-deposit box, I asked him what he thought. The first part of our conversation was about the meaning of the term science fiction. For Randy – and I think he’s representative – sci-fi does include other planets, which may or may not have dragons on them. It includes the wildly paranormal: not your aunt table-tilting or things going creak, but shape-shifters and people with red eyeballs and no pupils, and Things taking over your body. It includes, as a matter of course, space ships and mad scientists and Experiments Gone Awfully Wrong. Plain ordinary horror doesn’t count – chain-saw murderers and such. Randy and I both agreed that you might meet one of those walking along the street. It’s what you would definitely not meet walking along the street that counts, for Randy. And he doesn’t think these things are going out of date. I agree with him. Not all of science fiction is “science” – science occurs in it as a plot-driver, a tool, but all of it is fiction. This narrative form has always been with us: it used to be the kind with angels and devils in it. It’s the gateway to the shadowiest and also the brightest part of our human imaginative world; a map of what we most desire and also what we most fear. That’s why it’s an important form. It points to what we’d do if we could. And increasingly, thanks to “science”, we can.

Stephen Baxter’s latest book, Flood, came out in July

Margaret Atwood’s most recent work of “speculative” fiction is Oryx and Crake

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15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 49

Science fiction

Time to read, space to think Monasteries of science and robots imprinted with human personalities. All this and more in the latest release of sci-fi novels

Mysterious world Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Atlantic Books/ William Morrow, $29.95/£18.99, ISBN 9781843549154/9780061474095 Reviewed by Elizabeth Sourbut

NEAL STEPHENSON’s latest novel is a smorgasbord of high adventure, quantum physics and musings on the nature of consciousness. On the planet Arbre, young Fraa Erasmas is a member of one of the many enclosed communities of intellectuals who are only allowed contact with the rest of the world once every decade or century. This arrangement was set up thousands of years before after a series of unspecified Terrible Events. Back then, theoreticians, computer scientists and practical engineers worked together to produce the fearsome Everything Killers, and now the three groups are kept strictly apart. The theoreticians, or “avout”, live in walled “concents” and pursue theoretical research and astronomical observation, while the outer world ebbs and flows around them in waves of civilisation and decadence. Erasmas’s settled life is shattered when access to the concent’s observatory is barred and his mentor, Orolo, is banished to the “saecular” world outside the concent walls. Afterwards, 50 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

a number of avout, including Erasmas, are summoned to an unprecedented gathering by the saecular powers. There seems to be a global crisis. Erasmas is sure it is connected with something Orolo saw through his telescope, so he defies the authorities to search for his mentor and find answers to the mystery. What follows is a fascinating combination of adventure-quest and scholarly dialogue. Even in adversity, the avout have a habit of pausing to dispute the finer points of philosophy. Over millennia, many different sects of avout have arisen, and the adherents of mutually contradictory philosophies love nothing more than to argue with one another. The events that have catapulted Erasmas and his friends out into the world are about to prove that these age-old disputes are anything but academic. This is a thoughtful, challenging and extremely wellwritten work that uses science fiction to explore complex philosophical and scientific ideas. It is well worth persevering through the opening section, with its unfamiliar vocabulary, and there is a glossary to help with all the witty neologisms scattered through the text. The highly readable prose carries the weight of ideas and, above all, it is a lot of fun to read. To view an exclusive interview with Stephenson about this book, visit our sci-fi webpage: www.newscientist. com/article/dn14757

No last hurrah The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl, Del Rey/Harper Voyager, $27/£18.99, ISBN 9780345470218/9780007289981 Reviewed by Michael Marshall

WHEN Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this year aged 90, he bequeathed the world a vast library of science fiction, including such classics as Childhood’s End and, with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. He also pointed out that geosynchronous satellites could be used as communication relays, which is now the basis of much modern telecommunication, and popularised the concept of the space elevator. The Last Theorem is his aptly titled final novel, and by all accounts its production was tortuous. He began it in 2002, but was plagued by ill-health. Worried

that the novel might never be finished, he called upon his old friend Frederik Pohl, himself a widely respected science fiction author. Clarke gave Pohl around 100 pages of completed scenes and scribbled notes. Pohl struggled to make sense of the notes, and Clarke was unable to remember what he had meant by many of them. Nevertheless, Pohl went to work. Clarke is said to have seen the final manuscript not long before his death. It is the story of a Sri Lankan mathematician, Ranjit Subramanian, who is obsessed with Fermat’s last theorem. Dissatisfied with the unwieldy proof submitted by Andrew Wiles in 1993, Subramanian labours for years to find a simple proof. Eventually he succeeds, and is rewarded with fame, wealth and a beautiful and loving wife. But Subramanian’s fame also means he has some unusual prospective employers: a group called Pax per Fidem (Peace through Transparency) who use non-lethal www.newscientist.com

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City at the End of Time by Greg Bear, Gollancz/Del Rey, £12.99/$27, ISBN 9780575081895/9780345448392 Reviewed by Sean O’Neill

weapons to halt wars and bring about international cooperation, but who may have a shady side. Meanwhile, an alien armada is bearing down on Earth, sent to exterminate the human race before we cause trouble. Disappointingly, the disparate plot threads never mesh. Subramanian’s mathematical endeavours are irrelevant to the alien-attack plot. He rejects Pax per Fidem’s job offer, and so takes a back seat as events unfold. His daughter disappears (briefly) when the aliens arrive, but that’s as involved as he gets. For a book in which the human race is under constant threat, there is a startling lack of urgency and no real climax. The book only really works as a compendium of Clarke’s best ideas. Its plot involves a space elevator, spacecraft sailing on the solar wind, the difficulties of interstellar travel, nearomnipotent aliens, and human personalities being uploaded into computers. Sadly, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. www.newscientist.com

CONTEMPORARY humans with novel powers, connected through dreams to fabulous creatures living in the universe’s last surviving city – a city besieged by encroaching “Chaos” and threatened by the end of time itself. It sounds promising, and for the first half of this book Greg Bear weaves several story strands into a gripping, original tale. The key characters are “fate-shifters”, able to select which “fate lines” to travel, and to discard universes in which ill-fortune awaits. Bear’s visualisation of this talent is nothing short of brilliant. But then he seems to lose focus. He throws in too many ideas, images, mythologies and distractions. Too many invented words are not explained, and thin characterisation and inexplicable motivations compound the problems. It started so well, but whips itself up into a virtually incomprehensible final act.

Quite a ride Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross, Orbit/Ace, £15.99/$24.95, ISBN 9781841495675/ 9780441015948 Reviewed by Jeff Hecht

CHARLES STROSS takes us to a future where the “people” are the robots left behind 200 years after the last humans died. Although their bodies are robotic, their minds are partly human, with our heritage of ambitions, joys and troubles. Freed from the demands of supporting organic life, they roam from Mercury to Eris in

spaceships so claustrophobic they make today’s economy-class aircraft seem like luxury liners. It has the hallmark of a wild and darkly playful imagination: a city that moves on rails to stay perpetually in the twilight zone of Mercury, with the heroine tied to the rails so that she must wriggle loose before the city crushes her. On the way, Stross tosses out ideas aplenty. Since his robots know they were created by humans, for example, they consider evolution heretical. It isn’t a relaxing bedtime read, but it is the sort of mind-expanding adventure that made “hard” science fiction famous. Highly recommended.

Mission possible Incandescence by Greg Egan, Gollancz/Night Shade Books, £12.99/$24.95, ISBN 9780575081635/ 9781597801287 Reviewed by David Langford

SIX years after his last novel, Greg Egan returns with an extraordinary work of ultra-hard science fiction. Its two plot strands are different kinds of quest. In a far-future interstellar community, one of our descendants gets the chance to explore the galactic core, whose mysterious inhabitants, the Aloof, have previously rebuffed all contact. Now they are allowing a “child of DNA” into their realm to seek a lost enclave of our cousins. Meanwhile, within the Splinter, a translucent habitat moving through the perpetual light known as the Incandescence, these cousins are trying to fathom the universe. Their technology is crude; conventional astronomy is impossible. But a gigantic disaster looms and their only hope is to understand the weird space-time geometry around the Splinter – to discover general relativity. Audacious as ever, Egan makes you believe it is possible. A breathtaking, if sometimes knotty, thought experiment.

ONES TO WATCH Sandra McDonald In ex-navy officer Sandra McDonald’s first novel, The Outback Stars (Tor, 2007), the way to the stars was led by Australians via “highways” created by mysterious aliens similar to the creatures of Aboriginal legend. The sequel, The Stars Down Under (Tor, 2008), brought in malign aliens – the Roon or Bunyips – and revealed that the aliens who built the highway network are gone, their heir is in bad shape, and the system needs a new helmsman. Expect a satisfying conclusion to the series in 2009.

Tobias S. Buckell In Crystal Rain (Tor, 2006), the first novel by Caribbean-born blogger Tobias Buckell, Caribbean refugees were forced to share a world with bloodthirsty Aztec wannabes in a universe so dominated by alien superpowers that humans could be little more than slaves, refugees or pets. Ragamuffin (Tor, 2007) and Sly Mongoose (Tor, 2008) showed humans striving towards equality on the galactic stage. His next book, Halo: The Cole Protocol, is set in the universe of the Halo computer game.

Walter H. Hunt Walter Hunt’s first novel, Dark Wing (Tor, 2001), launched a popular space-opera series that earned him comparisons to J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert. In his latest, A Song in Stone (Wizards of the Coast, 2008), a visitor to Edinburgh’s Rosslyn Chapel time-travels back to the last days of the Knights Templar and learns of the “healing music of Rosslyn”, which can heal the world of its ills if only it can be released. Tom Easton Read more at www.tinyurl.com/5nxen2

15 November 2008 | NewScientist | 51

Science fiction

Your all-time favourites Throughout October we ran a poll to find out our readers’ best loved sci-fi films and books. Here are the results – they may surprise you IF ONE thing is clear from our poll it’s that you love science fiction: you posted thousands of votes and comments. In the film category, you voted for 129 titles, but two stole the show. The favourite was Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film based loosely on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which attracted 12 per cent of votes. “This film literally drips with atmosphere and foreboding, offering us a dystopian world which is all too easy to imagine,” commented one voter. A close second was 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke, popular despite (or perhaps because of) its notoriously enigmatic finale. “It is still the breakthrough vision of near-Earth space travel, the paragon of a robot gone bad,” wrote one enthusiast.

Incidentally, neither of the books that these films were based on did well in the poll. To prove that you’re not only stuck on films from the previous century Serenity, the 2005 “space opera” from Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), was voted third place. If the votes for individual Star Wars films were lumped together, they’d have come in fourth, no doubt resulting in howls of protest from those who commented that “Star Wars is not science fiction”. Instead, fourth place went to Forbidden Planet, the 1956 classic starring Robby the Robot. Other popular films were The Matrix, Contact, Dark Star, Gattaca and Silent Running. Less obvious were the votes for The Truman Show, Dr Strangelove and Starship Troopers: Harrison Ford’s blade runner is pursued by replicants in 2019 Los Angeles

“It was so bad it was amazing”. By far the favourite of the 254 books you voted for was Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 epic set on the desert planet Arrakis. The comments accompanying your votes reveal just how much this book blew your minds: “The immersion into an alternate universe/culture/environment is incredible,” wrote one voter. But you weren’t impressed by the film based on it, directed by David Lynch (one of you described it as “disastrous”). Second place went to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which started out as a short story collection published in 1951 (“The history of the future,” wrote one voter). Douglas Adams’s sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the New Scientist staff’s favourite sci-fi book) came

“The movie drips with atmosphere and a sense of foreboding” third. “Full of brilliant speculation masked by liberal doses of humour,” wrote one voter. The 1985 Orson Scott Card novel Ender’s Game (in which child genius Ender Wiggin must save the world from aliens) was voted in fourth, followed by Dan Simmons’s Hyperion series – a futuristic Canterbury Tales, the first of which was published in 1989.

Showing that New Scientist readers are up with the modern stuff too, also popular were Neil Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk (or post-cyberpunk?) novel Snow Crash and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy about colonising the Red Planet, published in the 1990s. The most amusing entry must be this one advocating The Bible: “A superman creates a lot of rubbish out of dust and sets up a version of a “simulation of a city” game… there’s a twist at the end but I won’t spoil it for you.” Science fiction is a genre often ignored by the mainstream, but this poll reveals the profound influence that sci-fi has on many of you (also see the “lifesaving” perspective that it gave the writer William Gibson, page 47). Many of the comments that accompanied your votes reveal how a film or book caused you to question the world and what it means to be human. “Dune pretty much blew my mind when I was a teenager, and I still think about it more than a decade later,” wrote one voter. Another described Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke: “This book changed me as a person like no other. When I first picked up this book at the age of 13, little did I know where it was to lead me.” Alison George ● Read all the comments in the poll, and find out the winners of our prize draw at www.newscientist.com/ article/dn14757

TOP FIVE... Films 1. Blade Runner 2. 2001: A Space Odyssey 3. Serenity 4. Forbidden Planet 5. The Matrix

Books

BFI

1. Dune 2. Foundation series 3. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 4. Ender’s Game 5. Hyperion series

52 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

www.newscientist.com

Feedback–

MISTS and mellow fruitfulness are the marks of this season in northern latitudes, so clear the mists from your mind and start feeling fruitful because the time has come to announce the Feedback end-of-year competition. Our theme this year is time travel. When the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was about to go into operation, some physicists speculated that it might attract visitors from the future (New Scientist, 9 February, p 32, and Feedback, 5 April). For our competition, we ask you to imagine three such visitors arriving, each bringing glad tidings and bearing a gift from the future. What would the gifts be? Ten lucky winners will each receive a selection of New Scientist goodies – including books from The Last Word series, a pen drive and, of course, huge amounts of kudos. You may enter the competition by email – with “Competition” in the subject field, please – or by fax or post, or you can enter online by going to www.newscientist.com/article/dn15121. The competition closes on Monday

The letter from the Zest for Life gym received by Phil Price warns him: “Your membership is due to expire on 09/09/2090.” That makes 82 years of zestful living before renewal becomes necessary 76 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008

EXCITING news reaches New Scientist in a message promoting “a three day event called ‘Evolve Your Brain’ – The Science of Changing Your Mind”. It is taking place this very weekend (14 to 16 November) at King’s College, London. And who would not want to discover, after millennia of fruitless enquiry, “the relationship between thought and the physical body” and “How disease is created”? The message offers to send us a resumé of the credentials of the speaker, one Joe Dispenza. Thanks, but we’ll take a look for ourselves. At www.drjoedispenza.co.uk we discover a website promoting the film What the Bleep Do We Know? – reviewed in New Scientist with the conclusion that it “short-changes the public with drivel” (16 April 2005, p 55). The site also seems to be trying to co-opt to its cause - whatever that may be - the work of Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroscientist who has spoken inspiringly about her recovery after she suffered a very severe stroke (19 April, p 42). Dispenza, the site tells us, “received his Doctor of Chiropractic degree at Live University in Atlanta, Georgia, US”. He promotes his self-help books on the back of his appearance in the film, whose credits lead us to its origins with the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, and the circle of one J. Z. Knight, who says she “channels” a 35,000year-old mystic named Ramtha, and so on. The event, the message says, “is full of scienfific [sic] research for the attendees to draw their own conclusions from”. A bargain at £199. More on the intriguing field of “scienfific research” may well appear here shortly.

HARD-TO-BELIEVE product claim of the week: the bottle of Waiwera Infinity mineral water Leo Condron saw for sale in New Zealand told him: “Hydrate Faster: micro water – a reduced size of hydrogen clusters more rapidly hydrates the body-cells.” JUST another phishing scam, Feedback first thought on receiving an email entitled “Bank of America Internet Banking Security Alert”. But for some uncanny reason we glanced at the hidden address behind this message that was trying to get hold

of our most intimate bank details. We were somewhat surprised to find the scam apparently hosted at www. bostonparanormal.org. That’s the home of Boston Paranormal Investigators, formed “to promote research into all aspects of the paranormal – hauntings, UFOs, parapsychology, and any other topics that fit under this ‘umbrella’”. Scammers often hide their scams on compromised servers: it seems these scammers just happened to hack into the world of the paranormal. A little famoussearch-engine-ing indicates that Boston Paranormal is a harmless-seeming bunch of would-be ghostbusters. Did they irritate some phantom phisherfolk into setting up a scam on their website in retaliation? Unlikely.

PAUL MCDEVITT

1 December and no entries will be accepted after that date. The results will be published in the 20/27 December issue of New Scientist. The editor’s decision is final. Happy imaginings!

FINALLY, when Daphne Watkins wanted to open a savings account with the UK Post Office, she received a letter from Richard Norman, director of savings and investments, telling her that “a number of changes” had been made and “These changes are based on customer feedback”. The first change mentioned in the letter was: “For cheques paid in at a Post Office you will be able to withdraw the proceeds two days earlier.” Denis Watkins, who told us about this, comments: “How good to know that the Post Office is responding to the wishes of its customers” – and that it is doing its bit to un-crunch credit.

You can send stories to Feedback by email at [email protected]. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. www.newscientist.com

The last word– SOMETHING EATS WASPS I spotted this amazing sight (see photo) in Croatia in July 2007. In light of New Scientist’s book Does Anything Eat Wasps?, I’d like to know what’s going on here. Which insect is eating which, and is it common?

There is wide consensus on the family to which the predator belongs, but still some dispute over its exact identity and that of its prey – Ed

one is a wasp mimic and, as we can see, a killer. They are known to attack large insects in flight, gripping the prey with their forelegs and then piercing it with their proboscis to inject a neurotoxin along with enzymes that break down proteins. The robber fly then lands and sucks the liquidised juices straight from the body of its prey. In this picture the wasp is in the process of being paralysed. There are more than 7000 different species of robber fly. Some are fairly common, and few are as impressive as the one shown. Peter Scott School of Life Sciences University of Sussex, Brighton, UK ● Both insects are from the order Diptera. The larger is a robber fly of the family Asilidae, which has caught a thick-headed fly of the family Conopidae. The prey will be sucked dry by the attacker’s piercing mouthparts. The victim is not a wasp, but a waspmimicking fly. You can tell, as they both have only two wings (hence di-ptera) while wasps have four. P. H. van Doesburg, Emeritus entomologist Natural History Museum Leiden, Netherlands

● The smaller insect is a wasp (probably a potter wasp) and the other is a robber fly (Asilidae, probably of the genus Mallophora). Robber flies can grow to more than 2 centimetres long and are quite fearsome in appearance, with the orange tufts of hair around the face thought to protect it from its prey. This

● The picture shows a large robber fly, or asilid, eating a wasp. Apart from being a beautiful specimen of an impressive species, this wasp-eater is doubly interesting in that it seems to mimic a large spider-eating wasp from the Pompilidae family. Asilids are better known for mimicking bumblebees. So why is this one mimicking a wasp? Pompilids are well behaved, but the large ones sting

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agonisingly if grabbed. So to mimic a pompilid offers a broad hint of danger. In fact, a stab from the beak of any large asilid is memorable, so if you are not an entomologist just admire them from a distance. Most asilids sit on rocks or vegetation, ambushing passing food such as flies, butterflies, other asilids or, indeed, wasps. Some even rip spiders from their webs. This behaviour is not as common as it once was. As wild territory shrinks, the loss of such species and their interrelationships is

“Most asilids sit on rocks ambushing passing food, such as flies, butterflies, other asilids or wasps. Some even rip spiders from their webs” beyond the imagination of ecological incompetents. As a child I took asilids for granted. Nowadays, to see a nice big asilid is a rare treat. Jon Richfield Somerset West, South Africa ● A few years ago my family, my friend and I visited a place called the Otter Pool on the Raider’s Road in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland. As we sat eating our picnic in the summer sunshine, a dragonfly landed on my friend’s shirt sleeve. It had caught a wasp and was happily munching away. The dragonfly stayed on my friend’s sleeve for around 5 minutes, until the entire wasp was consumed. My father filmed the event and you can see it at www.tinyurl.com/6qmne2. Mark Jepson By email, no address supplied

THIS WEEK’S QUESTIONS Track challenge It must be easier to run in a straight line than it is to run around a bend. And the tighter the bend, presumably, the slower you have to run. In a standard Olympic 400-metre race, run in lanes, the staggered starts are presumably arranged so that the competitors all run exactly 400 metres. What disadvantages do runners on the inside lanes face? It seems unlikely that they can ever run as fast as the athletes in the outside lanes. Angela Whitcliffe Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Reverse charge Having watched high jumpers in slow motion, I cannot work out why it is easier to jump over a high-jump bar backwards using what was originally the “Fosbury flop” technique that was introduced in 1968, than it is to go forwards over the bar. What facets of human mechanics enable jumpers to jump higher when travelling backwards? Felipe Hernandez Mexico City, Mexico Jump start A sprint athlete is deemed to have false-started if they react within 0.1 seconds of the starting gun. This seems like a rather arbitrary round figure. What studies have been done to test human reaction times, and is the fastest a person can react to the sound of a gun really exactly 0.1 seconds? Cathy Jameson Barrow, Cumbria, UK

Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? A brand new collection – serious enquiry, brilliant insight and the hilariously unexpected Available from booksellers and at www.newscientist.com/polarbears

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