I
-
Official government fuel consumption figures in MPG (Litres per 100km) for the new SLK-Ciass range: Urban 28.5(9. 9)-32.8(8.6), Extra Urban 51.4(5.5)-53.3(5.3), Combined 39.8(7. 1)-43.5(6.5). C02 Emissions: 167-151 g/km. ' The new Mercedes-Benz SLK-Ciass range starts from £29,980.00 on-the-road. Model featured is a new Mercedes-Benz SLK 200 Blue EFFICIENCY (Manual) at £33,795.00 on- the-road including optional 18' alloy wheels at £715.00, optional Intelligent Light System at £895.00, optional sports suspension at £205.00, optional nappa leather upholstery at £1,355.00 and optional metallic paint at £645.00 (price includes VAT, delivery, 12 months Road Fund Licence, number plates, new vehicle registration fee and fuel). Prices correct at time of going to print.
CONTENTS
Volume 211 No 2824
This issue online newscientist.com/issue/2824
News
News 4
6
UPFRONT
Syndicates dominate wildlife crime. "Unnatural" gene patents restored 6
Eat worms
THISWEEK
Oust triggers ice ages. Thank climate change for rise of human genus. Colon cleansing a steaming pile of nonsense. How vampire bats detect blood."Super'' superbugs here to stay. Our cannibal moon. Antiprotons ring Earth
A tasty way to treat allergies 8
INSIGHT
Polar bear researcher left out in the cold 18 IN8RIEF
Gastric surgery prompts healthy cravings. Flower attracts bats. Saturn's own rain cloud
Technology On the cover
34 So long space-time The deeper reality beneath Einstein's • umverse
42 Life begins at 90 Why aging eventually stops 38 Tunnel vision Cool ideas for the subway's hot problem 6 Eatworms A tasty way to treat allergies 30 Somalia's other crisis Race to rescue its vanishing treasures
Cover image j ennifer Smith/Getty Images
Aperture 26 NASA's Curiosity Mars rover taking shape
Opinion 28 Overheated debate Australia's climate wrangle has descended into death threats and chaos, says Clive Hamilton 29 One minute with... Dorien Schroder What do you do when a shark jumps into your boat? 30 Somali land's lone archaeologist As a child, Sada Mire had to flee. Now she's back 32 LETTERS On existence. The splinternet
Features
Features
34 So long space-time (see above left) 3 8 Tunnel vision Cool ideas for the subway's hot problem 42 Life begins at 90 (see left)
42 Life begins at90
21 Electric "crude" to power green cars. Droids at your seNice. Predicting a crowd disaster. Court ruling against Taser. Robotic exit signs
Instant expert
•
The evolution of selfless behaviour Your eight-page collectable guide to evolution's most controversial idea
Live long enough and your body stops aging
Culturelab REVIEWS 46 15th-century globalisation. Art of taxidermy 47 Climate basics - and batiks 48 Urban lab in the Big Apple. Origin of ideas
Coming next week ... (J.. Reed Business Information
(
-...
recycle
Regulars 3
Dawn of evolution The small, fragile beginnings of life
A thousand suns Nuclear fusion as you've never seen it before
EDITORIAL Cut the red tape around
worm therapy 32 56 57 50
ENIGMA FEEDBACK The X factorial THE LAST WORD Strange tidings JOBS & CAREERS
• apz•
6 August 20111 NewScientist 11
The ultimate guide to making the most of your science career in the future:
The future of working in science We look at wh1ch careers might be most relevant In the future, and consider how certam areas of sc1ence may have changed m 20 years time.
What areas of science are hirmg? An m-depth look at sectors that are looking to grow In 201 1 and why you may want to work w1thin them
Get the ultimate transferable skills All scientists need them for future career development. Learn what they are, how to get them and how to apply them . Alongstde all this find profiles of some of the top sc1ence and engineering employers, helping you Identify who you should be working for.
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EDITORIAL NewScientist LOCATIONS
Let them eat worms
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Official caution on parasite therapy has been overtaken by events IF YOU were to draw a world map of severe immune disorders and superimpose it on a map of infections with parasitic worms called helminths, you would see a very clear pattern. Where immune disorders are common helminthic infections are rare, and vice versa. According to the hygiene hypothesis, this is because living in an ultra-clean environment deprives the immune system of necessary exposure to pathogens and parasites. If that's true, then reconciling people with their long-lost worms could help to reset malfunctioning immune systems. That's exactly what some scientists have been investigating since the tggos. But helminthic therapy has not got very far. There has never been a full-scale clinical trial and most published studies recruited only a handful of people. Pig whipworm
has been granted the status of Investigational New Drug in the US, but given that it usually takes hundreds of millions of dollars and more than 10 years to get a drug to market, worm therapy is still a distant prospect. No wonder some people are taking matters into their own hands: breeding the worms at
"Some people are taking matters into their own hands, swallowing eggs isolated from faeces" home, swallowing eggs isolated from faeces or buying worms from companies that have sprung up to meet the demand (see page 6 ). The US is so concerned about this u citizen science" movement that it has made it illegal to sell helminths for therapy. If there are more than a few
The cooling power of dust SHOULD we be squeamish about geoengineering? After all, we are already engineering t he planet in ways profound enough for geologists to discuss whether we have left the Holocene behind and entered the Anthropocene. The question is revived by new evidence of the power of dust to amplify global cooling and plunge the world into ice
ages (see page 12). By fertilising plankton blooms that lock away carbon dioxide, iron-laden dust seems to have been the planet's main thermostat for the past 4 million years. Of course, the fact that dust has played a natural cooling role in the past does not mean that the deliberate application of iron filings to the ocean surface would
scientists intrigued by worm therapy and plenty of volunteers to swallow the worms, why aren't there more clinical trials? The problem is onerous regulation. The caution is understandable: helminths are living organisms, not chemicals that can be precisely dosed, and they can cause illness. But given that there are already hundreds of people experimenting with therapies, it is clear that caution has been overtaken by reality. It is surely time to loosen the regulations and encourage fruitful collaborations between scientists and citizens. That would at least dissuade the do-it-yourself worm therapists who potentially endanger themselves and their friends. It may even deliver muchneeded progress in some of the most expensive and int ractable health problems of our age. •
have a similar cooling effect today. But the very uncert ainty suggests it would be useful to know more. It is hard to see how we might find out the truth without large-scale and long-term trials. Given our apparent inability to reduce emissions, we should get on with these as a matter of urgency. But this time, unlike our inadvertent planetary engineering up to now, we should agree on a rulebook first. •
Information Ltd. England. New Scientist ISSN 0252 4079 is published weekly except tonhe last week inDecember by Reed Business lnfoonation lid. England. ReedBusiness InfOrmation. c/o Schnell Publishing Co.lnc, 360 Park Avenue South, 12th Floor, NewYori<. NY 10010. Periodicals postage paid at New Yori<, NY and other mailing oftices. Postmaster:Sendaddresschanges to New Scientist. PO Box 3806. Chesterfield. M063006·9953. USA Registered at thePost Officeas a newspaper andprinted in USA by Fl)' Communi<:
A whale of an opportunity AREyou a university student with an interest in whales and dolphins? New Scientist has funding for five students (undergraduate or postgrad) to join a week-long field training course at the Cetacean Research and Rescue Unit in Gardenstown, Aberdeenshire, UK.
The grants are worth £1000 each towards travel, accommodation, food and equipment. There are no cash payments. They are available to students from low-income or disadvantaged backgrounds who are unable to fund such an opportunity
themselves.The course runs from 18 to 24 September inclusive. For more information and an application form. please email beverley.
[email protected] with "whale" in the subject field. Closing date for applications is 19 August 2011. •
6 August 20111 NewScientist 13
UPFRONT
Godfathers of extinction WHERE animal heads might once have been put in people's beds. crime
Bennett has found that modern poachers use methods such as
syndicates are now t rading them. Iconic animals including tigers. rhino and elephants are being supplied
hidden compartments in shipping containers, changes of smuggling routes and anonymous e-commerce
by organised crime to satisfy demand f rom Asia for dubious medicines
to avoid det ection ( Oryx, DOl: 10.1017/s00306053100017Bx).
based on animal parts. Wildlife law enforcement efforts have failed to keep pace with the
The result is that South Africa, where rhino are meant to be protected, lost 230 animals to
increasing sophistication of poaching and t rafficking as huge crime syndicates have moved in on the
poaching in seven months last year, and there are now f ewer than 3500 w ild tigers left w orldwide.
act, according to Elizabeth Bennett a conservationist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York.
What's needed, says Bennett, is to increase surveillance along the smuggling routes, and use snifter
" We are rapidly losing big, spectacular animals to an entirely new type
dogs, DNA tests and smartphone apps to identify species. The key, she says, is to cut demand by challenging
of trade driven by criminalised syndicates, and the world is not yet taking it seriously;· she says.
the "deeply ingrained" faith in the efficacy of wildlife medicines.
Making a killing
Unnatural patent? HOW'S this for a brain teaser: gene patents scrapped last year on the grounds that they were based on natural molecules were last week reinstated on the grounds that the molecules are, after all, unnatural. The development is the latest twist in a dispute over patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene variants that raise the risk ofbreast cancer. The result will likely be welcomed in the biotech industry, which h as already patented 4000 human genes, but civil liberties groups are less th an impressed. In a ruling last March, the US Dist rict Court for the Southern District of New York declared the patents invalid because they describe genes found in nature,
"The patented genes were deemed to be unnatural because they omit non-coding regions" which cannot be patented as they are not inventions. Last week, the Court of Appeals for th e Federal Circuit reached the opposite conclusion. It decided
41NewScientist 16 August 2011
that the BRCA genes p atented by Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, Utah, differ from their natural counterparts by omitting noncoding "junk" regions that are present in the human body. "The molecules as claimed do not exist in nature," says the judgment. The Am erican Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundat ion, which origin ally brought the case in 2009, may yet appeal. "Human DNA is not a manufactured invention, but a natural entity like air or water," says Chris Hansen, a lawyer with the ACLU.
Free contraception WOMEN in the US are to be offered free birth control following a mandate passed by th e Department of Health and Human Services. From August 2012, insurance companies will have to offer women full coverage for a range of health services, including screening for diabetes and HIV, and birth cont rol. Currently women have to pay at least part of the cost. While th e move has been welcomed by many as an important step toward healthcare equality for women, religious
groups are critical of the plans to support birth-control measures, particularly for drugs such as ulipristal acetate, an emergency contraceptive wh ich can be used up to five days after sex. A representative from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has said : "The pro-life majority of Americans would be outraged to learn t hat their prem iums must be used for this purpose." But Maryland senator, Barbara Mikulski, described the mandate as" one step closer to ending the era when simply being a woman is treated as a pre-existing condition".
Rock shock IT'S an asteroid Austin Powers would love. Vesta, th e secondlargest rock in th e asteroid belt, boasts huge grooves around its equator that may be scars from a wild past. The grooves appear in the best detail yet in new images from NASA's Dawn probe, which went into orbit around Vesta on 16 July. They may have been shaped by the force of an ancient impact that Groovy baby blasted an enormous crater in the
For daily new s stories, visit newscientist.com/news
60SECONDS
asteroid's south pole. "The orientation of the grooves suggests it was associated with that early giant impact," Dawn's chief scientist, Chris Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles, told reporters at a briefing on Monday. The probe also revealed mysterious dark streaks inside some craters. Mission scientists hope to learn more about what they are as the spacecraft spirals towards the asteroid: it was about 3300 kilometres away on Tuesday but will eventually skim just 200 kilometres from the rock's surface.
Dead zone limited
Universities Marine Consortium in Chauvin. Don churned up the gulf in late July, returning oxygen to deeper waters. That's not to say wildlife didn't suffer- animals normally found at the bottom of the ocean were
THANK Don for a smaller-thanexpected dead zone. The region of oxygen-poor water in the Gulf of Mexico has been measured at 17,520 square kilometres this year- smaller than feared follow"The dead zone in the Gulf ing the massive flooding of the Mississippi in April and May. of Mexico is relatively small as a tropical storm The river emptied nutrientrich water into the gulf, causing a churned up the water" brief algal bloom that robbed the sea floor of oxygen when the algae seen surfacing to breathe. "The died and decayed. The main reason gulf is becoming less resistant to that the dead zone was relatively nitrogen pollution," says Rabalais. "It just doesn't take as much to small is tropical storm Don, says aggravate the system as before." Nancy Rabalais ofthe Louisiana
made to flip in and out of hibernation by injecting their brains with chemicals that either stimulate or block the neurotransmitter adenosine. The finding could lead to drugs that induce hibernationlike states in humans Uoumal of Neuroscience, 001: 10.1523/ jneurosci.1240·11.2011).
Stem cells to treat MS
replacing workers with robots that can perform t asks such as spraying, welding and assembling. He says Foxconn will boost its robotic
Oxygen gas in space
Million robots to make iPhones
STIGMA and homophobia against gay men is hampering efforts to manage a growing epidemic of HIV in Islamic countries, warned epidemiologists this week. "The stigma is a barrier to HIV prevention services," says LaithAbu-Raddad of the Weill Cornell Medical College-Qatar in Do ha. He heads a team that is assembling, for the first time, data from the Islamic world on the prevalence of HIV in gay men. They report in PLoS Medicine that the arrival ofHIV in the gay community has been relatively recent compared with other regions of the world, but warn that it is on the rise. In Pakistan, for example, the prevalence of HIV in transgender male sex workers rose from 0.8 per cent in 2005 to 6.4 per cent just three years later (DOT: 10.1371/journal. pmed.tooo 444). A problem in much of the Islamic world is that male gay sex is illegal. That and homophobia hamper efforts to contain the virus by making gay men too scared to seek help. Abu-Raddad says that governments are managing " to deal with [HIV] discreetly" by inviting nongovernmental organisations to provide testing, counselling and treatment for gay men.
rrs certainly one way to deal iPhone and iPad, was criticised last year after a spate of suicides by its workers. Now it plans to replace much of its troublesome human workforce with a million robots. Foxconn is based in Taiwan but is the largest private-sector employer in mainland China, with more than a million employees. Last year 17 killed themselves, most by jumping from factory buildings. The ensuing criticism and negative headlines worldwide pressured the company into doubling its workers' salaries. Now founder and chairman Terry Gou says he wants to cut rising labour costs and improve efficiency by
Arctic ground squirrels can be
Around 150 people in Europe with multiple sclerosis are to take part in the largest clinical trial yet using stem cells to treat the disease. Later this year Paolo Muraro of Imperial College London and colleagues w ill inject the subjects with stem cells produced from their own bone marrow (The Lancet Neurology, DOl: 10.1016/S1474-4422(09)70017·1).
HIV and Islam
with bad publicity. Foxconn, the manufacturer of parts for Apple's
Hibernation on demand
workforce from 10,000 to 300,000 next year, before reaching 1 million by2014. Forget visions of an android army: the machines are unlikely to be anything more impressive than robotic arms. Statistics from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) also suggest that Foxconn has set Its sights incredibly high compared with the current state of industrial robotics. In 2009, the IFR said that about 1,020,000 industrial robots were at work worldwide, and predicted thatthe total would be j ust under 1,120,000 by the end of 2013.
Molecular oxygen has been detected in space for the first time by the orbiting Herschel telescope. Paul Goldsmith of NASA and colleagues spotted its infrared signature in dense gas close to the Orion nebula (TheAstrophysical}ournal, DOl: 10.1088/0004-637X/736/l/1).
Fukushima still hot The Tokyo Electric Power Company has reported rad iation levels exceeding 10,000 millisieverts per hour at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. TEPCO's own regulations state t hat workers must not receive a dose greater than 2.50 millisieverts, but the company said the rad iation would not hamper recovery efforts.
Post-shuttle angst Is the US comfortable relying on Russia for trips to space? A brouhaha in the US media last week suggests not.lt came after a Russian official said the International Space Station would be de-orbited in 2020, triggering accusations of unilateral decision-making. In fact, the official was merely restating current policy. Noworkforhumans 6 August 20111 NewScientist 15
THIS WEEK
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Hookworms: now on the menu
THE ingredients seemed simple enough: water, sugar, salt and a smidgen of stool from a generous friend. Within a month, Sally had a dish of warm water brimming with hundreds of helminths tiny worm-like parasites growing inside eggs from her friend's faeces. She plucked soo eggs onto a microscope slide and licked it clean. The parasites, she hoped, would colonise her gut, modify her immune system and cure her severe allergies. Sally belongs to a growing community of people with immune disorders who are isolating and breeding parasitic worms for themselves, their friends and their customers. The idea is that helminths, which chemically bewitch the immune systems of their hosts in order to survive, can temper the overzealous immune system behind disorders like Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis and acute allergies. This "citizen science" approach has not escaped the notice of researchers. Some are impressed enough to request permission to safely infect people in clinical trials, while others strongly oppose worm therapy. P'ng Loke of New York University says he had always been aware of helminthic therapy, but "even though I considered it a reasonable hypothesis, I wasn't brave enough to do that kind of stuff myself". That changed when a man with worms in his belly approached Loke with an intriguing proposal. In 2004, a 29-year-old man with ulcerative colitis - an immune disorder that ravages the intestines- flew from the US to Thailand to swallow soo human whipworm eggs provided by a parasitologist. A few years later, virtually symptom-free, the man asked Loke, then at the University of California, San Francisco, to study his guts and look at what, if anything, the worms had done. Repeated colonoscopies
In this section • Dusttriggers ice ages, page 12 • How vampire bats detect blood, page 13 • Droids at your service, page 22
revealed that wherever worms had colonised the colon, the inflammation and bleeding that characterise colitis were significantly reduced or nonexistent. Loke published his findings as a case study in Science Translational Medicine (DOl: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3001500). He was so impressed with the results that he is seeking funding for his own clinical trial to
can stunt growth. "It's like the old days of giving people malaria to treat syphilis," he says. "It's not something that has any place in modern medicine." There are other problems for those wishing to carry out clinical trials, not least that the same species does not behave in the same way in everyone. "Every autoimmune disease involves different tissues and cell populations. It's naive to think "Nobody in their garage that we will find one helminthic can quality control therapy that is a cure-all," says parasites. How is it going Rick Maizels ofthe University to work clinically?" of Edinburgh in the UK. More worryingly, some helminths have been shown to worsen allergies investigate just how helminths suppress the immune system. and immune disorders rather "People now feel there are than make them better (New sufficient data to warrant further Scientist, 11 July 2009, p 42). trials of therapeutic potential," It is not hard to see why says Thomas Nutman of the authorities are often reluctant to National Institute of Allergy and give researchers permission to Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, infect people, but those behind the few clinical trials on helminthic Maryland. "The reason there aren't more clinical studies isn't therapy argue that they can so much scepticism about minimise risks by controlling the whether it works. It is more the number of worms each person huge number of hoops one needs receives. How a helminthic to jump through in order to infection affects someone experimentally infect volunteers." depends on the number of worms Those many hoops may well be and the person's age, health and justified. Helminths can make diet. So a malnourished toddler people severely ill. Peter Hotez of in Somalia who is continually George Washington University in reinfected with huge numbers of Washington DC emphasises that hookworms will likely develop helminthic infection is a major anaemia and developmental health problem in developing problems, whereas many healthy countries and can cause severe adult Americans are walking digestive problems, anaemia and around with a few dozen
Whipworms may relieve colitis
hookworms or whipworms and show no symptoms of illness whatsoever. One of the earliest helminth enthusiasts was Joel Weinstock of Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts, who has been studying the worms' therapeutic potential since the early 2ooos. In 2005, he published one of the few controlled clinical trials to appear in a peer-reviewed journal, giving 52 volunteers with colitis 2500 pig whipworm eggs or a placebo every two weeks for three months. Forty-five per cent of those who received whipworm eggs improved, compared with only 17 per cent who received placebo (Gastroenterology, DOl: 10.1053/j. gastro.2oos.o1.oos). Weinstock is not the only one: in the same year, John Croese of Townsville Hospital in Douglas,
CITIZEN SCIENTIST: HOOKWORMS CHANGED MY LIFE Michael was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 1996 as a 17-year-old. Three operations and a slew of drugs
German company called Ovamed (it is illegal to sell or breed helminths in the US). Michael drank 2500 eggs every
that they have billions of bacteria crawling over their skin right now." Before self-infecting, Michael's
relieved the symptoms, but only at the cost of unbearable side effects. After reading scores of research
two weeks for three months. His symptoms began to disappear. In April 2010 he allowed 35 hookworm larvae
intestines were ravaged and bleeding. When Moshe Rubin of the New York Hospital Queens examined
papers, Michael decided to try helminthic therapy. He was not overjoyed at the idea of swallowing
to burrow into his skin and says that his Crohn's disease has been in remission ever since.
Michael's intestine earlier this year, he found that his "small bowel looked almost completely normal". "lt's not
worms, but everything he read convinced him it was worth the risk.
"As soon as you say worms people get freaked out," Michael says. "But
When he was 25 he ordered a batch of pig whipworm eggs from a
it's not like you feel disgusting worms wriggling inside you. People forget
a controlled trial, but the suggestion based on this observation is that helminthic therapy was helping him;· Rubin says.
Queensland, Australia, published the results of inoculating nine Crohn's patients with hookworm. After 11 months, five were in remission (Gut, DOl: 10.1136/ gut.2005.079129). Now researchers from the University ofWisconsin, Madison, and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark are recruiting volunteers to test whether helminths can help treat multiple sclerosis, in which the immune system attacks nerve cells. But waiting for further clinical trials and regulatory approval is not an appealing option for many people living with immune disorders. Emboldened by the success stories told online (see "Citizen scientist: Hookworms changed my life"), some choose to take the risk and swallow vials of whipworm eggs or press bandages crawling with hookworm larvae against their skin. People who breed the helminths say that they screen donors for HIV and other diseases the worms could transmit, and point out that if an infection goes wrong there are powerful anthelminthic drugs that expel parasitic worms, such as albendazole. "There is definitely growing interest in helminthic therapy in mainstream immunology," says Loke. "But nobody in their garage can quality control parasites. The question is how will it work in a clinical setting?" • 6 August 20111 NewScientist 17
THIS WEEK INSIGHT expand drilling in Alaska."If someone wanted to remove him from the scene in a way that left no f ingerprints, this wou Id be the way to do it" says Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Inspedor General for the US Environmental Responsibility, which Department of the Interior for several is defending Monnett. BOEMREdenies any connection months. The specific allegations are to oil explorat ion. In an email to staff unknown, but a transcript of an interview with investigators in February in Alaska on 29 July, agency director (available at bit.ly/qaOfsX) suggests Michael Bromwich said that Monnett's that he is accused of"potential scientific suspension is not related to his misconduct" relating to the 2006 paper. 2006 paper but is "the result of new Monnett oversees projects studying information on a separate subject". Arcticwildlife t hatcould be affected by oil exploration. His suspension comes The fate of polar bears has turned into a big bone of contention as BOEMRE is considering permits to
This seems to relate to another BOEMREproject in which researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, are radio-tracking polar bears. On 13 July, Monnett was removed f rom the project's management via a memo which questioned his ability to act objectively. The University of Alberta was instructed to cease work on the project. Andrew Derocher, who leads the research team, could not be reached for comment. Scientific colleagues defend Monnett. "I have never had the slightest indication that he has any bias of any kind," says Phillip Clapham of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, which collaborated on the bowhead whale survey. The 2006 paper "did not overstate anything", adds Ian Stirling at the University of Alberta. Debate over the fate of polar bears rages on. Climate sceptics point to increased sight ings by indigenous Canadian communities, though that could be due to declines in sea ice \!! g driving the animals ashore. In 2009, ~ the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the '=' ~ International Union for Conservation ~ of Nature reported that eight polar u ~ bear subpopulat ions are declining, ffz three are stable and one is increasing. ~ Seven others could not be assessed ...~ due to a lack of data. Peter Aldhous ~ and An drew Purcell •
more of t he heavier of two oxygen isotopes, as the lighter one is preferentially accumulated in snow and ice rather than the ocean. Grove found t hat the mean temperature changed suddenly on three occasions during the last 5 million years. Each change was equivalent to the difference between glacial and interglacial temperatures - but none of these episodes coincided with the hominin
"golden age". What marked out this period was a greater range of recorded temperatures, suggesting it was a t ime of rapid but short-lived fluctuations in climate. Grove says such conditions would have favoured the evolution of adaptability that is a hallmark of the genus Homo Uournal of Archaeological Science, DOl: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.07.002). Grove says the classic survival traits of H. erectus, forged during this period of change, include teeth suited for generalised diets and a large brain - both of which should have been advantageous at a time of swift climate change. Andy Coghlan •
Can spotting dead polar bears add up to misconduct? IMAGES of polar bears drifting on isolated chunks of ice made the species a poster child for the perils of climate change. Now the USgovernment scient ist who raised the alarm about the animals' plight has been suspended from his post and is accused of scientific misconduct. The news set competing narratives loose in the blogosphere. Environmentalists claim t hat Charles Monnett of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) is the vict im of a "witch hunt" aimed at opening up more of Alaska to oil and gas drilling. Meanwhile, climate sceptics have dubbed the affair "polarbeargate" and claim Monnett's work is discredited. In 2004, during an aerial survey of bowhead whales in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, Monnett and his colleague Jeffrey Gleason observed four dead polar bears. In 2006, they noted in Polar Biology that these were the first drowned bears seen since the survey began in 1987 - and speculated that such drownings may increase as pack ice retreats (DOl: 10.1007I s00300-005-0105-2). Monnett was suspended on 18 July this year. By that time, he had been under investigation by the Office of
Thank climate change for the rise of humans SOME claim climate change will destroy our species; now it seems it also helped forge it. The rapid fluctuations in temperature that characterised the global climate between 2 and 3 million years ago coincided with a golden age in human evolution. The fossil record shows that eight distinct species emerged from one hominin species, Austra/opithecus Bl NewScientist 16 August 2011
africanus, alive 2.7 million years
ago. The first members of our genus appeared between 2.4 and 2.5 million years ago, while Homo erectus, the first hominin to leave Africa, had evolved by 1.8 million years ago. To work out whether climate had a hand in the speciation spurt, Matt Grove of the University of Liverpool in the UK turned to a global temperature data set compiled by Lorraine Lisiecki at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Lisiecki analysed oxygen isotopes in the "Rapid but short-lived fluctuations in climate shells of fossilised marine organisms would have favoured called foraminifera. During glacial human evolution" period s, the forams' shells contain
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0
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typical speeds of asteroids and comets that blast out craters on the moon. Like racing cars that swerve and hit each other on a circular track, the moons' speed relative to each other is low because they travel in nearly COLON cleansing can supposedly help you lose weight, eliminate toxins and the same orbit. Such a low-speed impact does enhance well-being. But a review of scientific research suggests that not melt or vaporise rock like a high-speed crash. Nor does it form these claims may be a steaming pile a crater - it actually adds material of nonsense. to the moon. "In a way you do make Ran it Mishori at Georgetown a crater, but you fill it all in with the University in Washington DC and impactor material," says Asphaug. colleagues reviewed 20 studies on colon cleansing published in medical The smaller moon breaks up and spreads out from the collision literature over the past decade. They found little evidence of benefit point like a landslide, thickening the larger moon's crust on one but plenty of negative side effects, side. "It basically looks like you including vomit ing and kidney failure are smearing the impactor across Uournal of Family Practice, in press). Mishori, a family medicine the face of the moon," says John physician, has seen people who were Chambers of the Carnegie Room for one more? Institution for Science in j aundiced or dehydrated as a resu lt Washington DC, who was of colon cleansing. As more of her patients enquired about such not involved in the study. Like squashing one end of a procedures for their health, she decided to look to the literature to tube of toothpaste, the impact see whether her anecdotal evidence also pushes subsurface magma was symptomatic of wider problems. to the opposite side of the moon Colon cleansing often involves from the crash point. This could f lushing the colon with a mixture explain why rocks on the moon's faced nature. The moon's crust near side are richer in potassium, of herbs and water through a is thicker on its far side (pictured) tube inserted in the rectum. Self phosphorus and other elements administered alternatives include and differs in composition from that suggest they were among rocks on the side facing Earth. the last rocks to solidify out of the laxatives, teas and oral capsules. Previous explanations for the moon's primordial magma ocean. Although the procedures may difference have created their own One way to test the idea is to get be touted as the ult imate detox puzzles. For example, a giant, rock samples from the far side, says treatment , "the body has its own high-speed impact could have mechanism to detoxify", says Mishori. David Greenwald, at Albert blasted away much of the crust "The smaller moon hit the from the near side. But this would bigger one and spread out Einstein College of Medicine in New from the collision point York City, agrees. Scientif ic evidence probably have led to a global magma ocean that would have of the benefits of colon cleansing is like a landslide" lacking, he says. cooled and erased the initial The practice has been around since thickness difference. Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Now Martin Jutzi and Erik ancient times. Auto-intoxication, as Institute ofTechnology. The it was formerly called, was popular Asphaug at the University of simulation suggests rocks on the California, Santa Cruz, have until the early 20th century, when far side come mostly from the simulated the effect of an impact smaller moon, which should have it was discredited by professional between the moon and a smaller societies, including the American previously cooled and solidified Medical Association. sibling 1300 kilometres across, faster than the main moon, about one·third as wide (Nature, making its rocks older. "Focus on the proven things," says Low-speed collisions have also Greenwald. "Increasing fibre in the DOl: to.to38/naturetoz8g). diet has been shown to be of benefit." Crucially, such an impact been proposed to explain some Mishori, too, has words of advice. would have happened at about comets' layered structures. If a 2 kilometres per second, which, smaller comet hit a larger one, its 'The road to wellness does not although fast in everyday terms, icy remains might be plastered on necessarily go through your rectum," is very low compared with the she says. Amy Kraft • the surviving sibling. •
Rectal route to well-being questioned
Transformer: dark past of the moon David Shiga
FAMILY squabbles rarely result in cannibalism, but that may be just what happened in the moon's youth. It may have gobbled up a smaller sibling, making itself permanently lopsided. The moon is thought to have formed when a Mars-sized body slammed into the infant Earth. This threw a cloud of vaporised and molten rock into orbit, which coalesced into the moon. Simulations have previously shown that additional moons could have formed from the debris cloud, sharing an orbit with the one large moon that survives today. Eventually, gravitational tugs from the sun would destabilise the moonlets, making them crash into the bigger one. New simulations now suggest such moon-on-moon violence could explain a long-standing puzzle about the moon's two-
6 August 20111 NewScientist 19
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THIS WEEK
Dusty history of cooling found in sea the surface of the Southern Ocean. The plankton that then bloom take the carbon they need from the water, causing the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate. This cools the atmosphere further, creating yet more dust-producing regions, and the cycle continues,
Fred Pearce DUST is all that's needed to plunge the world into an ice age. When blown into the sea, the iron it contains can fertilise plankton growth on a scale large enough to cause global temperatures to drop. The finding adds support to the idea of staving off climate change by simulating the effects of dust- perhaps by sprinkling the oceans with iron filings. Iron-rich dust falling on the ocean has long been known to spark blooms of plankton, and researchers suspect the process could have intensified the ice ages that have occurred over the past few million years. The thinking goes that, during warm periods, much of the Southern Ocean is an oceanic desert because it lacks the iron crucial for plankton growth. That changes at the start ofice ages, when a wobble in the planet's orbit causes an initial cooling that dries the continents, generates dust storms - particularly in central Asia - and sends dust onto
Modern alchemy turns acid boron into a base ANCIENT alchemists wanted to transform common metals into gold. Now chemists have achieved a more subtle modern-day equivalent converting the element boron from an acid to a base. The work could lead to safer medicines. Chemists identify acids and bases by t heir electronic structure. Each tends to react with different elements. Electron-starved acids gravitate towards electron-rich areas on other atoms, while bases 12 1NewScientist 16 August 2011
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Now Alfredo Martinez-Garcia at the Swiss Federal Institute ofTechnology in Zurich and colleagues have used marine sediment cores taken from an area of the Atlantic Ocean just north of the Southern Ocean to look back 4 million years. They say dust levels have been twice as high during deep glaciations throughout that time (Nature, DOl: 10.1038/nature10310). "Dust deposition in the Southern Ocean increased with the emergence of the deep glaciations that characterise the late Pleistocene," says Martinez-Garcia. John Shepherd of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, says the study "confirrns the magnitude of the role of iron" in the onset of severe glacial conditions. Fertilising the oceans with iron filings has been suggested as one method to combat climate change. So far, however, realworld tests have created only small blooms of plankton. Shepherd says the tests have been on too small a scale to demonstrate any lasting effect. "It would be of great scientific interest to do some larger-scale longer-term experiments." The new evidence, he says, suggests Dust storms bring a cool climate that it should work. •
sinking Earth into an ice age. When the planetary wobbles, known as Milankovitch cycles, eventually choke off the cooling, the feedback goes into reverse: continents warm, dust storms subside, the Southern Ocean is starved of iron, and C0 2 levels in the atmosphere rise again. Evidence for the theory can be found in ice cores from Antarctica, which show lots of dust in the air coinciding with low atmospheric C0 2 levels during recent ice ages. But this record goes back only 8oo,ooo years.
with "free" electrons attack atoms where the other bonds would be. that are electron poor. This gives it a split personality- it has Guy Bertrand of the University free electrons like a base but could also gain electrons to form stable of California, Riverside, and his colleagues tinkered with the number bonds at those two sites, like an acid. To force it into behaving like a base, of electrons surrounding boron. lt the team added two carbon-containing prefers to remain electron-deficient and often binds to three other atoms. molecules to the mix. These shared In this state, it has room to borrow electrons with the borylene in such electrons from another atom, acting a way as to resemble stabilising as an acid. The researchers tricked it bonds. This removed borylene's into feeling as if it had taken on extra need for additional electrons through electrons, t ransforming it into its bonding, shutting down its acid-like chemical opposite: a base. side. lt still had its own extra The researchers started with "The boron bases could borylene, a very reactive form of boron that is bound to only one other replace some toxic atom instead of the normal three, phosphorus bases used leaving itwithtwofreeelectrons to make medicines"
electrons, however, making it a base. This stable, electron-rich state can survive for at least two months at room temperature (Science, DOl: 10.1126/science.1207573). Ordinarily borylene is so reactive that it can only be kept stable at tempe ratures close to absolute zero. The boron bases could replace some toxic phosphorus bases used as catalysts to make medicines, says Bertrand. These compounds are difficult to remove from medicines entirely and can affectthe central nervous system and respiratory tract if they enter the body. Bertrand hopes to create a family of molecules t hat can cling to borylene, stabilising it. Melissae Fellet •
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
Bloodsucking bats feed on their distant kin VAMPIRE bat s use heat detection to seek out their next meal, and the way they do it provides the latest evidence that they are more closely related to the cattle whose blood they suck than the rodents they resemble. Desmodus rotundus vampire bats sense infrared radiation using heat-sensitive pits on their faces, just as boas, pythons and pit vipers do. Elena Gracheva at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues had previously shown that these snakes use a heat-sensitive protein called TRPA1 for the task. Now her team has discovered that vampire bats do it differently. All bats make a protein called TRPV1 to help them detect and
avoid painfully hot surfaces. Unusually, vampire bats have two versions of the protein, says team member Nick lngolia of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Baltimore, Maryland. "One is sensitive to painful heat, but the bats produce a version in their facial pits that is sensitive to lower temperatures." The newly discovered protein, TRPV1-S, is shorter than TRPV1 and is activated by temperatures 10 ·c lower -corresponding to the temperature of certain spot s on the bodies of animals that the bats feed on, where veins or arteries lie just below the skin. "Without this adaptation the bats probably would not survive as a species," says Gracheva.
Blood relatives?
Gracheva's team found that the vampire bats have an extra length of DNA in their Trpv1 gene, which normally codes for the TRPV1 protein. In certain circumstances, this extra piece of DNA causes TRPV1-S to be made instead. Cows, pigs and dogs also h ave the extra DNA and so produce two forms of the protein, though both have the
same sensitivity to heat. Mice and humans lack the insertion (Nature, DOl: 10.1038/nature10245). The team's finding fits with previous studies that place bats evolutionarily closer to carnivores and ruminants than rodents, says Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, who was not involved in the study. Cian O'Luanaigh •
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THIS WEEK
·super' superbugs have staying power Andrew Purcell
chunk of DNA from another organism - or coping with a new antibiotic resistance mutation uses up a cell's resources and leaves it less competitive once the antibiotic has been removed, says Francisco Dionisio at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. At least, it should. Dionisio and colleagues focused on 10 strains of Escherichia coli that had already acquired genes for antibiotic resistance from other organisms and that then evolved one of five
MULTIDRUG-RESISTANTbacteria may be here to stay. The common wisdom that antibiotic-resistant superbugs are outcompeted by their non-super neighbours in the absence of antibiotics has been turned on its head. Bacterial antibiotic resistance can make infections very difficult to treat. Resistance occurs in one of two ways: either through mutations in a bacterium's own DNA or by the acquisition of resistant genes from "To overcome superbugs other organisms. we need drugs which will stop the transfer of genes In both cases, studies suggest that superbugs cannot compete between bacteria" once antibiotics are no longer present. For instance, a voluntary DNA mutations also associated ban by Danish farmers on the use with antibiotic resistance, of antibiotic growth promoters in resulting in so strains. In five of chicken and pigs cut antibiotic these the bacteria outcompeted non-resistant bacteria when both resistance in the bacteria within the animals by over go per cent. were grown in a dish - even in the That's because maintaining a absence of antibiotics.
141 NewScientist 16 August 2011
Tren dsetting pigs
A similar thing happened if the team began with E. coli that had acquired resistance to antibiotics through genetic mutation and then gained further resistance by grabbing genes from another organism. This time 16 of the so superbug strains studied remained more competitive than normal bacteria (PLoS Genetics, DOl: l0.137t/joumal.pgen.to02t8t). This process has a name positive epistasis - but it "remains a mystery" why it occurs, says Dionisio. "It was a real surprise to find so many cases where the multiresistant bacteria were at an
advantage," says Isabel Gordo, a member of the team based at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Oeiras, Portugal. Jim Caryl at the University of Leeds, UK, says that the problem could be tackled by using those antibiotics that have the highest fitness cost to the bacteria, which might reduce the chance of positive epistasis emerging. Dionisio disagrees: what's really needed is an alternative to antibiotics, he says. "We need drugs which will stop the transfer of genetic elements between bacteria - it's amazing that we still don't have a way of doing this." •
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THIS WEEK
Antiproton ring surrounds Earth Hazel Muir
ANTIPROTONS appearto ring the Earth, confined by the planet's magnetic field lines. The antimatter, which may persist for minutes or hours before annihilating with normal matter, could in theory be used to fuel ultra-efficient rockets of the future. Charged particles called cosmic rays constantly rain in from space, creating a spray of new particles- including antiparticles - when they collide with particles in the atmosphere. Many of these become trapped inside the Van Alien radiation belts, two doughnut-shaped zones around the planet where charged particles spiral around the Earth's magnetic field lines. Satellites had already d iscovered positrons - the antimatter partners of electronsin the radiation belts. Now a spacecraft has detected anti protons, which are nearly 2000 times as massive. Heavier particles take wider paths when they spiral around the planet's magnetic lines, and
weaker magnetic field lines also lead to wider spirals. So relatively heavy antiprotons travelling around the weak field lines in the outer radiation belt were expected to take loops so big they would quickly get pulled into the lower atmosphere, where they would annihilate with normal matter. The inner belt was thought to have fields strong enough to trap
anti protons, and indeed that is where they have been found. Piergiorgio Picozza from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy, and colleagues detected the anti protons using PAMELA, a cosmic-ray detector attached to a Russian Earthobservation satellite. The spacecraft flies through the Earth's inner radiation belt over the south Atlantic. Between July 2006 and December 2008, PAMELA detected 28 antiprotons trapped in spiralling orbits around the magnetic field lines sprouting from the Earth's south pole
Ring of anti protons Eart h is surrounded by two zones of charged particles, called the Van Alien radiation belts. Anti protons, which may persist for minutes or hours, have now been found in the inner belt , . . . - - - - -'(" .... , . . , . - - - - - - -......~~O~U:T:ER RADIATION BELT ANTIPROTONS
Detection by Pamela spacecraft (350-600km f rom Earth's surface)
INNER RADIATION BELT
(Astrophysica/ Journal Letters, DOl: 10.1088/2041-8205/737/2/ 129). PAMELA samples only a small part of the inner radiation belt, but anti protons are probably trapped throughout it. "We are talking about of billions of particles," says team member Francesco Cafagna from the University ofBari in Italy. "I find it very interesting to note that the Earth's magnetic field works a little bit like the magnetic traps that we are using in the lab," says RolfLandua at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. There, researchers have been trying to trap antimatter for ever longer periods to compare its behaviour with that of normal matter. Alessandro Bruno, another team member from Bari, says antimatter in the Earth's radiation belts might one day be useful for fuelling spacecraft. Future rockets could be powered by the reaction between matter and antimatter, a reaction that produces energy even more efficiently than nuclear fusion in the sun's core. "This is the most abundant source of anti protons near the Earth," says Bruno. "Who knows, one day a spacecraft could launch then refuel in the inner radiation belt before travelling further." Millions or billions oftimes as many antiprotons probably ring the giant planets. •
metastasis. Finding a way to predict
between healthy cells, cancer cells
He says the model should help
which tumours will lie dormant and which will spread is one of the most important goals of cancer research,
and the surrounding blood vessels. The result is a model that predicts "corridors of likely tumour growth"
identify which blood vessels to remove to limit a tumour's growth. "In the future, treatments will no
and physicists and mathematicians are increasingly becoming involved.
says Choe, using the distribution of blood vessels around the tumour.
longer have to be based on population averages. People will get individual
A MATHEMATICAL model that predicts how a tumour will develop could help design treatments tailored to
Among them is physicist Sehyo Choe of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, who, with colleagues,
When applied to the mice in the study, in all cases it was able to predict how their cancer would
treatment based on the predictions of our model," says co-author Neil johnson, a physicist at the University
individual cancers. Some tumours stop growing once they have reached a certain size, while
has developed a mathematical model of how tumours evolve. The team analysed detailed images of tumours
progress. "lt's like having a fastforward button," he says (Scientific Reports, DOl: 10.1038/srep00031).
of Miami in Florida. Claus j"rgensen of the Institute of Cancer Research in London,
others continue to grow. As they do so the network of blood vessels feeding them becomes more extensive. lt can
taken from mice with cancer, and of the blood vessels feeding them, at different stages of development. The
also carry cancer cells to other sites in the body, a process known as
results were then fed into equations describing the complex interplay
'Fast forward button' predicts cancer growth
161 NewScientist 16 Augu st 2011
"The model describes the complex interplay between cancer cells and surrounding blood vessels"
says models like this will have an important role to play in future cancer treatments, but adds that the model oversimplifies some aspects of tumour growth. Andrew Purcell •
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IN BRIEF Neanderthals got lost in the crowds
Brain to car: "Apply the brakes now, please"
and asked t hem t o d rive at 100 kilometres per hour in a car simulat or, closely fo llowi ng the car in front . The EEG measured patterns of brain activity as drivers
TALK about cutting out t he middleman. A mind-reading device that taps into a driver's brain can recognise
were forced to brake suddenly. lt recorded t hree distinct patterns, which the t eam were able t o use to det ect t he intention to brake before t he driver moved, says Benjamin
and act on t he bra in signals t o stop t he car precious milliseconds before t he signals become leg movements. Some cars carry systems to detect traffic danger, and
Blankertz, also at TU Be rlin, who eo -led the study. Sensors on t he drivers' legs t o monitor m usele tension provided another way t o confirm t he intention to brake.
w ill then st op the vehicle the moment the driver t ouches the brake. Stefan Haufe from the Berlin Instit ute of Technology in Germany says plugging into t he driver's
The syst em reliably t riggered t he braking syst em 130 milliseconds sooner than waiting for t he driver t o touch t he pedal. At 100 km/h that reduces the stopping
thought s cou ld make response t imes even fast er. With colleagues, he wired 18 volunteers to an EEG headset , a non-invasive way t o measure brain activity,
distance by the length of a small car - pot entially enough t o prevent an accident Uoumal of Neural Engineering, DOl: 10.10BB/1741-2560 /B/5/0 56001).
Cuban flowers rely on bat signal GOTHAM CITY famou sly relies on a bat sign al to call for h elp . Now we know th at a Cuban flower does too. The rainforest vine M arcgravia evenia grows an un usual bowlshaped leaf above each ring of flowers and n ectaries. Th e plan t's other leaves are much flatter. Ralph Simon of the University ofUlm, Germany, suspected the bowl-leafis an ad aptation to draw pollinating bats, which use 18 I NewScientist 16 August 2011
ech olocation to navigate th e forest. So he played sounds at the plant and analysed the resulting echoes. Ordinary leaves produ ced a st rong echo when face-on to the sound source, but the signal strength d ropped- and its acoustic signature changed - as the source shifted position in front of th e leaf. The signal from a bowl-leaf, however, retained its strength and character wherever
the sou nd source was placed. Simon reckons the better echo from the bowl-leafhelps bats fi nd the flowers. In experiments, he found that nectar-feeding bats (Glossop haga soricina) could fin d an artificial nectary twice as fast with a replica of a bowl-leaf- rather than a flat leaf- above it (Science, DOl: to.u z6/science.120421o). The bowl-leaves are less efficient at photosynthesis, but Sim on says that the ben efits of attracting bat s outweigh this cost.
-
WAS it good old-fashioned competition, not interbreeding, th at led to the demise of the European Neanderth als? Recent genetic evidence that our extinct cousins in terbred with m odern h umans has seen a spate of interbreeding hypotheses to account for their demise. Bu t Paul Mellars and Jennifer French at the University of Cambridge point ou t there is no eviden ce for interbreeding when Eu ropean Neanderthals disap peared. Th e duo says that the archaeological record does, h owever, show that the n umber and size of occupied sites increased enou gh when the first modern humans reached Europe to su ggest the population grew tenfold. They say it was the weight of numbers of m odern h umans sustained by better technology that pushed Neanderthals to extinction (Science, DOl: 10 .1126/ science.t206930 ).
Water in solitary confinement IT'S the t iniest drop of water possible. The isolation of a single water m olecule inside a carbon cage could allow the life-giving stuff to b e st udied in a new way. Kei Kurotobi and Yasujiro Mu rata of Kyoto University in Japan made a pore in a carbon buckyball. Oxygen atoms ringing the pore bonded to one water m olecule, which then entered the spherical cage u nder high temperature and pressure (Science, DOl: t o.u z6/scien ce.1206376}. Research ers can now stu dy how water behaves when strip ped of th e hydrogen bonds that normally govern its p roperties, as well as the molecule's two different "spin" states, which cann ot be separated when water molecules are en masse.
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Geyser moon is Saturn's rain cloud LIKE a hapless cartoon character, Saturn has its own personal "rain cloud" that follows it around. Water vapour spewing from its moon Enceladus appears to drizzle onto the giant planet from space. When water was discovered in Saturn's cloud tops in 1997, the source was a mystery.lt is too cold there for water to linger- it should condense and rain down to lower altitudes. But now Europe's Herschel space observatory has an answer: space rain. lt spotted the infrared signature of water vapour in a vast ring around the planet (Astronomy and Astrophysics, DOl: 10.105110004-63611201117377). The most likely source is Enceladus's geysers. which shoot 900 tonnes of water into space per second from the moon's south pole. Models suggest that up to 5 per cent of that water may rain down onto Saturn, making Enceladus the only moon known to affect the chemical make-up of its planet. 'There is no analogy to this behaviour on Earth," says Paul Hartogh of the Max-Pianck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany. Leigh Fletcher of the University of Oxford says the space rain offers "a rare chance to glimpse the processes through which a planet's stratosphere is determined".
Bite me and taste my poison, says killer African rat THE deadly secret of a rat that kills lions and jackals has at last been revealed. Unlike some mammals that produce their own toxins, the African crested rat is the first known to protect itself by daubing it s fur with poisons from plant s. The same lethal toxins are u sed by African tribal hunters to coat their arrow-tips. Suspecting that Lophiomys imhausi m ay obtain toxins from chewing on the bark of the poison-arrow plant, acokanthera, Fritz Vollrath of the University of Oxford and his team offered some
to a captive anim al. Over the course of a week, it periodically ch ewed the bark then sm eared it s saliva over a sect ion of short hairs that lies alon g its flank, hidden inside its fur. Placing the hairs under a microscope revealed that their surface is perforat ed. Each also contains fibres at its core, allowing it to soak up the toxins an d store them (Proceedings ofthe Royal Society B, DOl: 10.1098/ rspb.2011.116g). Vollrath says the findings tally with reports that when attacked,
the rat stands its ground, parts its fur to reveal the stripe of poisonous h air, and invites the aggressor to bite it s flank. Aggressors who do go in for the kill have been seen to shrink back, froth at the mouth and often collapse and die, apparently from heart failure. The rat s are also known to have abnormally thick skins and skulls, which prob ably evolved so that they could survive attacks unt il the poison kicks in. They have also - clearly - evolved immunity to the toxins.
Slipped a disc? Grow a new one A LIVE implant could kill the pain associat ed with slipped discs, a study in rats suggest s. Between 1.5 and 4 million Americans are wait ing for surgery to fix a herniated spinal disc, but the relief provided from a synthetic imp lant is the best it's ever going to be "the minute you put it into the patient", says Lawrence Bonassar of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Livin g tissu e can grow an d adapt, so may provide a better long-term solution, he says. Bonassar's team used cells taken from sheep spines to build replicas of rat discs, and implanted them into the spines of rats. The implanted discs stood up to pulling and compression like the original discs. Cru cially, they also improved with age, growing new cells and binding to nearby vertebrae in the six months aft er surgery (Proceedings ofthe
National Academy of Sciences, DOl: 10.1073/pnas.1107094108). Although t he study was in rats, "it shows us wh at is possible", says Ab h ay Pandit at the National University oflreland in Galway. He adds that future studies will need to address the load borne by upright human spines.
Gastric bypass puts people off fat the rats had to digest the fat without
A MORSEL of good news: having a gastric bypass gives people a taste for a healthier diet.
tasting it. The bypass rats learned to avoid the w ater but the others did
To understand why people often say they eat less fat after a bypass, a team led by Carelle Roux of Imperial
not. This suggests that the bypass rats avoided high-fat foods, not because they disliked the taste,
College London carried out either a gastric bypass or a sham operation on rats (American journal of Physiology,
but because they found it harder to digest after the operation. Le Roux's team also found that
DOl: 10.1152/ajpregu.00139.2011). They found thatthe bypass rats ate
levels of some hormones that make people feel full were higher in rats with a gastric bypass than in the
less and regained less weight after the surgery than the others. The researchers then gave the rats
sham-operated rats after eating. They are now doing studies to see
sugar water while infusing corn oil directly into their stomachs, so that
if these hormones could be used to tackle obesity.
6 August 20111 NewScientist 119
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TECHNOLOGY
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The next generation of electriccar batteries may thrive on a liquid that looks like crude oil Ferrisjabr
THE tiny glass bottle in my hand is filled with what looks like crude oil, but it's actually oil's nemesis. Ifit works, this black sludge will transform the rechargeable battery, doubling the range of electric cars and making petroleum obsolete. Today's electric cars are handicapped by batteries that are heavy, expensive and a waste of space. Two-thirds of the volume of the battery in Nissan's Leaf electric car, for example, consists of materials that provide structural support but generate no power. And those materials cost more than the electrically active components. One way to vastly improve rechargeable batteries is to put more of that deadweight to work. That's the purpose of the secret sauce in the bottle, nicknamed "Cambridge crude" by Yet-Ming Chiang and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who developed it. In a standard battery, ions shuttle from one solid electrode to the other through a liquid or powder electrolyte. This in turn forces electrons to flow in an external wire linking the electrodes, creating a current. In Chiang's battery, the electrodes take the form of tiny particles of a lithium compound mixed with liquid electrolyte to make a slurry. fli The battery uses two streams of ~ slurry, one positively charged and >< ~ the other negatively charged. Both >: g are pumped across aluminium and
of years," says Yury Gogotsi of Drexel Nanotechnology Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "Chiang offers a unique hybrid between a flow battery and a lithium-ion battery." Drivers could have three ways of recharging the semi-solid flow battery. They could pump out spent slurry and pump in fresh; head to a recharge station where tanks of spent slurry would be replaced with fresh ones; or recharge the slurries with an electric current. In the first two cases regaining full power should only take a matter of m inutes. Rechargeable batteries are the heaviest and most expensive components of electric cars by a large margin. Chiang estimates that the cost of manufacturing his team's battery will be $250 per kilowatt-hour of generating
"Of the three ways drivers can recharge the battery, two would take a matter of minutes"
lt packs a lot more juice
copper current collectors with a past stationary electrodes. Chiang permeable membrane in between. reckons that the power per unit As they flow the streams exchange volume delivered by his lithium lithium ions across the membrane, "semi-solid" flow battery will be 10 times that of conventional causing a current to flow externally. To recharge the battery, designs (Advanced Energy you apply a voltage to push the Materials, DOl: 10.1002j aenm.201100152). ions back across the membrane. The MIT creation is a type of "This is probably the most flow battery, which normally has exciting development in electrical a liquid electrolyte that moves energy storage in the past couple
capacity. So if one were built to replace the 24-kWh battery in the Nissan Leaf, it would cost $6ooo. That is about one-third the cost of existing batteries, and just low enough to compete with gasoline. Chiang also calculates that Cambridge crude would let a car travel at least 300 kilometres on a single charge, double what is possible with today's batteries. "This is an especially beautiful technology," says Dan Steingart oftheCityUniversityofNewYork Energy Institute, because you can recharge the spent slurry. But he adds that even if the team manages to create a prototype car battery within five years, building the recharge stations to support it would take much longer. Last year Chiang, his colleague Craig Carter and entrepreneur Throop Wilder founded a company called 24M Technologies to develop the battery. They have raised $t6 million in funding so far, and plan to have a compact prototype ready in 2013. • 6 August 2011 1NewScientist 121
TECHNOLOGY FIELDNOTES Domestic droids
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Meet my robot room-mate How to live happily with robots is taking some thinking about, says Paul Marks AS I walk across the wood-tiled floor of an IKEA-furnished living room, my footsteps appear in real time as shimmering blue footfalls on a computerised map of the room. In one corner, a robot with a single purple eye stands, brooding. What I'm seeing is the robot's laser-radar view, shown on a nearby laptop, of the obstacles on the floor - and I am just one of those obstacles. This is my first taste of the technology that twelve British volunteers will experience as they live with a selection of domestic robots in a semi-detached house in Hatfield, UK, over the next few months. These volunteers will be helping roboticists as part of the Living with Robots and Interactive Companions (LIREC) project. It aims to work out how squadrons of robots can be truly useful to people, how they can do so safely, and establish just how many robots people can cope with at 22 1NewScientist 16 August 2011
any one time. Lead researcher Kirsten Dautenhahn and her colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire, also in Hatfield, have an advantage over others attempting to assess domestic robots: they have bought a regular house to ground their research in the realities of domestic life. Her team comprises psychologist Dag Sverre Syrdal, adaptive systems engineer Kheng Lee Koay and robotics engineers Mohammad Reza Oskoei and Steve Ho. "The high-level aim here is to develop robots that can assist people in their household environment. And particularly help the elderly with fetching and carrying things around, with memory issues - like remembering their medication schedules - and perhaps help them access entertainment," saysKoay. They have populated their house with four robots, two of them wheeled and two four-legged.
These comprise a medication scheduling/dispensing robot dubbed Sunflower, built at the University of Hertfordshire, a robot-arm-equipped CareRobot from the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology and Automation in Stuttgart, Germany, for fetching and carrying food, drink and household items, plus two Sony Aibo robotic dogs for entertainment.
"One robot's head goes limp as it enters sleep mode and another robot stirs. The transference is spooky" A key idea is that only one robot can be active at a time, to spare human users from the risk of "cognitive overload" if too many robots seek their attention at once. When one finishes a task and another needs to become active, data is wirelessly migrated from one - which enters sleep mode to another, which wakes up and
knows your recent requests. But does it work? I take a seat and the purple-eyed CareRobot, whose double-jointed robot arm looks like it could throw together a car if you let it, makes its way over to me. It brings me a fruit drink on a tray and, to demonstrate its dexterity, a woolly hat t hat I must gently pull from its three grasping fingers. It approached me in a wide, sweeping motion so I could see it coming, but in a subsequent meeting it suddenly appeared, startlingly, at my side. I preferred the sweeping motion, but it did block the TV. Such are the behavioural nuances the volunteers will report on. Care Robot then swishes back to a corner and migrates its brain data to Sunflower, which has an LCD touchscreen for delivering messages and a drawer on its front for delivering medication. It is also wirelessly aware of the house's electrical grid, so it can sense when the kettle is being boiled or the fridge door opened by the telltale current drain measured by a smart meter: both are signals for it to go and see what its human master is up to in the kitchen. Sunflower trundles over to me and opens its drawer as if it's delivering my medication, then asks me via a message on its screen if I want to send its brain to an Aibo so I can play a game: I press a button to agree. Its head goes limp as it enters sleep mode - and a moment later the Aibo stirs and stands. The transference is spooky. After playing for a while, I send the dog's brain data back to Sunflower, which promptly heads off because Dautenhahn opened the fridge door to get milk. The volunteers will decide whether such behaviours are the future of robots in our homes, or if there is still fine-tuning to be done. "We'll see how acceptable people find it and perhaps go back and redesign it. We're just starting to explore these issues," says Dautenhahn. •
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Mass sway reveals risk of a crushing crowd A CROWD crush at the Love Parade music festival in Duisburg, Germany, last year ki lled 21 people and injured over 500 others. The disaster might have been avoided if security personnel at the festival had been able to detect the dangerous crowd build-up, but monitoring the behaviour of thousands of festivalgoers is no easy task. A new system aims to detect congestion hotspots, guiding security to disperse a crowd before tragedy can strike. Barbara Krausz at the Fraunhofer Institut e for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems in Sankt Augustin, Germany, developed the system based on one simple observation: when people become trapped in a highly congested area, they sway slowly from side to side in an effort to keep their balance. Software detects this motion by analysing the movement of each pixel between differentframes of crowd video footage - highly symmetrical pixel motions indicate swaying. " lt does not recognise that there is a person, we just check the pixels," she says. Any sudden increase in symmetrical movements suggests there may be a congestion problem, but it could also be the result of something unusual in the crowd. The system highlights such areas in red,
allowing event organisers to quickly investigate the problem. When applied to the available footage of the Love Parade, Krausz's system highlighted areas where people squeezed together as emergency vehicles made routine patrols through the crowds. The system produced its highest alert about half an hour before the disaster - the last moment for which Krausz analysed data. Simply knowing about a congestion problem doesn't solve it, of course. Krausz hopes a future version of her system could run crowd simulations
" When people become trapped in a highly congested area, they sway slowly from side to side" to tell security personnel the best course of action, like opening a gate at a given location. She will present the work at the Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance conference in Klagenfurt, Austria, next month. Anders johansson, a researcher in crowd modelling at University College London, says that the move from individual tracking to whole-crowd models is promising. "You cannot replace humans altogether, but to give attention to certain areas that seem to be developing in dangerous ways is useful;' he says. jacob Aron •
Channelled into a dead end 6 Aug ust 2011 1NewScientist I 23
TECHNOLOGY
Taser stunned A US court has found Taser guilty of lax training practices, but doesn't query the stun gun's use TASER International, the maker of the electro-shock stun gun, has seen off 1271awsuits f rom families who have claimed that its 50,000-volt weapon, in the hands of police, killed a relative. In all but one case the f irm's lawyers have successfully argu ed that mitigating circumstances- mainly the victim's alleged drug use or a pre-existing cardiac condition - meant they would have died from the trauma of being physically subdued by police officers in any case. In the one case the company lost it paid out $150,000 in damages. But on 19 July the Arizona-based firm lost a major decision when a jury in a US district court ruled that Oarryl Turner, a 17-year-old shop assistant in Charlotte, North Carolina, had been killed by a police taser after receiving an extended 37-second shock. The ruling orders the firm to pay Turner's family $10 million in damages. 241 NewScientist 16 August 2011
Turner's chest. He then keptthe current applied for 37 seconds. After that Turner was not moving. The Mecklenburg Count y medical examiner found he had died from cardiac arrest. This is not how a taser is supposed to be used. When you see a taser demonstration, the volunteer usually gets a half-second burst - enough to fell most people with excruciating muscle spasms. In practice, officers use a 5-second burst. This can be repeated - and often is- but officers shouId be well aware that research shows multiple bursts are a health risk (New Scientist, 12 November 2005, p 30). 1n 2009, despite winning legal challenges, Taser International revised its training manuals to warn users that they should avoid f iring at people's chests owing to the proximity of t he heart to the electri c pulses. Toxicology tests revealed no drugs in Turner's bloodstream and that his heart was in good shape. Death was caused by "agitated state, stress and use of a conducted energy device", according to the medical examiner: Taser International disputed this, arguing Turner had a pre-exist ing risk of cardiac arrythmias of a type exacerbated by drugs - and that he was carrying marijuana. What was clear to the jury, however, was that the CMPO officer should have been trained to avoid the chest and they found Taser lnternationaI had been negligent in not doing this. John Burton, legal counsel for Turner's parents, proclaimed the case would mark the beginning of the end for the
Amnesty International estimates that 450 people in the US have died after being tased since 200l. lt welcomed the verdict. 'This important verdict conf irms our long-held position that tasers are potent ially lethal and therefore should only be used in a limited set of instances where there is a very serious and real threat to loss of life," says Oliver Sprague, Amnesty's "The jury found that the police officer should have UK arms programme director. The court's ruling does not question been trained to avoid firing a taser at the chest" the safety of the weapon itself. Instead, it finds the firm neg Iigentfor improperly instructing and training the energy weapon. "I think the taser is officers of t he Charlotte-Mecklenburg on the way out," he told New Scientist. Police Department (CMPD). When contacted by New Scientist, The Turner case concerned an Taser International said it plans to incident in a Charlotte supermarket appeal the verdict. But whatever the on 20 March 2008. Police were called outcome, the use of tasers remains when Turner, an employee, had an controversial. just hours af ter the argument with a manager. When Turner verdict was delivered, another Turner lunged at a CMPO officer, the CMPO officer tased a 21-year-old man. latter fired the taser probes into He died an hour later. Paul Marks •
Crisis robots lead people to safety • 1n an emergency WHAT should you do when alarms are ringing, the building is rapidly filling with smoke and t he crackle of fire is just round the corner? Follow the robot, say Ayanna Howard and Paul Robinette, electrical engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who want to create smart roving exit signs. Static signs point people to safety but can't warn evacuees when an exit is blocked or unsafe. The researchers suggest that evacuation robots could instead guide people to the nearest exit, seek out stragglers and alert emergency services to the whereabouts of people who are injured or trapped. Howard and Robinette say the robots should be at least as tall as a human, so that they can be seen in a crowd, and styled after familiar exit signs with lights and arrows to guide the way. They have created two possible designs. The first design has a thin, triangular shape that points evacuees in the right direction, and is coloured with red and white stripes. Howard and Robinette worry this design may look too much like a static sign, though, so an alternative has a cylindrical body with an arrow on top and "Emergency Evacuation Robot" written clearly on it. Teams of these robots would be stored in large buildings and receive instructions from a human operator during an emergency. A robot would start in "rescuer mode", searching for people in need of help, and then change to leader mode when it finds people it can guide to safety. If a robot comes across an injured person, it will make their location known to emergency personnel and stay with them to aetas a communication device. If everyone is being accompanied or aided, the remaining robots become static notifiers, pointing people in the right direction and blocking dangerous areas. The researchers are currently testing people's reactions to evacuation robots using a simulated environment. jacob Aron •
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OPINION
Australia's climate-change wrangling has descended into death threats and extreme insults. The science is being drowned out, warns Clive Hamilton THE battle over global warming, reaching fever pitch in Australia amid plans to introduce a carbon tax, is part of a long-running and bitter culture war between conservatives and liberals dating from the tg6os. In the US, it is no accident that the Tea Party seamlessly incorporated climate-change denial into its suggestions of a liberal elite conspiracy and claims of populist rage. The same toxic brew is being drunk in Australia, a nation that has always hovered between European social democracy and US individualism. There, climate scientists report death threats, figures on the right of the conservative opposition party mutter about excessive United Nations power, and protesters wave placards calling Prime Minister Julia Gillard "Bob Brown's Bitch"- a reference to the leader of the Australian Greens party, who holds the balance of power in the upper house of the nation's parliament. The torrent of abuse has been led by Sydney's right-wing shock jocks, such as Alan Jones. He refers to Gillard as "Ju-Liar". The ugliness on the air-waves has broken even commercial radio's bounds of decency, with Jones allowing one caller to complain bitterly that tax payers have to pay for Gillard's tampons. Leader of the Conservative opposition, Tony Abbott, is vigorously stoking the fire with his trademark blend of alphamale swagger and hyperbolic claims about the ruinous effects of the carbon tax. On paper, the opposition party has committed 28 1NewScientist 16 August 2011
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Australia to the same emission that the incumbent Labor party would be trounced were an cuts as the government - a 5 per cent reduction on 2000 levels election held now. Pundits are by 2020. Against the advice revising their view that Abbott of economists and the Federal is unelectable, because his Treasury, Abbott insists the target testosterone-soaked presence can be reached more cheaply by is a turn-off to women voters. "direct action", such as paying All of which raises the most farmers to enhance carbon puzzling feature of Australian sequestration in soil. climate politics. For years voters His rejection of climate have made it dear they want their science- he once called it "crap" government to do something. and is the only political leader Even John Howard, a sceptic to have agreed to meet leading prime minister, was forced to go denier Christopher Monckton to the 2007 election promising to has emboldened climate sceptics "Voters want a strong everywhere. The carbon tax leader, but one who will uproar has not been confined to the right-wing fringe but has deliver only symbols of spread to the majority. Polls show action on climate change"
match the opposing Labor party by introducing an emissions trading system. His lack of action on climate change was one of the three factors that saw Labor's Kevin Rudd replace him as prime minister. Rudd received a standing ovation at the UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007 when he announced that his government would ratify the Kyoto protocol, and Australians felt a rush of pride. But as Rudd got close to legislating for emissions t rading, his poll ratings faltered. Nervous and under pressure from colleagues less committed to climate action, he abandoned his emissions trading policy only to see his public support collapse. He stood down, replaced by Gillard. So to the riddle of Australian politics: voters want a strong leader, but one who will deliver only symbols of action on climate change. Australians want to feel good about themselves without making any sacrifices. The source of the venom directed at Gillard seems to lie in this flaw in the modern Australian character. Confusing what Australians say they want with what they actually want, her plan to push through a carbon tax has turned her into a hate figure. Behind it all has been perhaps the most potent force in the nation, the mining industry. Miners have always been powerful, but the China-driven minerals boom of the last few years has created a cadre of militant rich with an enormous sense of entitlement and a
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willingness to fight" government interference". A dispute in 2010, which was sparked by a proposed mining super-profits tax, was a defining moment. It was enough to unite corporate giants such as Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton with the new crop of belligerent billionaires whose iron ore and coal companies have been turned into behemoths by China's industrialisation. They set up a A$100 million fighting fund that spooked the government. In a bizarre spectacle, Western Australian mining moguls Gina Rinehart (who has assets of A$4.75 billion ) and Andrew Forrest (worth A$4.24 billion) gathered employees in an anti-tax rally in Perth in which they pumped the air with their fists and demanded justice. Eventually concessions on the tax were won. Back to current events and Monckton 's lecture tour. It got off to a shaky start when images emerged from the US of him describing Ross Garnaut, the economist whose study underpins the carbon tax, as a fascist, quoting words from Garnaut's report under a giant swastika. Those who turn up to Monckton's rallies wave placards reading "Ditch the Witch" and "Ju-Liar". Anti-tax populism now verges on extremist violence. At a public lecture on 12 July in Melbourn e by eminent German climate scientist Hans Schellnhuber, a protester from a far-right "citizens group" brandished a noose. The urbane Schellnhuber was shaken and left the country with t h is warning to fellow climate scientists: "Some day some madman will draw a pistol and shoot you. It will happen- to me or somebody else. I'm pretty sure about that." • Clive Hamilton is the author of Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change (Earthscan, 2010) and professor of public ethics at Australia's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics
One minute with ...
Dorien Schroder What do you do when a great white shark lands in your boat? We ask someone with first-hand experience
What were you doing out on a boat in shark-infested waters?
One of the projects I've been working on is the study of great white shark populations with an organisation called Oceans Research in South Africa. We go out on "chum trips", where we attract sharks to the boat with fish oils then take photos of their dorsal fins, which have distinct notches and patches. In this way, we can estimate the numbers of sharks in the area. Tell me about the day you became shark bait
We went out on a chum trip and were anchored near Seal lsland, which is where the great white sharks usually are in winter time. We had seen a few sharks, but it had gone quiet. Then I heard a splash behind me and turned around to see a great white hovering in the air next to one of t he interns we had with us. She stepped away, because luckily she had seen the shark coming out of the water. I grabbed her hoodie and pulled her away from the shark as it landed in the boat. How big was the shark?
She was about 3 metres long and weighed 500 to 600 kilograms. At first she was panicking and thrashing around, but she ended up curled in a corner, calmed down. This was lucky because I was worried that she would hurt herself. We poured buckets of water over her gills so that she could breathe. Had it crossed your mind that one of the sharks you had been studying might end up in your boat?
We'd talked about it now and then. Here in South Africa it is a normal occurrence for great white sharks to breach out of the water. We see it about once a week. lt is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Sometimes they breach when another shark is swimming underneath them and t hey get scared, which is what I think happened this day. The shark breached out of the water and didn't realise the boat was there until she landed on it.
PROFILE Dorien Schri:ider is a principal investigator with Oceans Research in Mossel Bay, South Africa. She has a master's degree in oceanography from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands
How did you get the shark back in the water?
We called the port authorities for a crane to lift her back into the water. When she felt the water around her she started moving around, so we cut the ropes and she swam off. We were excited that she was so lively after being out of the water for over an hour. You sounded as concerned for the shark as you were for yourself...
I was probably a little bit more concerned for t he shark to be honest. Of course, the interns came firstI made sure they were all right. After that it was def initely the shark that was f irst priority. She was lucky to land in a boatfull of people who love sharks. Have you seen her since?
We have sent a picture of her dorsal fin to everyone doing shark research or tourism along the South African coast so they can keep a lookout for her, though no one has spotted her yet. Has this put you off working with sharks?
Definitely not. I went out on a boat the next day. Interview by Alison George
6 August 20111 NewScientist 129
OPINION INTERVIEW Photography: jason Bye for New Scientist
I
.....,am a i an """"''s one arc aeo o'-111s As a child she was forced to f lee Somalia. Now Sad a Mire is back, uncovering ancient rock art and ruined towns. She told Curtis Abra ham what it's like to be the only working archaeologist in the region, and why she believes cultural heritage remains a priority even in t imes of war and famine What was life like growing up in Somalia?
I grew up in the 1980s in the Medina area of Mogadishu, a multicultural east African town with Somalis, Kenyans, Italians, Arabs and descendants of Chinese merchants. My father was a police officer and my mother was a midwife. Desp ite hardships and violence at the hands of the Mohamed Siad Barre dictatorship - my father was arrested and tortured several t imes, and my sister and I were expelled from school due to clan discrimination- I thought at the time that I had a normal childhood. My parents did all they could to shield us and help us live a normal life. We went to school, our brothers played football, we watched Hollywood films. When civil war broke out in 1991, you and your family had to escape and eventually found asylum in Sweden. How did you do that?
We had to escape Somalia because of the war. We come originally from the north, and would have been targets for anti-north sentiments. We tried first to walk out of Mogadishu but we could not go far because we had our elderly grandmother in a wheelbarrow. However, after a few weeks, a distant relative put us on the top of an already packed lorry, and we hung on to the ropes that held the load together. It was a dangerous journey, Militiamen wanted to rob the lorry and rape the women, and to avoid these dangers we drove where no roads existed. On several occasions the lorry nearly fell off the narrow mountain paths. My older sister was in Sweden and she arranged for us to join her.
You went on t o study archaeology. What made you choose this subject?
The idea that the remains of past cultures could be excavated and history could be written based on this was very appealing. The recording of African history and heritage has been hampered and sometimes destroyed by slavery, colonialism, wars and pillaging. I wanted to be part of rescuing and writing about the rich heritage of Africa. You have made some amazing archaeological discoveries in Somaliland, including 5000-yearold rock paintings. Tell me about them.
Dhambalin is a rock art site located in the desert 20 kilometres south-east of the coastal town ofBerbera. The most striking element of the Dhambalin paintings is the images of sheep. This is the only site in the region that depicts sheep. It also depicts humans worshipping cattle with big udders, as well as hunting scenes, and some of the humans appear to be wearing headgear or masks. What do the paintings tell us about life in the Horn of Africa several millennia ago?
The Dhambalin rock art site displays rich information about past symbolism and beliefs in the region. Many of the animals depicted cattle, certain types of antelope and wild animals such as giraffes - no longer exist here due to climate change. Also the paintings show headless beasts with big udders, a symbol of fertility. These are similar to paintings found in north Africa. What else have you discovered?
PROFILE Sada Mire is a fellow in the department of art and archaeology in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She is also heads the department of antiquities in Somaliland, an autonomous region of Somalia (see www. somal iheritage.org)
30 I NewScientist 16 August 2011
The recent discoveries include ruined early or medieval Islamic towns, burial sites with decorated upright stone monuments of preIslamic origin called steglia, and pre-Islamic Christian burial sites. The ruined towns t ell us about ancient trade between the Horn of Africa and Arabia, India and China. We have found Chinese pottery from the Yuan and
Ming dynasties, which is important since it brings the dat ing of the sites back to the 13th century. This helps us understand the period of seafaring and maritime interaction. We now have a list of potential World Heritage Sites. What is your most important discovery?
If you mean material discovery it would be the Dhambalin rock art site and its depictions of sheep; it is one of a kind. But actually the most important discovery I have made is not a site or a material object, it's the notion of preserving knowledge and skill rather than
"The intangible heritage of dances, songs and poetry, are rapidly vanishing" objects - I call it the Knowledge-Centred Approach. It is a distinctive method amongst the Somalis for preserving heritage as knowledge rather than heritage as objects in museums and monuments. This perspective totally blew me away since it was completely different to what I had learned at university. I now use this methodology as a way of engaging local communities with material heritage such as objects and monuments. Have you ever been threatened while you are out in the field?
Sometimes somebody may put obstacles in our way, but I have not been threatened personally. So far the danger has been due to landmines, snakes, car crashes and bad infrastructure such as non-existent roads. What is it like to be the only w orking Somali archaeologist in t he region?
It is a very daunting task. There is so much
to be done because we are in a cult ural emergency: our heritage is disappearing day by day. So being alone is not fun; I really need assistance. I feel I need to be
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in so many places at the same time. It's also a humbling experience because, at the end of the day, I can only do my best to research and protect the heritage. I also feel that Somalis, although missing in the field of archaeology, appreciate the fact that there is at least one person who is dedicated to saving this heritage. I receive many encouraging emails from people all over the world, both Somalis and non-Somalis, who support my work. That means a lot to me. Why should archaeology be a priority when there are so many problems facing the Horn of Africa, including famine?
I see cultural heritage, including archaeological heritage, as a basic human right. Even people who are refugees or internally displaced need not only food and security but also a cultural heritage to understand their situation and to preserve their identity and dignity. Wars, poverty and droughts are dehumanising experiences which cultural activities and heritage awareness can protect against. And if we can protect and conserve cultural heritage, this helps create livelihoods through tourism and cultural resource entrepreneurship. Why have you described the situation in Somalia as a "cultural heritage emergency'?
The intangible heritage relating to traditional practices such as Somali performance art, dances, songs and poetry, are all disappearing at an alarming rate due to the political conflict, displacement and older generations dying. But Somali tangible heritage is also disappearing due to the deliberate destruction of sites, looting and illicit trade of antiquities and unplanned development. Cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible heritage, is in an emergency situation. Do you think that there are other archaeological sites yet to be discovered in this region?
Yes, there are many, probably over a thousand sites to be discovered. There are archaeological sites everywhere in the country; the region was a crossroads for many civilisations of the world. The region's arid climate has helped the preservation process. Also, most Somalis have until recently led a nomadic lifestyle and did not interfere with any of these sites, and there has been almost no farming or industrialisation. This is changing now, and there has recently been looting as the diaspora return and build factories and roads. There is an urgent need to document the heritage before it is too late. • 6 August 2011 1NewScientist 131
OPINION LETTERS I hurt, therefore I am From Eric Adams
fluid is really a hologram, and it is equally silly to suggest that we are. Mathematically, our world can be modelled in several equivalent ways. Physically, they all describe the same thing.
How do I know I exist (23 July, p 36)? 1. Sit at desk. 2. Open drawer. 3. Put fingers in drawer. 4. Slam drawer shut. Coventry, West Midlands, UK Yep, I exist. Birmingham, UK
From Anthony Hammond
I was struck by a number of questions when reading about the idea that we may be holograms. What are the deeper implications of us being holographic entities? Is consciousness itself holographic? Indeed, are my questions here only illusory, having been generated billions of light years away on a 2D surface? Manchester, UK
From Ian Stewart, Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick
Central to answering the question "Am I a hologram?" (23 July, p 31) is the holographic principle, which states that there is a one-to-one correspondence between quantum states within a domain and states of a related set of equations on its boundary. This has numerous precedents in classical physics, such as the flow of a fluid inside a domain, which is uniquely determined by the boundary conditions. No one suggests t hat a
Alzheimer's insight From Huntington Potter, Antoneta Granic, Ivan Iourov, Lucia Migliore, Svetlana Vorsanova, Yuri Yurov, Byrd Alzheimer's Institute, University ofSouth Florida
Andy Coghlan reported the latest evidence that Alzheimer's is, in part, a cell cycle disease that generates neurons and other cells with abnormal numbers of chromosomes (14 May, p 8). We would like to supplement this story by pointing out that the vast majority of abnormal neurons
Enigma Number 1658
Seven into five GWVNOWEN ENIGMA is a number in which the letters denote different digits. The numbers corresponding to IN, GIN, GAIN, GAMMA and ENIGMA in which there are no leading zeroes, are divided by 7 and each has remainder I (I as in Ink). Find the maximum value ENIGMA can take. WIN flS will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on Wednesday 7 September. The Editor's decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1658, New Scientist Lacon House, 84 Theobald's Road, London WClX 8NS, or to
[email protected] (please include your postal address). Answe r to 1652 A colourful lamp: 9 colours, 621 tetrahedra The w inner Tony Harker of Oxford, UK
32 1NewScientist 16 August 2011
and other cells in people with Yet the internet still prevailed, as Alzheimer's show less than double it was the best way for people to the number of chromosomes. find each other. They are monosomic or trisomic, In short, I don't see the internet containing just one or three copies reverting to old, closed ways of of various chromosomes. This is doing things. On the contrary, I see more and more ofthose old, a cell state known as aneuploidy, closed ways being made obsolete which is evidence for a general by the intemet. chromosome mis-segregation defect rather than merely a Hamilton, New Zealand problem with DNA replication and uncompleted cell division. Many of those cells have three Chimp tests copies of chromosome 21, a defect known as trisomy 21, which is seen From David Leavens, University in all the cells of people with ofSussex, and Sarah Boysen, Down's syndrome. Thus people University ofPortsmouth with Alzheimer's essentially In her article on the mental lives become mosaic Down's syndrome of animals, Emma Young wrote, individuals - that is with some, "Chimps... just don't get abstract rather than all, cells affected. physical concepts, like weight, gravity and the transfer offorce" Chromosome 21 also encodes the Alzheimer amyloid precursor (2 July, p 41). She cited work by protein gene. All people with Daniel Povinelli, in which a group Down's develop Alzheimer's of orphaned, institutionalised pathology by the age of 20, and chimpanzees often failed to select a tool with the correct properties most develop dementia by so. to retrieve food. Furthermore, mothers of most people with Down's are often Yet when this same task was given to chimpanzees kept in mosaic for trisomy 21, are prone to chromosome mis-segregation unusually enriched captive and at greater risk of developing circumstances - either raised as Alzheimer's. part of a human family or in very Tampa, Florida, US close association with people they performed very well (Animal Cognition, volu, p 83). More generally, apes that experience Unbreakable net enriched captive rearing From Lawrence D'O/iveiro environments perform well The intemet will never become in tool-using tasks requiring the" splintemet" (16 July, p 42). sophisticated manipulations of To understand why, remember weight, gravity and force (Animal that there were splintemets Cognition, vol12, p Ss). before the intemet. It was the Wild chimpanzees use tools to intemet that swept them aside, crack nuts, spear animals, probe not the other way around. termite mounds and soak up The importance of the intemet lies in its connectivity, not content, despite what some corporations fondly believe. There were proprietary online services before the intemet, like CompuServe, the original form of AOL, BIX and others. They had access to valuable "premium" content that the intern et could not offer, and had promotional budgets that the early internet service providers could not afford.
To join the debate, visit newscientist.com/letters
liquids, all of which require the application of abstract physical concepts during tool preparation. It is therefore absurd to use the behaviour of those subjected to institutionalisation as a generalisation of all chimps. It has been demonstrated that orphaned children brought up in institutions experience severe cognitive delays. Moreover, the longer they spend in these settings, the worse the impact (Science, vol318 p1937). Why would chimpanzees be any different? Brighton, UK, and Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK
Contrail cooling
potential host nations for some of the thousands of antennae needed are not. The distances involved would make protecting the entire SKA almost impossible. Australia, the other potential host, also h as vast, sparsely populated areas, with limited or no radio interference, as well as being in an appropriate location in astronomy terms. The difference between the two bids would seem to be t hat Australia has political stability. For a project with the potential to make ground-breaking discoveries of global impact, this should be paramount. Woollahra, New South Wales, Australia
From Tony Budd Reading how contrails from Millions and billions second world war bombers changed the weather (16 July, p 14) From David Garnett In "Unsung elements" (18 June, brought to mind the flight p 36) James Mitchell Crow states marking the 10th anniversary of the wartime 1000 bomber raids they "make up a few parts per by the UK's Royal Air Force. billion of Earth's crust". While I was living in west London, near correct for one of the nine Northolt airfield, and the weather tellurium is about 1 part per was fine, clear and very warm. billion (pp b) - he is way out with A huge band of aircraft appeared, the others. With reasonable confidence, probably higher than the original 8ooo feet used for the raids. their crusta! abundances are: indium 200 ppb; terbium 1000 They covered the sky as far as you could see, leaving a" carpet" ppb; europium 2000 ppb; of contrails which soon merged. dysprosium 6ooo ppb; yttrium It immediately became noticeably 30,000 ppb; neodymium 35,000 chillier, and as far as I remember ppb; lanthanum 35,000 ppb; and the temperature did not recover cerium 6o,ooo ppb. for many hours, if at all, that day. Darwin, Northern Territories, Wickford, Essex, UK Australia
Focus on stability
Baby talk
From Fa trick Harley de Burgh South Africa's efforts to increase its scientific capabilities should be applauded (16 July, p 25). However, the decision on siting the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's biggest radio telescope, should be made in the best interests of science, not to foster scientific development in any one region. Whilst South Africa is astable and democratic nation, other
From David Crawford After reading of the connections between words and sensory perceptions and possible links to the emergence oflanguage (16 July, p 30), I suspect that "the ancestral genius who invented the first words" was female. I can see language developing out of a game played by mothers and their babbling, curious children, with mothers
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remembering and developing the children's words, encouraging more, inventing connections and spreading the results. As the hunting males returned, they would have joined in. Bickley, Kent, UK From Colin Day Contrary to what was written in your article "Language's missing link", in linguistics a "b" sound is not a continuant - a sound made with an incomplete closure of the vocal tract. Like the "k" sound, it is a stop, breaking the airflow. The difference is that "b" is a voiced bilabial stop and "k" is a voiceless velar stop. Leyburn, North Yorkshire, UK
Faking it From Anthony Wheeler The real fault with lie detectors (25 June, p 46) is the assumption that lying is stressful. It is for most of us, but tor sociopaths lying is no problem. Career non-sociopathic criminals are another matter, though they soon learn tricks, like a drawing pin inside the shoe. In the 1g8os, my colleagues and I used polygraphs to teach students cardiovascular physiology. On quiet days we wired ourselves up and played games, seeing who could raise and lower their heart rate the best. Weevokedimagesthatengaged the autonomic nervous system to change our physiology. Beating polygraphs would have been child's play for us. Mackay, Queensland, Australia
Men vs women From Mary Searle-Chatterjee I was delighted to read Alan White's thoughts on why being male is so bad for health (18 June, p 31). I have been irritated by the way feminist social scientists, among whom I count myself, often explain women's higher rates of illness in terms of social factors, but men's higher rates of mortality in terms of biology. If the tendency of men to die early were biologically programmed then we would expect similar differences in all countries. In most societies for which we have records, men do die earlier than women, but the difference ranges from one year in Japan to 15 in pre-tg8os Finland. There are even a few societies where women die earlier, such as Afghanistan. Ulverston, Cumbria, UK
Tau's day From Daniel Greenhill There appears to be a backlash against calls to replace pi with tau (g July, p 5). After reading The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hart! (tauday.com}, I took the document's advice and did a review, looking back through my engineering and physics books. I was dumbfounded at how often 2pi showed up- nearly every time and in cases where pi was alone or with another factor, such as 4pi, it was actually enlightening to replace pi with tau. Pi has always been one of my favourite numbers. Despite that, I agree tau is the winner. Houston, Texas, US Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist 84 Theobald's Road, London WClX 8NS Fax: +44 (0) 20 76111280 Email:
[email protected] Include your full postal address and telephone number. and a reference (issue, page number. tit le) to articles.We rese!Ve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information rese!Ves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine. in any other format.
6 August 2011 1NewScientist 133
TWASN'T so long ago we thought space and time were the absolute and unchanging scaffolding of the universe. Then along came Albert Einstein, who showed that different observers can disagree about the length of objects and the timing of events. His theory of relativity unified space and time into a single entity - space-time. It meant the way we thought about the fabric of reality would never be the same again. "Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself: are doomed to fade into mere shadows," declared mathematician Hermann Minkowski. "Only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." But did Einstein's revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, 341 NewScientist 16 August 2011
COVER STORY
Momentum space isn' t as alien as it first sounds. When you look at the world around you, says Smolin, you don't ever observe space or time - instead you see energy and momentum. When you look at your watch, for example, photons bounce off a surface and land on your retina. By detecting the energy and momentum of the photons, your brain reconstructs events in space and time. The same is true of physics experiments. Inside particle smashers, physicists measure the energy and momentum of particles as they speed toward one another and collide, and the energy and momentum of the debris that comes flying out. Likewise, telescopes measure the energy and momentum of photons streaming in from the far reaches of the universe. "If you go by what we observe, we don't live in space-time," Smolin says. "We live in momentum space." And just as space-time can be pictured as a coordinate system with time on one axis and space - its three dimensions condensed to one - on the other axis, the same is true of momentum space. In this case energy is on one axis and momentum - which, like space, has three components - is on the other (see diagram, page 36). Simple mathematical transformations exist to translate measurements in this momentum space into measurements in space-time, and the common wisdom is that momentum space is a mere mathematical tool. After all, Einstein showed that space-time is reality's true arena, in which the dramas of the cosmos are played out. "'~ Smolin and his colleagues aren't the first ~ to wonder whether that is the full story. As 3 far back as 1938, the German physicist Max Born noticed that several pivotal equations in quantum mechanics remain the same whether expressed in space-time coordinates or in momentum space coordinates. He wondered whether it might be possible to use this connection to unite the seemingly it incompatible theories of general relativity, which deals with space-time, and quantum mechanics, whose particles have momentum and energy. Maybe it could provide the key to the long-sought theory of quantum gravity. Born's idea that space-time and momentum space should be interchangeable - a theory now known as "Born reciprocity" - had a remarkable consequence: if space-time can be curved by the masses of stars and galaxies, as Einstein's theory showed, then it should be possible to curve momentum space too. At the time it was not clear what kind of physical entity might curve momentum > ~
Canada, doesn't think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space. If this radical claim is true, it could solve a troubling paradox about black holes that has stumped physicists for decades. What's more, it could set them on the path towards their heart's desire: a "theory of everything" that will finally unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. So what is phase space? It is a curious eightdimensional world that merges our familiar four dimensions of space and time and a fourdimensional world called momentum space.
"If Einstein's space-time is no longer something all observers can agree on, is the true fabric of reality?"
6 August 20111 NewScientist 135
space, and the mathematics necessary to make such an idea work hadn't even been invented. So Born never fulfilled his dream of putting space-time and momentum space on an equal footing. That is where Smolin and his colleagues enter the story. Together with Laurent Freidel, also at the Perimeter Institute, Jerzy KowalskiGlikman at the University ofWroclaw, Poland, and Giovanni Amelino-Camelia at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, Smolin has been investigating the effects of a curvature of momentum space.
you are and the more energy is involved, the larger the event seems to spread out in spacetime," says Smolin. For instance, if you are 10 billion light years from a supernova and the energy of its light is about 10 gigaelectronvolts, then your measurement of its location in space-time would differ from a local observer's by a light second. That may not sound like much, but it amounts to 30o,ooo kilometres. Neither of you would be wrong - it's just that locations in space-time are relative, a phenomenon the researchers have dubbed "relative locality". Relative locality would deal a huge blow to our picture of reality. If space-time is no longer "Relative locality an invariant backdrop of the universe on deals a huge blow to our which all observers can agree, in what sense can it be considered the true fabric of reality? understanding of the That is a question still to be wrestled with, nature of reality" but relative locality has its benefits, too. For one thing, it could shed light on a stubborn The quartet took the standard mathematical puzzle known as the black hole informationrules for translating between momentum loss paradox. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking space and space-time and applied them to a discovered that black holes radiate away curved momentum space. What they their mass, eventually evaporating and discovered is shocking: observers living in a disappearing altogether. That posed an curved momentum space will no longer agree intriguing question: what happens to all on measurements made in a unified spacethe stuff that fell into the black hole in time. That goes entirely against the grain of the first place? Einstein's relativity. He had shown that while Relativity prevents anything that falls into space and time were relative, space-time was a black hole from escaping, because it would the same for everyone. For observers in a have to travel faster than light to do so- a curved momentum space, however, even cosmic speed limit that is strictly enforced. space-time is relative (see diagram, page 37). But quantum mechanics enforces its own This mismatch between one observer's strict law: things, or more precisely the space-time measurements and another's information that they contain, cannot simply grows with distance or over time, which vanish from reality. Black hole evaporation means that while space-time in your put physicists between a rock and a hard place. immediate vicinity will always be sharply According to Smolin, relative locality saves defined, objects and events in the far the day. Let's say you were patient enough to d istance become fuzzier. "The further away wait around while a black hole evaporated, a
Fabrics of reality Space-time is like a malleable sheet with the three spatial coordinates on one side and time on th e other. Momentum space is similar, with three coordinates of momentum and energy MASSIVE OBJECTS BEND SPACE-TIME
NO ONE KNOWS WhA1 MlurlT BEND MOMENTUM SPACE
ENERGY
MOMENTUM (p., Py· Pz)
361 NewScientist 16 Augu st 2011
process that could take billions of years. Once it had vanished, you could ask what happened to, say, an elephant that once succumbed to its gravitational grip. But as you look back to the time at which you thought the elephant had fallen in, you would find that locations in space-time had grown so fuzzy and uncertain that there would be no way to tell whether the elephant actually fell into the black hole or narrowly missed it. The information-loss paradox dissolves. Big questions still remain. For instance, how can we know if momentum space is really curved? To find the answer, the team has proposed several experiments. One idea is to look at light arriving at the Earth from distant gamma-ray bursts. If momentum space is curved in a particular way that mathematicians refer to as" nonmetric", then a high-energy photon in the gamma-ray burst should arrive at our telescope a little later than a lower-energy photon from the same burst, despite the two being emitted at the same time. Just that phenomenon has already been seen, starting with some unusual observations made by a telescope in the Canary Islands in 2005 (New Scientist, 15 August 2009, p 29). The
effect has since been confirmed by NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, which has been collecting light from cosmic explosions since it launched in 2008. "The Fermi data show that it is an undeniable experimental fact that there is a correlation between arrival time and energy - highenergy photons arrive later than low-energy photons," says Amelino-Camelia. Still, he is not popping the champagne just yet. It is not clear whether the observed delays are true signatures of curved momentum space, or whether they are down to "unknown properties of the explosions themselves", as Amelino-Camelia puts it. Calculations of gamma-ray bursts idealise the explosions as instantaneous, but in reality they last for several seconds. While there is no obvious reason to think so, it is possible that the bursts occur in such a way that they emit lower-energy photons a second or two before higher-energy photons, which would account for the observed delays. In order to disentangle the properties of the explosions from properties of relative locality, we need a large sample of gamma-ray bursts taking place at various known distances (arxiv. org/abs/1103.5626). If the delay is a property of
the explosion, its length will not depend on how far away the burst is from our telescope; if it is a sign of relative locality, it will. Amelino-Camelia and the rest ofSmolin's t eam are now anxiously awaiting more data from Fermi. The questions don't end there, however. Even if Fermi's observations confirm that momentum space is curved, they still won't tell us what is doing the curving. In general relativity, it is momentum and energy in the form of mass that warp space-time. In a world in which momentum space is fundamental, could space and time somehow be responsible forcurvingmomentumspace? Work by Shahn Majid, a mathematical physicistatQueenMaryUniversityof London, might hold some clues. In the tggos, he showed that curved momentum space is equivalent to what's known as a noncommutative space-time. In familiar space-time, coordinates commute - that is, if we want to reach the point with coordinates (x,y), it doesn't matter whether we take x steps to the right and then y steps forward, or if we travel y steps forward followed by x steps to the right. But mathematicians can construct space-times in which this order no longer holds, leaving space-t ime with an inherent fuzziness. In a sense, such fuzziness is exactly what you might expect once quantum effects take hold. What makes quantum mechanics different from ordinary mechanics is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: when you fix a particle's momentum - by measuring it, for example - then its position becomes completely uncertain, and vice versa. The order in which you measure position and momentum determines their values; in other words, these properties do
Where's the supernova? Observers in curved momentum space disagree about where in space-time an event such as a supernova takes place Supernova happens in one location, but the two observers disagree about where
-===-
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not commute. This, Majid says, implies that curved momentum space is just quantum space-time in another guise. What's more, Majid suspects that this relationship between curvature and quantum uncertainty works two ways: the curvature of space-time - a manifestation of gravity in Einstein's relativity - implies that momentum space is also quantum. Smolin and colleagues' model does not yet include gravity, but once it does, Majid says, observers will not agree on measurements in momentum space either. So if both space-time and momentum space
"There would be no way to t 11 h th 1 h t e W e er an e ep an aCtUally fell intO the black hole or narrowly missed it" are relative, where does objective reality lie? What is the t rue fabric of reality? Smolin's hunch is that we will find ourselves in a place where space-time and momentum space meet: an eight-dimensional phase space that represents all possible values of position, time, energy and momentum. In relat ivity, what one observer views as space, another views as time and vice versa, because ultimately they are two sides of a single coin a unified space-time. Likewise, in Smolin's picture of quantum gravity, what one observer sees as space-time another sees as momentum space, and the two are unified in a higherdimensional phase space that is absolute and invariant to all observers. With relativity bumped up another level, it will be goodbye to both space-time and momentum space, and hello phase space. "It has been obvious for a long time that the separation between space-time and energy-momentum is misleading when dealing with quantum gravity," says physicist Joao Magueijo ofimperial College London. In ordinary physics, it is easy enough to treat space-time and momentum space as separate things, he explains, "but quantum gravity may require their complete entanglement". Once we figure out how the puzzle pieces of space-time and momentum space fit together, Born's dream will finally be realised and the true scaffolding of reality will be revealed. • Amanda Getter is a consultant for New Scientist based in Boston Further reading: The principle of relative locality by Giovanni Amelino-Camelia and others (arxiv.org/ absl1101.0931} 6 August 20111 NewScientist 137
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lt's one of t he world's t rickiest engineering =--oreenrord problems- how to prevent people overheating on underground trains. Justin Mull ins looks beneath London
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N A quiet backstreet in central London, not far from Buckingham Palace, a small, nondescript building hides the entrance to an unusual tunnel. There are no signs indicating its presence. "We take security very seriously," says Kevin Payne, the engineer showing me around. It's easy to understand why: this tunnel is a crucial ventilation shaft for the Victoria line, one ofLondon's deep tube-train tunnels. Before we can enter, Pay ne has to switch off a giant 2-tonne fan that draws hot air out of the tunnels, lest we be blown away like sweet wrappers. Then we descend into a dark, dustblackened tunnel that connects the north and southbound rail tunnels. The air is warm. As we reach the bottom and the trains rattle past, just centimetres away, I feel a pang of guilt. I'd travelled this section ofline earlier, with sweat dripping down my back. With the fan switched off for my visit, am I condemning these travellers to an extra degree of discomfort? Payne reassures me any temperature increase will be minimal. As the person in charge of power and cooling at London Underground (LU), he should know. The new fan at the top of the shaft is his baby. It is part of a major programme to tackle rising temperatures across the tube network. In these tunnels on the Victoria line, one of the hottest lines in London, platform temperatures can average 32 •c in the summer. In one notorious incident in 2006, temperatures on the Central line were ~ reported to have reached 47 •c. 0 ~ London is not alone in battling heat ~ underground. Some 170 metro systems ~ around the world carry millions of commuters ~ every day, keeping the world's major cities 381 NewScientist 16 August 2011
running (see map, page 40) and on many of these engineers are seeking to prevent uncomfortably hot conditions. In the face of growing concern, LU, the organisation that runs the tube, has begun
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Feeling the heat Here's the problem. The trains fit snugly in their tunnels and so act like pistons, pushing cool fresh air ahead of them through the tunnels as they move. What's more, underground stations themselves act like ventilation shafts, allowing cool air into the system: at Highgate station on the Northern line, the icy blasts of wind rushing down the escalators can take your breath away. And yet, air temperatures in these tunnels have doubled in the 100 years since they were built. That's partly because the tunnels are so old. The deep lines are carved out of solid clay. At one time, the clay acted as a heat sink. In the 1900s, LU advertised its tunnels as "the coo lest place to be in hot weather". Not any more. After decades of continuous >
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heating, the clay is now hot too. The sources of heat are easy to identify. The electric motors that drive underground trains pump heat into the tunnels every t ime they accelerate. And when the trains decelerate using friction brakes, the kinetic energy dissipates as more heat. Even when stationary, electric trains cope with electricity surges by burning off excess power through resistors designed to heat up. LU engineers affectionately call these circuits "toasters". Together this accounts for 8o per cent of the heat introduced to the network. The rest comes from other sources such as the body heat of the commuters, who are sometimes packed into carriages at sardine densities of up to five people per square metre. One obvious solution is to use more energy efficient trains. LU has been introducing new trains with regenerative brakes that turn lctnetic energy back into electricity rather than into heat. By 2012, all trains running on the Victoria line will have them. This and other energy-saving measures should allow the same service to run using 10 per cent less power, says Ian Flynn, LU's head of engineering strategy. But plans are also afoot to increase the number of trains operating on the line by 10 per cent. It's like running to keep still. Back in the tunnel, we're clambering through huge baffles that absorb the sound of the rushing air as it is drawn out of the ventilation shaft. Without insulation, noise would be a significant problem. The vent extends up beyond the ground-level entrance, sandwiched between an office building and a residential flat. As the trains race past beneath us, Payne tells me about the scale of the cooling challenge he faces. The problems in London are particularly
acute. Other cities can suffer because of the extreme temperature and humidity of the atmosphere outside, which is exacerbated in cramped tunnels where airflow can be poor. But in London the problem is the sheer age of the deep tunnels and the fact they have so little ventilation, having been designed for just a few trains per hour. Payne and his team have scoured the world for inspiration. In Madrid and St Petersburg, for example, engineers pump a fine mist of atomised water into the air which then evaporates, absorbing heat. The human body uses exactly this kind of evaporative cooling and it is now used in many outdoor spaces.
far consists of an inconspicuous set of heat exchangers - like the radiators in your carattached to the ceiling in a busy pedestrian tunnel at Victoria station, just a couple of hundred metres from where we're standing. Stand beneath them and you can feel a steady stream of cool air wafting over you. "The heat exchangers create a plug of cold air in the platform area that each incoming train then pushes down the tunnel," says Payne.
Train drain Heat exchangers aren't new but the way these ones handle heat is. It all started in 2001, when Graeme Maidment, an engineer at London's South Bank University, noticed that the city's tunnels feature an escape route for excess heat that nobody had spotted- storm drains. Under some of the stations, pumps carry seepage water into the sewers to prevent it pooling and flooding. There's a sump under platforms at Victoria station in which water collects. So in 2006, LU began pumping cold water from this tank, through the heat exchangers and then sending the slightly warmer water out into the storm drains. Maidment says the system achieves 2 or 3 •c of cooling and has won him and LU a number of awards for innovative, green engineering. It has been so successful that LU is now building a bigger system on the Victoria line, north of us at Green Park station. The plan here is to pump cool water out of a chalk aquifer 80 metres beneath a nearby park, through heat exchangers in the station and then back into the aquifer at a slightly higher temperature, downstream of the source. Payne says that the design has had to pass all kinds of environmental checks to get the project approved. "The water we pump back in will be chemically identical to the water we take out, just a few degrees warmer," he says. The boreholes and pipework are now finished and LU is waiting until after the London Olympics in 2012 to finish the project
"London's tunnels feature an escape route for excessheatthatnobody had spotted" But Payne says this would not work in London because the atmosphere is already humid. Human comfort depends not only on temperature but also on humidity and airflow: increasing the humidity can make people more uncomfortable even though the temperature is lower. Then there is the problem of condensation. "Water and electricity are not a good mix," he says. One thing Payne did for starters was to soup up the existing cooling shafts with powerful new fans - the shaft we are in is one of 13 that have been revamped along the Victoria line. It's no panacea, but it helps. The fans extract hot air at 75 cubic metres per second. "That's about the volume of a double-decker bus each second," he says proudly. But his team's most innovative project so
Going underground Every day more than 100 million people are shuttled around by about 170 underground transit systems
(Proceedings ofthe Institute ofCivil Engineering, DOl: 10.168o/cien.2010.163.3.114).
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These ideas are just the beginning. In future, trains could be drastically redesigned, says Flynn. One promising approach is surprisingly simple: make trains lighter and more efficient by reducing the number of wheel chassis, called bogies, on every train. With each weighing 5 tonnes, two per carriage and seven carriages per train, that's a combined weight of7o tonnes. A better option is for carriages to share bogies, so that a single bogie supports the ends of two carriages. Although that would require more carriages, the result would be a train with 10 bogies rather than 14, a saving of 20 tonnes or about 15 per cent of the total mass of the train. This directly reduces the power required for acceleration.
lt ain't half hot. .. but body heat isn't solely to blame
A further 5 per cent drop in the power removing it," says Maidment. He and his They'd be unlikely to run before 2020. required to accelerate the train could come if colleagues have been working on an The ultimate solution that Payne and Flynn rolling resistance can be reduced. Most comes alternative that means more cool air in are looking for is to use the excess heat from from the interface between the wheel and the carriages - they call it "coolth"- by using the the underground system elsewhere: to heat rail but not in the way you might expect. Push trains themselves to store and then release water for local businesses and housing, for a set of wheels along a straight track and the warmth on sections of the line where it will example, or to de-ice pavements and car parks movement is essentially frictionless, says in winter. That's not as far-fetched as it sounds. dissipate. Many lines pop out into open air At Stockholm Central Station in Sweden, Flynn. But resistance rises dramatically when where they could do just that. excess body heat from commuters will help you come to a curve and the wheel flanges Such a system is essentially a giant freezer. Before the train enters the tunnels, it freezes begin to rub against the rail, generating meet the heating needs of a 13-storey office friction - and the infamous screeching noise. water in an on-board container. Once inside, block being built above. The project is due to the freezer is switched off and the ice begins to be completed next year. The real estate Above ground, this friction can be melt. This process "releases" coolth, or in other company behind the scheme, Jernhusen AB, minimised by keeping tracks as straight as possible and, when a curve cannot be avoided, words absorbs heat from the carriage and hopes this heat will account for 15 per cent of by raising one rail so that the train banks into stores it in the increasingly liquid water. When the new building's heating. the curve. This means less force pushing the Climbing the staircase from the deep wheel flange against the track. But the tunnels to the surface, going with the flow "The thick, black oily underground lines in London tend to follow of the hot air from the bowels of the city, I try in vain to avoid the walls and handrails the pattern of roads at the surface, and so twist dust- mainly human and turn in unreasonable ways. And raising because they are caked in a thick, black, oily skin - is a reminder of the one rail is not possible because ofthese trains' dust. Payne says it is mostly human skin. sheer volume of travellers" It's a final reminder of the sheer volume of rapid changes in acceleration. For example, a train approaching a curve before a station people who use the tube every day - millions the train returns to open air, the water is of travellers crammed into carriages, would enter the curve at high speed but then slow down as it pulls into the platform. The converted back into ice, releasing this stored fanning their faces with newspapers. Then result is that the front and rear of the train take heat (Proceedings ofInstitute ofRefrigeration, we emerge, blinking, into the sunlight and the curve at different speeds, which means go our separate ways. vol104). friction losses are still high. LU was impressed with the idea and funded But the shafts have a strange allure. Twenty research into the feasibility of retrofitting minutes later, I' m on a Victoria line train, Still, some reductions should be possible such a system to trains on the Piccadilly line, via track replacement and fewer bogies. If rattling past the place where I imagine the these efficiency measures are achieved, that which has a significant length of overground cooling shaft meets the tunnel. I peer hard might allow LU to invest this saved energy in line where the heat could be released - unlike through the window but the entrance to the shaft is impossible to see in the darkness. All I some more exotic cooling technologies. the Victoria line which is almost entirely One of these could be a clever twist on air underground. "Although this was a very early can do is imagine the cool air it is drawing into conditioning. Conventional air conditioning prototype, the tests were very successful," says the tunnel and wish, slightly sweatily, that it on the deep lines has never made sense. "You Payne. However, passengers will have to wait. could draw a little more. • end up pumping heat out of the train and into Flynn admits that introducing trains with justin Mullins is a consultant editorfor New Scientist the tunnel where you still have the problem of major redesigns is not currently on the cards. 6 August 2011 1NewScientist 14 1
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42 1NewScientist 16 August 2011
studying how natural selection might allow the cumulative damage to happen. All that started to change in 1992, when the labs ofJim Carey at the University of California, Davis, and Jim Curtsinger at the University of Minnesota independently published landmark articles in the journal Science (vol258, p 457 and p 461). One big problem with the 1939 research was that Greenwood and Irwin were using human data, and humans are bad experimental animals. People aren't willing to live in laboratory cages - and they live a long time. They also tend to live out the latter part of their lives in relative comfort. Perhaps the levelling off of mortality was merely an effect of the benefits of nursing care.
Dropping like flies
Live long enough and your body stops ageing. We don't yet know why but t hat shouldn't stop us exploit ing it, says Michael R. Rose
N 1939, British statisticians Major Greenwood and J. 0. Irwin published a little-noticed article in the journal Human Biology. Not only was 1939 a bad year for making scientific history, their article contained some fearsome mathematics, guaranteed to scare away most biologists and doctors. The article also contained a profoundly unexpected discovery. Greenwood and Irwin were studying mortality figures for women aged 93 and over. They expected to see the death rate rising with age, as it does throughout adult life. But they did not. Instead, between 93 and 100 years of age the acceleration in death rates came to a screeching stop. Little old ladies aged 99 were no more likely to die than those aged 93. Even the authors were dismayed. "At first sight this must seem a preposterous speculation," they wrote. After all, like every other respectable biologist of the time, they
assumed that" decay must surely continue". But what if it doesn't? What if ageing stops? And if it stops very late in our lives, is there any way we can make it stop earlier, when we are in better health? The idea that ageing stops makes very little intuitive sense. The fact of ageing has been well known to biology and medicine from their earliest days. Aristotle wrote a good book on the topic more than 2300 years ago. Like pretty much every biologist since then, he thought of ageing as a remorseless process of falling apart, until death finally puts us out of our misery. Present molecular and cell theories of ageing still assume that ageing is a physiological process involving some type of cumulative damage, disrepair or disharmony. The theories differ only over which specific kind of cumulative breakdown happens. Evolutionary biologists like myself who work on ageing likewise used to think that we were
Carey and Curtsinger studied not humans but those stalwarts of the lab, flies - hundreds of thousands of them. They kept groups of thousands of flies of the same age in carefully controlled conditions and meticulously recorded the death of every single fly until the whole group was dead. Amazingly, they found the same thing as Greenwood and Irwin: at first the mortality rate increased exponentially, but after a few weeks death rates stopped rising. Some of Carey's results were breathtaking: once death rates levelled off, there were months of stable or even declining death rates (see diagram, page 44). It looked as if a relatively brief period of ageing was followed by a long plateau when ageing stopped. This time, everybody noticed. Soon other biologists were looking for signs of life after ageing. To our collective astonishment, they were found in every laboratory experiment of sufficient size, whether flies, nematode worms or beetles . Admittedly, there aren't very many studies that have used large enough cohorts to see the effect, and nobody has done it in mice or other mammals. But that merely showed why we hadn't noticed it before: almost no one had thought to keep large enough cohorts to measure death rates at later ages accurately. Once we started doing experiments on the right scale, it was obvious that what Greenwood and Irwin found in their old ladies was generally true: look late enough in the ageing process and it seems to stop. There is a "third phase" of life after adulthood characterised by stable mortality rates. And that just didn't make sense. For me, as an evolutionary biologist who had been working on ageing for 15 years > 6 August 20111 NewScientist 143
prior to 1992, confronting the Carey and Curtsinger results was like a near-death experience. My mind reeled. At the time my view of ageing as unrelenting decline was informed by the work of the great evolutionary theorist William Hamilton, specifically his 1966 mathematical model of how the ageing process evolved (Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol12, p 12). Hamilton reasoned that in early life, any gene that kills an organism before it can reproduce will be ruthlessly weeded out by natural selection, since that individual will fail to leave offspring. But genes that kill only later in life are not weeded out as rigorously, so they can hang around in the population. By this reckoning, ageing evolved as a result of
"We now know that ageing is not a process of cumulative chemical damage, like rust" "declining forces of natural selection" as individuals get older. Evolutionists universally interpreted this as proof that unrelenting ageing was inevitable. Our basic interpretation of Hamilton's work was that once an individual reached an age at which bad genes have no further impact on reproductive success, the protective force of natural selection would reach zero and survival would completely collapse. It was supposed to be like walking off a cliff. Yet here we were with evidence that ageing actually stopped. I spent two uneasy years thinking about the problem. Then I had an idea; a hopeful speculation. What if our interpretation of
Hamilton's work was wrong? What if ageing was actually caused by the declining forces of natural selection? If so, once these forces bottomed out, the ageing process too would stop. I did not have a full explanation - it was just an intuition. But I knew how to test it. My colleague Larry Mueller is a gifted computer modeller and statistician, as well as an evolut ionist. Plus his office is next to mine. I asked him to run some computer models of the ageing process incorporating this new interpretation of Hamilton's mathematics. My hope was that under some circumstances, evolution might allow ageing to stop late in life, at least theoretically. The surprising thing was that in every case we ran, ageing came to a stop. It looked like the conclusion that evolutionary theory required unending ageing was wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact (Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences, vol93, p 15294). So we decided to push the idea further. Could we predict the evolution of different stopping points for ageing? Again, the answer was yes. It turned out that the last age at which a population is allowed to reproduce over many generations is key. If reproduction stops earlier, so too does ageing. Stop reproduction later and ageing follows suit. So not only did we have a theory of why ageing could stop, we could test it experimentally. Now the burden was on me and my lab. Fortunately I already had dozens of fly populations in which we had tightly controlled last ages of reproduction for hundreds of generations. We compared the ageing patterns of these different populations in extremely large experiments featuring months of daily observations of many thousands of flies by hundreds of students. No one else had done anything on this
The key to stopping ageing early may be to revert to a huntergatherer diet
Going, going .. . still not gone The standard view of ageing is that mortality rates - the chances of an individual dying at a given age should rise relentlessly throughout adult life, but t hey don't Experiments on flies show mortality rates eventually level off...
... the same plateau has been seen in very old people, such as this 1939 data
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scale. Not for nothing do the people in my department call my lab "the sweatshop". The results were striking. Exactly as the models predicted, populations with an earlier last age of reproduction stopped ageing earlier, and vice versa (Evolution, vols6, p 1982). That was encouraging, but it did not rule out another interpretation that Greenwood and Irwin first offered in 1939. Perhaps the end of ageing is an illusion caused by individual differences in robustness. In each population of flies there are a few Supermen, a few Woody All ens, and everything in between. The feeble die off first, leaving only the super-robust. These would be the sole survivors at later ages, making it look as if ageing has sharply decelerated. Biologists have been looking for this "lifelong heterogeneity" for years, but have yet to find it. My doctoral student Cassie Rauser did a series of experiments but found only evidence against it. For now, only the model that Mueller and I proposed has significant experimental support. We still don't have a full explanation of the underlying genetics of the cessation of ageing. One possibility is that there are genes that are advantageous early on but damaging to health later in life - an effect called" antagonistic pleiotropy". We are making progress on this, but in any case the fruit fly experiments tell us that the effect is real. We now understand that ageing is not a cumulative process of progressive chemical
damage, like rust. It is a pattern of declining function produced by evolution. Aristotle was wrong, and so are all the present-day biologists who try to explain ageing in terms ofbiochemistry or cell biology alone. All this work on life after ageing is documented in detail in the book Does Aging Stop?. But it is only the start of what I see as a revolution in our understanding of ageing and our manipulation of it. A decade ago, I proposed that it would be more useful if we could stop ageing early rather than slow its progression. The effect on lifespan, and still more on "healthspan", would be much greater. If we could stop human ageing in middle rather than old age - which is what happens in flies - useful and enjoyable life could be extended indefinitely and the health burdens of decrepitude avoided. Back then I had no idea how to bring that about. Now, in Does Aging Stop? and at mywebsite sstheses.org, we have proposed one way by which it might be possible. The starting point is the idea that the forces of natural selection decline with age. That means you are best adapted to your environment when you are young, and less so when you are old. Or to put it another way, ageing can be seen as progressive decline in adaptedness as you get older. But this is not the only factor. Building adaptations takes time, particularly in response to environmental change. So environmental change can add to the decline
in adaptation, and thus health, with age. This is very relevant to humans. It is only relatively recently that our species underwent a major environmental change - the switch to an agricultural way of life and a diet based on grasses and dairy produce. This, I propose, may be the reason we make the shift to a post-ageing life at such a late age. Given the declining forces of natural selection, we can expect to be well adapted to agricultural diet at early ages but less so at later ages. This has the effect of amplifying the decline in adaptedness that we experience as we get older. On top of that, the adoption of an agricultural way of life may have increased human fertility at later ages and pushed back
"We are well adapted to wheat, rice and corn when we are young, but not when we are older" the last age at reproduction - and we know from the fly experiments that this can lead to a later transition to the late-life plateau. To improve the course of our ageing, and to stop it earlier, we need to pay close attention to our evolutionary history. This is of course complicated, but there are a few guidelines that offer possibilities. The simplest human evolutionary history is that of individuals whose ancestors never
lived under agricultural or industrial conditions. This is a small minority, but their ageing is important for understanding the possibilities for the rest of us. People from Papua New Guinea, whose ancestors were only exposed to agricultural foods and lifestyles during the past century, will not be welladapted to them. In his 2009 book Food and Western Disease, Staffan Lindeberg of the University ofLund in Sweden documents the health benefits such people can reap by reverting to their ancestral hunter-gatherer diets. Calculations Larry Mueller did for Does Aging Stop? support the idea that people with hunter-gatherer ancestry should be able to stop ageing much earlier by switching to their ancestral lifestyle and diet. For the rest of us the picture is more complicated, as we are somewhat adapted to agricultural diets thanks to our ancestors' exposure to them over the past 1o,ooo years. But the greater force of natural selection at early ages implies that we are best adapted to this environment when we are young, perhaps under 30. At later ages, there may have been too few generations of natural selection, and natural selection may not have been strong enough, to adapt us to that lifestyle. So it may be beneficial to our health to switch to the diet and activity levels of hunter-gatherers. I have been following such a diet essentially avoiding grass-derived foods, such as grains, rice, corn and sugar cane, and anything made from milk- for two years and the results have been good. I am not suggesting that everyone, at every age, should adopt a Stone-Age diet, as those who embrace the "Paleo" doctrine advocate. We are well-adapted to wheat, rice and corn when we are young and can eat them with impunity. But, I propose, not when we are older. The benefits for most of us will probably not be as dramatic as those for people who have no agricultural ancestry. But even reduced benefits offer the possibility of warming the chilly draughts of death. The existence of an age at which human ageing stops is no longer questionable, nor is its potential malleability. The discovery that ageing stops suggest that the age-old desire to radically extend the human lifespan is a real possibility. • Michael R. Rose is professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, lrvine. For more on this topic, consult Does Aging Stop? by Laurence D. Mueller, Casandra L. Rauser and Michael R. Rose (Oxford University Press). For a less technical but still extensive discussion, visit 55theses.org
6 August 20111 NewScientist 145
CULTURELAB
Entwined ecology Colonising the Americas kicked off a chain reaction that irrevocably altered the world 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus created by Charles C. Mann, Knopf/Granta, $30.50/£25
Reviewed by Sandra Knapp
GLOBALISATION is seen as a modern state of the world resulting from air travel and free trade. In 1493 Charles Mann . shows this is not so - we have been interconnected for a very long time indeed. Our perception of a local and pristine bygone world is in fact an imagined version of the past. Trade and exchange have linked Europe and the Americas since Europeans first sailed beyond their shores. In this wonderfully entertaining and subtly balanced book, Mann traces some of these linkages, telling familiar stories mixed with fascinating new takes. Plants are a familiar example of one such link. Of all the things that have moved with people around the world, food and drug plants top the list. We take our
. ... .. . ....
ideas of the world for grantedhow could there be Chinese or Indian cooking without chilli peppers, or Irish stew without potatoes? But these plants come from the Americas, and relatively recently at that- post-1493! Mann focuses on the chains forged by the Spanish galleon trade, largely because Spain was the first European country to have a truly global enterprise. People, plants and minerals all travelled around the world in a complex web, with fascinating cause and effect - from the collapse of the Chinese Qing dynasty to the Irish
potato famine to the translocation state, but also fuelled unrest of millions of African people to and instability in China. Using the Americas as part of the slave material from recently available archives, the story of China's trade. One might quibble that other narratives of exploitation interactions with Europe and the and trade are ignored, but this New World enriches the narrative. focus allows Mann to explore the The complexities of ramifications of actions in a more interconnections are in essence detailed way. the theme of the book, and Colonisation of the Americas nowhere is this more apparent has previously been contrasted than in the discussion of the by degree of exploitation - the iniquitous trade in humans, which English went to cultivate and completely changed our species. the Spanish to extract. But Mann What makes this book compulsive convincingly paints a picture reading is not the stance it takes, of extraction by all European but instead the detailed humanity colonists, whether exhausting with which Mann tells the the land along the eastern story, and the way in which he seaboard of what is now the US illustrates the paradoxical nature by planting tobacco or mining of the ecological effects linking silver in the Bolivian Andes. the world. What our ancestors did He also explores how the flood had unexpected effects; what we of silver from Bolivian m ines into do today will too. Europe not only caused financial volatility and ultimately the Sandra Knapp is a botanist at the bankruptcy of the Spanish Natural History Museum in London
Many of today's crops have travelled far from their native land since 1493
Displaying the dead The Authentic Animal by Dave Madden, St Martin's Press, $26.99
Reviewed by David Cohen
DEAD animals mounted above the mantelpiece are a rare sight in this day and age. They conjure up images ofVictorian 46 1NewScientist 16 August 2011
old-worldliness, something you might see in a dusty museum or a posh gentlemen's club. Yet to a small number of hunters and collectors, having a preserved animal on display is a matter of pride. This uncommon desire and the equally unusual delight in - and devotion to- the art of taxidermy is the subject of The Authentic Animal.
To find out why some people stuff animals, Dave Madden has travelled far and wide, unearthing
remarkable, meticulously researched vignettes in the process. He joins judges in the World Taxidermy Championships, goes on the hunt for the oldest stuffed specimen, and toys with the idea of stuffing an animal himself. His journey is woven with the story of modern taxidermy pioneers, chiefly earl Akeley- famous among cognoscenti for choking a leopard to death with his bare hands. Madden is at his best when he
reports from the scene, bringing a live taxidermy session to life with exquisite detail, for example. He is less good on the philosophical digressions and mu sings on our relationship to animals. Had he rolled up his sleeves and tried his hand at taxidermy, perhaps he would have revealed something more profound. As it stands, this is a skillful and illuminating but ultimately unsatisfying fly-onthe-wall account of the history and present of a peculiar art.
For more books and arts coverage and to add your comments, visit newscientist.com/culturelab
Basics and batik of climate change Global Climate Change: A primer by Orrin H.Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey,
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Duke University Press, £12.99/$19.95 Reviewed by Catherine Bra hie "IT TURNS out • that there is a hoax involved in climate change. Only t he 1 hoax is being perpetrated by public relations efforts by the fossil fuels industry.'' Thus begins the most memorable chapter of Global Climate Change. Better known for his exposes on the f laws of coastal engineering, geologistOrrin Pilkey has turned his attention to this century's hot environmental topic: climate change. There are no surprises for those familiar with the subject butthe book does a good job of explaining the foundations of climate science to an interested novice. The chapter on climate change scepticsstandsoutfor its passionate description of how industrial groups spread doubt among the public. Energy empires were systematic in their approach: identifying vulnerable audiences ("older, less educated males" and"younger, lower-income women"), and the sources they trusted ("technical sources"), before releasing targeted documents arguing, for instance, that climate change would be a boon for plant growth. As the authors point out that is only a half-truth. Scattered throughout t he book are Mary Edna Fraser's batiks, inspired by satellite and aerial photographs (such as Gulf Oil Spill, right), which turn global catastrophes into works of art. Her beautiful illustrations have the same effect as t he Earth from the Air photo series by Yann ArthusBertrand: landscapes are f lattened into abstract patterns, illustrating our planet's unique beauty in the hope that once impressed, you will want to protect it. • 6 August 20111 NewScientist 14 7
CULTURELAB
Urban laboratory Guggenheim's travelling hub will turn passers-by into subjects of city research Museum in Manhattan, the lab will be packed up at the end of its stint in the Big Apple and taken on an international tour, to Berlin and an as-yet-unnamed city in Asia. Another two travelling labs are planned for the six-year project. The theme for this first cycle is "confronting comfort". Teaming up with psychologist Colin Ellard,
BMW Guggenheim Lab, 33 East First Street, New York City, until16 October By Kat Austen
LIKE an increasing number ofLondoners, I cycle to work every day through hectic traffic, navigating busy roads and passing huge cement trucks, heavy goods vehicles and darting pedestrians. In two years I have seen two cyclists crushed. So, why take my life in my handlebars? It is about comfort: I can't stand the tube, the bus is too crowded and it takes too long to walk. This is precisely the kind of thought process that journalist and self-described "urban experimentalist" Charles Montgomery wants to study. As part of a new initiative from the Guggenheim Foundation he is roping in New Yorkers as lab rats. Montgomery is one of four people hosting the New York installation of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a temporary pop-up building filled with artworks and interactive ;:: displays. The brainchild of Maria >~ ffi Nicanor and David van der Leer, iil curators at the Guggenheim ~ LLILL&.&.
from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, Montgomery aims to "map out the emotional landscape of public space". To do so, visitors will be asked, among other things, to indicate their emotional state by choosing a representative image of a mannequin's facial expression or body language. Investigators will also use hardware to measure participants' physiological responses to street stimuli. Montgomery hopes to come away with meaningful insights - and data- to answer questions about The pop-up lab will be packed up and taken to other cities around the world
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factories later copied. Science writer Jonnie Hughes isn't On the Origin of Tepees: The evolution convinced. He believes that the cowboy hat invented itself: the of ideas (and ourselves) by jonnie wranglers merely provided a Hughes, Free Press, $25 "unique selective environment" Reviewed by jonathon Keats in which the hat could adapt to the US frontier. 01 tbe OrtCII MOST folk in the Readers of Richard Dawkins and American west Tepees reckon cowboys Susan Blackmore will be familiar invented the with the concept that ideas have cowboy hat. Taking a Darwinian existence in which wide-brimmed survival ofthe fittest is played L...--~-- headgear, made out at the behest ofmemes, the back east, cattle ranchers creased cultural analogue of genes. Rather than add to the theory, On the in the characteristic ridges that
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481 NewScientist 16 August 2011
Origin ofTepees explores North
America through its lens. The book is structured around a road trip. Playing the role of "amateur cultural naturalist", Hughes looks for the memes that make up tuna melts in a Minnesota mall and barns on the Midwestern plain. His observations show the parallels between culture and nature. For instance, he explains how the barns got their doublepitched gambrel roof through a confluence of English, German and Dutch architectural memes carried to the US in the minds of
the way the urban environment influences its inhabitants. "Do we feel better walking along blank walls or shop fronts?" he asks. "How many trees does it take to dull the emotional effect of car-filled streets?" Conceived to be "an incubator of ideas that can empower people", Nicanor says, the labs will involve local organisations in the various cities it visits. (This community feel may seem somewhat discordant with the corporate branding from BMW, but Nicanor insists that after several years of discussion there is a "common understanding" of the project's vision.) In New York City, local green activist Omar Freilla will be another of the lab's hosts, dedicating his efforts to grass-roots community involvement and sustainability. As the international nature of the project indicates, organisers also hope to use local issues as a mirror for global problems. Olatunbosun Obayomi, a Nigerian inventor who works on water systems, will use his time at the lab to examine the interaction between consumption and waste in New York by contrasting the city's sewer infrastructure with that ofLagos. He sees his research as an example of a wider principle of urban life: the city influences us, but it's what we do that shapes the city: "Everyday actions are what make the system function properly:' He pauses. "Or not."
immigrants. The design can thus be seen in terms of interbreeding and adaptation to the novel Midwestern environment. More ambitiously, Hughes aspires to uncover the evolution of the Native American tepee, proposing to enlist memetics as a tool for anthropological research. It is a compelling scheme, but it comes up short because his notion of field work is simply to ask a couple of casual questions whenever he meets a Native American. The tepee deserves a more attentive Darwin.
2 ASIMPLE SOLUTION Darwin realised that the problem could be solved if there was selection at a group level, not just at
to this theory, biological systems are a nested hierarchy of units, from genes
an individ ual level. If groups composed of individu als who behave in a more prosocial way outcom pete groups of individu als who behave in a less prosocial way, then traits that are for the good of the group will evolve. IS In short, natural selectio n betwee n groups will ~ counteract the costs of prosocial behavi our to :t individu als within groups. Or as Darwin put it: w ~ " ...an advanc ement in the standa rd of moralit y ~ will certain ly give an immen se advant age to one .. tribe over another. A tribe includin g many membe rs who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit ~ of patrioti sm, fidelity , obedie nce, courage, and ~ sympathy, were always ready to aid one anothe r, z ~ and to sacrifice themselves for the commo n good, ~ would be victorio us over most other tribes; and this g would be natural selection." ~ Darwin's insight was the starting point for the ~ modern theory of multilevel selecti on. According
within individu als, individu als within groups, groups within a popula tion
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and even cluster s of groups. At every level, the traits that maximise relative fitness within a unit are unlikel y to maxim ise the fitness of the unit as a whole. Genes that outcom pete other genes within the same organism are unlikel y to benefit the whole organism. Individ uals that outcom pete other individu als within their group are unlikel y to benefit the group as a whole, and so on. The general rule is: "The evoluti on of adapta tions at each level of the hierarchy requires a process of natural selectio n at that level and tends to be underm ined by selectio n at lower levels."
When individuals within a group compet e ...
... selfish individ uals will produce the most offspring and come to dominate t he group
When groups compete. groups with more selfless individ uals...
,?
-
/
... will beat groups of selfish individ uals, so the proportion of selfless individ uals increases in the overall population even though it decreases within groups ii I NewScientist 16 August 2011
AN IDEA REJECTED The theory of natural selection clearly explains how features such as the sharp teeth of the tiger, the thick fur of the polar bear and the camouflage of the moth evolved. When the ancestors of polar bears colonised the Arctic, for instance, those with thicker fur would have had a better chance of surviving and producing more offspring than those with thinner fur. Many social species, however, have traits that benefit others or the group as a whole, often to their own cost. lt is much harder to see how such traits evolve. Darwin proposed that it was a result of the survival of the fittest groups, rather than the fittest individuals. Today, most evolutionary biologists think he was right, but group selection, as this idea is known, has a long and complicated history
1 THE PROBLEM "The idea of group selection was initially accepted too eagerly and uncritically"
Wolves share food with other members of the pack. Vervet monkeys make alarm calls that risk attracting a predator's attention to themselves. Bees sacrifice themselves to defend a hive. But why? lt is hard to see how such traits evolve by natural selection because individuals that behave in these ways would seem to have far less chance of surviving and producing offspring than more selfish members of the same group. Darwin himself was acutely aware that the suicidal sting of the honeybee and most of the virtues associated with human morality, such as bravery, honesty and charity, posed a severe challenge to his theory. "lt must not be forgotten that... a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe," he wrote in The Descent of Man.
The question, then, is how can traits that are oriented toward others or one's group as a whole - known as "prosocial" traits - evolve when they appear to reduce the relative fitness of individuals within groups?
Groups that can work together successfully will have an advantage over other groups 6 August 20111 New Scientist I iii
INCLUSIVE FITNESS, SELFISH GENES ANDALL THAT The rejection of group selection in the 1960s meant biologists had to come up with alternative theories to explain the evolution of social adaptations. Several were put forward, including inclusive fitness theory - also known as kin selection - selfish gene theory and evolutionary game theory. In retrospect, all of these theories can be shown to invoke group selection after all. William D. Hamilton, who came up with inclusive fitness theory in the 1960s, was among the first to realise this after encountering the work of theoretical biologist George Price in the 1970s. Hamilton's formula calculated when an altruistic gene evolves in the whole population but did not keep track of what happens in any particular group. In contrast Price's formula divided evolution in the whole population into within and between-group components. When Hamilton viewed his own theory through the lens of Price's formulation, he saw that altruism is usually a disadvantage within groups and evolves only by virtue of between-group selection, exactly as Darwin envisioned. This is true even when groups are composed of relatives. Group selection can occur only when there is variation among groups, and since groups of relatives are more likely to differ from each other than groups of unrelated individuals, relatedness increases the strength of between-group selection compared with within-group selection. As Hamilton recalls his realisation: 'Through a 'group-level' extension of [Price's] formula I now had a far better understanding of group selection and was possessed of a far better tool for all forms of selection acting at one level or at many than I had ever had before." Unfortunately, other biologists did not share this insight: while Hamilton's 1960s work was much cited, his revised formulation was largely ignored. Recently, though, it has become clear that all evolutionary theories of social behaviour implicitly assume that social interactions take place in groups that are small compared with the population as a whole. Also, that the prosocial behaviours variously labelled "cooperation" or "altruism" are disadvantageous to individuals and evolve only by virtue of the differential contribution of groups to the total gene pool. In other words, each theory relies upon the simple logic of multi level selection. The reason that this was not obvious from the beginning is because these theories only tracked what evolves in the whole population without simultaneously tracking natural selection within single groups. lt is impossible to evaluate whether group selection needs to be invoked without tracking natural selection at each relevant level of the biological hierarchy. iv I NewScientist 16 August 2011
"A group can only evolve into an individual when between-group selection is the primary force"
MAJOR TRANSITIONS Until the 1970s, evolution was thought to take place entirely on the basis of the accumulation of mutations over many generations. Then biologist Lynn Margulis proposed that complex cells did not evolve by sma 11 mutational steps from bacterial cells, but from symbiotic associations of different kinds of bacteria that became higher le\lel organisms in their own right. In the 19905, evolutionary biologists John Maynard Smith and Ears Szathmary proposed that similar major transitions occurred throughout the history of life, Including the evolution of the first cells, the advent of multicellular organisms and the development of social Insect colonies (see diagram, right). They even suggested it could explain the origin of life, with groups of cooperating molecular reactions coming together to create the first life forms. The realisation that evolution takes place not only by small mutational st eps but also by groups of organisms tumlng into higher-level organisms represents one of the most profound developments in evolutionary thought. Today's individuals are yesterday's groups. For a major evolutionary transition to occur, there has to be a shift in the balance between within -group
and between-group selection. A group can only turn into an individual when between-group selection is the primary evolutionary force, and this in turn can happen only when mechanisms evolve that suppress selection within groups. The rules of meiosis, for example, ensure that all genes on the chromosomes have an equal chance of being represented in the gametes. If genes can't succeed at the expense of each other, then the only way to succeed is collectively as a group. Major evolutionary transitions are rare events in the history of life but they have momentous consequences, as the new super-organisms become ecologically dominant. Eusociality in insect.s only originated about a dozen times - including in ants, bees, wasps and termites - but insect colonies comprise well over half the biomass of all insects. These transitions are never complete as selection within groups is only suppressed, not eliminated. Some genes do manage to bias the rules of meiosis in their favour. Increasingly, cancer is studied as an evolutionary process that takes place within individuals, causing some genes to succeed atthe expense of others, with tragic results for the group as a whole. When cells stop cooperat ing, cancer can result
AN IDEA REVIVED The revival of group selection is a result of better models and experimental studies showing it is indeed possible, as well as the realisation by biologists that today's individuals are yesterday's groups. In addition, it has become clear that the supposed alternative explanations for the evolution of prosocial behaviour are actually equivalent to group selection
~~~:=::J+~HE EVIDENCE FOR GROUP SELECTION The rejection of group selection was based on the
aggressive males outcompete non-aggressive
claim that, in practice, selection within groups always beats selection between groups. However, recent studies have shown that traits can evolve on the
males for females. However, the aggressive males also prevent females from feeding and can injure them, which
strength of between-group selection, despite being disadvantageous for individuals within each group. Take the water strider Remigis aquarius, an insect
results in a group with lots of aggressive males producing fewer offspring than groups with fewer aggressive males. Variation among groups is
species that skates on the surface of quiet streams. Males vary greatly in their aggressiveness toward females, and lab studies by Omar Tonsi Eldakar and
magnified by females fleeing groups containing lots of aggressive males and aggregating in groups with non-aggressive males. So our studies show
colleagues, including me, show that within any group,
that between-group selection is essential for maintaining non-aggressive males in the population (Evolution, vol64, p 3183).
Today's individuals evolved from yesterday's groups. This could only Groups of have occurred if selection was simple cells evolved occurring at the level of groups into eukaryotic cells rather than individuals
They then infected some of t hem with a virus, and mimicked the natural spread of viruses by using robotic pipettes to transfer them between wells.
PROTEOBACTERIUM MITO(:HCINDIRIAI
••
The team found that in some circumstances, a "prudent", slow-growing strain of the virus was more successful than a "rapacious", fast-growing
ARCHAEON 411
In another experiment. a team of microbiologists headed by Benjamin Kerr at the University of Washington in Seattle grew E. coli in wells on plates.
~
CHLOROPLAS11
CYANOBACTERIUM
Groups of complex cells evolved into multicellular animals
CHOANOFLAGELLATE
strain. The rapacious strain often killed off all the bacteria in a well - and therefore itself - before it had a chance to spread. The prudent strain persisted for longer and so was more likely to get a chance to colonise other wells. In this way, the prudent strain could remain in the population even though it was always outcompeted by the rapacious strain when both were present in a single well. In other words, it was only on the strength of between-group selection that the prudent strain survived (Nature, vol442, p 75). The conditions of this experiment closely
Groups of animals have evolved into superorganisms
resemble a scenario proposed by Vero C. WynneEdwards in the 1960s for the evolution of
SPONGE MALE AND FEMALE
reproductive restraint in many species. Such restraints might not evolve in all species, but as this experiment shows, it is plausible that they can evolve in some species in some circumstances. These two experiments involve very different spatial and temporal scales, but they embody the
QUEEN AND DRONE
key problem and simple solution of group selection: the traits that benefitthe whole group are not advantageous for individuals within the group and so require an additional layer of natural selection to evolve. 6 August 2011 1NewScientist I v
The spread of cultural traits such as farming has reshaped the planet
CULTURAL GROUP SELECTION Cultura l evolution is a multilevel process, just like genetic evolution. Socially transmitted traits can spread because they benefit whole groups, or give individuals an advantage within groups, or because they act like parasites and do not benefit individuals or groups. Examples can be found at all levels but group-level selection appears to be an even stronger force for human cultural evolution than for human genetic evolut ion. With genetic evolution, a mutant gene starts out at a low frequency within single groups.lt takes many generations for a beneficial mutation to become common in a group and eventually in the tota l population. With cu ltural evolution, however, a new trait can become common within a group in less than a generation. Cultural variation between groups can even be maintained in the presence of migration, as long as individuals entering a group abandon t heir old cust oms and adopt the new ones. Finally, almost any trait can be established within groups by norms enforced by rewards and punishments. Group selection for norms that are stable within each group can be more powerful than group select.i on for traits that are selectively disadvantageous within groups. Cultural group selection has resulted in the development of cooperative human societies several orders of magnitude larger than t he pre-agricultural societies t hat existed only 15,000 years ago. Human history provides a detailed record of multi level cultural evolution, including t he expansion of the most cooperative and coordinated cultures and t he collapse
of cultures plagued by d ivisions. This dynamic might even explain the rise and fall of empires t hroughout human history, as ecologist Peter Turchin details in his 2005 book War and Peace and War. Darwin's problem is encountered at every scale of human society: from t he smallest g roup to the global v illage, t he behaviours t hat maximise relative advantage within a social unittend to undermine the welfare of the unit as a whole. Establishing prosociality at a large scale requires a process of selection at that scale- whether a raw process
of variation and selection or a more deliberative process of selecting practices by intentional planning. vi I NewScientist 16 August 2011
'Just like genetic traits, cultural traits can spread when they benefit groups"
A NEW VIEW OF HUMAN EVOLUTION Our ability to cooperate closely with other group members and to suppress cheats means that selection at the group level rather than the individual level has been an exceptionally strong force during human evolution.lt may have played a crucial role in shaping both our genes and our culture
THE HUMAN TRANSITION WAS ARARE AND MOMENTOUS EVENT
Converging lines of evidence suggest that human
developmental psychologist Michael
genetic evolution represents a major evolutionary transition and one which accounts for our uniqueness among primates. In most primates, members of a
Tomasello has argued. Even dogs, which have been eo-evolving with humans for tens of thousands of years, surpass most
group cooperate to a degree, but there is also intense competition within groups tor social dominance.ln contrast, most extant hunter-gatherer societies are
primates with respect to adaptations based on trust (Science, vol 298, p 1634). As with other major evolutionary
vigilantly egalitarian, suppressing individuals who try to benefit themselves at the expense of others. As we have seen, the suppression of within -group
transitions, the human transition was a rare event that had momentous consequences. As the only primate
selection is the hallmark of a major transition. Vigilant egalitarianism probably arose early in
super-organism, we have spread over the globe, occupied hundreds of ecological niches and displaced
Ehuman evolution and was a precondition for the other ~
l!) attributes that make us so distinctive as a species. 0
~ This is an example of gene-culture eo-evolution
~ in which it is impossible to say which came first.
"' Our closest primate relatives are also highly Q "'~ intelligent but in a way that appears predicated on w
...~ mistrust. In contrast, human intelligence appears ~ to be based on trust among members of a group,
countless other species- for better or for worse. The human transition is also by no means complete. Within-group selection is only suppressed, not stopped, so constant vigilance is needed to maintain prosocial behaviour. Indeed,
..,~ making shared awareness and coordination of
many aspects of human morality can be interpreted as the apparatus that evolved to make group selection a
~ that they are now instinctive in our species, as
strong force in our species.
~ activities advantageous for so many generations
David Sloan Wilson David Sloan Wilson is a professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York state. He is best known for his work on multilevel selection, and has played a major role in reviving the idea of group selection after its dismissal in the 1960s.
NEXT NSTAN T EXPERT Eiza beth Pisani HIV/AIDS 3 September
A NEW CONSENSUS Darwin's problem is an unavoidable fact of life for all species, including our own: prosocial adaptations usually put individuals at a disadvantage relative to other members of their group. The only way for them to evolve is if there is another layer to the process of natural selection. That layer is group selection. More prosocial groups robustly outcompete less prosocial groups, which means a prosocial trait's betweengroup advantage can make up for its disadvantage within groups. it's that simple. If scientific history had taken a different path, multilevel selection could have become the theoretical foundation for studying the evolution of social behaviour, or sociobiology. Instead, after the 1960s biologists tried to explain all social adaptations as forms of self-interest. When an entire scientific discipline decides something is wrong, it is difficult to persuade people to reconsider their position. Today, though, there is near-universal agreement among those familiar with the subject that the wholesale rejection of group selection was mistaken and that the so-called alternatives are nothing of the sort. Some, such as William Hamilton, reached this conclusion as early as the 1970s, but decades were required for others to follow suit. However, many people who do not directly study the subject, including many biologists, have got the impression that group selection was conclusively disproved and that nothing has changed since. As a result, there is widespread confusion. lt is probably not an accident that the viii I NewScientist 16 August 2011
individualistic swing in evolutionary theory coincided with similar swings in economics, the human social sciences and western culture at large. While evolutionists were interpreting all social adaptations as varieties of self-interest, economists were explaining all human behaviour as individual utility maximisation, and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was declaring that "there is no such thing as societyonly individuals and families". Science does not take place in a vacuum. just as Darwin and his contemporaries were influenced by Victorian culture, we should be prepared to acknowledge and correct for- the influence of a highly individualistic culture on the theories put forward during the second half of the 20th century. The new consensus states definitively that the individual organism is not a privileged level of the biological hierarchy. The harmony and coordination associated with the word "organism" can exist at any level and individuals can lose these properties when selection takes place within them, such as when cancers evolve. Social groups can become organisms, and organisms are highly regulated social groups- not just figuratively but literally. Group selection has been an exceptionally strong force in human genetic and cultural evolution. Accepting it at face value and exploring its consequences will have implications for all branches of the biological and human-related sciences, from the origin of life to the regulation of human society at large spatial and temporal scales.
RECOMMENDED READING The Neighborhood Project: Using evolution to improve my city, one block at a time by David Sloan Wilson {Little, Brown, 2011) Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson {Delta, 2007) Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello (MIT Press, 2009) Why Humans Cooperate: A cultural and evolutionary explanation by joseph Henrich and Natalie Henrich (Oxford University Press, 2007) The Price of Altruism: George Price and the search for the origins of kindness byOren Harman (Norton, 2010) Evolutionary Restraints: The contentious history of group selection by Mark Borrelia (University of Chicago Press, 2010) WEBSITES
David Sloan Wilson's blog Scienceblogs.com/evolution Evolution Institute blog Evolution-institute.org Evolution: This view of life Thisviewoflife.com Cover image: lrene Laxmi/Corbis
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CLINICAL Sr. Scientist. Formulation Development (110400) Allergan United States Plans, directs, and executes product formulation development actMties in support of development of new products intended for clinical trials and commercialization with focus on topical ophthalmic and dermal dosage forms. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401219810 Sr. Scientist, Formulation Sciences (110424) Allergan United States Plans, directs and executes formulation development activities in support of new drug candidates intended for non-clinical and earty phase clinical trials. Conducts research in the area of formulation sciences in support of topical ophthalmic, IV. and oral dosage form development For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401219809
Associate Director, Clinical Publications AstraZeneca US DE - Delaware The primary accountability and responsibility for the Associate Director of Clinical Publications is the leadership and line management for a team of Clinical Publications personnel, including performance management recruitment training, coaching, and skills development for the group. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401217603 Director Scientific Communications-Clinical Publications Ast raZeneca US AZ - Arizona The Director of Clinical Publications leads the global section that is accountable for developing leadingedge publication strategies and plansfor AstraZeneca products that will allow Al. to gain and sustain competitive advantage. For more information visit NewSclentistjobs.comjob ID: 1401219788 Patient Safety Therapy Area Medical Expert (PS TAME) AstraZeneca US DE - Delaware Promoting the safety of patients who receive AstraZeneca products, with the aim of optimizing overall benefit/risk. Providing Integrated strategic safety expertise to product development programmes and marketed brands. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.comjob ID: 1401219741 Sr. Pharmacometrician (Director) AstraZeneca US DE - Delaware The SRPM (together with the Lead Modeller of Statistics and lnformatics (S&I)) is accountable for the M&S plan of the clinical projects. The M&S plan is a collaborative effort with modellers from S&l as well as consultants from outside AstraZeneca (AZ). For more information visit
Faculty Positions University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and Department of Phannacology &: Chemical Biology Applications are invited for a tenure-stream AssL~tant Professor level faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI). The incumbent will bave primary appointment in the Department of Pharmacology, University of Pittsburgh. We are particularly interested in the recruitment of a PhD scientist working in the area of nuclear hormone receptor signaling in lung cancer prevention and/or treatment The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine ranks among the top 10 NTHfunded academic medical ce.nters, and the department is consistently one of the rop 10 NlH-funded Departments of Pharmacology. At UPCI, faculty and lab personnel have access to state-of-the-art shared facilities with animal care, microscopy, mass spectromeoy, high throughput drug cliscovery, translational research and clinical pbannacology analytical capabilities. The UPCI laboratories and shared facilities are located in the newly constructed Hillman Cancer Center. Successful candidates should have a track record of extramurally-supported researchgrantfunding,astrongpublicationrecordandexcellentcommunications skills. Salary and benefits will be commensurate with experience. Applicants should provide a one-page statement of research objectives, curriculum vitae, and contact in£onnation for three professional references by August 15, 20ll to: C/0 Vijaya C. Gandhi, PhD, MBA Associate Director for Administration and Strategic Planning, UPCI 5150 Centre Avenue, Suite 532, Pittsburgh, PA 15232 Emai1:
[email protected] The UniYaSily ofPiusburgh is an Affinnarivc ActloniEqual Optxm.rmity Employrr.
NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401215468
MI - Michigan The Dow Coating Materials business unit has an exciting and challenging opportunity for an Research & Development (R&D) Technician role focusing on Industrial Coatings technology for packaging coating applications located in Midland, MI. For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com job ID: 1401215476
Research ScientistAnalytical SdencesSeparation Science Characterization (1105175) Dow Chemical (US) MI - Michigan The Analytical Sciences global capability is part of Dow's Core R&D organization which delivers worldclass science and technology to Sr. R&D Technologist discover, develop and commercialize (1105173) new Dow products. This role Dow Chemical (US) requires fundamental chemistry, TX - Texas materials science talent and strong The person filling this role will separations science skills. be responsible for supporting For more information visit compounding projects for NewScientistjobs.comjob ID: customer support or for technology 1401215475 development Requests entered by R&D and TSD personnel around the world will be supported by this Senior Research & position. Development Technologist For more information visit NewScientistjobs.comjob ID: (1104843) Dow Chemical (US) 1401215481
6 August 20111 NewScientist 153
newsclentlstjobs.com
MOUNT
OLYOKE
MO&IIU ttOLYOal: COlll
Harvard University Origins of Life Initiative
2011 Post-Doctoral Fellow The Harvard Origins of Life Initiative is a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses the disciplines from planet formation and detection to the origin and early evol ution of life. We invite applications for Origins Post-Doctoral Fellows, who will pursue independent research on topics r elated to origins of life in collaboration with one or more Harvard faculty members. Application Requirements: Candidates should have received their terminal degree between May 2006 and August 2011. They should secure the commitment of at ]east one Harvard faculty member to host their work (a letter of support is required). A CV, a research proposal (3 pages), and a letter of recommendation (from a former advisor), should be sent to Carol Knell (
[email protected]) by August 31, 2011 . The appointment will be for 1 year initially, with opportunity for renewal for up to 3 years. Competitive compensation and allowance package. For more information on the fellowships send questions to:
[email protected], and check: http://origins.harvard.edu
Harvard University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Applications from women and minorities are strongly encouraged.
Environmental Scientist Mount Holyoke College MA - Massachusetts Area of research specialty shou ld explore biotic and abiotic aspects of environmental systems and may include biogeochemistry, global environmental change, earth systems science, ecotoxicology, soi l science, science and sustainabil ity, etc. Applicants should be both trained and interested in interdisciplinary field-based approaches. The hired applicant wi ll be expected to employ this interdisciplinary approach in teaching and in an active research program that involves undergraduates. Teaching responsibilities include: participation in an interdisci pl inary introductory coursei development. For more information visit newscientistjobs.com Job ID 1401214564
OIU:GON
HEALTH &SCIENCE UNIV(Il\ITY
CMOP Center for Coastal Margin Observation & Prediction Career Opportunities Oregon Health & Science University, OR - Oregon The Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction (CMOP), a multi-institutional NSF Science and Technology Center hosted at Oregon Health & Science University, is researching the integrated understanding and prediction of physical, chemical and biological processess of the Columbia River estuary, and their change under cl imate and human infuences. CMOP is seeki ng to hire the following positions: • Modeling Post-Doctoral Researcher • Modeling Research Associate • Marine Biogeochemistry Field Technician For more information visit newscientistjobs.com Job ID 1401213368
ABPDU The Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU) Faclllty will enable the transition of technologies created by the DOE Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs) from laboratory scale to commercial operation. The BRC's include BioEnergy Science Center (BESC), the Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBEI) and the Great Lake Bioenergy Research Canter (GLBRC). The ABPDU Facility will have capabilities for pretreatment of blomass, production of enzymes for biomass deconstrucllon and a fermentation capability for ethanol, butanol and advanced biofuels. The ABPDU will enable biofuel production and purification in quantities stJfficient for engine testing at partner institutions. Input from the three BRCs has been Incorporated into the proposed equipment in the ABPDU to provide maximum flexibility for scale-op via multiple routes for multiple types of blofuels. The anticipated facUlty capaCity will be 100-200 lblday of biomass, corresponding to a production of 3-5 gallonsfday of fuel. Data obtained from the ABPDU will be used to determine material and energy requirements for commercial processes. Of particular importance are water and utilities requirements, as these wmprovide the bases for determining the sustainablllty of various process configurations. In support of this scientific mission, the following postdoctoral positions are available: Chemist Postdoctoral Fellow-73126 The Postdoctoral Fellow will be responsible for the pretreatment of targeted biomass feedstocks, the fractionation and characterization of lignin. and the potential conversion of the llgnin to desired products. The incumbent wiUhave experience with a variety of chemical engineering, biochemical engineering, analytical chemistry, and biophysical techniques efficiently characterizing the impact of biomass composition and pretreatment process conditions on lignin extraction. Postdoctora! Fellow - Eermentation-13371 The incumbent will fulfil! a key position in the group for planning, executing R&D projects and experiments, collecting, analyzlng and reporting data fromlaboratory and pilot scale thermochemical pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis processes. Essential to success is the command of a broad spectrum of biochemical/chemical engineering unit operations applicable to advanced biofuel production. Postdoctora! Fellow- Biomass Pretreatment-73367 This position is part of the Biomass Pretreatment group of1he Advanced Biofuels Process Development Unit (ABPDU)Iocated in Emelyville. The incumbent will fulfil! a key position in the group for planning, executing R&D projects and experiments, collecting, analyzilg and reporting data from laboratory and pilot scalethermochemical pretreatment and enzymalic hydrolysis processes. To leam more about the program, v isit http://abpdu.lbl.gov. To Apply to thes e positions, visit newsclenUstjobs.com keyword: " Lawrence Berkeley"
54 1NewSclentlst 16 August 2011
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MONSANTO .MoJ)&&Iltn ia an equal opportunity employer: we valu~ a diverae combination of idcu. P""'Jl"C'ives Md culture.. EEO/M E>'i.PLOYER MIFIDN C2011 Monsanlo Company
6 August 2011 1NewScientist 155
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FEEDBACK feels the need to launch th e Society for th e Promotion of Numerate Proofreading (SPNP). Clearly, a scientist who quickly skims a paper, skipping the equations, knows she is going to have to go back and read it properly. The temptation for a proofreader to check the words but skip the funny squiggly numeral things must, similarly, be resisted. Furthermore, it is a good idea to consider who your readers might be. A sequence of symbols that is unexceptional to one group of readers can leap out of the page to startle another. Jeffery Cooper, age 12, points us to an advert for Mercedes cars that bears the slogan "125! years of innovation" - which can be found at 125-years-of-automobiles.com. "Does this imply that the car is hundreds ofbillions of years old?" ... Jeffery asks. ~ William Collins elaborates: "As 0 3an A-level mathematics student, ~ I know that an exclamation mark
placed after a number is called a factorial, and is short for a positive integer multiplied by every consecutive number between it and 1." According to his spreadsheet, and ours, the claim is even more startling than Jeffery thought, since 125! works out at 1.88 x 10209 - to spell this out, write "188" followed by the word "billion" 23 times. For comparison, the age of the universe in years multiplied by the number of atoms in it is a relatively minuscule to 90 . The SPNP points out, not at all smugly, that the ad agency might have got away with it - had they not run the ad in question on the back cover of New Scientist's edition oft6 July.
THE Home Electricity Saving Tips website get s off to what Craig Borland calls "a cracking start". 'There are just under 1.6 1000000000000 electricity meters installed in the universe,"
Alex di Giovanni's lnternet-Linked French for Beginners book from Usborne promises "a complete list of numbers on page 40". How wide are those margins, then? 56 1NewScientist 16 Augu st 2011
it proclaims. Then, before we have had time to work out whether that is a number, what it means or how it was compiled, the article at bit.ly/ elec-meters disintegrates into lost -in-translation gibberish: "In add-on, a size f igure of refurbished meter. which have been verified and re-calibrated, are used for substitution;· it t ells us. adding that: "Since the ghetto of electromechanical meter, which represent the successor majority of M in work, t in be very long, the sum content of switch is very large." The website goes on like this for another 1000 words or so. then invites us to "Leave a comment". We think we had better not.
DAVID RAPLEY is a family doctor, and one of his patients was taken aback by the information leaflet in a packet of quinine sulphate tablets that David had prescribed for night cramps. "Tell your doctor," it exhorted, "if you notice any of the following side effects... Muscle weakness, excitement, 'spinning' sensation, confusion, loss of consciousness, coma, death." "As a doctor, one of course encourages the self-reporting of side effects," says David, "but I am not sure how keen I would be to receive such messages from a medium."
READER John Whalley was confused by an offer f rom Perfect Pizza of "Savings of up to and over £250" (4 June). His confusion reminded Peter Northrop of the time he went to a showroom to buy a car. In the window was the proclamation, "Bring us your old car and we will give you up to a minimum of £1000!" Peter asked the salesperson if that would be more than £1000 or less. "He had no idea," Peter reports.
THE Wakefield Triangle strikes again- or should we say the Rhubarb Triangle? Last month we reported that Paul Barker's
computer failed to locate where it was when the train it was on passed through the Wakefield area in Yorkshire, UK. We speculated that rhubarb grown in that area had a disruptive effect on the computer (9 July). Now Paul Allonby tells us that it is not only computers on trains that are affected. Paul travels frequently to the north of Englan d in his Peugeot 406 car. He has noticed that when he reaches the Wake field area, his car's speedometer reading drops to zero, however fast he is driving. After 10 seconds or so, the speedometer returns to the correct speed.The same thing happens again at the next junct ion- presumably, he concludes, because that is where he exits the triangle. Powerful stuff, that rhubarb.
MEANWHILE. the map on Robert Milne's "allegedly smart" phone has told him that his "current location is temporarily unavailable". "So where does that leave me?" he demands.
FINALLY, Tina Hirschbuehl sends us a photo of a leather sandal. On one of the four straps that form the sandal's upper is a label saying: "Waterproof."Tina asks: to what does it refer?
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Strange tidings Sailors in coastal waters say that when the tide changes, more often than not the wind direction changes too. What links these two events, one of which is astronomical and the other meteorological?
• There may be an easy explanation for the observations. There are many places around the UK and elsewhere with fastflowing tidal currents, which also have a large population of sailing vessels. Consider the impact of the tide on airflow measured on board a vessel bobbing in such areas. When the tide is going out at 3 knots, for example, and the there is a 3-knot wind moving in the same direction, there will be no wind felt on deck. But if the tide changes direction and the wind does not, you will then feel a 6-knot breeze on the deck. The wind has not changed in relation to the land and seabed but, as far as the sailing boats are concerned, the wind has indeed been influenced by the tide.
GrahamCox By email, no address supplied • There are several reasons why sailors think the winds change with the tides. When the wind blows against the direction of the tide, it can make waves steeper than when air and water are moving the same way. This slows the yacht down. So a change in tide makes it seem as if the wind
Questions and answers should be concise. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. Include a daytime telephone number and email address if you have one. Restrict questions to scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena. The writers of published answers will receive a cheque for £25 (or US$ equivalent}. Reed Business Information Ltd reserves all rights to reuse question and answer material submitted by readers in any medium or format.
strength has altered, even when the change in apparent wind is small. Tidal changes may often occur in the morning or evening and so coincide with the onset of a "sea breeze" or a "land breeze", caused by the warming and cooling of the land on sunny days. Sailors, who are often longing for a wind shift, may associate this weather phenomenon with the tide.
Max Wilkinson Dedham, Essex, UK
• When we analyse problems in familiar modes, we know where to seek the necessary information in the most promising form and place. When stumped by unfamiliar problems, we grope for clues in unfamiliar dimensions. If we have difficulty when struggling to lift a heavy weight, we engage in displacement activities, such as grimacing and contracting irrelevant muscles. Such activities are practically universal, both among vertebrates and intelligent invertebrates, and may be nature's version of the problem-solving guru's advice to "think outside the box". Moving or tilting the head gives a different focus, parallax, or perspective of an object. Species that need to aim, such as chameleons, or that have eyes
This week's questions
• As a sailor of coastal waters SKIN TONES for some 40 years, I have to tell your questioner that their My husband and I go to see bands scepticism is correct - there is no together and get ink stamps connection between tide and on our hands (see photo) so we wind direction. Tidal direction can be allowed back into the venue if we leave temporarily. changes four times over an approximately 24.5 hour cycle, We have noticed that the stamp but the wind does not. What one on his hand remains clear can say with absolute certainty is whereas the stamp on my hand that if the wind direction changes, "Moving or tilting the head quickly deteriorates to a smudge. the t ide will have changed at some gives a different focus, Does anybody have any ideas parallax, or perspective why this might be so? point in the previous 6.5 hours. Beware that sailors are of an object" Jackie Buchan Muchalls, Aberdeenshire, UK also likely to tell you about mermaids, and refuse to wear fixed in their head, such as owls WHERE THERE'S MUCK green while at sea. or egrets, or people who have lost Vincent Lugthart the sight of one eye, will often tilt, On the London Underground, London, UK I was struck by the black dust that waggle or bob the head for the sake of perspective. Humans often cakes the tunnels. Much of it must behave similarly when tackling be human skin (see "Tubular hell", You what? unfamiliar problems, either page 38). What is the annual While I have been trying to teach futilely or in the hope of mass of skin cells shed into the my old dog new tricks, I have recognising an overlooked clue. underground system? People noticed that he tilts his head to one Sometimes it works, both for us make a billion journeys on the side when he is puzzled by my and for old dogs. Perhaps your tube each year. Are there other instructions. I have seen cats do the dog is trying to "think outside factors? And what other material same thing, as indeed do humans. the box". is the dust composed of? Why do we all have the same response?
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