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CONTENTS

Volume 207 No 2778

8

Transgenic fish

Swimming to

a plate near you soon?

COVERSTORY

30

Heart of

the galaxy

We knew itwas strange, but it just got even stranger

34

Masters of illusion

How art exploits glitches inyour brain

(!... Reed Business InformatIon

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Coming next week ... The accidental journey

We owe au r existence to a stri ng of coi nddences

Hard-wired for happiness

What's the point of positive emotions?

This issue online www.newscientist.oom/issuelZ778

News 6 UPFRONT

LHC rep 0 rts first non" sta nd a rd p hysi [5. Polio spreads as budgets are (lit

8 THIS WEEK

o rug. tre atrn e nts fa r a uti sm e nte r new phase, The stench afMartian life, j'Glued light" reveals warped spare, Gene therapy treats blood disorder, M-theory - flOW with no rnultlverss required, Ancient Greek pills brought back from the deep

11 INSIGHT

Was groupthink at play in Gut!' oil disaster? 16 IN BRIEF

Bowerbirds sxoloit optical illuslons, Dolph.ins huntwith conches, Planetary pinball

19 TECHNOLOGY

Animal fingerprints reveal who's who,

Give old "dumbphones" 21 smartphcne fee'!. How to squeeze ju ice from jellyfish

Opinion 5 EDITORIAL

Rise up to defend sdsnce

24 Towers of hope Surplus power from cellphone towers could save millions of lives BIery year, say Harvey Rubin 'andAlice Conant 25 One minute with ... 8j0m Lomborg Has the "sceptical environmentalist" changed

his tune over climate change?

26 LETTERS On wind power Shaken babies 28 Goodbye natursvs nurture Time to reinvent thelanguags of development and ,gem~ti[s, argues 'Evelyn Fox Keller

Features

30 Heart of the galaxy (Self' above left) 34 Masters of illusion (see 161ft)

40 The new canutss Some spectacular ideas to reverse the seas' [Elentlegsrise 44 The virtua.1 therapistwil.1 see you now Replirating the connection between therapist and client in cyberspace

CultureLab

46 can video games be art? Samantha Murphy asks game designers, piayeracademics and artists

47 Reviews How to get rich by fighting

old age, Hanging out with the worlds most mysterious fish,Earth'syouthin a Debbie

Regulars 26 ENIGMA

56 FEEDBACK Designer llniv~mes 57 THE LAST WORD Simply red 48 JOBS & CAREERS

18 September 2010 I NewScief1tist 13

EDITORIAL

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Rise up to defend science

At the heart of a bitter funding row is a battle forscience's soul

WHATis the point of science? Most researchers would probably saytt is to increase our understanding ofthe world, though they would also be the first to point to the amazing extent to which life and health have been enriched by their curiosity. Understandably, many politicians have a more cold-eyed, practical view: research is done to make money.

Such differing views create tensions between governments and scientists, tensions that have been thrown into sharp relief in the past week. Researchers in the UK are taking up their pitchforks to defend science from those who only see theshort-term cost of science, not the long-term value.

Their anger is prompted by the way the British governmenta Conservative- Liberal Democrat coalition - is trying to rebalance the economy in the wake ofthe credit crunch and some of the policies of the previous Labour administration. The £6 billion annual research budget is now being scrutinised, and huge cuts are proposed,

Business secretary Vince cable made his first speech on science last week. Much of what he said made sense. He talked

"Cuts in funding of

25 per cent co uld mean the UKwithdraws from whole areas of research"

of'the need for excellence in research, and for the UK to cash in on the fruits of that research. He appreciates that increases

in productivity have come as much from new knowledge as from capital and labour, and that we know this thanks to advances in economic research.

But Cable's crude advocacy of "more commercially related research" showed little awareness

PRORLE

Robert M. May holds a profes$orship jointly at the Univer~ityof Oxford and I mperiai College London, He was president of the Royal Society between 2000 and200S and

(hief sCientific adviser to the UK government from 1995 to 2000

of the complex interplay between basic research - new ideas - and their translation into products.

Then he made what could best be explained as an Inept.attempt to manage expectations. He said that the previous government had planned cuts of up to 25 per cent, im plying that his government was doing no worse, and added that studies of UK universities' research activity found that 54 per cent of their work was world class. However, in a later interview, Cable reversed this statement, saying that around 45 per cent of research was not of an excellent standard, This quickly became a media story about taxpayers funding" mediocre" research and was spun as a justification for cuts.

Cable is not just wrong in

his sentiment. His figures are dangerously wrong, focusing on just one funding stream that gives more than 90 per cent of its money to research already deemed to be world-leading.

At the time, I condemned what he said as just plain stupid.

British research has delivered

more bang per buck than any other nation. With 1 per cent of the world's population, the UK produces 8 per cent of the world's scientific publications, receives

12 per cent of citations, and 14 per cent of citations with the highest impact. In terms of the number of papers and citations relative to national wealth, the UK Isranked first in the GS.

Science funding has only jus t returned to the level it was at in 1986 and there is, if anything, a strong case to increase it further: there is more excellent research than the government is able to fund.

Basic research is not a cos t but an investment, and lam not alone in this way of thinking. The US has announced a $21-billion boost for science as part of a stimulus package, while the British government seems to doubt the UK needs one. France - to the tune of€35 billion - Germany and China are also backing science.

Any informed reading of the evidence shows British research offers a unique competitive advantage, yet the government has come to the perverse conclusion that it should be cut by up to

25 percent. That could mean withdrawal from whole areas

of research, and a lost generation of scientists and engineers.

What the UK needs to do

is work ou t how it can reap the benefits of research rather than China or any other rival economy with better policies and foresight to exploit Ideas, The UK needs to reform regulations and banking to cultivate a more entrepreneurial culture, not diminish the fountainhead of innovation.

The current thinking is not just wrong, it's mad. That is why I count myself among the angry mob that is prepared to defend science to the utmostfrom muddled political thinking .•

18 September2010 I NewScientist 15

UPFRONT

LHC surpasses its rivals

THE large Hadron Collider is flexing its muscles. A team attha collider in CERN, near Geneva, SlAritzerland,is satto pu bl ish th e fi rst resu It that su rpasses the a bi I iti es of rival particle smashers.

The result concerns the search

for an elusive "excited" quark. Quarks are not thoughtto be composed of anything smaller, but if one was found in an excited state, itwould show this to be wrong. This is

b eca use an ex cite d state 0 n Iy arises when there is a change in the way that possible smaller partldas within a quarK are bound together.

Now the ATLAS detector at the lHC has extended this range by over

40 per cent, cQunting out excited quarks. up to 1260 GeV.The workwill appear in PtrtsicQI Revi_ew Letters.

Due to the LHCs high energy; ATLAS achieved this with less than four months of data, compared with the fouryears needed fortbe Te,-atron result. "Obviously we're

all very excited because'lile builtthis machine to get into a certain energy regime;' says Tom LeCompte of ATLAS.

Kurt Riesselmann, a spokesperson for Fermilab, says that despite this result, the Tevat.ron still. leads the race

experimentS at the Teva~ron to find other particles, SUch as ~he

collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, Higgs boson, because it has collected

have previously searched for excited more data to siftthrough."That's

quarks, and ruled out their existence where the Tevatron will hold the

at masses upto 870 gigaelectronvolts. edge for a ftlw more years;' he says.

Polio crisis

mE world financial crisis could upset the zz-year battle to eradicate polio, just as victory is in sight.

N ext week the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, (GPEI) based In.Geneva, Switzerland, will announce.thatit is short ofa third of the $2.6 billion it needs this year, due to financial cutbacks in the countries funding the programme.

It would not be the first.time pledges have been late, but

this time the problem runs deep, says Bruce Aylward, head of the GPEI. The donor countries contribute to polio eradication from funds not tied to regular aid budgets. "Those are the first to go ina budgetcrisis,"he says.

Unless the money is found

"We did not have enough money to g:o in and vaccinate in areas known to be polio risks"

before the end of September

the GPEI will have to cut back in countries that have ellmlnated polio but are at risk of reinfection without continued vaccination

61 NewScientist 118 September 2010

and surveillance. "It is a risk we shouldn'thave to take at this point," says Aylward.

The programme has made progressIn much ofthe world, partly due to a redesigned vaccine that immunises against the two most common strains of the virus, rather than all three as it used to, focusing immuni ty where it is needed.

India has slashed cases

by 88 per cent so farthis year. In Nigeria cases have fallen

99 per cent as Muslim leaders, once against vaccination, now su pport it. Mass vaccination seems to have stopped a resurgence of the waterborne virus in flooded Pakistan.

Yet in Tajikistan, which eliminated polio in 1991, an outbreak in April paralysed more than 400 children. Las t week the G PEl announced that polio is re-established in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Both areas were highlighted as risks last year because of low vaccination rates, says Aylward. "But we didn't have enough money to go in and vaccinate" just on the chance polio might strike.

'N~nt;JJ~LICalo Stream

Vahooforpi

A YAHOO researcher has made a record-breaking calculation of the digits of pi using his company's computers. Thefeat comes hoton the heels of a Rubik's cube result that harnessed Google computers, highlighting the virtues of using the vast computational power of the internet search giants to make mathematical breakthroughs.

Tsz·Wo Sze of Yahoo In Sunnyvale, California, used the shared resources of 1000 of the company's computers to calculate

pi's 2 quadrillionth (z x 101') digit in binary notation (arxiv.org/ abs/ioos.grn), That's twice as far along as the previous record. Sze didn't calculate all the preceding binary digits, or bits: instead,

he ski pped to the target. This is still a noteworthy feat as more computations are needed the further along the bit offnterest is,

Last month, ateam used Google's computers to crack a lingering puzzle. They proved that you never need more than

20 moves to solve any arrangement of a Rubik's cube.

10.1007/513280-010-0066-8),

Five different conditions were identified, with the most common being lesions similarto those Caused by poxvirus, which affected 142 dolphins. But the cause is not ~Iear. "Our first suspicion immediately falls on contaminants such as psstiddas, heavy metals, o.rganochlorines and fire retardants:' says Maldini. These pollutants can weaken animals' immune systems and make them more vulnerable to viruses.

Mystery skin lesions hit dolphins

DOLPHINS in California aren't happy. Some 90 per cent of bottlenose dolphins in Monterey Bay are

su fferi ng fro man 0 utb re ak of ski n leslcns - and nobody knows why.

Between 2006 and 2008, a team led by CanielaMaldini of Californian research organisation Okeanis.found that of 147 identifiable adult dolphins and 42 calves living in the area,

133 adults and ao callies had skin lesions (AMBIO:Ajoufnai of the Human Environment 001:

For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientistcom/news

60 SECONDS

Arctic storm slump

Oldie memory lapses

The rnorematu ra among us

may no longer be able to blame forgetfulness simply on old age. According to a study of 350 people given annual memory tests and

virh ose bra i ns vire re exa m in e dafter death, the same bralnleslonsthat are associated with dementia are responsiblefor mild memory loss as we age (Neurology, vol 75, p 1070).

CLIMATE change is expected to bring more extreme weather, but at least one region may benefit from fewer storms: the Arctic.

Polar lows, also known as Arctic

"By the end of this century, the number of polar lows could have fallen to half the current level"

Altered obesity

Thirteen genes altered chemjca.11y through a process called methylation have been linked with lnereased body weig.ht. Screening forthe altered genes.could help spot people atrlsk from obesity beforethey put o ri weight, say .researchers (Science Translational Medicine, 001: 10.1126Jscitranslmed.3001262).

hurricanes, ate weaker than Atlantic hurricanes but are still a hazard for shi ps and oil platforms. Dozens occur each winter, when thetemperature difference between the cold air and warmer sea stirs up convection currents

in the lower atmosphere.

Matthias Zahn, now at the University of Reading, UK, and Hans von Storch ofthe GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, used a computer model to look at what would happen to the frequency of these storms as greenhouse gases rise. They found that by the end of this century, the average number of polar lows will fall to around halfthe current level (Nature, vol 467, p 309). This is because the atmosphere will warm faster than the sea, so the temperature difference will fall and convection currents dwindle.

There is a catch. The model only looked at storm frequency, not severi ty - which could increase.

If so, fewer but stronger storms University and his colleagueshad

could cause more damage overall. been studying the cave molly for ...- __ ... '" many years, when they became

~ interested in how the toxin might ~ be affecting the fish.

l;I They collected fish from water where the Barbasco toxin was added every year, and others from water upstream, then mimicked the ritual by adding Barbasco paste to both tanks.

They were surprised to

find differences between the

two populations. Fish from

the sui phur cave resisted the anaesthetic for longer, suggesting that over time, evolution has selected for fish that can cope with the toxin (Biology Letters,

Ritual evolution

DOl: 1O.lOg8jrsbI.201O.0663).

"The study indicates thatthe fish have adapted to the.local Zoque traditions," says Tobler, who describes the effect as" an intimate bond between nature and local culture". It is yet more evidence show:ing how human activities can affect the evolu tionary trajectory of species, he says.

EACH year, members of the Zoque people of southern Mexico gather in the Cueva del Azufre- a dark, sulphurous cave, home to the cave molly fish. They bring with them the mashed root of the Barbasco

Ch inese sub dives deep A crevired Chi nese s u brn ersi b Ie named after a mythical dragon has dived 3759 metres to the bottom of the South China Sea., making China one of only five nations that can dive that deep .. Its designers now planto "take the submersible, Jiaolong, to 7000 metres - 500 metres deeper thanji;lpan's ShinkaJsub managed.

plant, a powerful.anaesthetic they use to stun the fish as part ofa ritual to ask their gods for rain.

N ow it turns out that this

centuries-old religious ritual has given evolution 8. helping hand.

Mark Tobler of Texas A&M

Spring for babies

PlANTS burst into Itfe in spring and that might be true for people, too. So says a study on seasonal success rates oflVF, presented at the World Congress on Fertili ty and Sterlllty in Munich, Germany, this week.

A team led by Daniela Braga of the Assisted Fertilisation Centre in Sao Paulo, Brazil, measured hormone levels in 1932 women undergoing IVF treatment. They found that levels of oes tradiolwhich is vital for reproduction - were sIgnificantly higher in the spring, and correlated wi th a

45 per cent higher fertilisation rate during this season.

Another survey presented atthe conference, by the International Federation of Fertility Societies, highlighted the lack of consistent global safety standards for IVF. Ian Cooke of the IFFS, who co-authored the survey, is now developing an international code of practice.

"The fish have adapted to the rain ceremony ritual and are able to resist the anaesthetic to r longer"

Alien opera invite

It ain't CIIIertili the fat Klingon

sings. Theworld's firstoperain the invented language of Star TreKs Klingons has been performed in the Netherlands. Organisers used the CAMRAS radiotelescope inthe Dutch town of Dwingelooto beam an

i nil ltatio n to the sta r.A rctu ru S, th s supposed location oftheKiingon homeworld.

Synthetic life supported

Two-thirds. of Am erlca ns supportths emerging field of synthetic biology and tts potential to combatdlsease and global warming. However, the survey, by Hart Resea.rch Associates and the Woodrovir Wilson Center in Washington DC, showsthat another lhirdwould like a ban until it is better un d e rsto od.

18 September 2010 1 NewScientist 17

THIS WEEK

Peter Aldhous

AT AN undisclosed location in the highlands of Panama, 68 water tanks sit behind a code-protected door. The building's ground-floor windows are barred, motion detectors are deployed inside and the exterior steel doors are deadbolted. To reach this citadel, an intruder would have to breach a fence topped with barbed wire and dodge motion-activated cameras.

What sounds like the lairof a James Bond villain is actually a fish-rearing facility owned by AquaBountyTechnologies, based in Waltham, Massachusetts. It

was set up to win the world's first approval to sell a genetically modified (G M) fish for human consumption. Whether or not the safety measures are sufficient will be debated next week, when the

81 NeWScientist 118 September 2010

US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) holds public meetings on AquaBounty's proposal to sell a variety of Atlantic salmon that is engineered to grow abou t twice

as fast as normal fish.

Regulators worldwide have been looking to the FDA to take a lead on the issue ofGM fish. If,. as seems likely, it gives the green light, engineered fish being developed in labs from China to Cuba could follow {see table, right}. "This is precedent-setting, not justin the US but internationally," says Eric Hallerrnan, a fish geneticist at.the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg.

AquaBounty's salmon owes its rapid growth to a hormone gene

. from the chinook salmon. It would be the first G M animal to be approved for human consumption. The main scientific controversy

relates not to the safety of eating its flesh, which was given a clean bill of health by the FDA's scientists. At issue are the potential ecological consequences should fish escape.

Farmed fish can wreak havoc if they get into the wild. Large numbers of Atlantic salmon have

"The salmon would be

the first tiM animal of .any type to 'be approved for human consumption"

escaped and are breeding with their wild cousins, producing animals that are less likely to survive. Farmed Atlantic salmon have also escaped into Pacific waters, and there are fears that they may compete with. native species of salmon.

Add genesfrom other species . into the mix, and the potential

risks become even greater, which explains why AquaBounty has faced formidable hurdles in bringing its salmon to market. The original plan, hatched more than a decade ago, was to grow the fish in conventional salmon farms; using net pens in coastal waters. The risks of escape were deemed unacceptable.

That led to the company's current proposal.lt states that the salmon will be produced in secure, land- based facilities. Fish will be hatched and grown in Panama, where Atlantic salmon would be unlikely to survive even if they did somehow escape. All" female eggs will be flown in from a similarly contained facility on Prince Edward Island in Canada. Shortly afterferttltsatlon the eggs will be subjected to high pressure, which makes them retain a set of

In this section

• The stench of Martian life, page 11

• "Glued light" reveals warped space, page 14

• AncientGreek pills brought back from the deep, page 14

chromosomes that is normally expelled. resulting in sterile "triploid" fish. ''A.quaBounty has gone to unprecedented lengths to provide a product that can address people's concerns," argues Ron stottsh, the company's president.

Ecological risk-assessment

experts agree that the measures are impressive. But AquaBounty's set-up will be just the beginning of the GM fish market. If it is to tum a profit, it will have to sell eggs to other salmon producers, who will need their own facilities. Without knowing their locations and precise safety measures, it's hard to judge the likelihood offish making it into the wild, says Anne Kapuscinski of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who studies the risks posed by GM fish.

Should a.ny fish esca pe and survive, the risks are uncertain. Hallerman's team has found that AquaBounty's salmon seem more susceptible to stresses including extremes of temperature and shortages of food. While that suggests that they may struggle

in the wild, work on GM coho salmon by Robert Devlin of Fisheries.and Oceans Canada in Vancouver and Fredrik Sundstrom of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden has shown that the consequences of carrying a foreign growth- hormone gene can vary.

For example, raised ina typical hatchery environment, the GM coho salmon grew bigger, were more voracious predators and took risks that could expose them to being eaten if they were in the wild. But when raised in a simulated natural s tream, these differences were much reduced. This makes it difficult to calculate the risks posed by GM fish. "If the environment changes you don't know how they will respond," Sundstrom warns.

SALMON GO AGAINST THE FLOW

The genetically modified salmon created by AquaBourlty Technologies (see main story) arenotthe only

fish raising eyebrows right now.

This month a Canadian go ... ernrnent commission begins hearing e ... idence on why wild sockeye salmon populations are plummeting in British Columbia's Fi'aserfiver.

Yetin a stunning ironic.twist, the number of sockeye heading upriver to spawn this year is the greatest

in 97 years: salmon prices arefallil1g and wholElsalers are runnfng out

of ice to store the catch. Didri't

the salmon get the memo?

In fact, the bumper crop doesn't eliminate the long-term problem.This yearisthe peak of the Fraser sockeye's four-year cyr;le, so fish biologists were predicting a healthy tun of about

11 million fish. It looks like about

34 million will act.ually make the trip.

Young salmon do poorly in warmer

swimming to a plate nearyou

Dozens of ge netkally mod ifl e·d f sll have bee n .created i 11 f.acilities arc un d ttl a wort d AQua80unty Technologies· TIsh (1n blue) may be the firstyou·lltaste

ATLANTiC SALMON (US) Growth-hormone genB

(S(/lmos~lar) "- ........ ffortlthinooksalmon

RA INBQWTROUT (US) (Oncorhyncil us myl(iss)

CHANNEL CATFISH (US) (lctaluws punctatus)

CHANNEL CATFISH (US) (lctLJiiJrw; punctatus)

COMMON CA RP (CHINA) (Cyprinu!u:mpia)

HYBRID TILAPIA, (CUBA) (Oreochromis homcrum ·crtJ.ssed with O. aumus)

What's more, AquaBounty's system for producing sterile fish is only about98 per cent reliable, so there is a small chance of escapees breeding with wild fish. That is a concern, given the "Trojan gene" hypothesis, which states that a gene which boosts reproductive success but is ultimately harmful to the species can rapidly spread through a wild populatlonff'[ust

a few genetically modified fish escape. Studies simulating natural populations suggest that this could cause them to crash.

Beyond the questions surroundingAquaBounty's salmonls the precedent that would be set if it is approved for sale. Many more GM fish are being developed in the US and beyond. Rex Dunham of Auburn University

waters, which cou Id explain the long-term decline. This year's bounty is likely the pay-off from lower temparaturssln 2008, when this year's returning spawners first entered the ocean as juveniles,

says Sa rry ROSE! nberg e r of (a na d as Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Such luck is unlikely to be repeated very·often in a warming world, so this year's abundance otsalmon may.be a rare treat. Bob Holmes

Enhanced growth

Grilwth.hormprlegene from ~hinook!t~lmon

Enh~nced growth

Growth-hormomr gene Enhanced

fro m ra i nbow trout or catf sh !iI rowth

Gan e fur antibac:terial peptide tromsllk moth

Baderi a I d isaa se resistance

Growth-hormone gMe from gr"asscilrp

Enhanced growth

Growth-hormone'gene, fro m til ~pi a

Enhancelj growth

in Alabama is developing GM channel catfish that grow more quickly or resist bacterial diseases {see table}. He is still perfecting techniquesto ensure sterility,

by knocking out genes vital for reproduction, but he hopes to bring the fish to market within three or four years. FDA approval for AquaBounty's fish would bea significant step towards making that happen, he says.

Others are itching to move straight away. Zuoyan Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute ofHydrobiology in Wuhan has developed a growthenhanced common earp.that he says has been ready to market fora decade, held back only by regulatory-concerns in China. FDA approval of AquaBounty's salmon would improve the prospects for Chinese GM fish, says Zhu. If that happens his team will" definitely" make an application to the Chinese authorities.

China accounts for about half of the world's aquaculture, so any approval could open up an enormous market- and raise significant questions about how' to prevent escapes. As Kapuscinski puts it: "I t seems to me that achieving multiple confinement, and assuring it, would be very challenging

in China." •

18 September 2010 1 NewSdentist 19

THIS WEEK

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Autism drug aims to balance brain signals

Andy Coghlan

TIlE first trial of a drug intended to rebalance the brain chemistry of people with autism has hel ped symptoms in most ofthe 25 volunteers who tested it - with reductions in irritability and tantrums, and lm provements in social skills.

The announcement coincides wi th news that the Usfederal government has finalised its financial package for Hannah Poling. In 2008 the government conduded that vaccinations may have res ulted in her autism-like symptoms. The family will receive $1.5 million, plus $500,000 annually to cover the costs of caring for her,

Her case, however, is likely to be unique - she has a rate underlying genetic condition affecting her mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell. This was judged to account for the symptoms she developed aftervaccination,

As the debate over vaccination and autism rumbles on in the US, the resu.lts from the drug trial of arbaclofen are encouraging. Although doctors sometimes prescribe drugs for autism, they ate usually antidepressants and anti-psychotics and aimed at specific symptoms.

Arbadofen, by contrast, is intended to.rebalance brain chemistry, said to be awry in people with au tism spectrum disorders. "We are trying to normalise signalling functions within the brain," says Randall Carpenter of Seaside Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm is developing arbaclofen as a generic under the name STX2og.

Previous studies suggest that people with autism produce too much of the neurotransmitter glu tamate in the brain, which

ramps up neural activity. They may also make too little gammaamino butyric add (GAM), which dampens activity down.

"Too much activation with glutamate makes people with autism very sensitive to loud noises and other, sudden changes in the environment, increasing anxiety and fear," says Carpenter. Arbaclofen norrnalises this imbalance. "It may stop them being oversensitive".

"Too much glutamate makes people with autism fearful of loud noises. Arbaclofen corrects this imbalance"

The firm released a summary of the results last week, but held the raw data back for publication. Carpenter says the results mirror those released earlier this year from a trial of arbaclofen to combat a specific form of autism linked withfragile X syndrome, which causes mental impairment.

"We've observed Significant improvement in social interaction across both studies," says Carpenter, adding that a larger trial of up to 150 patients is planned. But Susan Hyman from the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York cautions against over-interpreting such a small study.

As for last week's vaccine settlement, "the payment

does not acknowledge a link between autism and vaccines", says Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation in New York.

According to Salvatore DiMauro of Columbia University inN ew York, there are only fourother cases of Poling's specific mutation worldwide, so the ruling is unlikely to apply to the other 5000 compensation cases. •

For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientistcom/news

INSIGHT

There's more to disasters than mechanical failure

WHEN the spdc€lshuule'(olumbid

di si ntegrate don l'e-e ntering Ea rth's atmosphere on 1 February 2003, the immediOite cause soon becameclea[ A piem-Qf foam hadmme off durihg launch and cracked the wing, allowing hot gaseSTo destroy thestrunure,

8m there was aAmher, more insidious factor. NASA engineers

had spotted the impact and dismissed the risk that it Dosed, The accident investlgatidn teamfound they had consistently tak~n into account all

the indications that the foam ~id not pose a risk and ignored indications that itdid ~ a classic @x;JmpleofH phenomenon psychologists GIll groupthink, They concluded that the s~lfe1Y culture at NASA that allowed this to,happen was as much Ig blame fonhe accident as the foam.

last week, BP published its own investigation into the GIUsesof the Deepwater Horizon blOW-au!. It concluded that the failure of eight technical.systems designed gither

to prevent this kind of disaster or mitigate iTS effects were-m bfame. The report makes no meriDOn of how the company manages safety and whether thrs may have contributed,

This has surprised safety experts, "The factthat BPhas. failed to identify

its orgdnisation~1 structure as

a factor in the accidemis itself an indiGltion of a problem wtth its saf@ty cuiture," says Erik Hollnagel, who specialises in industrial s;jfety at MINES ParisTech inFra nee,

Itwollidn't be the fir~ time that such problems have emerged within theoll industry, On6July 1988, the PiperAlpha platform in the North Sea

BP hasblarnedthe Deepwater Horizon disaster on technical faults

exploded, killing 167 men, An investigation revealed serious deficien(i@sirnheorganisational strucrure at Occidental Petrbleum, the companytnat operated the platform.

The accident occurred after workers inserted a metal disc into a pipe in place of a faulty saf@tyvalve. Workers on the next shift Dumped gas irito the pi pe, riot realisi rig that the vaWewas absent Thediscfailed, causing an explosive leak,

The lack ofpmpemlmmunication channels between workers on different shifts was indicative of a much broader problem. other organi sarional problems also contributed. Forexample, two ne~rby platforms continued to pump_

gas to Piper Alpha, even aftertheir crews saw the explosion, believing they did not haVe the <Juthonty to rum offIll" supply,

B P ITs e tf ha s a clLequered re co rej,

In 200S, an explosion at its oil refinery in Texas City killed 15 people and injured 170 others, A review panel

I <l1,er highlighted numerous problems with th-e company'soSafety (u IUi~.

BP is now likely to. come under intense scrutiny from the US National AC<;Idemy of Engineering cgmminee mat is investigating the Gulf blow~ou!. Severn] mmrninee members spedillise inme role of human faaors in accidents. Its interim flndingsare due in Daober, Justin MuUins •

Snif'fing for the stench of Martian life

IF THERE'S life on Mars, we might smell it before wesee it. A chemical involved in bad breath and flatulence in humans could lead usto alien microbes on the Red Planet.

The sui phu r-containing molecule methyl mercaptan is naturally

prod uced in significant quantities on Earth only by microbes, indudi ng some that rna ke their pu ngent

presence known in the human body. NASA's next Mars rover is highly sensitive to the smelly chemical, which could betray the presence of Martian microbes, says Steven Vance of NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The instrument in question is the, Tunable laser Spectrometer, which will fly on the Curiosity rover - set

to land on Mars in 2012. TlS was designed to analyse the carbon isotopes in Mars's metha ne to search for signs that the gas has a biological origin. Butthe isotope tests might produce ambiguous results, so

finding methyl mercaptan would help bolsterthe case for Martian microbes, Vance says. TlS should be able to detect the gas at concentrations below 100 parts per billion, according to his team's tests on a si milar spectrometer (Planetary and

Space Sdence, 001: 10.10161 j.pss.20l0.0S.023).

The researchers are also planning to chec.k llS's sensitiv ity to other

"The rover should be able

to detect the bioma rker gas at concentrations below 100 parts per billion"

gases produced by terrestrial microbes, like ethane. "We're demonstrating its ability to lock at additional biomarkers and hopefully thatwill help us in our search for life," Vance says.

Kenneth Nealson at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study, says findi ng severa I potential indicators of life in the same p.lace would make it a good tarqetfor tollowup missions. "I think you'd get pretty excited;' he says. "You'd want to make sure that the next landerwould spend time at. th at site." David S'higa •

18 September 2010 I NewScientist 111

THIS WEEK

Doubts linger over godless multiverse

Kate McAlpine

STEPHEN HAWKIN G' S new book The Grand Design sparked a furore over whether physics can be used to disprove the existence of God. But few have noted that the idea at the core of the book, M -theory, is the subject of an ongoing scientific debate - specifically over the very aspect of the theory that might scrap the need for a divine creator.

That the laws of nature in our universe are finely tuned for life seems miraculous, leading some to invoke divine involvement.

But ifthere is a multlverse out there ~ a multitude of universes, each with its own laws of physicsthen the conditions we observe may not be unique.

Hawking suggests that M·theory, the leading interpretation of string theory, calls for a multiverse. others are divided over the strength of'thls link. "My own opinion is that we don't understand the theory well enough to be able to say whether there is one single universe or a multitude of universes," says

M· theorist Michael Duff of Imperial College London.

String theory's grand claim was

that it would be able to unite quantum mechanicswith general relativity. Until the mld-iqqos, however, five different versions of it, each featuring 10 spatial dimensions; were vying with each other, along with a sixth model known as n-dlmenstonal super-

membrane theory. M·theory stitched these six theories together into one overarching theory. But while these six areas are fairly well fleshed out in M·theory, other parts of the theory are threadbare.

One major gap is how and where the Seven extra spatial dimensions, beyond the three

we experience, are hidden. "The conventional view is that the extra dimensions are very small," Duff says. Alternatively, our universe could exist wi thin a

"bulk" that contains the extra spatial dimensions.

A multi verse is compatible with both pictures, so some versions of M·theory are constructed to include a multiverse. However, some theorists argue that being compatible with M-theory does not make a multiverse essential. Duffadds that with our current patchy understanding of

M -theory, the multiverse seems plausible enough, but it might not work if we could see the bigger picture. Even then,

assuming multi pie universes remain mathematically possible, , . there would still be no proof that they are actually present.

For now, it is hatd enough

to tes t string theory, let alone

M -theory, Two weeks ago, Duff and his colleagues made some progress by using string theory to make predictions about the behaviour of entangled quantum bits (Physical ReView Letters, 001: lO.1103/PhysRevLett.lo5·100507), This demonstrates that aspects of string theory can be tested in the laboratory, bu t won't reveal if it

is "the right theory to describe all the elementary particles, the

big bang - the' grand design' as Stephen describes it", says Duff.

"It's dangerous to pin your beliefs on any theory ofphysics," Duff adds, "because it might turn out to be wrong. But if Stephen wants-to stick his neck out, I wish him good luck." •

Blood disorder cured - a first for gene therapy

A 21-YEAR-o.LD Frenchman isthe first person in the world to be

cu red of the blood disorder betathalassaemia through gene therapy. But there is some confusion over whatmadethe treatmentwork.

Before gene therapy he needed monthly blood transfusions to provide him with beta-globi n, a key component of the haemoglobin

121 NewScientist 118 September 20.10.

molecule that carries oxygen around the body. He has now been transfusion-free for overtwo years.

Philippe Leboulch of the UniverSity of Paris, France, and Harva rd Medical School in Boston, infected stem

cells from the man's bone marrow with a harmless vi rus, which

t ra n sfe rre d pe rfe ct cop i es of the beta-globin gene into the DNA of the extracted cells.

Returned to the patient, these cells now contribute about a third of his beta-g lobin, with his body produci ng the rest. Although the treatment had the desired effect,

th e p rol ife rati on of th e a Ite red ce lis could be down to the activation of a different gene, HMGA2, switched on by accident during the DNA tra nsfer (Nature. Do.l: ID.I038/natureD9328).

One worry throughout the history of gene therapy is that viruses transferring beneficial geneswill accidentally activate other genes that could trigger cancer. This happened in four French boys

"His beta-thalassaernla is cured but a, g.ene switched on by accident may be at least partly responsible"

treated for the immune deficiency, X-SClD, who developed leukaemia. One died and the others recovered a fte r treatme nt.

"We must. be very cautious,

but the signs are that the impact oftheHMGA2genewill be benign:' says Leboulch.

After more detailed analysis,

the team fou nd other cells producing beta-globin that do not have the HMGA2 gene switched on. Leboulch concludes that it is unl ikely the HMGA2 gene by itself is responsible forthe surviva I of the beta-globinproducing cells. Andy Coghlan.

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THIS WEEK

Ancient medicine chest spills secrets

IN 130 BC, a ship fashioned from walnutwood and bulgi ng with medicines and Syrian glassware sank off the coast of Italy. Incredibly, when archaeologists discovered it some

20 years ago, the contents of a sealed box of pills were still completely

dry. Now they have exam ined and analysed the pills.

"Forthe first time, we have

141 NewScientist 118 September 2010

physical evidence of what we have in writing from the ancient Greek physicians Dioscorides and Galen;' says Alain Touwaide of the Smithsonian Institution's Nat.ional Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

Robert Fleischer of the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park, Washington DC, analysed DNA fragments ln two of the pills and looked thei r sequences up in the GenBank genetic database

mai ntained by the US National lnstitutss of Health. He identified carrot, radish, celery, wild onion,

oak, cabbage, alfalfa and yarrow. He also fou nd hibiscus extract,probably imported from .Asia or eastAfrica.

"Most of these plants are known to have been used by the ancients to treat sick people;' says Fleischer, who presented his findings atthe Fourthlnternat.ional Sy mposiu m on Biomoleeular Archaeology in Copenhagen, Denmark, last week. Yarrow staunched blood from

"For the first time, we have physica,l evidence of what we have ln writing from ancient Greek physicialns"

wounds, and Pedanius Dioscorides, a physician and pharmacologist

in Rome in the first century AD,

d escri bed th e ea rrot as a pa n a ce a

for a nu mber of problems. "They say that reptiles do not harm peoplewho have taken it i n advance; it also aids conception," hewrote.

Drugs described by Dioscorides and the physician known as Galen of Pergamon have often been dismissed as quackery. Touwaide hopes to find the truth of the matter by exploring whetherthe plant extract mixtures in the pills are now known to treat illnesses effectively. Shant3 Barley.

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IN BRIEF

Male bowerbirds use optical illusion to get a mate

biggerthe furt'herthey were from the bowe~. When he reversed the order, he found that after justthree days nearly halfthe males had returnedfhelrcourtsta'the original design. Within two weeks all courts were fixj:l'd (Current.Biology, DOI:.I0.I016Jj.cub.2010 .. 0S .. 033). "The¥ didn't like itwhenl~hangedit around:' says. Endler.

He specldlates-ti'latti'le l:iirds are using an illuslen called f'orced perspective. An a r,eaJ coks bigger if large objects are doserto theviewer and smatlernnesfurther away ~ a trick aften used in small gardens. By laying aut abje.tts in increasing size order, a-scene can be made to look smaller. Endler believesthis is the be_werbird's tattlc.lf'lts court looks smaller, the birfl could appear bigger in contrast.

Ei'ldJeris now using video camerasto test whethe r birds

BIGGERis better far a-felJl.ale bowe.rb.ird in sear;ch of a mate, andmales are prep_aredto manipul.ate perspective to exploitthis.

Male great bowerbirds tChlamjldero nucha/is) bulld intricate tunnels from interlaced twigs, and place ornaments likestanes and shells an the "court" atthe bower's entrance: Females sit-inside, whire males strut around the court attempting to wao them.

John :Endler of Deakl n University in Waurn Ponds, Australia,_studied 33 bower courts a-nd noticed thatthe

omamentswere carefully Ielid aut, with objects becamiog that create the bestlllusicn increase their. mating success.

Meet William the Concherer ...

the surface,knockingthe shell around to stun the fish before ti pping it into their mouths. "Con clung behaviour is really aboutfotaging." says Allen,

One idea is that this tactic gives the animals access to prey others can't reach. One of the conching dolphins, which the researchers have named William the Concherer, has a different fatty acid profile to other dolphins, suggesting the technique gives

. it access to a novel food source.

DOLPHINS don't have fishing rods but a pparently conch shells will do. For years, bottlenose dolphins have been spotted hefting conch shells out of the water in Western Australia's Shark Bay and then shaking them, but no one had any idea why, untilnow.

Simon Allen, a behavioural ecologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, was on a routine survey with a student

when they photographed a dolphin surfacing with a shell. "We thought this might be play orshowing off," he said. But when they developed the photos, they spotted the dolphin slurping a fish from the shell (Marine Mammal Science, 001: 10.1111/ j.1748·76g2.2010.00409·x).

The researchers think the dolphins may chase fish into the conch and then take it to

161 NewScientist 118 September 2010

Wingspan of fossil

I mega bird revealed

IT WAS a bird that really lived up to its dinosaur heritage.

For decades, fragmentary fossils had hinted that extinct birds once had wingspans of 6 metres, more than twice that of the wandering albatross, which now holds the record. Now we finally have proof for such giants: a 70 per cent complete skeleton of Pelaqornis chilensis, a sea birdthat lived 5 to 10 million years ago in Chile.

The bones suggest its wingspan was at least 5.2 metres, says David Rubilarofthe National Museum of Natural History in Santiago, Chile, who led the analysis of the

, fossil. The work will appear in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The bird had thin-walled bones,and previous fossils had been crushed, making it hard to determine their original size. The new fossil is intact, says Rubilar,

and shows that estimates of pelagornithid wingspans beyond 6 metres were too high.

Twisting electrons could trap atoms

SET a beam of electrons twisting, and the resulting vortex could be just the tool to manipulate atoms.

10 Verbeeck from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and colleagues set outto make such a beam using platinum foil bearing a specific pattern of holes. This "mask" partially blocks a beam of electrons shone at it, though those that get through corkscrew into a vortex between land 100 nanometrestn diameter (Nature, DOl: 1O.1038/nature09366).

"This is a fundamentally new state that we can bring electrons into," says Verbeeck. The vortex could be shrunk further with a redesigned mask, potentially allowing single atoms to be trapped inside it and moved around to modify nanoscale structures.

For new stories every day, visitwww.NeWScientist.cominews

Antibiotics play hell with gut flor.a

ANTIBIOTICS can cause long-lasting changesin the bacteria living in

the human gut. As changes In gut flora co,u Id increase th e risk of

some chroDic dlsease_s, such as inflammatory bowel syndrome, each course of antibiotics may represent a tratle-off between sbort-tarrn benefJt and long-term risk.

Les Dethlefsen and David ReIman of Stanford Univer:sity-io California collected more than 50 stool samples from three people over a lO-mofl1:h -period that lndudedtwo courses of the antibi.otic ciprofloxacin.They used gene sequencing to identify the microbial. stralns p!'¢sentih each sample. They found that each person had a unique set of microbial flora, the composition ofwhich fluctuated around an equlllbrlumwhlch was disrupted Qy each course of drug~.

In most cases, the composition c:)uiddy returned to its pre/ious state, but in a few, bacterial species present Ilefore treatment were replaced

by refateCl-species. One person tol'npletelylost a common genus of bacteria, wbich did notreturn forthe duration of the stlJdy (proceedings _a/the National AcadelTfll of Sdence~ DOI:.l0.1073lpnas .. l0000B7107).

Each round of antibi.otics lsa roll of the dice th~ could lasd to lasting changes in a. person's gllt microbes, says Dethlefsen. The work shelllls th at ariti blotl cs shou I d be used on Iy when truly necessary, he says.

Finding baby blUes in the brain

POST-NATAL depression? Don't blame raging hormones: the brains of women with post-natal depression process negative emotions differently to new mothers withoutthe condition.

Mary Philli ps at.the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,

and colleagues, used functional MRI scans to com pare the brains of 14 women with post-natal depression and 16 new mothers wi thoutwhilethey looked at pictures of angry and sad faces.

They found that the depressed women had less activity in the

Don't rub, scrub with a paper towel

DOCTORS and nurses take noterubbing your hands together in a hand dryer leaves them coated with more bacteria than just after you washed them. Even normal skin bacteria may be bad news for sick people.

"When you rub your hands, you bring a lot ofbacterla to the surface from the pores of your skin," says Anna Snellingofthe University of Bradford, UK. She asked 14 volunteers to dry their hands for 15 seconds using three dlfferent.types of air dryer, sometimes rubbing their hands together and sometimes not.

When volunteers kept their hands still, the dryers reduced skin bacteria numbers by around 37 per cent compared to just after washing. But the count rose by

18 per cent when volunteers rubbed their hands undeJ one ofthe machines. Paper towels proved the most efficient, halving the bacterial count even though volunteers rubbed their hands. That's because the towels actually scrape off'the bacteria (Journal

of Applied Microbiology, DOl: lO.1111/j.l365- 2672.2010.°48 38--1c).

Thework was funded by Dyson, the hand-dryer manufacturer based in Maimesbury, UK.

dorsomedial prefrontal cortexan area of the brain thought to pick upon emotional cuesand mediate emotional responsesthan the non-depressed women (The American/Duma/' of Psychiatry, DOl: 1O.1176/apPi. ajp.201o.ogo8123S)·

Women with post-natal depression tend to find it hard to bond wi ththetr babies. Phillips suggests that this might be linked to a more general loss of interest in social interactions.

The team had previously found that people with depression tend

to be more sensitive to negative images than people free of it. This study shows that new mothers with post-natal depression seem to buck this trend - shutting out negativity and not reacting to it.

The apparent deficit in brain activity was not seen in the healthy new mothers, she says, so it is unlikely that pregnancy alone causes the effect. But more research is needed to find our whether the deficit is caused by depression or if women with less activity are predisposed to postnatal depression.

Uranus the victim of planetary pinball

URANUS mil)' have been batted back and forth betweenJ!J pttsrand S~turn b efo!'e bei og flun gout to its present lo~ation, new simulations suggest,

Previous modelling has shown thatJupiter and Saturn moved out: of their iniUal orbits in tlie early solar sy ste m, scatt8"ri n g'n e arl5y 0 bj e rts.

In some slmulatloaathls led to Uranus crossing the path of Saturn, which Eould then -have flung it towarDS jupH:er, which lobbed it back to Saturn. The process might. have happened three times before Uranus was finally ·ejected beyond Saturn, to where it now rasldas, Hurling l)~al1us

Wou.ld have causedjupiterandSaturn to recoil, further sbifting their omits.

NeW!ii mulatiorts led by Alessandro Morbideili of the C5_te d'Azur Observatory in France suggest

this pinball game. which would

have lastedjust 100,POO years, fits with observattons .. In an altern~e scenario,jupiter:andSatur,n moved to their orbits overs million years by simply flinging away space rocks, but thiswould have visibly scarred the asterojQ belt (AstronomicaIJoi.lmal, in press). "The l!Vo.iution ofthegiant planets has been more 'iii ol.entthan we thought," Morbidelli says.

18 September 2010 I NewScientist 117

TECHNOLOGY

For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientistcomitechnology

YouTube tries live video stream.ing

IT'S one small step for YouTube, but it could be agiantleap for internet TV: this week,the firm began triallingJive broadcasting.

The website has occasionally offered live TV before- including US president Baraek Obama's first State of the Union address- but using thtrd-partytechnology.

The two-day-iong exercise

was described as "an initial trial,

a first step" by YouTube product manager Josh Siegel. Still, a study by internet marketing research company CornS core shows there's an appetite: last year there was a 648 per cent surge in the amount of time Americans devoted

to watching live streamed video on other websites.

Google TV is also launching in the US in the nextfew weeks. It aims to integrate full web access and search features into home television packages.

of people aged over 50 in the US now use an online social networking site, nearly double the percentage in 2009

Google anticipates your every need

avoid repeating similar searches.

other search engines are exploring more subtle improvements. For example, Yahoo Research in Barcelona, Spain, has shown that taking a user's age or sex into account allows more appropriate search results to be delivered.

In an interview with the WaU Street /0 urn al last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt described an even bolder vision: to provide what you want even before you ask, drawing on your social networks, past behaviour, location and so on. "Most people don't want Google to answertheir questions," he said. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

WILL Google soon be foretelling your every desire? That's the future heralded by the company's new search tool Google Instant, which delivers results even before you've finished typing a query.

Google Instant, which launched last week, takes auto-complete to a new level: as you type into Google's search field, a list of results appears for the query Google thinks you want to makein other words, for the matching search that is most popular or statisticaily likely. Google's servers manage the increased load this requires bypooling resources to

IIHe is consistently chubby,jumpy, interesting and red"

Jazz-pop singer [a rnle Cullum paystribute to Mario in the week that marks 25 years since Nimendo's mascot was named. The Italian plumber is at the heart of the biggest game franchise in history. now stretching to morethan 200 games (Pocket" lint.com.13 September)

18 September 20101 NewScientist 119

TECHNOLOGY

Haven't we met somewhere before.

When identifying individual ani mals in the wi Id, there's a I im it to what we humans can do - but now there's a way to track them by their fingerprints

Helen Knight

LEOPARDS can't change their spots - and tigers, zebras and whale sharks can't change their stripes. This just as well since they can be used to ldentlfy individual animals from pictures or video instead of conventional identi ty bands and radio tags.

It is more effective to track animals by such "fingerprints" since they don't have to be caught and sedated, which is stressful.

To monitor the population and movement ofleatherback sea turtles, marine biologists normally use plastic "cattle tags", which contain a unique identity number. These often fall off, says Scott Eckert, a director of the Caribbean sea turtle conservation network Widecast. "We get a large number of leatherbacks coming into Trinidad with tag scars. So we know they've been tagged, but we have no idea when,"he says. "We losea tremendous amount of

valuable information."

Wide cast approached Eric Pauwels and colleagues at the Dutch centre for mathematics and computing (eWI) in Amsterdam to develop an algorithm that would identify individual leatherback sea turtles from digital images of their pink spot,

a patch without pigment on the top oftheir heads. These spots ate

"Anyone who sees a turtle on a beach could take a photograph and find out where the animal is from"

unique to each turtle, arid don't change throughou t their lives, says Pauwels. The algorithm looks forspecific identifiers on the spots - in particular areas of contrast, such as white patches on dark areas. It then encodes these details into a unique biometric sign for the turtle.

The team has tested the system on digital photographs

ofleatherbacks, and they now plan to add it to Obls-Seamap,

a global marine animal database. Biologists will then be able to

u pload images of sea turtles alongside details of where they have been spotted, and get an instant ID lf'Its details are there.

It's not just researchers who could use the system, says Pauwels. "Ideally, anyonewho comes across a turtle on a beach could take a photograph, upload it to the website and find out whether the animal has been seen before, where it is from, and how old ttts," he says.

Tilo Burghardt at the University of Bristol, UK, is hoping to do the same for African penguins. His team has developed a system to automatically identify individual penguins from video of a colony on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa.

Usually, studying penguin populations means attaching numbered bands to their flippers,

Birds-eye viewer

HOWwould you I i~eto perch for hours on a cold and windy clifftop, monitoring the comings and goings of hundreds of identi.calliitdsl Thafs often the Unenviable task of those studying ne.s~ing guUlemots._But help is at hand.

Patrick Dickinson of the University

'So Dickinson and collea.Ques a~e deteloping software that can pick out l:iirds from a background of moving foliage. Not only will this automate the process Of counting tile birds, but it sheu Id also give biologists valuable insights .into thalr behaviour, says. Dicki nsnn "One.of

of Lincoln, UK,says a [eSedrdier may the thin_gs they are interested in is

wishto monitor a pair of birds ellery day to see if their chick.is still there. "8uttney ~an't stare at one pair of birdsforthewholeday."

201 NewScientist 118 September 2010

chick survival rates; and hON that correlates with the amount dftime bird:; spend attheir nests;' he says. 'To get data like that.

manually is virtually impossible."

The system wi'11 be tested on video footage of-nesting gUiliemots on Skomer off the coast of Wales, UK The first step is to train the softWare on imdges ofthe nestrng area, to develop a model. of the moving background. It then compares thisto each newvideo frame, breaking the image down into different regions and lool<ingfor new objeqswith ~he right sha_pe and position to be nesting birds.

says Burghardt, but these can cause severe injuries. And practieally speaking there's a limit to how many uncooperative birds one researcher can band.

Burghardt maps the placement and shape of spots on each penguin's chestas they pass the camera, and compares this with

a database of known birds. Soon visitors to the island will be able to upload their own pictures to help with identification.

At a computer vision conference in Is tanbul, Turkey, last month, Burghardt revealed that the pengutn-spotting technique can be used to fingerprint any animal with spots or stripes. Next, he hopes to use it to spot great white sharks by the jagged pattern on the rear of their first dorsal fin.

It is not just an animal's surface

For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.comitechnology

features that can be used as identifiers: footprints are also unique, says Zoe Jewell of Belize based conservation organisation Wildtracks.

While monitoring black rhino using radio collars in Zimbabwe in the 1990s, Jewell and her husband Sky Alibhai discovered that repeatedly sedating females to attach and then maintain collars reduced their fertility rates /journal of Zoology, vo1Z53, P 333).

So they began to investigate whether technology could emulate the way bush trackers identify animals by their prints. The footprint identification software they developed measures the distances and angles between various landmarks on the print, to create a unique biometric signature. So far it works for white and black rhino, cheetahs and

polar bears,

The software doesn't cope too well with smudged footprints, which have to be picked out by hand, but the pair are working with software firm SAS, based in Cary, North Carolina, to solve this.

Wildtracks is working with a conservation gTOU p in India to

hel p them track Bengal tigers. And they recently received a request for help in identifying

a rogue elephant in a herd in Botswana that has been train piing crops. This is likely to be tough, says Alibhai, because there are likely to be few features to look out for with an elephant print.

"You can spin the thing around and you don't know where the. top and bottom are," he says. But he is still optimis tic that the new technique will help spot their elephant in the crowd .•

Acoustics give 'dumbphones' a touch of smartphone magic

EM BARRASSED by your"ancient" push-button cellphona? Touchscreen envy eating you up inside? Fear not. New software could offer users of cheaper push-button phones access to some of the features usually found only on more pricey smartphones.

Called TouchDevice, the program uses acoustics to effectively render the casing and LCD display of a standard phone sensitive to touch. And it needs no new hardware, so can be appl ied to most existi ng phones, its creato rs cl aim.

The TouchDevice software, developed by Input Dy namics of Cambridge, UK, will let users scroll through menus, browse orzoom; all by swi ping, tapping or scratching a fingertip along the side of the phone.

It achieves this throug h smart use of the phone's built- in microphone, says inventor Giova nni Bisutti. Every tap on the phone's screen or its

casi ng produces a telltale sound that resonates throug h the dev ice. "The bui It-in mit picks up these 'acoustic fingerprints' and the TouchDevice software algorithms work outwhich spot 011 the phone was tapped or

swi peel" to within about 1 square centimetre, says Bisutti.

At last week's Meerkats and Avatars conference in (a mbridge, UK, the firm demonstrated a version able to identify si ngle crisp taps from a fi ngernail or styl us. The fi rm says that it is refining its algorithms to interpret the acoustically distinct signatures made by scratchi ng the

devicewith a fingernail, and tapping or swiping itwith a softer fi ngertip.

In future they say that the algorithms will be able to hand le taps from

mu Itiple fingertips at once, turning old phones into multi-touch devices.

Bisutti says he is in talkswith phone manufacturers about l.ic.ensing the software. "They see the advantages .. It lets them build a touchscreen phone without the

"The so·ftware uses sound to render the casing and screen ·of a standard phone sensitive to touch"

need for expensive hardware - and the software can be uploaded into existing phone desig ns," he says.

Acoustic fi ngerprinting hit the headlines earl lerthis yea rwhen

Chris Harrison at (a rnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, developed a human-skin- based cellphone control system called Skinput. Skinput uses compact

p roj ecto rs, dub bed p icop roj ecto rs, to turn skin into a "touchscreen" that, for i nsta nee, allows people to tap an icon projected on their forearm to answer a call. The tap's acoustic signature - a resonant ricochet through the arm's bone, muscle and fat - activates the phone's answeri ng mechanism.

;'Acoustics fingerprinting is really neat in that you can turn a totally passive item like a table, or i n this case a cell phone,into an interactive surface:' says Harrison. Paul; Marks.

18 September 20101 NewScientist 121

TECHNOLOGY

Living fuel cells to squeeze juice from jellyfish protein

WH 0 wants a dead battery? Dollops of green goo made of the material oflife- from jellyfish to fireflies - are now being recruited to produce electricity.

Zackary Chira.gwandi at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues have built a. fuel cell powered by stuff taken from living cells. First, they made a photovoltaic device based on green fluorescent protein (GFF)

. from the jellyfishAequorea victoria. They deposited two aluminium electrodes with a tiny ga p between themonto a silicon dioxide substrate and then

added a droplet of OFF on top, whereupon the protein assembled itself into strands between the electrodes. When ultraviolet light shone on it the OFF absorbed photons and emitted electrons, which travelled around a circuit to produce electricity.

N ext the team found a way to

power the jellyfish device withou t the need for an external light source. They concocted a mixture of llght-emlttlng pigments-

the luciferase enzymes found in fireflies and sea pansies - and the molecule ATP, which provides

living cells with energy. The mixture produces light, so when itwas placed alongside the GFP inside a fuel cell, the jellyfish goo produced its juice.

The team's fuel cell, which they will describe in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, could power nano-devices embedded

in humans or animals, says Chiragwandi, for example to diagnosedisease. HelenKnight.

Steampunk chip could ta ke the heat in jet engines

STEAMPUNK t;he rEl"imagining of modem"day teChnology tnrouqh a Victorian perspective could fiim! its way into modem jet engines. A retm logic gate. built in the sty'le of Victorian inventor (",ha r 1015 8a bba qa works at tem peratures that stOlfi d ilrd tra rslstcrs cannot stand. and 50 could be used in jet e ngin e e Ie ctro n i [5.

8ab ba ge fa mous Iy desi gn ed mechanical computers, in which

stea m- driven piston s tu m eel

cogs and levers. 'but hi,s unwieldy contraptions were qu i ckly sup e rs e ded by electronic computers, through which data is processed t;t vast arrays of tra nsi stn 1"5.

In a trnnsistor; the voltilge app'lied to ors of th e term inals. the gate,

d eterm in es wheth er a current flows tnro ug h it But ab ov e 2 SO °C th e device iS50 awa5h with thermally generated

e lectmn s that th e current lea ks thro ugh th~ gats when it is dosed. EVEm silicon carbide. a semlconcuctor material hardy against heatislitimmune to

the problem.

That prompted Te·Hao Lee', team

at CaseWestern Reserve Uniwrsity ill

(I eve la nd all io, to GO ns.id er retu m in g to methanicallogic. His team has developed a mechani.calversion of an inverter - the building blotkfor many types of logic gate, which thems81vss are fundamental mmponents of digital circuitry with in rornputers, The device uses an arrangement of flanoscalelevers lnstead of transistors (SGierl(e, 001: 10.llZ6/ science.1l92S11). Uke a telegraph

op erato r'sMo rse key; th e s e I eve rs physiGlI.1y make 0 r break co nta ct to pass or 'block rurrents.

App I ieati 0 n of a vo Itage rna I<es

the levers move Llndereledrostatic

a quantum refrigeration system that attraction. At SSO 0("' Lee's team managed

ru ns on s i mil a r pri nd pies to the B ri stol . tog et thei IIV erter to switch 01'1 an d off

team's blueprint, but.ths cooling is 500.000 times a 58cono. The faster the

World's smallest fridge takes aim at absolute zero

the 101 and 010 group states are exactly equal in energy, meaning the system can swap between the two easily. Next, the team imagined that the first qubit is attached to a heat bath, providing it with a constant source of energy that should increase the probability that the qubitswill take on the 101 state. However, the qubits interact on a quantum level with the unexpected consequence that the probabilities flip. making

the 010 state more likely. As the probability of the third qubit being

way that itwould cool. in state 0 increases, itstemperature

Each qubit has two possible energy falls. Increasing the probability is

221 NewScientist 118 September 2010

be used to chill the qubits in a quantum computer, cutting outthe thermal noise that can upsettheir delicate quantum properties.

However, to reach super-cool temperatureswithin a quantum ccmputarthe fridge would need

a super-hot heat bath. Raymond Laflamme's team at.tha University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, has made

"The fridge could chill the qubits in a quantum computer, cutting out thermal noise"

driven by an external magnet acti ng on the qubits ratherthan heat. They

switcllilig speed, the zippierthe computing. Lee predicts that switching speeds of a billion times a secorld

(1 gigahertz) will. eventually be possible - ,high enough to run engine control systems. Paul Marks.

A QUANTUM trick cou Id pave the way forthe world's smallest fridge - one built on the atomic scale. The small but mighty cooler could brush the ultimate chi II of absolute zero to keep quantum computers ru nni ng smoothly, accordi ng to a team of

th eoreti ca I p hys i c ists.

Blueprints forthe device, designed by Noah Linden at the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues, suggest that the fridge wou Id consist of

two quantum bits, or qubits, which interactwith a third qubit in such a

states: high, orHl", and low, or "0". The three qubits together share a group state, such as 110. The team's theoretical system is chosen so that

easy: turn up the heat on the first have used theirfridge to cool a carbon

qubit. The workwill appearin Pfrlsical atom to -95°C, but they intend to

Review Letters. approach absolute zero in future

The team says that the fridge could experiments. Kate McAlpine •

Great Ideas Start Here.

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OPINION

Towers of strength

Surplus electricity from cellphone towers could be used to save 5 million lives every year, many of them chi Idren, say Harvey Rubin and Alice Conant

EVERY year, at leas t 2 million people die from vaccinepreventable diseases such as polio, measles and hepatitis.

A further 3 million die from diseases spread by unclean water. Both of these big problems ultimately come down to the same thing: a lack of energy infras tructure in the developing world. We propose a solution that could be implemented immediately.

The 2 million vaccinepreventable deaths do not occur for lack of vaccines, but because of inadequate distribution. To work properly, most vaccines must be kept cold. That means constant refrigeration from the point of manufacture to the point. of delivery, often a rural.location. The series ofstorage and mobile refrigeration units required

to achieve this is called the

"cold chain:'.

Refrigeration requires energy, and in countries with alimited energy infrastructure, maintaining the cold chain can be an overwhelming challenge {Vacane, vol 12, p 1423}. A 2007 study in rural India found that go per cent oflocalhealth centres suffered frequent power failures, and that only 45 per cent of these had a back- up generator (Public Health Reports, vol 122, p nz),

Several other studies come to similar conclusions. In Nigeria, for example, inadequate energy infrastructure causes significant loss of vaccine potency between the National Cold Store in 1.agos and rural vaccination centres (Pu biic Health, vol no, p 325).

Although the cold chain is

241 NewScientist 118 September 2010

not the only impediment to immunisation, it is a major one. A technology that allows the cold chain to better penetrate rural regions would have a big impact.

Many of the 3 million people killed by water- borne diseases are children. Their deaths are a direct result of the fact that mote than

a billion people have inadequate access to dean water and 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation. Access to dean water requires water treatment, an energy-Intensive process that is often impossible because there is no reliable local energy source.

Both problems demonstrate the urgent need for a.rural energy infrastructure in the developing

\ f I

:0· ~.

. _

'"

(' \.

world. Our Energy for Health project, based at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; proposes to tackle this problem by hi tching it to a juggernaut

of global technological development- cellphones.

Cellphones are the fas test spreading technology in the world. According to the

U nited Nations' International Telecommunication Union, approxtmatelyzg per cent of the world's rural inhabitants are now covered by a cellular signal and

"If we succeed, by 2015 everybody in the world could have access to vaccines and clean water"

dose to 100 per cent will have coverage by 2015.

Cellphone networks rely on cell towers, and towers need power. This is usually supplied from the . electrici ty grid. In recent years, however, cellphone networks have increasingly spread into areas with nCl grid connectivity. These use stand- alone cell towers powered by diesel generators and, increasingly, solar and wind.

The off-grid network is growing fast. The industry trade association, GSMA, estimates that by 2012 there will be 639,000 off-grid

cell towers in the developing world. These represent a potential new energy infrastructure in locations with no access to the electrical grid.

Our proposal is simple: use surplus energy from off- grid cell towers to power cold chains and water purification systems. If we succeed, by 2015 everybody in the world could have access to vaccines and dean water and we could save 5 million lives a year.

Although supplying power is notpart of the network operators' business plan, GSMArecognises its potential. It promotes the

idea through an initiative called "Community Power" and its mos t recent report states" a significant opportunity exists to provide ...

. energy to people in the developing world who live beyond the electrlcl ty grid".

With the support of Community Power, network operators are already exploring ways of using their surplus

tower power to charge mobile handsets, household batteries and rechargeable lanterns. They also

(omment on these stories at www.NewScientistcom/opinion

recognise the potential for powering entire villages.

Our first aim is to solve the cold chain problem due to its minimal energy requirements. Cold-chain refrigerators require a minimum of8 hours of electricity a day, and even the mostenergy- hungry models requite no morethan

2 kilowatts of'power- less than

it takes to run a clock radio. Offgrid cell towers produce about

5 kilowatts of excess power

on average, so this should be achieva ble with no negative impact on the cellphone network.

Other cold-chain solutions are being explored, including heat- stable vaccines, solar powered refrigeration units and immunisation teams with refrigeration units in.their cars. However, these methods are expensive and some require many more years of research.

Water purification is more complicated. There are numerous purification methods, so the energy requirements are not as easy to calculate. In addition, infrastructure for transporting water is often lacking. But if cell towers can provide the energy for water purification and are then integrated with transportation projects, clean water could

be made available to all rural locations in developing countries.

Our idea has received enthusiastic support and we

are starting to put the wheels in motion. The next. step is quite straightforward. We want to implement a pilotproject in collaboration with the cellphone and pharmaceutical industries and a local healthcare system.

We are ready to start immediatelywe must start immediately-

and we are available to provide further information or to

receive suggestions .•

One minute with ...

Biern Lomborg

Has the "sceptical environmentalist" changed his mind about climate change? After all, he's asking for megabucksto tackle it

FierSt off. lets get something m:aight.Exanly how sceptical are you about cHmale change? Man· made global warming exists. My problem is With tlle single- minded focus on d~S:tit carbon emission reduaions tliat hCNe been promisel":iin 'the18 y,earssin(Qtne EarthSummir iii Rio, and hoNe gOnen virtually nowhere.

Wha,ts the alternative to tliis approach to cutting carbon emissions?

l;Jssembled a team cif leading ecorornisrsto do cost~bel1efitanalyseson a rnngfl of solotions, from plantmg more'trees to methane redliqldb ;:md.carborttdl(e.s. The top short-term solution was investing in reseamh iAto Enmate engineering, such <IS whitening clouds 10 refhi!ct mgre

sunlight - w;ttrrhe cavellt thatwedortt know if it wot~s yet The b~est lorfg· term eptimltLirned out to be investment in green ehe~y technology,

Can decisions about climate change Ile.boiled down to monetary c;alc]Jlations?

No. Ttieseare political ahd moral questions ~ but economists can 1ielp.,We Gar! put monet:aryV;Jllie on things like the loss of em systems and show how ttl pnoritlse climate (hange (ompared with otherpreblems ..

Your new .bOOK calls for $100 billion a year to fight climate change .. Yet In the pa,styou've erltidsed'those whoadl1ocat'E! throwing moneyanheRfoblem.

I would Rope that everyone \tY0.uld·criticise the s·trategy of Glrilon (urSdt;:) COST of S;eSO billioG, with fNery .QoI1;:)r spent only saving a couple of cents Of dlh1ate damage. That is a waSte of money. tfyou spend that moileyas eurT'ese<rrch shOvVs,you avoid 511 of ciimat~ qamage every ye<lrfor every doll;;lr spent. That's a greilcdeal.

Wherewililtie money come from?

Most emnomis'ts would stiggesra cOlrhon'ta;< because you should rax negatives atcottJing the damage done, The latestresear'ch estimates that xbe cost of emitting angxtJdJonne of COtis.about '57.lfyou,appried 'this tax wo rtdw ide, ~0!-l would

Ha rvey R u hi n d i rscts the Institute for

S troteg ic Th reat Anaiys is and Resp a nse at th e Un fversity of Pen r1Sy Iva n la philadelphia (email rubinh@upenn,eduj, A Ii ce Cona nt ls a stud e nt at H a rvay Mudd College in Claremont, California

PROFILE

Statisridan Bjl2lrn LCimhorg is adJunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and d.irector of tn e tn in k ta 11 k Co PJ,!o holgen Consensus (enter; which cmalysesthe tlestway to spend development money. His latest bo()k is Smarr Solutions to ClimaUi! Change

raisealtluntf 525,0 billion dollars. But this.l~el of tdXatibn olilY amountS-to around 6 csntson a gallon 01 11:1el,50 Is fl0I"goin,g to make people

. sw itch off from foss il fuels.

How come everybody else has got ltwrong? There is.a mmplerepol;lrlsaii6n oflhe ·debate onciimatE chan,ge. You either hear that global warming is noHlap'Pening, or itisthe end of theworld. We need to look a! thesrnarr middle. Whals the s mairest way lustep emitting CO2? Alat ill Glmpaignem wno are we<Jdea to cutting ca[bonemi$sionssqy we shouldn't talk:about climareenglneering,aslhis willdetranfrom the morally superior chmiee of ac(e-Pting th!?twe

. should do without. FrnnklY,tr hasn't happened and I don'"tsee most df"the wona .accepting that ElGirig wlthoutm"JJ workf0r.a sm;:iil proportion of well~meaning westemen',.burits not going to work for the rna ioriJiY, nor fdr ilnYOne inCth e developin,g wprld,

Interv'iew by Alison George

18 September 20101 NewScientist 125

OPINION LETTERS

Cietting the wind up

From Gordon/ames, Friends of the Earth C:Vmm

John Etherington's criticism of the financial support provided to wind power is fundamentally flawed because it ignores the

high "external costs" of electricity generation by fossil fuels and also the subsidies that these fuels receive (21 August, p 27).

The European Commission published a report in 2003 that concluded the costs of the harm caused to human health and

the environment by generating electricity from fossil fuels were significant (EXtemal Costs: Research results on socio-environmentai damages due to electricity and transport). In the UK, including these costs in electricity bills w.ould have raised them by between 4and 7 Euro cents per kilowatt- hour for generation from coal. By comparison, the external cos t ofgenerationfrom wind was estimated to be

0.15 Euro cents per kWh.

The energy market is further skewed by the subsidy of $557 billion that the International Energy Agency estimates was

Enigma Number1613

Odd one out

SUSAN DENHAM

Tlier,e are frve teams iflour local famballleaQue and'ea(h.plays each etMer once, inthe season, earning

;3 points·fora wtnand 1for·lldrilW. Here is the league table from

the eM of last season, but only part Of it is shown. And digits

have ronsistemly'beel1 replaced

handed out by governments to the fossil fuel industry in 2008.

A global subsidy of just $46 billion was given to renewable energy

in 2009, according to analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The lEA research also concludes that the phasing out offossll fuel subsidies, as agreed by the G20 las t year, would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 6.9 per cent

by 2020, equivalent to 2-4, gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to the current emissions of France, Germany, Italy, S pain and the UK combined. This has to be the way forward in our climate-changing world. Cardiff, UK

From Charlie Robinson

John Etherington suggests that' the UK'sRenewables Obligation legislation - which compels power companies to provide a proportion of their power from renewables - is in effect a subsidy for otherwise unviable renewable energy sources.

He appears to have forgotten the indirect subsidies received by fossil fuel-based power generators, in that they have not had to bear any of the

by letters, with different letters u'sed 'fa r diffe re md igits. The"t€!a'rni ape in decreasing artier of ¢oints, witfi nutwo tied, Ustthe IEsults in tht'lsegames which were nOl.drqws, in the form ''X.beat 'f',

Wan 0r.;rwn tost GO~15· 0:.;;11 5' . F.tIlntS' ftj( galn~

Ailing

.E!E!IIEJQ 0 D ,I!J

G1II1D~ 0 N

~9l1ng

WIN £1S.will be awarded m the sender ill the firm correct-imswer opened'on Wednestiay 21:3 october 2010. The EtHtoi's decision is final. Please'-Send eritriesto Enigma 1613, New S(ientist, Laten House,

84 ThEWbClId's ~oad, London wax 8N5, otto enigma@newsci'ehtlstGOl"n (please Irmludeyour postdl ad1:Jtess).

Answer to lad7 E;n!,)laru11, Germ;my 4: Tnj:l number is 28 The winner AtfieWheeler of Cardigan, Ceredigion, UK

261 NewScientist 118 September 2010

~T';! A TU(l6.4 /fJ.lnJJIRY·

" I'¥E, ~I e ALL. P u~rp I

i-:I Ai.!~! ~fl.D.M I

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costs ill posed on the rest of the world by their carbon dioxide emissions. If the true cost of dealing wi th climate change and other forms of environmental degradation caused by fossil fuel electricity was applied to these generators, their electricity would likely be thought unmarketable. All this without even considering the many direct subsidies received by coal, oil and other fossil energy industries.

Hove, East Sussex, UK

Shaken babies?

From Stephen Wealthall

Your editorial on the science behind shaken baby syndrome calls for new avenues of thought on the issue (31 July, p 3). After years of clinical paediatric practice and research into pressure relationships in the nervous system, lnowconsider that repetitive squeezing to calm a child might lead to similar symptoms to those of SBS.

The skull and spinal cavity

are a closed box, with a shockabsorbing system to cope with sudden changes in pressure.

This system consists of'the cerebrospinal fluid bathing the brain and cord, and the venous "sponges" around the spinal cord, which hold bl.ood that drains into the main veins returning to the heart. With each heartbeat or other Change in pressure in

the brain, an instantaneous transmission of hydraulic pressure causes these venous sponges to transmit an equivalent

volume offluid out ofthe sys tern and into the azygos vein system of the upper abdomen and chest.

If the venous sponges of the spinal cord or the return of blood to the great veins is compromised, the shock- abs orbing effect is dlmlmshed. One way that this

can happen is by.increased pressure in the Chest, which restricts blood flow from the azygos vein system into the

great veins, producing large rises in intracranial pressure. This inadvertent raising of pressure in the chest during physiotherapy on premature infants was probably responsible for bleeding into the brain - something which vanished when the chest pressure technique was stopped. I suggest that similar repeated episodes of apparently non-violent squeezing the chest may be the underlying mechanism in" non-accidental brain injury".

Squeezing a baby around

the chest, which might start

as a calming activity, will raise intracranial pressure. Ifrepeated it may cause quietnessunconsciousness - just by the fact of raising the pressure. At. the ages where blood vessels are proliferating and easily damaged, raised pressure may cause blood leakage and even vessel rupture anywhere in the brain or spinal cord. I find it far more likeiy that the almost unconscious action

of squeezing a ba by around the chest to calm It, rather than shaking, may lead to a sequence of increased squeezing that could lead to death.

Al1ckland, New Zealand

Wane,y Squier of the Department of Neuropathology, John RadCliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK replies:

The function of the system of intracranial vascular "sponges" and extensive dural venous reservoirs is unknown, but

a role in buffering hydraulic pressure seems reasonable. These structures are much iarger in newborns and in the first year of life than in the adult, suggesting

To join the debate, visit www.NeWScientist.comlletters

they have a role during delivery.

The venous outflow from the brain returns to the heart via valveless channels; increased intrathoracic pressure and chest compressions during resuscitation increase pressure in the dural sinuses and may cause intradural bleeding. which is common in

the young infant and readily mistaken for the thin film subdural bleeding often associated with non-accidental Injury. Such physiological mechanisms should be considered. While childbirth and potentially CPR may cause intradural bleeding. whether the "unconscious action of squeezing a baby ... to calm it" mightdo so is an interesting, but unproven, hypothesis.

Acoustic intent

From Paul Devereux

Trevor Cox's article on acoustic archaeology mentioned the debate about the intentional use of sound in prehistory

(21 August, P 4S).

Archaeo-acoustics is a broad subject, and there is no doubt aboutlntenttonaltty in the case of'lithophones - rocks that ring

when struck, creating drum

or bell-like sounds. Indeed, Palaeolithic and Neolithic llthophones have been found bearing rock art or percussion marks. Under the auspices of the Royal College of Art in London we have been conducting acoustic mapping on Cam Menyn in Wales, the source of the Stonehenge bluestones. A ringing rock there

is marked with artificial hollowsanyone making the markings would have heard the stone

ring out.

Intentional use of the acoustical characteristics of stone chambers in Neolithic mounds is indeed harder to prove, but they would have been evident to anyone at any time who had ears. There is also some evidence of deliberate engineering. Archaeo-acoustlc research helps us to acquire additional informationfrom some archaeological sites and,

in my view, the approach will become increasingly important and sophisticated. Moreton-in-Marsh, Gioucesiershire, UK

Peter Sheppard Skaerved

I read Trevor Cox's excellent article about the acoustics of ancient architecture on the way home from recording some new music, on a 17th-century violin,

in a small 13th-century church. My sound engineer and I find that working in acoustic detail inside old buildings actually raises the awareness ofthe natural world outside their walls: the sounds

of leaves, sonic qualities of different weather and even, on one occasion, a butterfly's wings on medieval glass.

Rather than modem people being acoustically primitive,

as Cox's article suggests, my experience of'listeners' reactions to music and silence in different environments shows me that we are profoundly affected by subtle changes in our acoustic space. It is just that, with the constant aural clutter in the media, people get treated as if their aural sensitivity is crude.

London, UK

Pioneering unity

From Robin Russel

Reporting on Petr Horava's ideas on how to unify quantum theory and relativity (7 August; p 28), Anil Ananthaswamy comments that

the theory will be difficult to test because the" predictions will deviate from those of Einstein's relativity only at energies far, far higher than can beprobed in labs today".

Rather than high energies, could we instead look to tests carried out over longer time periods and distances? The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, currently heading into the outer solar system, are experiments which have been running for nearly 30 years. Their acceleration towards the sun is greater than

is predicted by general relativitya phenomenon known as the Pioneer anomaly. other satellites have experienced similar effects, but not planets.

Might this scenario provide a useful test bed to judge Horava's theory against Einstein's? Walton-an-Thames, Surrey, UK

From Simon Williams

Iread about the end of'space-time with great interest, thinking that Horava must be about to replace Einstein, and everyone else would be using his work to good effect, until almost the end of the article and the mention of dark energy. Here it transpired that Horava' s theory" contains a parameter that can be fine-tuned" to allow the value for vacuum energy to fit observations.

This parameter sounds remarkably like what I, asa business analyst, would call a fiddle factor. .. Cramlinqton, Northumberland, UK

Space recycling

From Malcolm Watts

Your article debates how to recycle a space station (21 August, p S).

I should think the enormous cost of constructing the space station would dictate that the facility

be "mothballed" in orbit as a resource after its useful life. ItS' components could be used for future missions, a moon colony,

or sold to a private operator for space tourism. Is it feasible to lift the facility to an orbit such as the Lagrange point LS that doesn't

r- .

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decay because it has the same orbital period as the Earth? Newmarket, Ontario, Canada

Probably guilty

From Mats Andersson

The worst mistake in the thinking behind the use of DNA evidence in court is a simple one of mathematics (21 August, p 8).

Say that a court is told that there is a 1 in a million chance that the DNA matches someone apart from the suspect. If we assume that gender can be.ldentlfled

with absolute certainty, this means that for a case in the UK, there are 30 other people in the country who would match the DNA profile. SoU. is not a 1 in a million chance the police got the wrong person, it's 1 in 31 that they got the right one - based on DNA evidence alone.

This is why it is important

to have other evidence too, such as an eye witness.

Tliby, Sweden

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Email: ie-tters@llewscientistcom

In dude your lui lpostel address an d teleph a ne numbe r. and a reference (;iss ue.'pag e n u mber. TItle) to articles. We rese rve the ri 9 ht to edit letters. Reed Busl 11e5sInformaiion raservesthe right to use a~ su b missions sent to the 'letters col umn of New Sdentist magazi ne. in any ather format

18 September 20101 NewScientist 127

OPINION THE BIG IDEA

The sound of distant drumming

Talking about nature and nurture as separate, clear-cut forces is now seriously adrift from the complexities of developmental science, says Evelyn Fox Keller

ON E of the most striking features of the nature/nurture debate, the argument over the relative roles of genes and environment

in human nature, is the frequency with which we read it has been resolved {the answer is neither nature nor nurture, but both} while at the same time we see the debate refuses to die. So what is it that evokes such contradictory claims, that persists in confounding us? Indeed, what is the debate really about?

This turns ou t to be far from easy to explain because different kinds of questions take refuge under its umbrella. Some express concerns that can be addressed SCientifically, others may be legitimate and meaningful but perhaps not answerable, and still others make no sense. One reason for the persistence of the nature/nurture debate, then, isthat these questions are knitted together by ambiguity and uncertainty into an indissoluble tangle, making it all but impossible to stay focused on a single, well-defined, meaningful question.

Another important issue is that some of that ambiguity and uncertainty comes from the language of genetics itself. For example, we may read that the debate is about sorting contributions of nature from those ofnurture, and trying to estimate the relative im portance, but what exactly is meant by" nature" and "nurture"? Sometimes the distinction is between what is inborn and what is acquired after birth; more often, it is between genes and environment But not only does nurture affect

PROFILE

This.essay is bassd on TnI!' Mirag@ ofa SpOC1& Between Nature and Nurture by Evelyn Fox Keller (Duke University Press1 emeritus professor of history and philosophy of SCiem,e, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her boeks include Making Sense of Ute (Harvard University Press, 2002),

281 N,ewScientist 118 September 2010

prenatal development, we also need to ask what exactly is a gene, and what does it do? What do we mean by environment? Does it refer to factors beyond the organism that affect its development, to the milieu in which the fertilised egg develops, or to everything other than the DNA sequence?

Finally,. there's the question of contributions.

Contributions to what? This question is almost never posed, yet itis the most recalcitrant source oftrouble with the nature/nurture debate. The reason is that the subject of debate depends critically on our tacit assumptions about how that question is to be com pleted.

A common assumption is that what is

at issue is a comparison of the contributions of nature and nurture to the formation of

. individual traits. In his widely read book,

Nat urI? via Nurture, Matt Ridley argues that modern genomics has shown that, expressed that way, the nature/nurture debate invokes a meaningless opposition: "The discovery

of how genes actually Influence.human behaviour; and how human behaviour influences genes, is about to recast the debate entirely. No longer is it nature versus nurture, bu t nature via nurture. Genes are designed to take their cues from nurture."

Ridley is, of course, correct, But H. Allen Orr, a population geneticist at the University of Rochester, New York, complained in The New York Review of Books (14 August 2003) that Ridley" seems to have the right answer

to the wrong question". The right question

is statistical, Orr says. "It asks about the percentage of variation in, say, IQ,. that arises from inherited differences among individuals (do some parents pass on smart genes to their kids?) versus the percentage that arises from environmental.differences (do some parents pass on books to their children?). [Ridley's] question is mechanistic. It asks about how

genes behave within individuals ... The fact that genes respond to experience is certainly interesting and important .. , But it's the wrong kind offact to settle the ... debate."

Orr is writing from a field where virtually

all efforts focus on statistics, and where most of his colleagues recognise the question of how much an individual trait owes to nature/ genes and how much to nurture/environment to be unanswerable. Yet ambiguity in the language of genetics fosters slippage between the two questions, maintaining their linkage not only in the popular imagination, bu t

also in the literature. Even Orr's colleagues have difficulty sometimes in remaining clear about the distinction between statistics and mechanism. The unfortunate effect is to

For more opinion articles and to add your comments, visit www.NewScientistcomlopinion

"The entanglement of developmental processes is immensely intricate"

the past." And everything we have learned since has only underscored the fact that the entanglement of developmental processes is from the start immensely intricate.

The development of a fertilised egg depends on the complex orchestration of multi pie events involving interactions among many kinds of elements, including not only preexisting ones such as molecules, but also new elements, such as coding sequence s.fo rrned out of such interactions, temporal sequences of events, and dynamic interactions.

Compounding this entanglement of genes and environment further, biologists now recognise that the development of phenotypic traits is guided not so.much by the actual sequence ofnudeotides as by patterns of gene

obscure the basic fact that the causes of the developmentof a trai tare not separable.

Thefactors involved in development are many: nucleic acids (DNNRNA), metabolites and proteins; nuclear and cytoplasmic factors; genetics and environment. Recognition that their influence cannot be disentangled goes back a long way. In 1932, in Nature and Nurture, geneticist Lancelot Hogben wrote:

"Genetical science has outgrown the false antithesis between heredity and environment productive of so much futile controversy in

Natu re and nurture are as inseparable as the drum and the drummer in making a sound

expression. These are themselves products of an immensely com plex web of interactions between environmental stimuli (both internal and external to the cell) and the structure, conformation and nucleotide sequence

of the DN A molecule. To think of the causes of development as separable is, therefore, a mistake. Moreover, given that the very notion of interaction presupposes entities that are, ideally, separable, it can even berrusleadlng

to speak of develo pment as a product ofcausal elements interacting with one another.

Hans Kummer, a primatologist now

at the U niversi ty of Leipzig, Germany, offered a useful analogy when he said that trying to determine how much of a trait is produced by nature/ genes and how much by nurture/ environment is as useless as asking whether the drumming we hear is made by percussionist or instrument. Neither the drumming northe trait of an organism is composed of separable elements.

The formulation that presu pposes the separability of nature and nurture can be traced to Francis Galton's 1874 book,English Men of Science, where he wrote: "The phrase 'nature and nurture' is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct

~ heads the innumerable elements of which

~ personality is composed." Authors had written ~ about nature and.nurture long before, but

~ never to my knowledge in terms of disjoint

~ elements. Yet the notion took off, at least in

~ the Anglo-Saxon world. Why? And why, given

«

~ what we now know abou t developmental

~ dynamics, IsIt so resistant to dlssolu tion?

~ Galton'sformulation was greatly assisted ~ by Charles Darwin's theory of particulate

inheritance. But where Darwin thought these particles ("gemmules") mtght.sometlmes allow acquired characteristics to be passed on, Galton Was convinced otherwise. Tohim, they were unchanging - hard, like atomsand, like many others, he thought particulate inheritance could do forbiology what atomic theory had done for chemistry.

But biology, and genetics, turned out to be vastly more com plicated. Not surprisingly, the language of genetics lags behind, keeping alive debates that no longer have ~ indeed, may never have had - meaning. My hope is that

a language that better reflects contemporary science will help us out ofthis morass, and let us.reformulate questions about nature and nurture in ways that more productively address concerns people continue to have .•

18 September 2010 1 NewSdentist 129

Who ate all the stars?

There's a hole at the centre of our galaxy, says Marcus Chown, and this one isnt black

30 1 NewScientist 118 September 2010

ALITILE over 25,000 light years away lies the mostmystertous place in the nearby universe. Jam-packed with colliding stars and cloaked in dust, it is the centre of our galaxy. At its very heart, we suspect, lurks a monstrous black hole more than 4 million times as massive asthe sun. Known as Sagi ttartus A·, it is thought to rip stars apart, orchestrating stellar mayhem as it warps the very fabric of space and time.

Similar supermassive black holes are thought to exist at the centre of every galaxy. I t is only now, by observing stars whirling aboutthe monster closest to home, that we stand on the verge of confirming their existence once and for all. Not only that, we could also test Einstein's general theory of

relativity in the most extreme environment yet.

While the centre of our galaxy could serve as a lab for studying processes that occur in other galaxies, the first tantalising glimpses ofit are throwing up surprises a bout our own. Recent observations have revealed that the heart of our galaxy harbours a second kind of hole - a region of space containing only a few young stars andmystertously empty of older ones.

Previous scans of the Milky Way's heart showed a few dozen young stars whose bright blue light is intense enough to shine through the shroud of dust. Astronomers expected them to be the tip ofthe stellar Iceberg, their light.overwhelming the faint glow emitted by vast numbers of more ancient stars.

That all changed when three teams

COVER STORY

independently got their hands on sensitive infrated telescopes capable of penetrating the dust shrouding the galactic centre, As they scanned the MilkyWay, they counted thousands of old stars. But when they got very close to the galactic centre, the numbers plummeted, revealing a patch of space 3 light years across that was seriously lacking in stars {Astronomy & Astrophysics, v6l499, p 483}.

The hole story

This is a big surprise because it goes against our ideas of what ought to be happening at the galactic centre, The gravitational field around Sagittarius A· is thought to be strong enough to have herded stars into its neighbourhood over billions of years. So why aren't there more ancient stars at the galactic centre?

The most mundane explanation is that even the latest infrared telescopes ate not sensitive enough.to pick up theirfaint light. Bu t there is also a more exciting possibility: that the centre of the galaxy is composed of super-dense bodies that are hard to see, such as neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes left behind in supernova explosions. Ifthis idea is correct, it suggests that most of the starsthat form at centre ofthe galaxy are massive ones that end their lives as

su pemovae, "This would make the region different from all other places we have observed," says David Merritt ofthe Rochester Institute of Technology in N ew York.

There are problems with this scenario, however. The main one, says Merritt, is that these massive stars would not grow up alone: a small number of less massive stars should also have formed here. At the end

of their life these would have grown into red giants, luminous stars that should be easy

to observe. So why haven't we seen any!' One possibility is thatthe stellar-mass black holes ate all the red giants, but'ft is hard to make this scenario work", Merritt says. "We would need more stellar- mass black holes than can be accounted for by the 1 million solar masses of matter known to exist in the innermost part of the galaxy."

An even more exotic explanation is that sometime in the past, the Milky Way merged with another galaxy whose own supermasslve black hole swallowed some of'the Milky >

18 September 20101 NewSdentist 131

IIWe know that something. massive lurks at the galaxy's centre because of its gravitational effects, but we need direttevidenre to be sure that it lis a black hole"

Way's stars. Alternatively Saglttarl us A' itself could be responsible for the stellar

void surrounding it. Anything straying within about Slight minutes ofa su permassive black hole would be ripped apart, a fate that could have befallen the missing stars.

Eyeing the monster

Merrlttalso blames Sagittarius A ., butfavours a slightly different scenario. He has calculated that the orbits of stars circling Sagittarius A· will become longer and narrower over time. Eventually the stars will venture close enough to the black hole to be sucked in. Ala s, this theory, too, has problems. As stars are continually forming, in order to create a void "you would have to send stars towards the supermassive black hole, then stop further stars being resupplied" to the central region, Merritt says. But it is hard to see just what could stop stars arriving at the galaxy's heart.

50 while there are plenty of ideas on the table, the mystery persists. "The observational results are not sufficient to really determine. which of'these scenarios is most likely, or even rule one out completely," says Rainer Buchholz of the University of Cologne in Germany, who hel ped discover the void at

the galactic centre. "For now, we can assume the hole is there, though we do not know fOT certain why." To find an answer we will need to get closer to the monster at the heart of

the Milky Way.

Luckily, a number of techniques are allowing astronomers to do that. Those

same techniques could also help us achieve something even more profound: putting general relativity- Einstein's theory of gravity- to the test. Its effects in the vicinity of planets, stars and galaxies have been probed, and the theory has passed with flying colours every time, Where relativity hasn't been checked is in the extreme gravitational field of a black hole, where space and time

are warped to an extraordinary degree. By watching exactly how matter falls into a black hole, astronomers hope to tell whether black holes are anything like the picture ofthem painted by general relativity.

Up.till now the most promising technique has been very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), which combines the signals from radio

321 NewScientist 118 September 2010

telescopes scattered across the globe to simulate a radio dish as big as the Earth. This virtual dish can resolve fine detailin astronomical objects, but even so its vision isn't yet acute enough to discern the most distinguishing feature of the supermasslve black hole: its event horizon. The point of no return fOT in-falling matter, itis about ig million kilometres across, or one-tenth of the distance between Earth and the. sun - minuscule in astronomical terms. Even the best picture of Sagittarius A* to date, taken by a team led by Shep Doeleman at the Massachusetts Institu te ofTechnology'sHaystack Observatoryin Westford, is still too blurred by afactor of3.

There is, however, a way to boost VLBI's resolution: observing at wavelengths shorter than the centimetre-long ones studied so far. By looking at wavelengths of1.3 millimetres and maybe even o.87millimetres, the technique should finally be able.to pick out what is happening near the event horizon (New Scientist, 23 May 2009, p 28).

Heart of the galaxy

Stars orbfting the Mil.ky WBis superrnasslva black hole have highly elliptical orbits

Even so, it won't be easy. The radio waves we are trying to observe are emitted by electrons inside "hotspots" in the electrically charged gas swirling into the su permasslve black hole. To test general relativity in the vicinity of the black hole, we would first have to run computer simulations of the swirling gas, predict its radio emission, and comparett with the observations, "VLBI is a promising technique butit is unlikely to give us a clean signal," says Merritt. "It's messy:'

Two groups of astronomers have a far cleaner way of probing Sagittarius A·: observing the individual stars orbiting it. Teams led by Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and Mark Morris of the University of California, Los Angeles, have been observing 20 super- bright stars orbiting within 100 light days of our galaxy's centre.

One star is pre-eminent in their studies:

a heavyweight called S2 that.is 20 times as massive as the sun. S2 is the only star to have been observed making a complete orbit of the galactic centre, a journey that takes it

15 years. From this, Genzel and Morris's teams have calculated the mass ofthe central superrnasslve black hole to be 4.3 million times that of the sun, which is slightly higher than previous estimates (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vo1707,P Li14,L117) ..

Let's not forget that; until now, there has only been indirect evidence for a. black hole

at the centre of our galaxy. We know that something massive lurks there because its gravity affects the motion of nearby stars, and the most likely cul prit is a black hole. But we need direct evidence to be sure. N ow the hope is that stars like S2 will not only provide that evidence but also allow us to test our most cherished ideas about black holes.

Among them is the idea, known.as

the no" hair theorem, that black holes are essentially so simple that they can be described adequately by their mass and how fast they spin. Theorist Clifford Will of

" Washington University in 5 t Louis, Missouri, ~ suggests that we could test the theorem, and ~ therefore general relativity, by examining the i orbits of stars close to the superrnasstve black ~ hole. One way to do this would be to watch a

~ star complete many orbits around the galactic 8 centre. Einstein's theory predicts that the

star's point of closest approach to the centre should progressively shift from one orbit to thenext, If the.no- hair thea rem is correct, the rate of'thts" precession" depends on the mass and spin rate of the black hole, and nothing else. Even better, says Will, would be to track two stars (TheAstrophysica/Journal Letters,

vol 674, p L25). That way, you can use the relationship between both stars' orbits to cancel out the mass of the black hole, so the precession depends only on its spin. If it turns out that the precession depends on something more complex, then the no-hair theorem is wrong. And if that is true.then general relativity is also wrong. So the stakes are high.

Another way to test relativity is to use

'lf a black hole's gravity doesn't depend on just its mass and spin rate, then general relativity is wrong"

pulsars. These super-dense remnants of

su pernova explosions spin very rapidly, sweeping a lighthouse beam of radio waves across the sky once every turn, This makes them fantastically precise timekeepers. If any exist in the centre ofthe galaxy, then we might be able to pick up another relativistic effect - gravitational time dilation, where

the passage of'time slows down in the warped space- time surrounding a massive object. Spot this and we would have evidence ofa massive black hole.

Star-spotting

Unfortunately, pulsars are intrinsically faint, making them difficult to detect in the dusty galactic centre. But astronomers have just embarked on an attempt to detect all the pulsars in the MilkyWay, and they arehopefuI of observing pulsarsin the centre of the galaxy (New Scientist, 17 March 2010, p 30).

General relativity isn't under threat just yet. So far Sz is the only star we know of'that comes within 1 light day of Sagittarius A" during its orbit. To really probe the space-time around the supermasstve black hole, we will need to observemany more stars this dose

to the galaxy's centre.

That is the aim of a team led by Andrea Ghez at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles, whichis currently upgrading the infrared interferometer at the twin 10" metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii. Meanwhile, Genzel's team is building an instrument called Gravity that will combine near- infrared light collected by the four telescopes atthe Very Large Telescope in Cerro Paranal, Chile, to measure faint objects with unprecedented resolution. They hope it will let them watch starsmoving within a region just a few times the diameter of the supermasstve black hole's event horizon. The instrument could be in operation by 2013-

For billions of years the Milky Way has kept its best secrets hidden from view. Waiting a few more years before we finally uncloak its su perrnasstve black hole isn't too much to ask, is it? •

Marcus Chovm is the author of We Need to Talk AboutKelvin (Faber & Faber, 2010). Follow him at twitte~[Omlmar[us(howrl

18 September 20101 NewScientist 133

Windowsto themind

When it comes to understanding the brain's visual system, artists are way ahead of

neuroscientists, says Jessica Griggs

Since humankind first put brush to canvas, .artlsts have played with the mind and the senses to create sublime atmospheres and odd impressions. It is only.recently, witha blossoming understanding of the way the brain deconstructs images, that neuroscientists and psychologists have finally begun to understand how these trickswork.

Here we take you on a grand tour of the burgeoning field of neuroaesthettcs,

341 NewSdentist 118 September 2010

You'll find out how Claude Monet bypasses your consciousness andplugs straight into your emotions (page 37), how Salvador Dali triggers neural conflicts (page 38) and how Renaissance art and trompe l'oeil fool us into believing the impossible (pages 35 and 36). On

page 39 we turn the spotlight on the artist's mind, revealing how Wassily Kandinsky drew on his synaesthesia

to produce some of the most celebrated artworks of the zoth century.

T

MODULAR BRAINS

PERSPEITIVE is one of the strongest depth cues out there. The British artist Patnck Hughes uses

this to actvalltage in his "reverspectwe" artworks, painted on wedges ortruncated pyramids wilich projea forward Whats cunning about t!lese works is til at til e p arts of the canvas 61 esest WIlle observer are depiaedin perspective, as though they are the farthest away. Despite the physiGll SHuaure coming out of the wall, when we look at ~hem suaight on we get the impression that they recede into it In the woli< shOVlin ablJle, for E'X<lmple, the Henry Moore 'iculpture at me end oftne lefthand corridor is physically closer to the viewer tna n the Picasso and Van Gogh portraiTS in the centre.

Thomas Papathomasof the Laboratory of Vision Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey has experimented with Hughes's reverspectives, locating the vi"ewing distance at which people stop seeing the illusion and see the structure as it really is (Perspective, vol 31. p 521).. Hefouild the Illusion is strongest when the works are viewed from afar ~ we are so familiarwith rect<lngiesdrawn in

Patrick Hughes's works play with the brain's 3D perception

perspeaive that almost everyone sees the corridors as receding!. But as you walk tnwards the work; other aspens of depth perception come imo play until they dominate the carefully crafted perspective russ and the illusion falls <lW<f!j, revealing the trus protruding S1JUCUJCE,. These aspects include our stereo vision and motion Darallax(wheh we move

in from of a stationary objea, the near parts of the objen mcwe further acoss our rsnnaman the more distant parts),

Papathomas says this shows that the brain

p roce 5S e s the di ffe re nt kJ nd 5 of vis u al information in distinct regions, "These kinds of effects tell us that our brain is modular," he says, There's1:he linear perspeawe "modul~' that says that the paiming is concave, and tt1estereoptic and the motion"parallax modules that s~ it is convex. Having multiple modules means lhanhe brain can take an average of their outputs to discern the most accurate interpretatibn, he says, The system works unless we encounter something created del,iberately to confuse it.

MYSTIFYING MIRRORS AND UNSETTLING SHADOWS

IT IS ajoyolls occasion - the newborn Virgin Mary gets herfirst bath, surrounded by attentive nursemaids. Her mother, exhausted from the birth, reclines en a golden dals'ln an alcove. All are bathed.in beautifullightthat floods in from all directions. But hang on a second. Where is allthis iiglit coming from; whEinthere .is only one arched opening and a smallwiodow to illuminate tfie alcove in the plaza? .And why dothe people.inthe foreground cast deeper sl1adowsthan those

fu rthsr ba c k?

Although nothing seems amtssat first glance, the more you look attbis painting by Fra Carnevale, the more Incongrultiesyoufii1d .. PYou couldn't recreate the Carnevale scene with all the spotlights in Hollywood;' says Patrick Cavanagh"a neurosGientistat Pari s Des ca rtes U oi vel's ity in Fran ta and at the Vision Science LaboratorY of Harvard University.

Yet we rilrely noti.cethese

disc re panei es be ca use the b rai n's intuitive understanding of lightand n:iflection is so poor. Indeed, cavanagh'S studies have found that wh.en the brain analyse.s a shadow,

]t doesn'~ notice discrepancies in

the rliredion ofiight, the shape of tlie Object or

th e d ista n ce be:tWe en

an object. and its shadow (JourI/o/ Of Experimental Psychology: Human Perceptionond PeJ:/ormance, vol IS, p3). Artists like Carnevale cashed in onthls trattto create atmospheric scenes that couldrrt possiply exist.

Reflections in mirrors are equally challenging to the brain. When Marco Bertamini attfie University of Liverpo 01, U K, ~ s ked people ~o lookat Diego Vel'azquez's Rolieby Venus, inwhich a cherub holds up.

w I

" :0

I

1l

'" t-

:':

The Birth ojthe Virgin by Fra Carnevale fools us into beli e;lng the impossible

a mirror to Venus as the goddess lies with her back to us.the majority assumed Venus was aamiring herself. YetvieweYs can see Venus's face ref;racted in their direction,

rna ki I1g it P try sica Ily im p oss i b I e that she is admiring herself (Perception, vol 92, p 593).

This inability to gauge mirror

'i rna g es, so ex pi 0 ltad bY a rtlsts, is reflected in real life, too: Bertamitii has shown that despite having mirrors all around us, we are appalling at predicting What should bavlslbls in them (CQgnit/Qn, vol 98, p 85). This 'inability was particularl?{tro,ubling for one Francisco Sca'ramanga, James Bond's arch enemyin The Man. with the Golden Gun, whose confusion in

a hall of mirrors costhlmhls life.

So what are the benefits of a' brain that works to a different set of rules from the world we live'in? According to Cavanagh, it's all about speed. You couldn't do a proper analYsis of all the laws of physics in the tenth of

a second lttakesyeurvlsual system to form an iinage, he says, so we evo.llled a small set ofrules that can be computed rapidly without requlrlnq a large proportion of our brain.

18 September 20101 NewScilintist 135

Ifmay Ibo~like a 3D cabinet buttbisworkwas gaint.ed _on a flat eanvas

UNCOVERING TROMPE L'OEIL

PLINY the ;E.lder recounts the story Renaissance, when palnters

of two legenda.ry painters; ZeUld.s mastered the art of perspective

and Parrhasius, who wei'e tl3'ing to decide which ofthemwas theniore accomplished artist They brought two covered canvases to show each other. FirstZeuxis revealed his - a bunch of grapes soJusciously iifeiike that birds swooped d'owR

t.o peck aUhe canvas. Corifident of

further into the cabinet you look, and the. way shadows fall on ~he sill

drawing,tAatthe genre flourished. and the paper drawing.

Examp[es include t.heJmage of a . the most important visual cue,

llttl e boy d i m oi ng 0 ut of a pai riti ng's however~ is th e stra'nge sha p e of

frame, called Escaping Criticism, the canvas - it:fo II ows the outline of

and the.work.abo.ve~ known as the the open cabinet. "We're al.llIery

Cabin.flt of Curiositfes, thouqhtto have been painted by the Flemish artist Domenico Remps in the 16905.

"Trompe l'oeil didn't flourish until the Renaissance .. when painters mastered the art of perspactlve"

victory, Zewdsleaned overto pull th e cove r off Pa rrhasi Lis's offe ri n g, only to 1 i nd th at thecoye.ri ngitse If wasthe painting. Having been fooled by his rival's handiwork, Zeuxis aCimifted defeat.

Examples oflliis 'trick of the rzye" art; or-trompe l'oeil. as it commonly known, date b.ack to GraecO"'Roman times, but itwasr1t until the

361 NewScientist 118 September 2010

This painting works because the objects are life:size and depicted in hyper-realistic detail, and also beca~se Remps lard a set of d.ecoys that hoodWink ourvlsual system into perce iv i ng depth, .say s Prlsdlla Heard, a neuropsycliologist. crtthe University 01 the West. of England in Bristol, UK. Misleading cueslnclude ~heway the wooel grain shrinks the

Monet's Water Lilies excites the emotional regions ofthe brain

familiar with tablnetswlth rectangular dears, so when we see this, we have eitlier goUo see it as an oddly-shaped thing on a wall or a's a fam ilia r object tl1a1: ts stic ki I1g o lit;' H ea td says.

All of these factors combine to fool the 'brain into perceiving a scene that may well be physically lmposslble, Heard and the late Rirhard Gregory, protessor emeritus of'neu ropsychol 0 gy' at toe Un ill e rsJty of Bristol, once tried teolacea Dottle of wine, '01 Wine glass and a lu mp af cheese in a'3D frame to mlrnlc a trompe roeil of the same image. ''We could nevertind the right objects because toe dimensions in the painting are distorted;' saysHeard.

EMOTIONAL IMPRESSIONS

The Impressionist movement ;Jrguably produced some of our best-loved pGlihtings.A \itudy of more than 90,000 people in the UK, aged 13 to 90, found that they preferred Impressionis.t art o.rer cubism, Henaissance or Japanese styles (Bririshjourno! of PSYchology, vol 100, P SOl), Butwhatis it atoutths movemem, led by Claude Monet, that we find so irresistible?

Harvard neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh puts

it down torne way these ambiguous imag.es fim:e the brain to create a more personal imerpreta.tion of the work. The bl urry shapes and spl ash es of colour mean that people have to draw on their own memories to fill in the missing visu~1 details, he says.

So each painuing is interpreted slightly differently bye~bh imltvidu~l, making theexperienm more visceral.. "Our visual system reflexively fills in expressions ;md mood ... going deeper into our mental state than any fully explicit painting could .. "

These paintings may also be amactwe because their blurred terms speak directly to the amygdala, a bra in region i flVolved in ttl e p races sin 9 of emoti 0 ns. The amygdala am like an ea rIy warning system, on the I ooko ut for u niocuse d til re ats I urki ng' i no u r peripheldl vision, and fttends to react more strortg[y to thingswe haven'T yet p~cked up consciously. In 2003, a study by PatrikVLlHIeumier, a neurologist at the UniverSitY of Geneva in Switzerland, found

lIThe crude brush strokes delay our conscious response and engage the brain's emotional centres"

that the amygdala responds more emhusia~ically to tu zzy fa ce s ttl an to sh Glrp vers ion s of Th e sa me image. Cavanagh says this indicates that 'blurred images seem to hdVe privileged access to the sunconsuous Indeed tJle brain regions typically associated with, conscious image-processing were noticeably 'Subdued when subjects looked anne blurred images (NotureNeurosdence; vol 6, p 624).

Impre5sionist paintings may exploit the same effea .. "The texTure and crude dabs and strokes of Impressionist art may be'enough to delay our conscous response mtne content of ttl.e painting. allowing the emotional Germes to fite more frequently," S;Jy5 Cavanagli.

18 September 20101 NewScilintist 137

DALI'S DUALISM

WHAT doyou see when you look anhe painting a Dove? A semi-naked woman in t.1le foreground? Check. A crumbling building in the background? Check, Nothing too unusual mere, But what

a bOllt ttl e ttl rea n ed figures u nde r th e archway 7 Look now, and you might see them talking, to two other characters in black and white. But look again, and they may instead be admiring a bust. of the philosopherVoltaire,

1Ns :is Salvador Dalis Slave Marker wirh rhe Disappearing BuS[ of VoJraire, which includes

ani II us ion ttl at lets observers perce we two DO 55i b Ie images, Just in case you can't see it the rear arch of the building bemmes the forehead of Voltaire. The heads of the tJlack-and~white figures are his eyes, and their clothes his cheeks and chin,

Susana MartinezcConde, a v!isuat neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurologicallnstltute in Phoentx,

Arizond.,expiains tMdt the ambiguity arises because our brain's p.efception of the wm1d sa rough apPIT»(imatlon of reality., "Our brain has to fit within our cranium so it cannot process everything that is out there," she says, So t.he brain takes short cuts, sampling only the most significant parts of the scene, such as the contours, the edges and the corners of objects, The rest is typically built around our memories of past experience and our expectations of what should be mere,

This ispamcularly notic:eable when the images arevagLie, says Martinez-Conde. Compare the level of detailin the non-arnblquous figure of the woman on the left who is richly depitted from the creases of her turban to the tendrils of her hair, with that of Voltaire, whose ears are missing and whose mouth canrot be made out Similarly, the hands and necks

arE missing from the bla(k- and,white characters ''There is a larof mtorrnauon whicll need5 to be fiHed in, and the brain can fill it in in a number of differentways," she eXDlains,

The brain's expectations often feed into the visual system, determining. how the.se brain regions fill in the missing details and gmwpdffffirent parts of the image. It's the same reason that trompe

l'oeil works (page 36), and it means your previous experieflces might determine whetheryou see

Th e figures or Voltai re's face fi rst.

Butwhy does the painting seemto flip tmtween the two interpretations at random? Previous fMRl1 brai n sr ans have s ugg este d lh at two se p a rate pools of neurons code each of the possible interpretations (Proceedings offhe Roya/Sodery B, vol 255,

p 2427), This led Andrew Parker and: Kristlne krug at the Ufliversity of Oxford to hypothe.sise that we

381 NewSdentist 118 September 2010

This Dali painting forces the brain to fill in the missing details under the arch

see one interpretJtion when the corresponding set of neurons fires more strongly than the set representjng the other image. Ne ural responses fluctuate, hOllVever; so evemually the other pool

of neurons will gain the upper Iland'. '!he flip occurs when one of these two Jlmostwarring populations of neurons, for reasons probably quite random, becomes more active," says Parker He has tested this theory in monkeys using' a similar illusion (Philosophical Tmnsaaions of rhe Royal SocieTy B, voI3S7, P 1053).

Why would the human mind have developed this strange trait? "We evolved to make sense of parti;:)1 visu~1 details ;md: to make out d coherent picture even in poor lighting," S<1jS Martinez -Conda "III us ions are a by-product of this. They represent the dissociallon between objective reality and subjective perception."

EXTRASENSORY CONNECTIONS

.lETliE RS, wo rds, nu m bers, so i.J tlds,

the one in KandinskY's Blue in one of

touch, paln and smell all triggerflashes . my acupuncture sessions, Since lt.is of colour in Carol Ste'en's mind. The New really hard to explain yourvisions to

York- bas e da rt ist fi rst d iscovere d she could paint toler synaesthetic visions aft.er allisitto her acupuncturist. "Each time aneadlewent in a colour flashed 'in front of my ey,es;' she recalls. "When all the needle,s were irfitwas like watching a movie. I rushed home and re.alised I could recall enough to paint apartotwhat I had seen:'

Other sYnaesthetic artists include David Hockney and Wassily Kandinsky, .who painted the piece below, entitled Blue. There is still some speeulatlon overwhetherKandinsky actually had. synaesthesia orwas simply"influenced by reports oflhe phenomenon.in other people. But to Christopher Tyl.er of the Smith-Kettlewell B.rainlmaging Center in San Francisco, who has analysed Kandinsky'swork, lt'ls olJvious UoumaJ otthe fiistary a! Neurosdence, 110112, p 22.3). "Ifsvery explicit ln f:iis work and his writings. He went to a performance of Wagner's musk and then wrote about howvlvld the visual impressions of the horns were and the colourtliat the music evoked in his mind. Thafs synaesthesia," he says.

Steen agrees: "I saw a sphere like

Ka,ndinksy exploited his synaesthetic: experiences in paintings such as Blue

someone, I assume Kandinsky was a synaesthete~' The striking colour contrastwitlithe red dot lsalso faFniliarto her.

These el;(periences are probably due to extra cor:mections between the auditory andvisual cortex, says jack towan, a mathematical neuroscientist atthe University of Chicago. He tfilnks the additiooillflow ofinrohnatjoninto thevi.sual cortex overloads its normal inhibitol)"rnechanisms, a.llowing spentanaous waves of activiW that WOi;Jld normally be elimi nated to propagate :through the brain. These sigDals may represent soape !:ii" colour. Since the brain can'ttell whether a signal was generated.within the brain or externally, synaesthetes see the shapes as if they came from the eye.

Steen, KandinskY and Hockney join aJong llna of synaesthetic poets" authorsand composers, a.ut are

S:J na e !;thetes natu Fa I!y m orecreatille? Jamie Ward atthe University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, found'tliatpeople with the conditi.on were more I ik:ely

to. be e ng age~'with the a its t han 'non-synaesthetes, whetherthrough pursuing a creatilfe hobby like painting

or,. more passively,through vi'siting art galleries, for example Uouma! of British Psychology, vol 99;pI27).

EM while ~naesthetes also tended to score higher on some measures of creativ ity;those th at performed best inthese testswere no more likel): to take llP an artistic

hobby than those who scored. worst This

s u 9 9 ests syn aesthetes dolft take to art simply because they'.re good at

it. On balance, Ward thinks people.with synaesthesi.a put brush to (ilnvas simply because they

want to express their strange experiences.

Jessica Griggs is th~ ,Glreei"S. editor of N~w5dentist

18 September2010 1 NewSdentist 139

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Is there any way to reverse the seas' relentless rise? Stephen Battersby investigates some spectacular ideas

401 NewSdentist 118 September 2010

•

FOR some, the end may come slowly, as the seas creep a little higher each year. That was the fate of the ancient cities of Herakleion and Eastern Canopus, which took centuries to be swallowed up. Elsewhere, the land may be eroded by waves and swept away by currents, as happened to the medieval English port ofDunwich. Or disaster could strike almost overnight, when as torm joins forces with the tides to create a surge that overwhelms flood defences, leaving the survivors wondering if there is any point

in rebuilding.

As the world gets warmer, sea levels are rising. It has been happening at a snail's pace so far, but as it speeds up more and more lowlying coastal land willbe.lost, At risk are many of the world's cities and huge areas offertile

farmland. The sea is set to rise a metre or more by the end of this century, swamping much vital intrastructure and displacing hundreds of millions of people {New Scientist, ljuly 2009, p 28}. And that's just the start. "Unless there is a rapid and dramatic abou t· face in emissions - which no one expectsthe next century will be far worse than this century," says glaciologist Bob Bindshadler of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt; Maryland.

Throwing trillions of dollars at the problem could probably save big cities such as New York, London and Shanghai, but the task of defending all low-lying coas tal areas and islands seems hopeless. Or.is.it? What if, instead offighting a rearguard action against the encroaching oceans, we stopped sea levels

rising at all? Could we find a way to slow the accelerating glaciers, drain seas into deserts or add more ice to the great ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica?

These ideas might sound Bond-villain crazy but we have got ourselves into such

a bad situation that maybe we should start to consider them. Ifwe carry on as we are, sea levels will rise for millennia, probably by well over 10 metres. Slashing greenhouse

gas emissions would slow the rise and ensure it peaks sooner and at a lower level, but the longer we prevaricate, the bigger the rise we will be committed to. Even if" conventional" geoengineering schemes for cooling the planet were put.In place and worked as planned, they would have little effect

on sea level over the next century unless

combined with drastic emissions cuts.

In short, if coastal dwellers don't want

their children and grandchildren to have to abandon land to the sea, now is the time to start coming up with Plan C. So New Scientist set out in search of the handful of researchers who have begun to think about specific ways to hold back the waters, or are at least prepared to talk about thefeaslbillty of such ideas.

One of the reasons why the great ice

sheets of Greenland and Antartica are already shrinking is that the ice is draining offthe land faster. Ice floating on the surrounding seas usually acts as a brake, holding back glaciers on land, so as this ice is lost the glacietsflow faster. The acceleration of the Iakobshavn glacier in Greenland is thought to be the result of warm currents melting the floating >

18 September 2010 1 Newscientist 141

IINot even the most crazed white-cat stroker would suggest setting off hundreds of millions of nuclear charqes"

tongue of the glacier. Other outlet glaciers are being attacked in a similar way.

Mike MacCracken of the Climate Institute in Washington DC is one ofthose starting to think that we shouldn't just sit back and let warm currents melt ice shelves. "Is there some way of doing something to stop that flow, or cool the water?" he asks.

Last year, physicist Russel Seitz at Harvard University suggested that the planet could

be cooled by using fleets of customised boats to generate swarms of tiny bubbles. This would whiten the surface of the oceans and so reflect more sunlight. MacCracken says the bubbles might be better deployed in a more focused way, to cool the currents that are undermining the Jakobshavn glacier and others like it. A couple of degrees of chill would take this water down to freezing point, rendering it harmless. ''At least that would slow the pace of change," MacCracken says.

What about a more direct approach: building a physical barrier to halt a glacier's flow into the sea by brute force? Bindshadler thinks that is a. non-starter. "The ice discharge has many sources, mostly remote and in environments where barriers are not likely

to work," he says. "Taking just the one example I know best, the Pine Island glacier inAnlarctica drains into an ice shelf that attts front is

25 kilometres across and 500 metres thick, and moves at over 10 metres per day. The seabed there is 1000 metres down and is made ofsediment hundreds of metres thick and the consistency of toothpaste." Not your ideal building site.

A slightly more subtle scheme to rein in

the glaciers was proposed morethan 2.0 years ~

~ ago by Douglas MacAyeal ofthe University of ~

Chicago. His idea is to fight ice withice. The big ~ outlet glaciers feed into giant floating shelves ijl of ice, which break off into icebergs at their outer edges. MacAyeal suggested pumping water up from beneaththe fee and depositing

it on the upper surface, where it would freeze

to form a thick ridge, weighing down the floating ice shelf. Add enoughice in this

way, and the bottom ofthe ice shelfwould eventually be forced down onto the seabed. Friction with the seabed would slow down the shelf'smovement, which in turn would hold back the glaciers feeding into it. It would be

like tightening a colossal valve.

"I think it's quite an inspired idea," says

HOW TO RAISE ENTIRE CITIES

When the town of Galveston in Texaswas.largely destroyed by a hurricane-drtvenflood in 1900,its citizens decided on a no-nonsense strata gy to sto P it ha ppe ni ng again. They jacked up surviVing bulldlnqs and shoved sediment in underneath, raising the town by

5 metres. This approach is unlikely to be copied any time sooii, though. Lifting buildings is horribly expensive, and would seriously disrupt theworkings of an intricately wired-up modem city.

One alternative ls using

. seawaterto solve the problem. Andrea Comerlati of the University of Padua in Italy has proposed raising Venice by pumping water

421 NewScientist 118 September 2010

intothe bedrock 700 metres beneath the city. Ac.cordiiig to

his calculat.ions itwou·ld take only 12wells and 10 years to lift the city by 10 to 40 centimetre.s.

That could help in theshort tun but it.is not even halfway towards compensating for a metre or more af fut u re sea-levs I rise .It ha s another downside, too: if the pumps stop, the land will deflate and the city wi.1I sink - a slowmotion farce ofa. disaster. 'To create permanent uplift, you need a layer of solid matter;' says laWrence Murdoch of Clemson University in South Carolina.

His suggest.ion isto pump some sort of slurI)' down a network of

boreholes. He reckons that if the geology is right, the high-pressure fluid will create horizontal fractures in the rock that spread ourtrem each borehole, eventually joi ning up into one continuous layer .. W.hen the water gets squeezed out again, the solid particiesleft behind will form

a permanent new layer.

Murdoch has done some small-scale experimentsto show that the fractuFing does work, and. is hoping to get funding for larger field tests .. ThIs method has the potential to lift up land areas by several metres, he says. "And disturbance to life atthe surface would be relatively slight:"

Bindshadler. But nobody has followed it up to work out how practical the scheme would be. "On the back of an envelope it has promisebut these ice shelves are big. You would need a lot of drilling rigs all over the ice shelf, and my intuition is that if you look at the energetics of

it, it won't work," Bindshadler says. .

Even if we could apply brakes to glaciers, this would only slow down sea level rise. Could we do better than that and reverse it - actually make the sea retreat? If you think ofthe sea as

As·a side benefit, you could get rid of waste materialsthisway. Murdoch suggests using ash from coal-fired power stations. Which should set like concrete.

Toe method mig hteven be used fo ria rge r co astal reg lo ns, r athe r thanjust cities. "I think that it wouldscale up fair.ly well;' says Murdoch. Inevitably, money will be the key. To raise a squarekllornetre of land by a. metre would cost rough.IyS8 million, he calculates. While that might be a bargain

for an island airport or a city in

the developed world, itis unlikely to helpJarmers in 8angladesh. Lifting up the land may be strictly forthe rich.

a giant bathtub, then the most obvious way to lower its level is to takeou t the plug.

"One of the oldest notions is filling depressions on the land," says MacCracken. Among the largest of these is the Quattara depression in northern Egypt, which at its lowest point is more than 130 metres below sea level. Various schemes have been proposed to channel water fromthe Mediterranean

into thedepression togenerate hydroelectric power, and as a by- product a few thousand cubic kilometres of the sea would be drained away. U nfortunately, that's only enough

to shave about g millimettesoff sea level:

a drop in the ocean. And there would be grave consequences for the local environment. "The seepage of salt water through fracture systems would saltnate aquifers for good," says Farouk EI-Baz, a geologist at Boston University who has studied the region.

Refilling the Dead Sea is no better. Because of surrounding hills, this depression could be filled to 60 metres above sea level, but even that would only offset the rise by 5 mHiimetresanddrown several towns into the bargain.

How about digging new holes on land to drain away a little more of the ocean? Or better still, dredging the seabed and piling the mud on nearby land to raise its level? The world's oceans cover 360 million square kilometres, so to reverse a t-metre risein level, 360 trillion cubic metres of soil or sediment would have

to be dug or dredged, and piled up somewhere. That's a lot of digging- and in fact the scale

of the task is so colossal that even nuclear

Venice's battle against risl n 9 waters! s a taste of things to come

explosions wouldn't be up to it. In the Sedan nuclear test of 19 62, designed to investigate the possibility of using nuclear explosions

for excavating canals, mines and so on, a

100" kilotonne bomb blew a neat hole in the Nevada desert. It is one ofthe largest artificial craters on Earth, buteven so it would hold only a few million cubic metres of water. Not even the most crazed white-cat stroker would suggest setting off hundreds of millions ofsuch charges around the world's coasts.

Totally unrealistic

A slightly less.lmprobable notion is to pump seawater up onto the frigid highlands of

Anta rctica and let it freeze. The East Antarctic ice sheet is thought to be much more stable than Its shaky West Antarctic counterpart, and might hang onto its new load for thousands

of years. But the scale ofthe operation that would be required is, to say the least, daunting. The water would have to be pumped 1000 kilometres or more, and raised to an altitude of at least a couple of thousand metres. The energy cost would be staggering. According to New Scientist's calculations, to shift a metre's worth of sealevel would need several terawatts ofpower- in the same ballpark as the power consumption of the whole world todaysustained for a century.

"You would also have to make SUIe your

pi pes don't freeze up, which wouldn't be easy," says MacCracken. He doesn't quite rule outthe idea, pointing to the success of geothermal

hot-water pipes that stretch across the chilly landscape ofIceland. However, Chris Binnie, a UK-based consu!tanthydrological engineer sees no chance of the idea being pu t into practice. "It is totally unrealistic," he says.

Even if this brute force approach were feasible, trying to build up the ice caps might well prove futile if the world continues to warm. There may, however, be a subtler approach that will both add ice to the ice caps and ensure it stays there for millennia.

An old idea for fighting climate change

is to spray fine sulphate droplets into the stratosphere, where they would reflect some incoming sunlight and so cool the globe. Rather than spreading the stuff around

the planet as is currently being considered, sulphates might be deployed more selectively at high latitudes, aetingas parasols for the polar regions. This has been suggested as a way to preserve the vanishing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, but it could also have a fortunate side effect. "We did some climate simulations with reduced solarradtatton over the Arctic and Antarctic," says Ken Caldeira of Stanford University in California. "Greenhouse gases will still be warming equatorial regions, so water is evaporating and the atmosphere is moister. The deflection of sunlight cools highlatitude air masses, so that moisture comes down as snowfall."

Snow that lands high on anice cap will stick there, gradually tum to ice, and not return

to the seas for many thousands of years . The numbers are promising. Greenland alone might take up as much as a centimetre of sea level per year. lf'thepolar cooling also slows down the flow of outlet glaciers, that might more than make up for the rise in sea level.

Or will it? The notion of engineering lower sea levels remains a highly speculative topic and, as wi th geoengineering measures intended to cool the planet, the very idea of deliberately messing about with the delicate mechanisms of our planet understandably horrifies many people. Even the enthusiasts say that it could only be part of the answer.

"If'the world doesn't control emissions, I'm pretty sure that no geoenglneenng solution will work - and it would potentially create other side effects and false promises," says MacCrack:en. "But if we do get on a path to curbing emissions dramatically - down 50 per cent by 2050, say - then the question becomes, can geoengineering hel p with the hump we're going to go through over the next few centuries?" •

Stephen Battersby is a corsoltsnt for New Scientist

18 September 20101 NewScientist 143

By MY fourth.interview, I'd developed

a checklist to use before each meeting. For starters, I would make sure I had grown some hair. I'd also check that I was fully clothed - I had learned the hard way about that one. Only then would I teleport to the interview, hoping that this time my avatar wouldn't materialise in anyone's lap.

Welcome to Second Life, a virtual world with almost 20 million players globally, where the avatars - digital stand- ins for the players - create everything around them. Every cobbled street, every tree swaying in the wind, even the wind itself, is the product of sorrreones imagination.

For some users, though, this isn't merely a game. It is precisely this ability to construct and control a virtual environment that Is creating a new branch of psychotherapyavatar therapy- in which therapists interact with their clients avatar to avatar.

On the face of it, this might sound.like a pale imitation of a real-life therapy session. Yet its proponents say avatar therapy hassorne unique advantages that tllke psychotherapy to the next level. In Second Life, therapy sessions are not confined to the therapist's virtual office; they can also involve role-play scenarios to allow the patient to practise their newly learned coping skills in virtual environments tailored to their needs. All the while the therapist gives real-time feedback, like

a medically qualified Jiminy Cricket,

Launched in 2003, Second Life was one

of the first virtual worlds known as massively multiplayer online games. It was designed not for fighting monsters, but for people to socialise and, increasingly, emulate real life. Musicians have concerts, artists display their work and scientists go to meetings. People work, learn and connect in these virtual worlds. So can they be used for healing too?

As a technophile, I love the idea; as a psychotherapist used to working the oldfashioned way, I had reservations. So I decided to meet some ofthe advocates of virtual therapy in their own domain, avatar to avatar, to see

if they could address my concerns.

One of my first interviews was with Dick Dillon, a real-life psychotherapist wi th Preferred Family Healthcare, a Missouri-based non-proft t organisation that also leads the field of virtual therapy. In Second Life, Dillon's avatar is a bald, square-jawed hunk with a passing resemblance to Bruce Willis. He took me through a typical therapy session.

Talking by voice chat or instant messaging, you and your therapist may decide it is time

to revisit the site of a traumatic event- a car crash, say. But in real life it is too far away, or perhaps you don't yet feel happy driving. No problem: your therapist builds, or" rezzes", the scene in a matter of minutes. Soon you are driving on a familiar road, with a steep bend similar to the one that you lostcontrol on in the rain. As you.approach the turn, your anxiety increases and your breaths become faster.

THE VIRTUAL

THERAPIST

WILL SEE YOU NOW

Can t~e connection be . .

and client be rePlicateJ~een therapist

Samantha M· h-· syber~pace?

- . urp Y InVestigates

441 NewScienti-st 118 September 2010

The therapist coaches you, reminding you of symptom . management techniques. Ifit

all becomes too much, they zap you instantly back into the office.

According to Dillon, this set-up lets the therapist give real-time feedback while providing an experience that feels genuine, yet takes place in the safe environment of a simulation.

The emotions are teal. The rewards are real. Only the location is fake.

"When the brain sees a 3D object in real life it converts it to a 20 object in the visual cortex," says Jeremy Bailenson, head of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University in California. Perhaps that's why a virtual scene can still provoke as trong psychological reaction, he says.

Phobia exposure

One of the first applications of avatar therapy was in treating social anxiety disorder, a crt ppling shyness that can

confine people to their homes, James Herbert, head of the anxiety treatment and research programme at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was among the first wave of researchers to investigate avatar therapy. Encouragingly, clients generally rated the treatment highly, though there were exceptions. "Some patients and therapists reported frustration with not being able to see the individual's face," he says, and sometimes

technical difficulties interrupted the sessions.

Avatar therapy has also helped people with phobias. In real life, the usual treatment is to gradually expose people to the source of their fear, but this can sometimes be difficult. An avatar therapist can introduce the phobia source while remaining in complete control, scaling the experience up or down according to the client's reaction,

In fact, many of the conditions treated by face-to-face talk therapy can also be treated virtually, including depression and anxiety. Avatar therapy is proving useful for more diverse conditions too, such as traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia and Asperger's syndrome. So far studieshave shown similar success rates to traditional therapy for social anxiety (Cyberpsychology & Behavior, vol S,

p 76) and post-traumatic stress disorder (Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networfling, vol 13, p 3). Dillon's team will soon publish a study showing its effectiveness in drug and alcohol addiction.

What about the downsides of avatar

it therapy- doesn't it lack the personal touch? ~ ''A Teal therapist dealing with a real person is .~ more likely to feel ethical responsibility and

In Second Life, counselling sessions need not be confined tothe therapist's office

"The emotions are real. The rewards are real. Only the location is fake"

care for that patient," says Christine Webber, a psychotherapist based in London.

The other major concern is the loss of body language. For people used to Second Life, this is not as much of a problem as you might think, according to Dillon. But as a therapist, I glean a great dealfrorn seeing someone become tearful or shift intheir seat.

It's a trade-off, say avatar therapists. What you lose in body language you gain in the eloquent expression of conscious thoughtat least for clients who type in their res ponses - as well as the loss of inhibition that comes with communicating through an avatar,

For people seeking therapy online, there are practical concerns, too: withou t visiting a real office with certificates on the wall, how can they be sure the people offering treatment are bona fide therapists? The Online Therapy Institute, a mental health training body

in Second Life, is pushing for professional standards to be agreed across this emerging field. It offers a "Verified by" logo that therapists who meetits standards can display on their websites. Because confidentiality

is paramount, one cri terion is that sessions must take place ln.dlgl tally secure areas.

So are psychotherapists ready to leave some of'theirrnost basic tools behind!' "It's not for everyone," says Kelli Turgyan, a social worker practising in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. "This type oftherapywould have to be done by the righttype oftherapistfor the right type of client." Because of the lack offace-to-face contact, only low- risk clients should be taken on, and they must be willing to use local emergency services ifthey hit a crisis, she says.

Despitethe downsides, avatar therapy is gaining converts. There's no official head count, but each month more and more therapists seem to pop up in Second Life and other virtual worlds. A growing number of journal papers and chapters in mental health textbooks are focusing on avatar therapy too, say DeeAnna Merz Nagel and Kate Anthony, co- founders of the Online Thera py Institute.

The field is still in its infancy and the technology is not without its pitfalls, but this new form oftherapy clearly holds promise. However, until the day that I can log in and find myself with sufficient hair, properly dressed, and less apt to inadvertently throw myself at complete strangers, it's clear it still has a little way to go, But avatar therapy is on the right track. You could say it's virtually there .•

Samantha Murphy is a counsellor and freelarnl writer based in Pennsylvania

18 September 20101 NewScientist 145

CULTURELAB DEBATE

Can video games be art?

Samantha Murphy puts this contentious question to game designers and game-playing academics and artists

IN APRIL, Chicago Sun· Times en tic Roger Ebert posted a blog article enti tied "Video games can never be art". Within minutes, the feeding frenzy began. Responses ranged from intellectual objections throughto classic online flaming. Many angles were argued, but

one viewpoint stood out: that

you cannot analyse the art behind video games without having actually played them.

Then Ebert relented a little.

In a follow-up piece entitled "OK, kids, play on my lawn", posted in July, he conceded that while his opinion had not changed, he had made his criticisms of video gameswtthout experiencing themfor himself.

Now it is time to put the matter

461 NewScientist 118 September 2010

to people who do have personal experience of the medium.

Here game designers, along

with a mixed bag of art critics, journalists, academics and historians- all of them avowed garners - tackle a question that.is emblematic of the clash between the technology and culture: can video games be art?

NICK MONTFORT:

Associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog,Y

People tend to mean several things by this questlon. First, can video games be sold by art dealers, appear in galleries and muse urns and be an accepted part of the art world?

They already are: just look at the creations of Cory Archangel, Mark tssen and Eddo Stem. Second, can video games tac!<le difficult lssuas and sensirtvely present us with different perspectives? They already have: see ·the worl< 9f Terry [<lVanaugh, Jason Rohrer, Molleindllstria dnd Tale of Tales, and commercial games such

as Bully (also called Canis Canem Edi~ and Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheitj. Finally, can video games present sn experience of aesthetic beauty that is p"rticular to the mEldillm?lndeed they do: see Tetsuya Mizugu(his Rez, a game dedicated to K;mdinsky and which I first discovered and played in the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. lrsa great time for those interested in this question to see what work is already our there.

Rich detail characterises games such as Vanitas_ created by Tale of Tales

DENIS DUTTON:

Professor of philosophy at the untversity of Canterbury, UK,

and author of The An Instinct

(8 loomsbury Press, .2008)

Many artistic elements go Into the creation of video games. I find it Impossible to experience the wit and eleganttectmicalskilisof Bioshdck with anything less than admiration fo r its (Ie ators' artistry. MoreOller, video games offer storylinestllat can be compelling. They also introduce anotner personality into the mix:

ThOlt of the gamer.

But in myenmuntersWith

. gaming - playing Grand ThejTAu[Q IV, for example ~ I have found that my presence has done nothing to mal<€> the totaldramOltic experience deeper or more affecting. So if Grand Theft Auto is a work of art. my own oafish tonrrlbutlonsto it h<lV€ been positively deleterious. Maybe I need more practice. Even then, rm not sure I muld raise the fun of machinegunning the odd gangster to the level of the best plays, nOllels or mNies.

Cons ide r Shakes p ea re's [}[h 12// Q.

Wt1y should I imagin" for a mom .. rn that my having an ability to intervene In the play could make it bener? Would a happy ending - Othello and Desdemona singing a love duet. with me seated behind them strumming

a harp ~ be an improvement on Shakespeare? Video games are good fun, butwhy do they mmd the validation of being called "art? Isn't being fun enough?

JARON LANIER:

Computer scientist, artist and author of You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf/Allen Lane, 2010)

I don't think there's any aspen of human life matcarrt be art Art happens when we reach fOfthe very largest framework for ourvalues, when we go beyond [(immerclal concerns, or concerns about status or coolness, and reach for some level of meaning that just might transcend the problems we know how to <Irticulate.

For more books and arts coverage and to add your comments, visit www.NewScientistcomlblogsiculturelab

Yes, it c<ln h<lDP,m invideogames, though I don't think it happens often, But then, how often do books or movies reach the level of art? Not that often, if we're honest,

poetry made of wordst<lKen randomly from a hat an audience cum ng the (I om e 5 off an artist, industrial paim thrown onto canvas, reproductions af commercial

adve rti sement!'i, a ml egfam Glsse rti ng that it was a portrait of its reCipient,

a baniGlde of oil barrels ana Paris street and live te,levision images of a Buddha statue.

Lestwe ml1clude that these are outlandish examples, consider the artists who produced them:

Marcel Duchamp, Piel Mondrian, Tristan Tzara, Yoko Ono,Jackson Pollock, Andy Warnol, Robert Rauschenberg, D1risto andjesnneClaude, ;md Nam June Paik,

respe c:tjvely. All a re eel e b Fate d, tl1 ei r statu 5 as artists never questi one d,

Anhas done many things in human history, but in the last century it has primarily tried to provoke us, to force us to see thingsdifferemly, So maybe

What started as an investigation into where eels spawn evolved into something part- travelogue, part-anthropological study; part campaign to save the eel. The eel's story is remarkable, and so are Prosek's tales of eel people. We meet Ray, who rebuilds a giant

s tone eel trap in the Catskill Mountains nearN ew York, only to see his eels flushed away by flood waters. We hang out with Stella,

a Maori student ofN ew Zealand's eels, wholures decades-old giants out of the river with dog food. Then there are the eel people of the Pacific island of'Pohnpei, who claim an eel as their ancestor. If you ever visit, don't ask to eat eel.

A youthful racket

Selling the Fountain of Youth: How the anti· aging industry made a disease out a/getting o/d - and made billions by Arl.ene Weintraub,

Basic Books, £14,99/$25,95

JESSE SCHELL:

Assistant professor of entertainment techno logy at Carnegii:! Mellon University in Pinsburgh, Pennsylvania, and CEO of Schell Games

Marcel Duchamp once said, '1 have come to tile conclusion thatwhile not all artists are chess players, al.1 chess

p layers a re artists:" Gamin g and pi ay bear a n iriterestin g rei ati on slli p to art Like art, play is experimental, creative, flexible and immerslve, It is done far its own sake, And like art, games can challenge and transform us, So can video gam@sbe an? They c@nainly inmrpolGlte many artistic elements:

Reviewed by Catherine de Lange

DON'T get sick, S~ l LI N G don't get old and 1H~ ~OU.t<rAI" don't die. These OF. YOUTH

""'''''"'''''' three maxims, as

stated by Robert

1IT1MI1"1I1lI~ 1,11 .... 'II'i1IIC!' ~UJI;M~lILD-

.'".~"",", Goldman.a

founding father of the antt-ageing industry, might sound a tad absurd, but they are nothing compared to many of the industry's claims which Arlene Weintraub explores.

By medicalising the process of growing old, sellers of anti-ageing "medicine" have made fortunes based on unfounded claims, she argues. Time and again, vulnerable people are spun a yarn and relieved of their cash. Some of the stories are shocking: the case of the antiageing doctor who prescribed hormone su pplements way above approved doses, for example.

While Weintraub has done her homework, her often dogmatic style leaves little room for intrigue. Still, her scepticism will be food for thought for anyone tempted by promises to turn back the clock.

Rock of ages

The Planet in a Pe.bb/e: A journey into Earth's deep history by jan Zaiasiewicz, Oxford University Prnss, £16,99

painting, architecture, music, sculpture, we should ask, "How are video games

aGing. writing, ~mimatl0n and d;dnce, changing our ideas about drt?" If the

The games mat feel more like art purpose of art is indeed to force us

Reviewed by Jon Turney

'I'he Pl.u,et APEBBLE picked

till a Pebble upon the shore

~ .... _I""'iIl.

originated from

the cliffs above. As ;;o"i~""""oIi.c.", it is a Welsh shore, then the cliff rock was ttself'once under the sea, formed from sediments worn from a long-vanished continent, buried deep and baked into new rock. Before that, its atoms were part of the crust of a young Earth, a much larger pebble, with its own origin story.

All this and more Isteased

out from this pebble in Jan Zalastewtcz's impressively skilful narrative. Common elements and atomic rarities, microfossils and ticking radio-isotopes all make an appearance. It builds to a satisfying picture of how our planet's history is etched into every fragment of the pebble. Zalasiewicz has a clear style, with some nice lyrical touches. His story is a celebration of the

as tontshlng ways geologists have found of sampling stone's secrets. Geology has a gifted new popular science writer.

tend to nave qualities in common. They do notpandertothe player; they dffi mysterio!Js;they feel more serious man most games; they have a complete, holistic feeling, Such games are r<lrities, Dunhey exist, and as the form evolves, just as cinema did, mom and more of them wi'll appear.

to see something we thoughtwe understood in a new lig.ht. pemaps the most fllndamefltai move video games have made in th.e artistic tr<ldition is in the very e liciti n g of tile question, "Can video games be art?"

JOHN SHARP:

Art historia n and professor of interactive design and game deve lopment at the Savannah College of Art a nd Design in Atlanta, Georgia

Look beyondthe cultural values

IAN BOGOST:

Game designer, critic. founding partner of Persuasive Games and author of Newsgames (MIT Press, 2010)

The 20th century saw the following celebrated as art: a urinal placed on a stand, a painting of a coloured square,

Feel for the eel

Eels: An exploration, from New assigned tovideo games and art and

you'll see many similaritles between Zea/and to the Sargasso, of the

world's most m;sterious fjsh by them: both are leisure pursuits, neither

elre obviously utiliTarieln, and both are James Prosek; Har~er, $25,99

hubs of deeply engaged subcu~:rure5,.

But there are differences: qarnes require direG engagement and what you might call (Q·authorship between the designer and the player.

All this poses the QUflstion of why we are concemed with giving video games the starus of an, Are we simply trying to legitimise them? Does being called "art" change the qualities of videog"mes? Only if we can answer these questions ran we move the conversation forward,

EELS: you either love' em or hate 'em. Well, perhaps few people have such strong feelings about eels, but this book ""'""'~ __ ........ should change that. Prosek's account ofn years spent in pursuit of" the world's most mysterious fish" is both enthralling and appalling.

18 September 20101 NewScientist 147

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481 NewScientist 118 September2010

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50 I NewScientist 118 September 2010

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The Stowers Institute has multiple openings for exceptional, scientists interested in applying innovative and/or multidisciplinary approaches to significant and fundamental problems in biolqgy.

Successful candidates will recelvesucstanttal ongoing and renewabl.e lntramural'support.as well as a ccess to extensive core laboratory facilities.

Candidates with Ph.D. or M.D. degrees, postdoctoral [e~earch experience, and outstanding records otresearch accomplishment should send a curriculum vitae and statement of resea reb pia ns to facultysea [email protected] by October 31, 2010.

More information mQY be foundat WWw.stowers.org

.. UNIVERSITY or MIN"N~S.OTA

..... Driven to Discover

Postdoctoral Associate- Craniofacial Genetics University 0/ Minnesota, Department of Pediatrics

The Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesora seeks a Postdoctoral Associate with a Ph.D. in abiological science and experience in mclecutar bio!Qgy, biochemistry, and mouse embryology. Tbe selected candidate wi!! be expected to carry out experiments that study the molecular and biochemical basis ofvariable craniofacial defects in Twisted gastrulation knockout mice. The experiments involve in situ hybridization, apoptosis and proliferation ass~y,li ·mmunohisto~emistry co-immJ.ll;IQp'l"ecipitation, cell culture, g enerati Jl of tissue-specifif k nock outsas we II as standard mol ecular biology t~c~niq~s. The projects ~lso rquire .strong c,o~p~tational skills and familiarity wi__thmethods to study ~.Ig(lnetlc geneSilllllClI1g.

The University of Minnesota, located ill the 'Twin Cities', provides challe ng ill g CMe:er oppo rtunities for,tHose in tet:eSi:ed in teich ing, rese arch, community ~rvice,lH1d,out~andillg clinical care ill0ur aeedemic University setting. As-the 16th largest metropolitan area. In the U .S., at .0'1" near the IQp of virtualLy every U.S. '1{\llllity-oHife' survey, the Twin Cities- still offers the ffietldly feel ofa <imaUrmidwestem town, bu wttln!lL of the ameuities of a d)!oomic and growingjurbim-commuility:

To appi¥ fOt tlli£posiiion, please visit our website at:http.!ILwww.nnrrl.edpl ohr/employment to complete an on-line application for requisition 1111. '166182 and attach 11 GVand letter of interest

The Universiiy of Minnesota is committed 10 the policy that all persons shall have equal acce!;5 /0 its pro grams,fadlilies and employment wuhout regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin. sex. age, manta! statu», disabi!iiy. pu btle assistance stiltuI. veteran status, or sexual orienta/io!!.

18 September 2010 I NewScientist 151

www.NewScientistJobs .. com

~ Penn Medicine

biomodic:,Ql, pon'tdoctorcl prQgrcmn

THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA BlomedlcallPostdoctoral Programs (BPP) Invites applications for postdoctoral appointments.

The University of Pennsylvania has long been revered and respected for its belief in the importance of education and its pursuit of excellence. The office of Biomedical Postdoctoral Programs (BPP) continues to uphold this tradition by providing Biomedical Postdoctoral Appointees with the highest quality training in and outside of the laboratory experience. From Its first-rate programming series to its emphasis on career development to intra mu rai sports teams, BPP works to enhance tile life of Biomedical Postdocs,

The postdoctoral experience at The University of Pennsylvania is nothmgshort of unique, From its inception, BPP has been one of a kind. Biomedical Postdoctoral Programs was created by the top-administrators of the School of Medicine at PENN. These individuals recognized the importance of their Postdocs and sought a means to ensure their needs were and continue to be met. It began with the Schoo! of Medicine and has expanded to includeDental Medicine, Veterinary Medicine, and Nursing.

WE PROVIDE QUALITY tRAINING OPPORTUNITIES:

• Schoo! of Medicine ranked second in N!H funding

• Over 800 teadmg research laboratories in the Biomedical Sciences

• Thirty-nine training grants jn specialized areas

• Teachlng fellowships available in the PENN·PORT program (http:;/www,med.upenn.edu/postdoc/ pe nn portshtm'l)

• New state-of-the-art laboratories

• Unique training and programming

• Professional skUl development

• Comprehensive compensation and benefits policies

• Annual Biomedical Postdoctoral Research Symposium

• Career Services by experts In their field

• Annual Career Fair

• Biomedical Postdoctoral. Council

• Intramural Sports and Socials

VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT: http:;/www.med.upenn.edu/postdoc/

TO VIEW OPEN POSTDOC POSiTION POSTl'NGS IN BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES IN THE SCHOOLS OF MIEDICINE, DENTAL MEDICINE, VETERINARY MEDICINE, AND NURSING.

521 NewScientist 118 September2010

For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com Job ID: 1400947619

MATHS&IT

Discovery Breeder ~ Williamsburg.IA (OOZ3U) Monsanto

!A· Iowa

Monsanto is seeking highly a motivated individual to become an integral member of a multidisciplinary breeding team. Th@ Discov@ry Bre@deris responsible forthe development of improved inbred lines with

a focus on agronomic traits

such as yield and disease tolerance.

For more inform ation visit NewScientistJobs.com job!O: 1400940572

Warehouse Technician· Gold Country Seed (OOZ6M) Monsanto

MN· Minnesota

The Warehouse Technician position is wh:h Gold Country Seed, a Brand within the Seed

and TraitCommerr:ial Organizatlon of Monsanto, based out of Hutfhinson, MN. You will work

in an environment where passion and team spirttgo hand in

hand.

For more inform ation visit NewScientistJobs.com job!O: 1400940578

Business Engagement Manager (OOlNG) Monsanto

MO· Missouri

Workwith Glleadership team partner rep rese ntatwes to provide strategic support and fB·edback

as well as understanding and communicating long range

plans between GI and partner organizations.

For more information visit NewScientistjobs.com Job ID: 1400945896

Seed Quality Lab Tech III (OOlTU)

Monsanto

CA· california

We are currently seeking a Seed

Quality Lab Tech III for our Seed Quality Laboratory in

Oxnard, CA. This position is responsible for creation of inspection lots for operations plants inNAFTA

For more information visit NewScientistjobs,com job 10: 1400947618

Operations Research Analyst (OOlLF) Monsanto

MO· Missouri

Monsanto is passionate about IJsing science and technology to improve agricutture. Monsanto sdemists are conducting the reseann and development (R&D) to revolutionize plant breeding and biotechnology.

For more information visit NewScientistJobs,corn Job ID: 1400947620

IOTHER

Associate Director. Scientific &amp; Medical Wr:iting Ce!gene

NJ· New Jersey

Development and management

of direct reports and outsoumnq plans for medical writing in assigned product areas. Co-develop the strategy for document preparation, SOPs, and guideline documents including "time frames that meet or exceed company standards and the document review processes.

For more information visit NewScientistjobs,com job 10: 1400948993

I

PHYSICS

Liaison Engineer CRJ Strongfie!d Aviation QC- Quebec

You will be responsible for coordinating theartivitles between production manufacturing and design engineering. You will support manufacturing by dispositioning non-conforming materials, components, assemblies on final line while minimizing the Impact on the master

schedulE'.

For more j nforrnati on visit New5cientistJobs.com Job 10: 1400939271

www .. NewScientistJobs .. com

Canl~rjeMeUon

Tenure-track facu Ity position at the j un ior level in the area of synthetic chemistry

The Department of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University invites appl ications for a tenure-track facu Ity position at the. junior level in the area of synthetic chemistry. Special attention will be given to applicants with interests in soft materials related to energy, environment and catalysis. The successful applicant will benefit from Carnegie Mellon's highly collaborative environment spanning Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Engineering Departments. Candidates are expected to build a vigorous externally funded research program and exhibit a very strong commitment to leaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Appl ications she u Id contain (1) a curricu lum vitae, (2) a I ist of publ ications, (3) a description of research pi ans and (4) three letters ·of recommendation and be sent to: Professor Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, Department of Chemistry at synthetic-chemistry-search@andrew_cmu.edu.

Hard copies 01 this information can also be mailed to Synthetic Chemistry Search Committee, Department of Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon University, Synthetic Chemistry Search Committee, Department of Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon University, 4400 Fifth Avenu6, Pittsburgh, PA , USA, 15213.

Review of applications will begin on October 1, 2010. Inlormationabout the Chemistry Department is available on the web at www.chem.cmLl.ed'u.

Carnegie Mellon University is an Equal OPPJrtunity/Affirmative Action employer committed to building a diverse tacu Ity; women and minorities are strongly encouraged to apply for this position.

®

,

.

SYSTEMS NEUROSCIENCE at Cornell University

1-

The Deparunemof Neurobiology and Behavior (NBS) Invites applications for a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Neurobiology Applicants must have a Ph.D. and invesrigare the neuronal basis of behavior. \Vhile the research area is broadly d.dined, topics of special interest include, but are notlimited to, rhe neuronal basis of decision-making; reward, learning, and memory; and sensorimotor inregration. We seek an individual lISing genetic, optical, computational, and! or physiological took She/be will be expecred to. establish a vigororn, externally funded., internationally recognized research program and to participate and excel in NBB's undergraduate and gmduate teaching programs. 'Ihe successtul candidate will join a glowing neuroscience and life sciences community on Cornell's main campll.'l in Ithaca, New York. The community includes several new academic units (e.g., Institute of Cell and Molecular Biol<>g)" Deparrmenc of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology); pmgrams (e.g., Center for Vertebrate Genomics, Center for Comparative and Population Genomics); and core facilities (e,g., Biophysical Imaging. DNA Sequencing and Genotyping, Animal Transgenlcs); visit http:l/wwwJife~clellces.comell.edIL For information about the Itbac" area, visit lutp:/Iwww,visitlihaca.oomi.

TOAPPLY: Send, via e-mail [email protected] PDF of the following materials: Curriculum Vitae, Statemenr of Research Plans, Statement of Teaching Interests, and np to three publications. Please have three letters of reference sent [0 the same e-mail address. Questions about the search can be directed to Prof. Joseph Fetcho, ChaIT, Search Committee, NBB, Seeley G. Mudd Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-2702 (phone 607~254-4340). Review of

f!.ppiiCttnts b.rgins November 1, 2010. .

Comell i. an Equal Opportuniry A/firmatWt AM'on Employer. W"",<,n and minority <andidru", are strongly "".",raged to apply.

AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR MICROBIOLOGY AND CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL. AND PREVENTION

2011 POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FEllOWSHIP PROGRAM

Up to ten feilomhip position. will be cworded by the Amerlcon Society for Microbiology forfull-tfm·e research In Infectious diseases; which co~se signlflciInt p~bll~ I;eolth problems, Fellow, w1l1 perform re,eor~1; [n re,ldenoe 01 one of tI1e CenTer; for DI.ease Control O!1d PrevenTion ICoC) I"'atlons In AtlanTa, GA,Ft. Collin., CO, Anchorage, AK,or Son Juon, Puerto Ricn.

E lig i b Ie Ileld.s of study in dude:

B aele rio I (In d M )'GoTlc Dlse 0 se, Viral end RickeTlslallnf,edloru No;ocomial inf.ectlons Htv/AibS

Vector-borne Infectious [)[seases Sexually Tral'lsmiTled D&seases Pa rositic DI.sease;

The fellowship positions are limited to lindlvlduols who eim,er enrned their dodorcrte degree IPh.D., $.::.0., M.D., O.VM.,or D.D.S.) or have completed a primary r'esidency within three years of their propcsed stcrt date. Ccnslderctlen will be given to Individuals wiTh moreexperien«e if TMere are ~ompellil1g re(l$Ol'ls f<)r doing SQ, ~ch Q. PQ;tgrociuote .ubspe<;lolty Iroli1lngor MtiQ1"l(l1 .erviQe, QuoHf]ed opplic(ll"lt, will receive cOilsideratlon without regard to race, cre,ed, color,Clge, :sex, or natlol"lalorlgll"l. Diversity among rellows iIel1Cour(lged. The progrom prevldesenennuel ;tip end for Two years, hea~h care benefits package up to $3,000 annuolly, retocatlol"l benefits up TO $500, ond up to $2,000 annually for professlonnl developmen:t.

T:I1eopplicorion deadline Is Jcnuory 15, 2011. The Pcstdcctcrol Resear<;h Progrom is admlnl;tered by the American SocieTy for Microbiology.

For more Informcrtion, vIsit .115M's home page at hTlp.//www.asm.org/po;tdocsore-.mail.~eliowship;@asmu;a.org.

The Cl p plkatlon [s CJValla b Ie on line.

I AM~I\I<Atl

socerr FOR MICROatOLOGY

Do you have a passion For cutting~edge science and proteding the public health?

Unleash your passion Into a rewarding care era. a Physician, SCientist or Consumer Safety Officer at the Center for Biologic. Evaluation and Research!

The Center for Biologic! Eva luation and Research's mission is te protect and enhance tile public health through fne regulotionof biological products indudlng blood, vccdnes, allergenics, tissues, and cellular and gene therapies. Biologics, in contrast to drug. that are chemically synthe$i-zed, ere derived from living sources (weh OS humcn, onlmols, ond microorganisms) and are not easily ldenrlfled or chorccterlzed, and many are manuIacturedusing biotechnology. These products often represent cutting-edge biomedical research and, in time, may oHer the most effective means to treat a variety of medical lllnessss and ccndlrlens fnat presently have few or n ooth e r tre aim e ntopti ens,

For detaH$on qualifications and salary, please visit our Hiring Opportunities IXIge at

http://www.fdd.gov/Abo~tFDA/Cerilers0ff1ce;/CBER/LX:m125465.htm;

How to Apply~

For eurrenl veccncles and opplketion procedures, visit·:

hitp:/ /www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/CeniersOfflCes/CBER/ucml03202.htm.

For future vcccnclas, submit CV /resume &. rover letter to our re.sume bmjk to, [email protected]: Job Code: NS/Gen

The Center lor Biolo\Jics EvClluotion Clnd Research is per+ of the Food and Dr~g AdmInIstration, Deportment 01 Health and Hurnon Service!.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER. SMOKE FREE ENVIRONMENT.

America's Veteran: http://www.fedshirevets.g.ov/

18 September 20101 NewScientist 153

www.NewScientistJobs .. com

• SAN DIEGO STATE

W UNIVERSITY POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH POSITIONS

San Diego State Univeriity Heart Inshtute-SDSU Researe!J Foundation The San Diego Scare University Hearr lnstlrure is recruiting POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS {O work in a dynamic; stare-of-the-art cardlovascular cell and molecular biology research setting in the labo rate ry of th e Insti tu te Di rector Dr. ChI is Glembotski, Srudyi'1g roles for heart-denved secreted cyeokines (ccrdiomyokmes) on cardiac protection and repair. Applicarus should have a Ph.D. in a relevant field, d em 0 nstrared eXpertise in bask ce] I and molecular bi ology, in d u ding meth 0& [Q examine g;Jin- and loss-o~g~ne-fullcti on in culture andaturnal models cfheart disease, excellent cornmunicaricn skills, a record 01' peer-reviewed journal publications, and the desire and ability to write and submit wmpetitive research grant ap pi ica:ti om. Salary is commensurate wirh experience; excellent benefits. Appllcanrsshculd submlr a cover I en;e"cl!n'irnlum vi tae, and a: dcscrip ti on (If resear ch ex peri e l1(:e ;1l1d profe.,siona! goals wi rh the appllcudcn for Job# 1.00120 ar website: hq:p5d Ijobsl'ollndadon.sdsll.edll or call [dephone:619-594-5703.

EtJI!4l EmplllJIM~rOpPQrnmizylllffirmati!'( IlwmlTitk IX Emp/t;j?r.

Research Fellowship

The Digestive Surgery Research Laboratory at the Price Institute of Surgical Research is seeking M.D. or post- doctoral Ph.D. scientists with an exceptional commitment to research to join. our team at the level of Research Fellow.

Pr·emrence will be given to applicants experienced in genetics, gsn omics, or eplgenatlcs using patients, populations, and/or model organisms. OnceselectecJ, th e SUCCI! ssfu 1M. D. ca n eli d ate is also sxps cts d to com p lete sl mu It an e ous Iy a Ph. D. degree' in the department of Physiology & Biophysics at th e University of Louisville under a 3 year commitment.

To apply please submit a LV., research experience, arid three letters of recommendation to [email protected]. Preference will be given to completed applications received on, N before October 1.5, 201.0. We ·offer a highly competitive start-up package (up to SDk lnclud ing benefits). Perman snt residents and grssncard holders will be given preference. We only offer J·1 visas. For more information, please see: http://www.priceinstitlilte.com/

The University of Louisville is an Affirmative A m'on/tq.ua/ Opportunity Employe~

• School of Medicine

Sackler Institute: P(J~td(Jctoral P"ogmm at NYU School of Medicine

NYU Langun.eMedicai Center is committed to being a wcrld-dass patient care/ educ ation, .an d research institution. Th e Pos td octoral Program/ run by th e S acid er I nsti rute, is one of the olde st an d m estactive in the ,0 !nltry, helps fulM that mission through training an d develop ing 0 I.!I' young scientists. We provide an unmatched co rnhinatio n of professional development and social events to build a sense of community among our 370 postdocs, who come fromover 3S countries, Unique features of our pro gr3,lll in clu de formal ceursework In grant wri ting, scientific in te grIty, career planning, and lab management. Informal career exploration dis cussl ODS with our Pro gram Man agee 0 n c aree r opp ortuni ties in ill j ob secto rs are re gularly sche duJe d to help you de ci de what yOU! next care er ,step could (should) be. Networking is a major focus at NYU, and you will have numerous chances each month to take part in intormal and lim sessions designed to foster collab oration and p rofesstonal developm ent, We invite you to le am more ab 0 ut tiS by vi.siting 0 LIi' extensi ve website at: www.med.nyu.edu/postdoc

The 0 ffic e of Di verslty Affairs works d os ely with our P ostdo ctoral Program to provide robust programs and initiatives to foster inclusivity and multicultural awareness at the Medical Center. Diversity at NYU Langone is not just a matter of statistics; it is a shared com mitme nt to bre;tking down barriers and fostering excellen c e by tapp ing into the kn owledge, skills and creativity 0 f all p eopl e. To le am more about cur co mmi tm ent to eli versity, visit 11S at: http://diversity.med.nyu.edl1/

541 NewScientist 118 September 2010

HERMAN B WELLS (ENTER FOR PEDIATRIC RESEARCH

lI'ItUANA u.~rVIl._UHT·V ~~h 00 I anlemci"<

Asthma and Allergic Diseases Program Assistant Professor

The Department of Pediatrics, Section of Pulmonology, Critical care and Allergy and the HE Wells Center for Pediatric Research (www .. weUscentel".lnpul.edll) is recnliting for 3 faculty position al the Assistant Professor' level. We are particularly interested in candidates working in asthma ami allergic disease.related research to complement existing strengths in cytokineand T cell biology, and airway p.hysiology in the areas of epithelial cell biology and viral infection. Candidates will have a Ph.D., M.D. or M.D.lPh.D. with a. strong research background and either current, or potential for, independent funding .. New faculty will be provided with generous start-up.packages audjoin an active multi-disciplinary Immunotogy and Airway Disease research community ami candidates with an M.D. will be given significant time for research, Interested candidates are encouraged to submit a cl.Il!iclllum vitae and a short description of eesearcn interests by email to:

Mark H. Kaplan, Ph.D., Director of Pediatric Pulmonary Basic Research, Wells Center for Pediatric Research, Department of PedtatrICs, Indiana University School of Mediclne, 1044 West Walnut St., Room 202, IndianapoHs, IN 46202, [email protected]

Indiana alliversity is an EEOIAA educator; employer and contractor (MIFID)

JlHUNTSMAN CANCER INSTITIJfE UN I VER51ll" Of UTAI;

It. UN.IVff!.SITY OF UTAH W' HEALTH SCIENCES

The Department of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah and Huntsman Cancer Institute invite applications for a tenure-track facu Ity Rosition at t~e a~ista~t or as~ociate professor level. We seek a baSIC cancer biologist WIth an Interest In early translational research, a PhD Or MD/PhD, and a track record of scientific excellence. Research interests could include basic cellular mechanisms altered in cancer, tumor models, cancer genetics, and investigational therapeutics. Departmental strengths includeepigenetks and transcriptional regulation, mouse andzebrafish models of cancer, and Cancer cell biology, including signaling, apoptosis, m?tility, and metabolism. HU~lsm. an Cancer Institute IS an NCI-Deslgnated Cancer Center WIth state-of-the-art I aboratori es and shared resources, in cl u ding co re facilities for imaging, genomic;, drugscreening, and popufalion studies. We offer a collegial and interactive research envrronment thatfosters the d.e~elopmentof junior faculty and robust graduate programs for trairung "PhD and MD/PhD students.

Candidates are encouraged to apply by November 10, 2010, with their curricul urn vitae, a description of research interests and accomplishments and three letters of recommendation to:

H u ntsrn an Cancer I nstltute, University of Uta h Attn: Recruitment Office, Room 5363

2000 Clrclaof Hope, Salt Lake City, UT 84112_555·0 e-mail: [email protected]

The UniverSity of Utah is an Affirmalive Action/Equal Opportunity employer anddaes notdlscriminate- based upon race, nationru OJig;n~ color, religion. sex, ageF sexual orientation, gender identity/exp,ession, dis.bility or statu.s as.a Protec.ted Veleran. Upon request, reaf!ooable· esxommodetions in the appiicatioo process will be provided ro in dividuals with dis;.bilitie,S. To inquire a~ut the UniverSi!y~ mmdiSGiminalion p:1licy or to request disabili~y sccommodsuon, please contact: 'Direcfu~ Office"ol Equal Opporwnitpnd Affilmative ActiDn, 201 S. Presidents Circle; Rm 135; Salt lake

City, UT 84112801·581·8365.

www .. NewScientistJobs .. com

11,e Computation," Bio!ogy Program (http://chio.mska.org) at M.'lKCC [mskcc, org) see is·innovative investigators for tenure-track positions at the Asslsiant, Assodate, or Full Professor level, Pursue basic research, '01"" l>ioiogiml problem, ",loh ma] or emphasis on eomputati orral me thods, and build actlve bridge, to experimen tal and clinical research. A<ti>Jely.participale in lruildillg out research programs alone of the best clinical-seien df'ic institutions in the world. Work in MSKCC~s new Zuckerman Research Center, on Manhattan's Upper East Slrle,. ill close proximity to R.xkcl"eller Uni"""ity and me Cornell Weill Medical College. Train grndwtre· srudeats in the Ge=ei- Sioan-Ke ttering Graduate School (,loanketteriRg.edu), the, Weill Cornell Graduate School ofMe<lical Sciences and in crbirnlltuDonal graduale programs.

Areas of special interest include chenical bio logy, pb}"'iQ!ogyidevclopmcota! biology, neurohiology, geaeucs and caacer biology. Applicants should h. ve • doctoral-level degree and the potendal to develop an independ ent, lnterdisclpllnary r es earch program. MSKCC offers a highly In teractive, supportive and djnarn lc research environment with programs in Compurarional Biology, D .... lopmernal BIology, Molecular Pharmacology & Chemistry, Cancer Biology & Ceneti es, Structural Biology, Irnmunolcgv, Cell Bio!~gy, Molecular Biology, and Human Oncology .and Pathogen~~ as well as unparallel ed clinical programs in cancer research, treatment and preven lion.

The deadline for applications is, November I, 2010. Please ""it www.cbio.mokoo.org!f.clll!).search for speciflc applicadon mstructions induding the required IMPACT format of your bibliography, To access the on-tine mOUlt)' application, go to http://faruhy_rch''ki.edu. PIe ase visit the ·,ite. .as soon as possible.as lt contains Important tnformation on the required application materials, includin g deadlines for submission of letters of reference, Inquines m';'l), be sen l to Chris Sander, Chair, Computational Biology Program via D~"" Agosto, Prog .. ", Coordmator, at agostod@m,kcc.org. MSKCC is on equal opportunity and offJrnlati"e action employer com,mitt€\l to dh .. ~rsit, and inclusion in all aspects of recruitingand employment All qualified In dividuals are encouraged to apply.

f"'*"T""'~C""

I • ; Memorial Sloan-Kettering

~ -- - g Cancer Center

- .

(<f}..fIr(1~~EfI ~""", w:ww. mskcc.ot-g

catiQnin this country, \~e Un Ivers il)l of De lawar" today co mbinl;!S tradition and Irlflo' vation, offering students a rich herltaqa aJong with the !'atesl In I nstrueno nal and rasea r!1h tech 00 logy. The Un Ivers ity of De laware Is a land·G rant, Sea-G rant, and Space-G ra n! Institution with its main campus ln Newark, DE, tocated hallway between Washington, DC and New YOrk City. Please vlslt our webslte at www.udel.ecllJ.

Engineering Cluster Searches The CoHege of Engineering

- .

The GoTiege Q! Engineering at Itie Un"lversity 01 Delaware Is ronduc1!ng clLJSI(!r searches and invltas nomlnanons and applications lor tenure-Ira.ck fa.cully positions 10 join growing programs In Itie foIlowing rasea rCih areas: ene rcyy, b lo eng inee rl ng, co rnpos ile materials, computer and lntormatlon technOlOgy, and national security. Candidates with backqrounds In these cluster areas are erlCOuraged to apply. Details regilrding each 01 the cluster searches can '~a found at ~itp:l/Www.engr.udel.edu/lacultysearc~.

Appointments may ba 1(1 a prlma.ry engineering disCipline or as anin1eRji$cip!i.nary appo lntrna nI ac ross dopa rime riIs. S ucca sstu I ca noldatas wUI be expected 10 cone uct innovative and lnternatlcnally recognized rasaarch, and engage ln high quality leaching a.nd me nlO ring.

Appl fC<l.nt!l s houTd s Lib m lt curricL1! um vitae, sta IIl.men! 01 res sa rch and teachl ng Inlerests and ach i evemenls, as well a s the na mas, add res sas, pho ne n umba rs, a nd 9- mail addresses 01 lour rllferences at http://www.engr.tKle!.edullacultySi!artih. Review 01 applications wlll begi.n as early as October i 5, 2010, aJihough nominations and appllcatena wll I be accepted untll ihe ooslnonls fllled,

TIte UNIVE.RS lTV OF DELAWARE .Ill ·an Equal OpportunllY Employer which enoouraf!r!s a,ppllcatlons from Minority Gro~p M!!mb!l~s and WOml'll.

[ .. Cleveland Clinic

Lerner Research I ns,titute

Lerner Research Institute Postdoctoral Research Opportunities

Postdoctoral fellowships and advanced postdoctoral positions (Research Associatl;! and Project Scientist) are available in fundamental. and translational research, including biomedical engineering, cancer biology, drug discovery and development, vascular cell bi.ology, and molecular cardiology, immunology and transplantation research, molecular genetics, virology, n eu rosclen ces, pathobiology, structure I bi ology, hu man geneti cs and genomic medicine.

For a listing of positions available, visit: www.lerner.ccf,org/iobs/postdoc

Visit: www.lerner.ccf.org/education for details about postdoctoral programs, career development programs, I.iving in Cleveland and working at the Clavsland Cllnlc,

Visit the Lerner Research Institute Edu cation website at www.lerner. cd.arg/education for information about recruiting, postdoctoral support, career development programs; living in Cleveland and working at The Cleveland Clinic www.lerner.ccf.org.

In Yale Un. iversity School of Medicine

• Yale Child Study Center

~

NIMH Postdoctoral Research Fellowships

The Yale Child Study Center invites applications for postdoctoral positions in the NIMH sponsored, multidisciplinary postdoctoral research training program in Childhood Neuropsychiatric Disorders. Active areas of research include: 1) evidence based treatments ofchild mental disorders in the clinic and in the community; 2) communitybased epidemiological studies; 3) phenomenology and treatment studies of autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, dyslexia, Tourette's syndrome, and Post-traumatic stress disorder; 4) molecular biological studies involved inoortical development as well as signaling mechanisms in learningand memory; 5) neuroirnaging studies of autism, 'Iburette's syndrome and other disorders; and 6) genetic studies of autism, Tourette's syndrome, mental retardation and dyslexia; 1) genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate neurogenesis during brain development and in human induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with autism and Tourette's syndrome.

Positiousareavailable for24 months, beginning July 2011. Applications should be submitted by November 1, 2010. Send curriculum vitae, any published research papers, three letters of reference and a brief statement of research goals to monique.staggers@yalc;edu. This is a U. S. Government sponsored fellowship and is only open to citizens or permanent residents of the United States.

Yale Universit» is tin AJfirma five A clion/Equn I Opportunity Employer and we/comes applications from WOl}!~n and minority caiJdidares, and individuals with disabiliiies,

including those wilh neurodevelopmental disorders.

18 September 2010 I NewScientist 155

FEEDBACK

PROGRAMMERS, when bored, sometimes like to be sarcastically vigilant in ensuring that their work covers all conceivable eventualities. Feedback thinks this mightexplain the actions

of those who created AutoCAD,

a program used to edit designs for everything from window frames to jet engine components. It even allows you to print the designs in three dimensions

(12 December 2009).

Andy Howsehas spotted that you can set the units in which your design is drawn up in light years. As he observes, this would be particularly useful for designing universes: "Perhaps there Is something in this intelligent design thing after am"

Feedback cannot be the first to imagine winding up a colleague working on a project scaled in millimetres, by setting their program tolnterpret the units

in imported drawings in light years and thus showing them galactic quantities ofwhlte space.

LAST summer Feedback lamented the short life of the blog The Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project (ll]uly 2009). As readers fluent

in sciency pseudo-Greek will know, this set outto documerit the truth of the claim that the British newspaper in question has an "ongoing mission to divide all the inani mate objects

in the world into those that cause

or cure cancer". We a re therefore delighted to have been anonymously alerted to a similar project at the self-explanatory address ki ll-or-cure, heroku.com.

Backthen, Feedback made

a preliminary estimate of the prevalence of causes and cures by sea rching the website of Middle England's favourite newspaper for stories in 2008thatmentioned

The automated response to Nia Faulder's

email inquiry to a recruitment agency concluded:. "I will not return until 05/08/2050," Nice work

if you can get it.

561 NewScientist 118 September 2010

For more feedback, visit www.NewScientistcomlfeedback

beards, civil servants are being encouraged not to wear jackets and ties in hot weather. But a local human rights lawyer, Fumio Haruyama, has claimed the ban on beards is a violation of personal freedom.

"cancer and "cure" (269) or, conversely, "cancer' a nd "cause" (66). The new site has a. more thorough approach .. It presented its readerswith stories from the newspaperthat mentioned cancer and asked them to categorise them as claims of a cu re or cause. This

provided a far more extensive ha ul.

Hence we find, for example, that false MEANWHILE, in the UKa notice on nails, fatherhood and using Fac.ebaok the wall by the kettle at Pau I Bader's

cause cancer, while fatty acids workplace admonishes: "Do you need

prevent it. Feedback's method missed to fill the kettle? When you make a

the first three because the stories hot drink, boil just the amount of

do not i nd ude the word "cause".

So now we know what to avoid:

it is there in print, so it must be true. We are less sure of the life lesson

to take from another manifestation of B riti sh gee ks' fa s ci n ati 0 n with

this newspaper .. A blog called The Poke gives us a variation on the topological marvel that is the London Underground map (13 February),

calli ng this version The Mora I Underground (bit.ly/dailymailsecret).

This bu ilds on the success of

the automatic Daily Mail headli ne generator at bit.lyJdailymailheadlinesa website that, when we visited, asked ''Will Brussels bureaucrats

give .England swine flu?" and

pro te e d ed at the next cI lck to

"Have worki ng mothers made Britain's swans obese 7". The Moral Underground maps such key "be

very afraid" concepts to the London Underground, showing the District line, for example, connecting Brussels, Paris Hilton, the euro, [CTV, wind turbines, sex education, Elton John and speed cameras. This isthe secret formula to the paper's ed ito rial success, the blog claims.

ACCORDING to a report by Reuters, the local government of the Japanese city Isesaki has taken an innovative but controversial approach to the problem ofglobal warming. It.has forbidden employees to grow beards.

A spokesman said the ban is part of'the "Cool Biz" campaign, an initiative that aims to reduce the use of air conditioning in government offices. As well

as being asked to ctit off their

wateryou need, and ina day we·could save enoug h energy to light. every street lamp in the UK."

Paul says he knew the kettle was inefficient, but he didn't realise itwas that bad.

VISITIN G the American store

. Kohl's at bit.ly /wardrobevalet, Allen Lutins spotted that the "American Flyer Suiter 26·inch Wardrobe Valet" suitcase has "quiet, 360-degree spinning wheels" that" allow you to move quickly through terminals".

Allen is pleased, because, he says, "I hate wheels that spin less than 360 degrees."

FINA LLY, there are two adjacent rooms at the University of Readi ng

in the UK marked "Phi losophy Storeroom" and "History Storeroom".

''What on earth do they put in them?" asks Peter Toye. "Discarded ethics in the former, perha ps7"

Yo u caf) 5 en d SID ries to Feed ba rk by email [email protected]. Pleas e inc! ud e yo u r h omea dd res s Thi,s week's and past filedbacks (an

be seen on ourwebsita

THELASTWORD

Last words past and present. plus questions, at www.last-word.com

Simply red

Occasionally my ears "burn", becoming very warm to the touch and glowing red. It can be j ust the left or the right ear, or both that are affected. I suspect itis something. to do with blood flow and cooling, but why the variation and what prompts it? And,at course, 1 do not believe the old myth that "someone is talking about me".

• You do not state the times of day, nor whether you habitually blush vigorously at embarrassing thoughts. !fyou light up mainly in the cold season then perhaps simple cold damage to your skin or mild frostbite is the cause. You needn't be exposed to severe cold to experience this; even in South Africa "winter oor" (Afrikaans for "winter ears") are a common nuisance.

In susceptible people exposure to temperatures below about

10 "C may bring it on. Sandals

or bare feet invite winter toes as well. Cryophilic bacteria may then Infectcold skin, aggravating peeling and itching. These bacteria do poorly at normal body temperature, so keeping the affected area warm and applying antiseptic compresses at a temperature of aboutaj "C will generally clear things up.

Arterioles in some people's extremities go into spasm for various reasons, especially in reaction to cold. This starves

the skin of blood, most familiarly in the hands. This is known as Raynaud's syndrome. When the

Questions.and a nsWefs shaul d be ['0 nds·e. W@ reserve the rightto edit items fur clarity . and style. lndudea daytime telephone number and emeilsddress if you ~ave

one. ResirictquESTIonito sclerit[fl( enquriesahout eveWday phenomena Thewritersofpublished' aRswers wi:11 receive a d,eqtJewrE2S (or USS equivalent). Reed Business Information Ltd reserves an ri ghts ill reuse q uestiona ~ d

a nsw e r fl1 aterialsu bmfl:tEd by rea dersi n ar.IY medi'um orformat

blood vessels relax and the affected areas warm up the skin commonly flushes red and may become painful.

jon Richfield

Somerset West, South Africa

Rising heat

In hot weather my loft can be almost 20 "( warmer than my cellar. Is there anything useful' or interesting I can do with this7Tbe cellar in question is three floors below the loft .

• The best thing you can do with the 20 "C temperature difference between loft and cellar is to make sure you store your food and drink in the cellar and hang your washing up to dry in the attic.

In the grand scheme of things ,

a 20"C temperature difference is not very big. If you want to extract mechanical energy from it, then the maximum possible efficiency is that given by a Carnot cycle engine. Running between a hot reservoir of temperature of say

30 "C (303 kelvin) and the cellar at say 10 'c (283 K), then the fraction of'the heat flow that can be extracted as useful work can be calculated by dividing 283 by 303 and subtracting the answer from 1. This gives 0.066 or, in this case, 6.6 percent. This means that for every 100 joules of heat energy that fl owe dfrom attic to cellar, you would only be able to extract

"The best thing you can do is store your food and drink in the cellar and hang up your washing in the attic"

New's ri entist retai ns total ed itorial ccrrtml over the CD nte nt ofThe Last Word.S en ~ questions and a nS\!l! ei-s toThe lasfWD[ct New SrientistLacon House. 84 Theobald's Road LonGonWD.X 8NS, UK. :~ ·~mailto :19,ill'd 0 [email protected] or vi sit

ww.w .. last -wordmm (plea.se.indude a postql, add ressi n order to receive p9)'mem fa r1l1lswers).

ror alist of all unarswered questlors sen d an SA'E to LW QI ist iltthe above address;

6.6 joules as work. In reality it would be even less than this since this is the upper thermodynamic limit for a perfect machine.

This efflctency limit is why practical engines always use hightemperature sources of energy, such as coal combustion. Running between combustion flames at 800 'C (1173 K) and cooling water at 30 'c (g03 K'.) gives a much greater theoretical efficiency limit of74 per cent. This is also the reason why using underground hot rocks as an alternative source of energy is a challenge for engineers. The temperatures of the extracted fluids ate often only in the range of a few hundred degrees C, so thermal efficiencies are low.

Simon Iveson

Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment University of Newcastle NeW South Wales, Australia

• Thermocouples area proven way ofge ne rating energy from

a temperature difference between a heatsink and source; they have been usedin spacecraft for this pUrpose and are both practicable and reasonably efficient.

In both cellar and loft, old central heating radiators ~ the bigger, the better- might be used to feed heat between thermocou pies attached to them and their surroundings. Copper and aluminium are potential materials for the connections between loft and cellar. Ideally, several pairs of cables connecting the thermocou pies in series

Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?

Our latest collactlon-

serious enquiry,bri lliant insig ht and the hilariously un~xp'e,Cted

Available., from booksellers

and at WWW:.new5cieritist.com/ polarbears

would generate a useful voltage for chargingbatteries in cell phones, cameras or emergency lighting.

Chris Collins

Ilandrindod Wells,. Powys, UK

• Brew beer in the loft, and store the product in the cellar. Job done. David Everton

Nottingham University, UK

This week's questions

SWEAT TEST

Anti perspirant deodorants

often claim to offer" 24-hour" protection. What determines the length of time a deodorant works and how do they test for it? How does the chemical composition ofthe deodorant prevent perspiration?

Rowan Howell

Lewes, East Sussex, UK

SOU ND OF SilENCE

My daughter dived underwater in the swimming pool and screamed as loud as she could.

I was right next to her with my head out of the water, but I could only detect the tiniest sound, at the end of the scream. But when

I was underwater with her, I could hem most of the scream. Why? Linda Simpson

Katonah, New York,. US

TYR E STRATEGY Why-can't you mix cross-ply and radial tyres on a car? Peter Spurring

Teddington, Middlesex, UK

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