CAN WE TRUST THE INTERNET? Asks Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger p28 www.knowledgemagazine.in
Volume 3 Issue 5 August 2013 `100
THE SCIENCE TH OF
PLUS
R.N.I.MAHENG/2010/35422
Other Monsters M of the Dark p30
A Megatsunami is Inevitable p38
G Global History Questioned p54 Q
Saving the Unicorn p62
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On the cover SCIENCE
SCIENCE
CAN WE TRUST THE INTERNET? ET? ET? ET T?
MONSTERS
Asks Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger p38 www.knowledgemagazine.in
THE SCIENCE OF PLUS
4
Volume 3 Issue 5 August 2013 `100
MORE MONSTERS EXPLAINED
Matt Kaplan discovers that the beasts of piercing stare and hooked claw that walk your nightmares are based on science fact
he half-man, half-beast minotaur, the fire-breathing dragon, the werewolf and its corrupting bite… all the stuff of utter fiction. Surely the monsters of campfire stories and Hollywood horror can have no basis in reality? That would be ridiculous. This is what we have deluded ourselves into believing but it is, astonishingly, wrong. While there never was a real werewolf that could curse others by biting deeply into their flesh, this is not how our ancestors saw things. Once upon a time, diseased wolves ran rampant across the European landscape. Countless souls were mauled and the pain of such attacks was far greater than the mere tearing of flesh. Just a single bite from these beasts would spread
ILLUSTRATOR: NATHAN MCKENNA
T
40
their infection and, within months, a contaminated person would be stripped of their humanity, snarl, hiss and ultimately be driven to bite others around them. Today, our understanding of epidemiology allows us to see this hideous transformation as the result of the rabies virus. But long ago it was the curse of the werewolf. Make no mistake, monsters are fictional creatures, but they did not emerge from nothingness. Our very worst nightmares have their origins firmly rooted in reality, taking form from terrifying phenomena that our ancestors were seeing but could not understand. So here, armed with today’s scientific knowledge, we’ll shed light on the birth of these horrific beasts.
Even the creatures of your nightmares have a logical explanation… well, we hope so anyway
August 2013
30 The Science Of Zombies
THE TH HE ES SCIENCE SC CI OF O F
We bring out the underlying facts behind thee tales of Zombies and other monsters
ON THE COVER: 123RF.COM; MONDOLITHIC STUDIOS; DREAMSTIME X2, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, THOMAS P PESCHAK, JEWELS OF THE NIZAMS, CORBIS
NATURE
NATURE
MEGATSUNAMI
PLUS
A tsunami triggered from a volcanic landslide could send a colossal wave crashing into the American coast
Other M Monsters onsters of the Dark p40
MEGATSUNAMI Are we in danger of a giant tidal wave causing mass destruction worldwide? Bill McGuire reveals how it’s only a matter of time before such a surge is unleashed
ecent events in Japan and southeast Asia have ensured we are all too aware of the tsunami-triggering potential of enormous, submarine earthquakes. Less well known, however, is the fact that volcanoes are also very effective tsunami generators, with ‘flank collapse’ – when a sizeable chunk of a volcano collapses into the sea – spawning tsunamis that have taken close to 20,000 lives in the last 400 years. In 1979 a tsunami caused by the collapse of Indonesia’s Iliwerung volcano took several hundred lives. And in 1792, the failure of part of Japan’s Unzen volcano launched a tsunami that battered coastal villages, resulting in 14,000 deaths. Now scientists say a collapse of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands could create a tsunami that would devastate the East Coast of the USA and batter the UK’s western shores. More often than not, volcanoes are not solid, unmoving bastions of strength, but wobbly piles of ash
HIS
ILLUSTRATOR: MONDOLITHIC STUDIOS
R
48
and lava rubble just looking for an excuse to collapse. The evidence for this is all around us, with many hundreds of massive landslides now identified at volcanoes right across the planet. Typically, these leave behind enormous collapse scars, such as the great rocky amphitheatre torn from the east flank of Mount Etna and, most recently, the 3km-wide bite taken out of the north flank of Mount St Helens by the landslide that triggered its 1980 eruption. Slippery slope Once a volcano’s flank has become unstable, it can be shaken off by an earthquake, pushed off by an injection of new magma, or sometimes just fall off as the flank becomes too steep. It doesn’t even need an eruption to start things moving. As the extraordinary footage of the collapse of Mount St Helens north flank reveals, once a volcanic landslide gets going, there is no stopping it. The mass of moving rock hurtles downslope at velocities matching those of a Formula 1
August 2013
38 Megatsunami
HISTORY
HISTORY
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
THE FIVE BIG QUESTIONS IN GLOBAL HISTORY Odd Arne Westad introduces five major themes in humanity’s wider story that strongly divide academic opinion
What is ‘global history’?
DREAMSTIME/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
What do we mean whe en we say ‘global history’ – or ind deed ‘world history’, ‘transnational history’ or ‘international history y’? These are surprisingly tricky terms to pin down. Here’s what historians do agree upon: we are e dealing with issues that are bi bigger than tho ose contained within one state or one e nation. In most cases, we’re also o talking about issues that have e participants from different societies s. To be more specific,, global history has come to me ean an emphasis on comparattive aspects
64
of human activities in the e broadest sense. World history is often o about histories that take a partticular view as to what connects hum mankind ankind over time. Transnatio Transnational history is about how ho ideas, money y and people e travel, and about how co ommunities are constituted outside tthe frameworks of empire, state or nation. International history cen ntres on relations among commu unities, peoples and states. These are vague and contested c definitions. But it is at lea ast helpful to know a little about wh here we’re starting from in these de ebates…
1
HISTORY ORY
Why hav W have Homo sapiens proved overwhelmingly successful? s overw so
Thee story of humankind is aat root the tale of cclever apes spreading across the globe.We know that the first humans of our own species, Homo sapiens or anatomically modern humans, walked out of their African homeland around 65,000 years ago.What we know lless about is what haappened to them durring the first few milleennia of their odyssey. The sp peed with which they spread is astonishing. Within less than 20,000 years they had reached Au ustralia, which they b began to explore at around d the same time as they sp pread to most of Europ pe. Whatt accounts for our massive an nd almost instant success as a species?? Our capacity to learn and to adapt is, of course, at the bottom of this. But the size of our brains, historians agree, is n not enough in itself to explain what happeened. Diet most certainly played a ro ole.The first humans protein-rich foods of chanced upon the p the coastal zone, and d it’s quite likely that their colonisation o of the world was linked to their dietaary needs (or preferences).This ex xplains why they followed the coasts everywhere and why it took a long time before they began to penetrate the interiiors. Life on the beacch certainly pushed humans in the direcction of life on the water, not just alo ong its edges.Within a hundred geenerations or so of them firrst venturing outside Africa, simple boats had madee their appearance, alth hough historians disagree over how far d the first humans
cou uld travel by water. It iss likely that our forebears’ maritime skillls developed incrementally, but thaat this knowledge spread fast. Our anccestors could communicate through language, and it is quite possible that the idea of a boat may have been familiar to peo ople who had never even seen one. Some historians claim that even in ourr early history similar tools appear in diffferent population groups, with the kno owledge of how to build these tools spreead via word of mouth rather than thro ough hard-and-fast experience. But could all humans communicate? Wee do not know when language
Some of the most important disease-fighting genes we now carry evolved outside our own subb species
our view of – and our debates about – early humanity.We know that Homo sapiens and humans of what we broadly call Neanderthal groups interbred – up to four per cent of our own DNA is of Neanderthal origin. But was such intermingling also common with other groups, whose identity we still cannot trace for certain? It will take a bit of time before we caan determine where and with what resultss different groups of humans interbred after our ancestors left Africa.This is one of the most exciting fields of prehistorical research and one that is going to have great consequences for our understanding of humans living today. After the Neanderthal genome was mapped a couple of years ago, it became clear that some of the most important disease-fighting genes humans now carrry originated from outside our own sub-species. Some researchers think th he very fact that we could interbreed with other human groups contributed massively to the peopling of the Earth, because it provided ‘hybrid vigour’ to help us become ubiquitous on all continents save Antarctica.
A Megatsunami Mega eegatts is Inevitable Ine nevi nevit n nev evit ev viitta vi able p48
Th his Cro-Magnon skull, which dattes from m c28,000 years ago, was found d in the Dordogne region of Fran nce 65
August 2013
Join in in the debate that tries to answer thee most pertinent questions in global history CONSERVATION OF INDIAN RHINO
SAVING
28 Comment and Analysis Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger says that we should should question the verity of information we receive on the web
NATURE URE
THE
UNICORN
URI GOLMAN
In the fertile floodplains of Assam, men risk their lives every day to poach – or protect – the few surviving Indian rhinos. Andrew Balmford reports from conservation’s front line
The Indian rhino is one of two ‘unicorn’ species (the other is the Javan). Here, a mother and calf are pictured next to a stand of elephant grass 4–5m high in Kaziranga National Park August 2013
August 2013
73
62 Saving The Unicorn Will the Indian rhino survive the next wave of onslaught by poachers?
2
August 2013
Saving ving i tthe Unicorn Unico icco ico co cor corn orrn p72
Every issue delivered direct to your ur door
54 Questions In Global History
72
Global Global obal b H bal History i Qu Q uestioned ue uest eestio esti sstio st sti ti tiio ioned on o n Questioned p64
82-83 SUBSCRIBE TODAY ODAY OD A
diffferentiation appeared (‘very earlly’ is most people’s guess), alth hough we know a bit about how w languages developed. It’s a sub bject complicated by the factt thaat our immediate ancestors werre not the only humans around in the new terrritories they colonised. In E Eurasia, at least one of ourr genetic cousins was alreeady resident. Recent advvances in human DNA reseearch have deeply influenced d
August 2013
NATURE
R.N.I.MAHENG/2010/35422 R.N N NG/2010/35422
Can calm waves be perpetrators of mass destruction? Bill McGuire finds out
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Contents
SCIENCE
HISTORY
NATURE
HISTORY
HISTORY
NATURE
NATURE
NATURE
SCIENCE
FEATURES ON THE COVER
30 The Science Of Zombies Matt Kaplan discovers Zombies and other monsters of the dark that existed long before fictional stories made them popular ON THE COVER
38 Megatsunami Find out how the intensity of an off-shore earthquake could trigger a series of tsunamis that would wreck havoc across the world
60 Jewels Of The Nizam Not just diamonds, the Nizams also had an affinity for emeralds
44 Portfolio: Canada’s Wild Nature Award-winning underwater photographer Thomas P Peschak travels deep within Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest to capture the diversity of its marine life
52 Opposites Attract
44 Portfolio
What governs attraction in nature? Daphne Fairbairn acertains upon a delightful chemistry in the oddest couples found in the animal kingdom
Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest is home to the world’s most exotic crustacean
ON THE COVER
54 History Of The World We answer some of the most debatable questions in world history that have lasted over a thousand years
38 Megatsunami
Are we waiting to be swept off by a giant tidal wave?
60 Jewels Of The Nizam Jewellery historian Usha Balakrishnan n selects pieces from the Nizam of Hyderabad’s collection that are rich in history and value ON THE COVER
62 Saving The Unicorn Hunted for its horn, which is believed to have mythical healing powers, the Great Indian Rhino battles for its survival against man
68 Inside The Pages In this excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s gothic hic ay, masterpiece The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Basil realises that Gray’s soul is trapped ed in the portrait, leading him to commit debauchery ebauchery without repenting
54 History Of The World
72 The Big Idea: Catastrophism hism
Is the conventional literature on global history correct?
Robert Mathews speaks of ‘Catastrophism’ hism’ and the devastation it has caused on the planet
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Contents REGULARS
12 Q&AA
8 Puzzle Pit A veritable buffet of brain teasers guaranteed to test your mind
12 Q&A Our panel of experts answer the questions you’ve always wanted to ask
Does the cuckoo cloc clock ck ch beat the digital watc watch when it comes es to t keeping time? me e?
20 Snapshot Outstanding photographs to entertain and engage you
24 Update
Are scientists closer to finding the origins of the meteor that crashed in Russia?
77 Principal Speak Padma Negi, Principal of Billabong International High Juhu, Mumbai believes that teachers have to aid students in overcoming daily dejections
80 Gadgets MP3 players in the market that are sure to get your tunes playing
UPDATE 24 Latest Intelligence 123RF.COM X3, SUPERSTOCK, GETTY, URI GO GOLMAN, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, ILLUSTRATOR: NATHAN MCKENNA
An analysis of the cosmic fireball that hit Russia ON THE COVER
28 Comment & Analysis Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, asks whether we can trust whatever we read on the web
RESOURCE 86 Web Clicks
30
62 Saving The Unicorn
The Science Of Zombies
Will our grandchildren see the Great Indian rhino in the wild?
You might want to look under your bed before you go off to sleep tonight
Our picks offer the best of science, history and nature on the web
87 Games Review We review the latest video games in the market
88 The Last Word Astrophycist Dibyendu Nandy talks about the inescapable thought of the Sun dying out
8 Puzzle Pit Puzzles, brain teasers and more that will entertain and boggle your mind
72 Big Idea Can mass extinction be a good thing? 4
August 2013
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FROM THE EDITOR I am all for the supernatural and the paranormal. Love the scary movies, the horror stories and the real life tales of unexplained phenomena. What is it about the creatures of the dark that tug our fascination? Perhaps the same reason why God is so popular the world over? A Scientists studying evolutionary history used to talk about a God Spot, and now rather a series of locations in the human brain that form the biological foundation for spirituality. It is an interesting thought, that our brain could have evolved, sensitised towards stimulants that we feel increase our chances of survival. And by proxy, raise our curiosity about that which could really challenge the odds… a.k.a. evil spirits, monsters, zombies, etc. Read our cover story about some of such enduring mythical creatures, about the facts behind their existence on page 30. Another engrossing feature is on the Five Big Questions in Global History (p54). Discover why the Chinese never conquered the world and more. This month’s edition is packed with the good stuff. From Megatsunamis to a lost continent found under the Indian Ocean. And nature throws up more proof that opposites really attract and why natural catastrophes may have been essential in the shaping of our planet. Happy reading.
Experts this issue Matt Kaplan is a science journalist living in London. He regularly contributes to various publications like National Geographic, New Scientist, Nature, etc. He is the author of the book Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters, which explains through facts, the origin and evolution of monsters. In this issue, he underlines the science behind Zombies and other monsters of the dark. See page 30 Bill McGuire is a science writer and the Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL. He has authored various books on climate change leading to catastrophes, his latest one being Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes. In this issue, he reveals how destruction can approach us in the form of a giant tidal wave. See page 38 Usha R Balakrishnan is an art historian, specialising in Indian jewellery. She has evaluated and catalogued the jewellery collection of the Nizams of Hyderabad and has documented it in her book The Jewels of the Nizams. In this issue, she picks some pieces from the collection to give an insight into the art and history of one of the richest dynasties in India. See page 60
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Editorial, advertising and subscription enquiries BBC Knowledge Magazine, Worldwide Media, The Times of India Building, 4th floor, Dr. D. N. Road, Mumbai 400001 www.knowledgemagazine.in Printed and published by Joji Varghese for and on behalf of Worldwide Media Pvt. Ltd., The Times of India Building, 4th floor, Dr. D. N. Road, Mumbai 400001 and printed at Rajhans Enterprises, No. 134, 4th Main Road, Industrial Town, Rajajinagar, Bangalore 560044, India. Editor- Preeti Singh. The publisher makes every effort to ensure that the magazine’s contents are correct. However, we accept no responsibility for any errors or omissions. Unsolicited material, including photographs and transparencies, is submitted entirely at the owner’s risk and the publisher accepts no responsibility for its loss or damage. All material published in BBC Knowledge is protected by copyright and unauthorized reproduction in part or full is prohibited. BBC Knowledge is published by Worldwide Media Pvt. Ltd. under licence from Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited. Copyright © Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without permission. The BBC logo is a trade mark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence. © British Broadcasting Corporation 1996
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WorldMags.net Picture Search: Antelope, Africa, Baby, Balloons, Cabbage, Cage, Cyclist, Dog, Eraser, Feather, Football, Giraffe, Gun, Handbell, Harmonium, Helmet
Q2 Deductions: Lamprey, Amiss, Tip
SOLUTIONS:
21JDLBOE$IPPTF Kalidasa, Caracas, Concerto, Siddaramaiah, Babble, Taciturn
123RF.COM X23
Q3 Go Figure: Easy: 3 x 2 x 8 + 3 = 51 Medium: 5 x 3 – 4 + 6 = 17 Hard: 6 x 3 – 6 x 6 = 72 Q4 Mensa Puzzle: K. Add the numerical value of the top left and centre letters to give the lower left letter, similarity with the top right and centre letters to give the lower right letter
August 2013
Q1 Chain Words: Archer, Herbal, Ballad, Laddie, Diehard, Hardhat, Hatred, Redden, Dental, Talent, Entrap, Rapport, Portend, Endpoint, Pointless, Lesson, Onrush, Rushlight, Lighthouse, Housecoat, Coattail, Tailgate, Gatepost, Postcard
8
Q6 Head & Tail: Now-Playing-With-Care-Package-DealOut-Come Q7 Double barrelled: Post Q8 Enigma Code: Linger, Engine, Ginger, Grille, Lining, Niggle, Ringer
In the jumble below, the words represented by each of the 16 pictures are hidden either horizontally, vertically or diagonally forward or backwards but always in a straight line. See how many of them you can find? Look out for descriptive names.
Find your way out.
MAZING
PICTURE SEARCH
Puzzle pit
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Questions and challenges guaranteed to give your brain a workout
Q1 CHAIN WORDS
Q5 PICK AND CHOOSE
Form a continuous path of words from START to FINISH by connecting the word parts given in the boxes. There are two parts to each word and the second part of one word is the first part of the next. You won’t necessarily need to visit every box to achieve your aim. START
Solve the six clues by choosing the right combination of letter sets given below. Each of the letter set can be used only once and only in the order given. The number at the end of the clues specifies how many sets of letters are used in the solution. 1. Renowned Sanskrit poet (3) 2. Capital of Venezuela (2)
ARC
LAD
DIE
RED
DEN
HER
BAL
HARD
HAT
TAL
LIGHT
RUSH
POINT
END
ENT
HOUSE
ON
LESS
PORT
RAP
5. Talk incoherently or irrelevantly (2)
COAT
TAIL
GATE
POST
CARD FINISH
6. Reserved and uncommunicative (3)
3. A classic music piece (4)
Q2 DEDUCTION You are given a nine letter word. Your job is to break up this word into nine separate letters and place them on the dashes to spell a seven letter word, a five letter word, and a three letter word. You can use each letter only once. PALMISTRY A
P
M
4. Karnataka’s new Chief Minister (4)
Q7 DOUBLE BARRELLED What word can be placed in front of the five words shown to form in each case another word?
C O D E BLE
SA
AMA
IAH
URN
TO
CARA
TAC
NC
DAR
BAB
IDA
CO
SID
CAS
IT
KAL
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H O L E A G E C A R D D A T
E S
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Q3 GO FIGURE Place the four numbers in the first, third, fifth, and seventh boxes and whatever operators you care to use in the second, fourth and sixth boxes in the correct order to get the answer. Use the numbers only once. X
The operators: ÷
+
Q8 ENIGMA CODE Each colour in our code repres sents a letter. When represents you you have cracked the code yo ou will be able to make up seven words. The clu ue to the first word clue is given to help you get starte ed. started.
–
Easy
3
2
8
Medium
= 17
3
4
6
6
3
6
Look at the clue to solve the answer in the form of a compound mpound word. The second part of the next answer is the first part of the next answer. At movies theatres currently
=72
Hard
The Clue: Hangg around.
Q6 HEAD D AND TAIL T
3
G
Now
G
—— —— Fire
6
G
Gingerly or lovingly
Q4 MENSA PUZZLE Which letter goes in the emty square and completes the puzzle?
G
G
Parcel containing necessities
G
Bundled good value
G
Hand cards evenly to players Result
G
come
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August 2013
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E
WorldMags.net Puzzle pit Q9 SCRAMBLE
Q11 SUSPENDED SENTENCE
Solve the four anagrams and move one letter to each square to form four ordinary words. Now arrange the letters marked with an asterisk (*) to form the answer to the riddle or to fill in the missing words as indicated. Now arrange the letters marked with an asterisk (*) to form the answer to the riddle or to fill in the missing words as indicated.
Each of the words at the top of the columns has to be placed in one of the boxes directly below, but not necessarily in the same order as they appear. When you’ve got them correctly arranged, they will form a quotation, which can be read line by line from left to right.
SETAE
*
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BARSS
*
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TOLSON
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When________________ fight, it is the____________that suffers African proverb (9,…,5)
IT FAILURE LEARNING PREPARATION
AND SECRETS TO THE RESULT
IS WORK OF THERE ARE
SUCCESS FROM NO HARD
Q12 TODAY’S TEASER
Q13 HIDATO
1. There is one in a minute and two in a moment, but only one in a million years. What are we talking about?
The goal of Hidato is to fill the grid with consecutive numbers that connect horizontally, vertically or diagonally from the first to the last number in the grid. The first and last numbers of the puzzle and some others are already filled in.
2. Your clock has gone haywire. At 2:41 am it read 6:17, at 6:17 it read 9:53, whilst at 9:53 it read 1:29 pm. What time will it read at 1:29 pm? 3. What food is it that you throw away the outside of, cook the inside of, eat the outside of, and throw away the inside of? 4. If one red rose equals three purple roses, and one purple rose equals four white roses, how many red roses are in 24 white roses? 5. What expression is represented here? I hear: “It, It, It, It, ...” You hear: “I_, I_, I_, I_, ...”
Q10 ONE LETTER CROSSWORD C Y
F
X
W
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P
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hard work, and learning from failure.
123RF.COM
Q12 Today’s Teaser: 1 The letter M 2 5.05 p. m. The clock is 3hrs 36 mins fast 3 An ear of corn. 4 2 red roses You will never hear the end of it.
Q13 Hidato: August 2013
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SOLUTIONS:
Quiz: 1c, 2b, 3a, 4b, 5a, 6c, 7b 10
Q9 Scramble:Tease, Brass, Stolon, Hang. When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
G
T
Q10 One Letter Crossword: Toy, Cow, Fax, Cat, Pin, Pig, Hat, Jar
P
Q11 Suspended Sentence: There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation,
T
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SOLVE CROSSWOR D & WIN GIFT VOUCH ERS FR
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Think n Win
Our Independence Day crossword will test your knowledge about our country
OM www.hitpla
y.in
Crossword NO.16 ACROSS 1 What appellation was given to Bhagat Singh after he was executed (7) 2 In this region of Bihar, Mahatma Gandhi fought for the rights of landless farmers (9) 5 The burning of a police station in this town in Uttar Pradesh, led to the end of the first non-cooperation movement (6,6) 8 Poem composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay which was given the official status of the National Song in 1950 (5,7) 12 Police officer murdered by Bhagat Singh to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai (8) 15 Tilak famously proclaimed that “Swaraj is my _____” (10) 18 Freedom fighter who went on to become the first Prime Minister of India (5) 19 Subhas Chandra Bose contracted tuberculosis in this prison in Myanmar (8) 21 Freedom fighter who is widely credited for
22 23 24 25
transforming the Independence Movement from an elitist struggle to a national one (6) Princely state in which Nehru was imprisoned (5) What Vallabhbhai Patel was popularly known as (6) The Dandi march started from Mahatma Gandhi’s ____ Ashram (9) Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy which means “Insistence or devotion to truth” (10)
DOWN 1 Newspaper started by Subhas Chandra Bose (6) 3 South African city in which Mahatma Gandhi was thrown off a train for refusing to leave the first class compartment (16) 4 Philosophy which means non-violence (6) 6 Brahmabhandav ____ : First martyr to die in British custody in the 20th century
7 9 10 11 13 14 16 17 19 20
freedom struggle (8) Mahatma Gandhi was held for two years in this palace in Pune (3,4) ___ Massacre: What the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was also known as (8) Movement started by the Indian National Congress in 1942 (4,5) Viceroy who ordered the partition of Bengal in 1905 (6) Practice of boycotting British goods (8) Philosopher whose works influenced many freedom fighters (11) Founder of Servants of India Society and Gandhi’s mentor (7) The number of years Mahatma Gandhi spent in South Africa (6,3) The 1857 Sepoy Mutiny started in this town (6) Brigadier General who ordered the shooting at Jallianwala Bagh (4)
YOUR DETAILS NAME:
Quiz See how you fare in the general knowledge quiz given below. Ratings: 1-3 Poor, 4-5 Fair, 6-7 Excellent 1) According to the Bible, who was the first person on earth after Adam and Eve? a) Seth b) Able c) Cain 2) Which form of carbon is most likely to be found in a lead pencil? a) Diamond b) Graphite c) Plumbago 3) Who wrote Discovery Of India? a) Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru b) Rabindranath Tagore c) Swami Vivekananda 4) In which language were the ancient Vedic texts writen? a) Prakrit b) Sanskrit c) Pali
AGE: ADDRESS:
5) Which communist country is physically closest to the United States? a) Cuba b) Venezuela c) China
PINCODE:
6) In 2001 he became the first wildcard entry to ever win the Men’s Singles title at Wimbledon. a) Thomas Muster b) Goran Pipric c) Goran Ivanisevic
TEL:
SCHOOL/INSTITUTION/ OCCUPATION:
7) By what name is solid carbon dioxide known? a) Fullerene b) Dry Ice c) Cold Ice
EMAIL:
SOLUTION OF CROSSWORD NO. 15 How to enter for the crossword: Post your entries to BBC Knowledge Editorial, Crossword No.15 Worldwide Media, The Times of India Bldg, 4th floor, Dr Dadabhai Navroji Road, Mumbai 400001 or email
[email protected] by August 10, 2013. Entrants must supply their name, address and phone number. How it’s done: The puzzle will be familiar to crossword enthusiasts already, although the British style may be unusual as crossword grids vary in appearance from
country to country. Novices should note that the idea is to fill the white squares with letters to make words determined by the sometimes cryptic clues to the right. The numbers after each clue tell you how many letters are in the answer. All spellings are UK. Good luck! Terms and conditions: Only residents of India are eligible to participate. Employees of Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. are not eligible to participate. The winners will be selected in a lucky draw. The decision of the judges will be final.
ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS OF CROSSWORD NO. 15
Neha Binwal Thane t Lakshmi Mirra Kannan Kolkata t Rajath.B Cochin
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HIGHLIGHTS Are all fermented drinks alcoholic? p14 Do whales have belly buttons and nipples? p16 What causes the ‘heavy’ sensation of a dead arm? p17 Could a new species of human evolve? p19
EXPERT PANEL Susan Blackmore (SB) A visiting professor at the University of Plymouth, UK, Susan is an expert on psychology and evolution.
Are new galaxies still forming?
Alastair Gunn Alastair is a radio astronomer at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, UK.
Luis Villazon Luis has a BSc in computing and an MSc in zoology from Oxford. His works include How Cows Reach the Ground.
Robert Matthews Robert is a writer and researcher. He is a Visiting Reader in Science at Aston University, UK.
Gareth Mitchell
NASA/HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE, SUPERSTOCK X2, THINKSTOCK X3
As well as lecturing at Imperial College London, Gareth is a presenter of Click on the BBC.
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107.1 decibels was the ever record loudest ed A car horn is burp. 110dB
ASK THE EXPERTS? Email our panel at
[email protected] We’re sorry, but we cannot reply to questions individually.
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It appears that new-born galaxies are alive and well in the Universe. Most galaxies formed very soon after the Big Bang and astronomers have known for some time that the rate of galaxy formation has steadily declined through time. When the Universe was young, galaxies were forming regularly, but over time fewer and fewer were born as these babies grew up into adult galaxies much like our own Milky Way. Recently, however, astronomers have found evidence that both dwarf galaxies and their more massive cousins are still forming in the Universe. Some may be younger than 1 billion years. These galaxies seem to have remained in an embryonic state as cold clouds of hydrogen and helium gas for most of the Universe’s history. Why they took so long to form into galaxies, and what it was that made them do so, is currently unknown. AG
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Pictured here by the Hubble Space Telescope, I Zwicky 18 is thought to be the youngest galaxy ever seen, at only about 500 million years old
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Why do our fingers wrinkle in the bath? The release of the wrist-cuckoo clock was a watershed moment for retro watch enthusiasts
Are digitall clocks locks more accurate than analogue clocks? In fact analogue clocks are more precise than digital ones. But they are not necessarily more accurate. That might seem contradictory, but the sweep of the hands on an analogue clock is continuous, whereas a digital clock is
How fast is a Wi-Fi network? Most Wi-Fi networks operate on variants of IEEE 802.11, an internationally agreed standard for carrying digital data wirelessly. The first widely used type was 802.11b, offering a theoretical speed of 11 megabits per second (Mbps). One megabit is 1,000,000 bits of data a second. At that speed you could transfer a 1GB movie across your network in just over 12 minutes. My own router supports the later 802.11g standard allowing speeds of up to 54Mbps, or a 1GB movie to be transferred in two and a half minutes. However, interference and physical obstructions can interrupt the speed of the network. GM
KNOW SPOT The hottest place in the Solar System is in the core of the 4VO BUBSPVOE ¡$
governed by fixed values. Therefore, an analogue clock can show a precise time. A digital timekeeper approximates to an interval determined by the number of digits on its display. So it can be more accurate, but it is less precise. GM
What determines how big a planet is?
This chap clearly doesn’t understand the physics of proto-planetary discs
A planet’s size is determined by how much material it was able to accumulate during its formation. The inner parts of the proto-planetary disc around the new-born Sun, from which the planets formed, were too warm for lighter molecules (like water and methane) to condense, giving rise to rocky planets with heavier elements. The gas giants formed further out where these lighter (or volatile) materials could condense more easily. Since volatile compounds were more abundant than heavier elements, the outer planets grew much larger. AG
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It used to be thought that wrinkling was a purely passive process, caused by your fingers absorbing nd water so that the skin swelled up and became too big for the tissue it was s ch anchored to. In fact, recent research has shown that it’s the other way s around: the tissues of the fingertips contract and pull the surrounding skin into wrinkles. This is an active mechanism controlled by the nervous system. Since your body is deliberately wrinkling your fingers, rs, that suggests there must be a reason for it and a recent study at Newcastle University showed that wrinkled fingers are better at gripping wet objects. As well as allowing our ancestors to grapple e with wriggling fish, this would have helped them to keep their balance on wet rocks because our toes get wrinkly too. LV
Why do candles only smoke after they’ve been extinguished? Smoke is unburned particles of carbon released when the hydrocarbon chain of candle wax breaks down. When the candle is alight, most of the carbon gets burned to carbon dioxide, but some escapes. If you hold a plate above a candle flame, you’ll see the carbon accumulate as a sooty smear. When the flame goes out, the glowing wick has enough heat left to break up the wax molecules for a while, but not enough to burn the carbon, so you get a trail of smoke until it cools. LV
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THINKSTOCK X2, UPMC, HO-YEOL RYU, GETTY ILLUSTRATOR: PAUL WESTON, ILLUSTRATOR: PAUL WESTON
How do infrared TV controls work?
What’s the e best be est way to o beat arachnophobia? hobia?
Infrared remotes send a binary signal encoded with a command. Instructions to change the channel or adjust the volume are usually encoded in a seven-bit code. Added to that is a device identifier so that the commands act on the television rather than, say, your set-top box. The command is converted into the invisible flashing of your remote’s LED in one of three ways: pulse, space or shift-coded. In the former, the duration of the light pulse represents the binary bit. For instance, a long pulse could be a ‘1’ and a short pulse, a ‘0’. Space-coded is the same, only the space between pulses carries the binary bits. Shift-coded is where the television detects what the pulse is doing at regular intervals in time. The LED going from off to on during one of those intervals, or on to off, carries the desired bit of code. GM
Exposure therapy is probably the most successful. Arachnophobia (from the Greek for spiders and fear) affects roughly half of women and one in 10 men. It may even be an instinctive response, evolved among our ancestors to avoid dangerous species. Arachnophobes often think about spiders and avoid situations where spiders may lurk, or even where they may see pictures or videos of them. This strategy only increases their fear. Effective treatment begins with information about how spiders behave, how fragile they are, and facts about the very few that can harm us and the majority that e cannot. Relaxation training helps the e patient learn to relax before they are gradually exposed to ever more
Are all fermented drinks alcoholic?
Why do planes appear ppear tto travel so slowly in the sky?
realistic spiders. They may begin with webs and very distant photos of spiders, gradually progressing to closer and more realistic ones. Virtual reality spiders in different settings can help, until finally the arachnophobe is introduced to the real thing. They may even end up able to handle enormous tarantulas and forget their fear completely. SB
Arachnophobia must be horrible when you turn a page to see life-like spiders…
Our brains judge the speed of objects passing by us through the time taken for them to cross our field of view. Those taking a long time could either be nearby and travelling slowly or faster and further away. And in the case of planes, our brains know that the second interpretation is the right one. RM Fermentation tanks brew man’s greatest invention: red wine
Yes, by definition, fermentation is the process of turning sugar into alcohol by the metabolic action of yeast, or sometimes bacteria. However, the alcohol can be removed after the fermentation process. Alcohol boils at 78.3ºC, rather than 100ºC for water, so you can remove the alcohol by heating the drink – distilling it essentially, except that you keep the part that is left behind, instead of the vapour that boils off. Vacuum evaporation is usually used to create alcohol-free beer and wine, rather than heating, to avoid cooking the drink and affecting the desired taste. LV
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The need for a third runway became paramount
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5,161–1
is the larges t kn XJUI own prime number, this large m EJHJUT/VNCFST ay application have a future in cryptograp hy
HOW IT WORKS Mind-controlled robotic arm It may sound like a concept from a science fiction film, but in December last year researchers at the University of Pittsburgh pulled off a remarkable feat: the operation of a robotic arm with mind control alone. Two tiny MICROELECTRODE ARRAY arrays of 96 electrodes were implanted just beneath the surface of the brain of 52-year-old quadriplegic Jan Scheuermann. The electrodes fed information from her brain to a robotic arm, which she could manipulate in real-time by simply thinking about 4mm doing so. To give Jan control of the arm, doctors first recorded her mental activity using an fMRI scanner as she imagined moving her arm. This enabled them to place the electrodes on the part of BRAIN-MACHINE the brain that was active when thinking of INTERFACE arm movement, in the motor cortex. The electrodes penetrate into the brain and The signals from the are able to pick up the activity of brain are translated individual neurones. Computer into a corresponding algorithms were then used to movement of the identify the different patterns of robotic arm by a computer firing neurones associated with various imagined arm movements. When the system was connected to the robotic arm, these movements were then translated into a corresponding action.
Two arrays of electrodes are implanted in the motor cortex and pick up signals from individual neurones before passing them to a connector on the skull CONNECTOR
The robotic arm can be moved in real-time by simply imagining doing so. It took Jan Scheuermann just weeks to be able to pick up and manipulate objects with the arm
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TOP TEN DISTANCES TRAVELLED ON OTHER PLANETS BY ROVERS
The life aquatic: a baby killer whale enters its watery world
1. Lunokhod 2
37km 1973, USSR
2. Apollo 17 Lunar Rover
35.8km 1972, NASA
Do whales have belly buttons and nipples?
3. Opportunity
35.5km
2004-present, NASA
4. Apollo 15 Lunar Rover
27.7km 1971, NASA
5. Apollo 16 Lunar Rover
26.5km
They do indeed. Whales and dolphins are mammals, which means that although they live in water, they are warm-blooded, breathe air, give birth to live young and have mammary glands producing milk. Young whales are born underwater and have an umbilical cord just as we do. When the cord is broken after birth the scar left behind becomes the belly button. The calf then drinks milk from its mother’s nipples which are usually hidden within a ‘mammary slit’.
In some species the mother squirts the milk into the calf’s mouth. This is possible underwater because whale milk is very thick, having a fat content of between 35 and 50 per cent and a consistency like toothpaste. Mother killer whales have been seen feeding their young in captivity. The mother glides in a horizontal position and the calf swims on its side as it sucks from her nipple. SB
1972, NASA
6. Lunokhod 1
Looking like something the A-Team would fly, the Westland Lynx is officially the world’s fastest chopper
10.5km 1970, USSR
7. Spirit
7.7km
2004-2010, NASA
8. Curiosity
0.7km
2012-present, NASA 9. Sojourner
0.5km
1997-1998, NASA 10. Prop-M
0km
(crashed)
1971, USSR
MARS MISSION
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What’s the fastest helicopter in the world? Officially, the world’s fastest chopper is the Westland Lynx, a multi-purpose military aircraft that has seen naval and battlefield use. In its record-breaking flight in 1986, a Lynx helicopter flew a 15km course in Somerset near the Yeovil factory where it was manufactured. Over two legs, the aircraft managed an average of 400.9km/h. However in July 2010, the Sikorsky X2 helicopter beat the Lynx, achieving 417km/h in a test flight. The Sikorsky is a distinctive beast with an inverted tail and coaxial rotors. ors. There are two rotors, each with four blades mounted one above the ng in opposite directions. There is also a six-bladed propeller at the rear. other, rotating This configuration uration is designed to increase speed and to usher in the next generation st military and civil helicopters. However, there was no observer from the of super-fast National Aeronautic ronautic Association to witness the Sikorsky flight, so the Lynx’s record still stands. GM
MOON MISSION
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While alcohol in your blood can make you feel good, the breakdown products give you a hangover. When you drink alcohol (ethanol), the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase in your liver converts it to acetaldehyde (ethanal). Then acetaldehyde dehydrogenase takes over and turns the ethanal to acetate, before it’s broken down into carbon dioxide and water. Asparagus contains compounds that more than double the speed of both the alcohol and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase enzymes. If you took asparagus before you went out for the
night, this would reduce how drunk you felt because the alcohol would be processed more quickly. Taken the morning after, it would also help to mop up any remaining ethanal in your blood. The downside is that a bottleneck is created that will increase the levels of acetate. This causes the chemical adenosine to accumulate in your brain, which lowers the activity of your brain cells. This is why a hangover also makes you feel sluggish. Luckily, caffeine binds to the same receptors as adenosine, so a cup of coffee prevents the adenosine from slowing you down. LV
What causes the ‘heavy’ sensation of a dead arm?
Usually it’s restricted blood flow. This often happens during sleep if you turn into an awkward position and squash the arteries running down your arm. When the flow of blood is reduced, muscles, nerves and other tissues are deprived of oxygen and nutrients. When nerves are affected this causes numbness as well as tingling or burning sensations that can wake you up. If you then try to move, your arm feels heavy. This is because the muscles are weakened by lack of blood. So even if you make a big effort, the arm does not move normally. The same effect can be caused by wearing a rucksack with the straps not properly adjusted or indeed by anything that stops adequate blood flow to the arm. If you have persistent ‘dead arm’ this may be due to injury or disease and needs medical advice. SB
The Cosmic Microwave Background has enabled us to slap a date on the Universe
Currently, the best estimate for the age of the Universe is 13.772 billion years, with an error of plus or minus 59 million years. We’ve arrived at this figure by measuring the current rate of expansion of the Universe and then extrapolating backwards. In practice, however, we also have to know how that expansion rate may have changed through time and this is dictated by the matter composition and energy density of the Universe. Fortunately, this information is embedded in the tiny temperature fluctuations found in the Cosmic Microwave Background, the faint glow of light that fills the Universe and which is the residual heat left over from the Big Bang. NASA’s WMAP satellite measured these fluctuations to an unprecedented accuracy, enabling astronomers to narrow down the age of the Universe to within 0.4 per cent. The WMAP results agree with other completely independent means of estimating the age of the Universe. AG
KNOW SPOT
We like to take things literally here at BBC Knowledge
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The oldest island is Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It broke off from the Indian subcontinent about 80-100 million years ago.
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Does asparagus help a hangover?
How do we know the age of the Universe?
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Room with a view: enjoy a sunset or sunrise every 45 minutes on the ISS
What time zone do they W u use on the International Space Station? S Intt International space station crews experience a sunset or a sunrise every 45 minutes. New sun n members me e arrive acclimatised to Kazakhstan time, tim m having departed from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Co o With so much scope for chronological confusion, it’s no wonder that the ch r ISS S needs to be locked to a consistent time. The Th e zone of choice is Coordinated Universal Tim m (UTC), which is equivalent to GMT. GM Time
H How do th d the h brains of intelligent people diff differ from others?
Why do we stretch when we wake up? When you sleep, your muscles lose tone and fluid tends to pool along your back. Stretching helps to massage fluid gently back into the normal position. Also, your muscles protect themselves from over-extension by inhibiting the nerve impulses as they approach their limit. Over time, this safety mechanism becomes increasingly restrictive. Stretching briefly takes your muscles outside their normal range. This recalibrates the feedback mechanisms that determine their normal amount of motion. LV
Reset your muscles’ limits with a stretch
When Albert Einstein died in 1955, doctors couldn’t resist opening up his brain and looking for clues to his brilliance. And what they found backed claims that really smart people have different brains. The most recent study, published last November by a team led by Prof Dean Falk at Florida State e University, suggests Einstein’s tein’s brain had a relatively large e prefrontal cortex – the region linked nked to the highest functions of consciousness, onsciousness, like imagination. on. He also had unusually shaped parietal lobes, known to be linked to o visualspatial skill and d mathematical ability. These were combined ombined with a high density nsity of so-called glial cells, which feed the neurones ones needed for thought. So Einstein’s brain seems well-suited to making amazing discoveries. arching for similar Studies searching differences among mong the general
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population have come up with intriguing results too. For instance, brain scanning research has shown a link between intelligence and the quantity of brain cell nuclei, known as grey matter. RM
Einstein’s grey stuff was preserved for posterity
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minutes is ho w long Internationa it takes the l Space Station to or bit the Earth
Why does cornflour suddenly turn solid when poked? Mix some cornflour with water until it’s like single cream, and you’ll find that if you jab it with a finger, it turns solid, but goes gooey again when treated more gently. Called ‘dilatancy’, it’s the result of the sharp-edge grains of cornflour piling up like speeding cars in busy traffic, which don’t give themselves time to manoeuvre round each other without colliding. RM
The inhabitants of a future Mars, terraformed to make it habitable, could become an entirely separate species to us Earthlings
Modern medicine and the comforts of civilisation have changed the way that natural selection affects us, but we haven’t yet wriggled entirely free of its grasp. But no matter how the human race continues to evolve, it will still be the same species. For humanity to split into a new species, we would need to become reproductively separated. Otherwise, the genes just get mixed back in again. Earth is too small for geographical or cultural barriers to prevent different nations and races from interbreeding. We’d need to colonise Mars or another planet with a community that remained separate for hundreds of generations before a separate species formed. LV
Why does looking at a bright light help you sneeze? It’s called the ‘photic sneeze’ but only about one in three people experience it. The exact mechanism isn’t known, but it may be that bright lights stimulate the branch of the large trigeminal nerve that runs to the eye and that some of this stimulus crosses over to the branch that connects the nose. LV SUPERSTOCK, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X2, SUPERSTOCK, GETTY, ISS
Could a new species of human evolve?
“I need my glasses to read this article on sneezing”
KNOW SPOT September 2003 saw the discovery of the most distant moon from a planet. S/2003 N1 orbits /FQUVOFBUBOBWFSBHFEJTUBODFPGNJMMJPO LN NJMMJPONJMFT
NFBOJOHJUUBLFTB staggering 26 years to complete an orbit.
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SNAPSHOT
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NATURE
Crimson tide This aerial photograph is of Lake Natron, a salt lake fed by rivers and volcanic springs in northern Tanzania. Its vivid colouration is caused by single-celled ‘extremophile’ microorganisms called archaea. They contain a red pigment and are able to tolerate the high concentrations of sodium carbonate in the water. The lake’s water also quickly evaporates, as air temperatures often top 40°C. “Extremophiles like this are of interest because they are living remnants of the first organisms on Earth,” says University of Leicester ecologist Dr David Harper. Current research is looking into the ecology of flamingos in Lake Natron. Salt crystallises out in the heat to produce thin white islands where the birds can raise chicks safe from hyenas.
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JUAN CARLOS MUNOZ/NATUREPL.COM
GREAT RIFT VALLEY, TANZANIA
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Space-age materials
NASA
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION What looks like an artist’s palette is actually a test bed for new materials in the harsh environment of space, where exposure to ultraviolet radiation and atomic oxygen can cause damage. The open box is attached to the outside of the International Space Station for a year, then returned to Earth for analysis. “We want to devise materials that will last longer in space,” says Dr Robert Walters of the US Naval Research Laboratory, who leads NASA’s eighth Materials International Space Station Experiment programme (MISSE-8). This particular tray was flown to the ISS by Space Shuttle Atlantis in July 2011 to testing whether strong yet lightweight silicon carbide could replace heavy ground glass in future space telescope mirrors. The tray returned to Earth in February this year and results are awaited. 22
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SNAPSHOT
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SCIENCE
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Update
THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
Is there a new continent under the Indian Ocean? p25 Do humans really have a four-sided DNA? p25 How are locusts helping in making robots? p26
Secrets of Russian meteor revealed Space rock’s death throes provide a window into its past The largest meteorite fragment landed in frozen Lake Chebarkul
n 15 February, early morning drivers around the Russian city of Chelyabinsk were startled by the biggest meteor strike in more than 100 years. Appearing literally out of the blue after sunrise, this cosmic missile became a fireball brighter than the Sun before exploding into thousands of fragments over the Urals. Since then, planetary scientists have been studying videos of the space rock’s final moments and analysing its remains. The task of tracing the meteor’s final moments was made easier by a network of CCTV cameras in and around Chelyabinsk, plus footage of the brilliant fireball from the ‘dashcams’ commonly fitted to Russian cars to record accidents.
GETTY, CORBIS, REXFEATURES, SUPERSTOCK, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
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By analysing seven different videos, Dr Pavel Spurný and his team at the Ondˇrejov Observatory near Prague were able to triangulate key points in the rock’s path and from that, calculate the meteor’s orbit before it ran into our planet. Spurný says the rock orbited the Sun on an elliptical path that stretched from Venus to the centre of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. “Our main contribution was to determine its atmospheric trajectory,” tells Spurný. “We proved that the main piece landed in Lake Chebarkul and that two or three large fragments and thousands of smaller, coin-size meteorites originated from the two biggest flares.” Spurný’s analysis also shows the rock first became visible at
a height of around 92km above ground before exploding at a height of 32km, 11 seconds later. The resulting shockwave damaged buildings and injured over 1000 people. As it entered the atmosphere, the rock would have been about the size of a
house and would have weighed in the region of 9000 tonnes. Many fragments of this behemoth have been found lying scattered around Lake Chebarkul. Prof Viktor Grokhovsky of Ural Federal University has collected more than 50 pieces himself, and found the asteroid was stony with a little iron, classifying it as a ‘chondrite’. The fragments contain glassy veins that would have been generated by collisions with other asteroid belt objects. This battering is likely to have led to weaknesses within the rock, which resulted in the spectacular explosion in our atmosphere. Rocks that were less flawed might have hit Earth’s surface intact. Spurný is working to further refine his calculations of the rock’s orbit using more observations. The meteorite chunks will also be analysed in greater detail to reveal what they contain.
Some of the damage caused by the e meteor explosion and (right) a fragment of meteorite
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The island of Mauritius sits where a much larger, much older landmass once lay
Lost ‘continent’ found under Indian Ocean elow the Indian Ocean, a continent has lain hidden for millions of years, but now its presence has been revealed by grains of sand lying on a beach. What’s more, geologists believe there could be lots of these ‘ghost continents’ scattered around the globe waiting to be discovered. When an international team of geologists analysed sand from the beaches of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, they found zircon crystals ranging from 660 million to nearly two
B
billion years old. But Mauritius is a much younger, volcanic island – its oldest rocks are no more than 8.9 million years old. These zircon crystals (‘zircons’) are also much older than any sea floor crust on the planet, so the researchers suggest the zircons were dragged up from an ancient landmass that once linked India and Madagascar – volcanic activity bringing them to the surface, where they mingled with the island’s sands. To test this idea they
looked at maps of the Earth’s gravitational field, which reveal the thickness of the Earth’s crust. They identified a banana-shaped sliver of unusually thick crust under the Indian Ocean. This crust, they say, could be the remnants of the microcontinent they have named ‘Mauritia’, which broke apart when India and Madagascar started to go their separate ways 85 million years ago. “Lots of other oceanic islands could be sitting above
Found in humans: four-sided DNA After more than 100 years of looking, scientists have finally tracked down a strange, four-stranded form of DNA. Our genetic code is usually incorporated in two strands of genetic material that wrap around one another, forming the famous ‘double helix’ struture. The discovery shows some of our genes are actually incorporated in a ‘quadruple helix’. These quadruplexes have been spotted in microorganisms before, but it’s the first time they’ve been seen in humans. It’s thought they may be involved
in the development of some cancers, providing new avenues of research into treatments. Professor Shankar Balasubramanian at the University of Cambridge, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Chemistry, describes the quadruplexes as ‘exotic knots’. Regions of DNA rich in the compound guanine, one of the four chemicals that makes up the genetic code, are particularly prone to forming the four-stranded DNA. Balasubramanian and his team conducted a computerised survey to search for guanine-rich
sequences. They found them all over the human genome. Research is already under way into how to use synthetic molecules to trap and contain quadruplexes – stopping cells dividing and therefore preventing cancer. “The research indicates that quadruplexes are more likely to occur in genes of cells that are rapidly dividing, such as cancer cells,” says Balasubramanian. “For us, it strongly supports the idea of investigating the use of these four-stranded structures as targets for personalised treatments.”
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drowned microcontinents,” says Dr Hans Amundsen, a geologist who runs the Norwegian company Earth and Planetary Exploration Services and who was involved with the research. “The Canary Islands and Madeira in the Atlantic Ocean are two possible candidates. To find out, scientists need to look for old zircons that have survived their travels to the surface,” says Amundsen. “I think we’re going to find more.” Fluorescent markers reveal the presence of the four-sided DNA as pink blobs in cells
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Update
ROUND UP KEEPING ABREAST OF THE TOP SCIENCE, HISTORY AND NATURE RESEARCH FROM AROUND THE WORLD
WILDLIFE Scientists at the University of Calgary in Canada have found a way to reduce bat deaths from wind turbines by up to 60 per cent – by slowing the turbine blades. The blades are slowed to a standstill during low wind periods, which coincide with the times when the bats are most likely to fly. Most bats killed at North American energy facilities are migratory tree bats, including silver-haired and hoary varieties. Bat deaths from turbines have lately outstripped bird fatalities.
DREAMSTIME X5, NASA
GENETICS The differences between the silky curls of a cocker spaniel and the shaggy mop of a sheep dog are down to just three genes. Scientists in the US and France made the discovery by analysing the genes of 80 dog breeds. They found that a dog’s coat can be split into three traits – length, curl and texture – and each of these is controlled by one major gene. So different combinations of different varieties of these genes leads to the vast majority of coat types of all the purebred dogs in the world.
PLANT PHYSIOLOGY
Pruning the main shoot in a plant encourages lower branches to grow because of the flow of the hormone auxin. Scientists in the UK, Canada and Sweden have discovered that for a side branch to grow, it must be able to export the auxin to the main shoot. So cutting off the tip of the main stem, or another side branch – where the auxin is also produced – will increase the chances that the side branch can export and grow.
AERONAUTICS The movement of locust wings will help engineers develop tiny flying robots for military reconnaissance. Scientists in the UK and Australia used high-speed photography to watch locusts fly in a wind tunnel (below). The insects were chosen for the study because they are efficient fliers and it appears that this is down to the complex way their wings fold in flight. The next task is for engineers to try to mimic the wing movement in small robotic aircraft – fixed wings are inefficient in tiny craft.
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TECHNOLOGY
A new piece of software can reveal whether one piece of music is a copy of another. Currently experts are called in to give their subjective opinion if one musician takes another to court claiming work has been copied. But, using complex algorithms, the software developed by experts in the UK and Germany can analyse the similarity of the melodies. Music plagiarism court cases from the US have been used as a test bed for the software and 90 per cent of the decisions were predicted correctly.
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THERE’S MORE TO EVERYTHING. EVEN POTATOES. KNOW YOUR STUFF.
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Comment & Analysis Larry Sanger asks whether we can trust what we read on the web
“I do not trust what I ingest on the internet because I know how the digital sausage is made”
With all the answers seemingly at our fingertips, what future do libraries have in our modern world?
he internet is profoundly shifting how we get information. Whether it’s through Web 2.0 services like social networking sites and wikis or through blogs and discussion groups, it is increasingly the resource of choice. And one of its key features is that it is unedited and devoted to open contribution. So the net has become – and is growing ever more so – the main way we interact with the world when we’re not face-to-face with it. But if it’s so unedited and wideopen, surely it must output vast amounts of garbage? Well, it does. This problem matters. It cannot be waved aside by saying, as so many do, that we merely need to become our own editors and think more critically. Our decisions are only as good as the information behind them, and no amount of cagey scepticism will defeat
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misinformation if we wind up acting on it, or use it to justify our deepest beliefs. Nor can it be dismissed by saying that perhaps a little misinformation is the price we pay for introducing democracy to the politics of knowledge. According to this attitude, when assorted experts, professional journalists and encyclopaedia-makers are deposed from their elite positions over us, the people are empowered. Perhaps.
The internet has two competing purposes: communication and information Neither of these replies grapples with the problem. When confronted with the quite sobering fact that we are ingesting more and more mental junk food, the reply appears
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to be: “But the internet is fantastic!” I agree, it is amazing. If I did not think so, I would not have spent so much time helping to create it. But, in awe of our shiny new digital toys, are we supposed to ignore how they might tend, perhaps subtly, to undermine the value we place on such things as deep personal reflection, painstaking research, careful rational inquiry and, quite simply, the earnest concern for the truth? I certainly hope not, because those are intellectual values on which the entire edifice of our civilisation is built. I do not trust what I ingest on the internet because I know how the digital sausage is made. I have been building and participating in internet communities, in the trenches, since 1994. This has taught me that most communities are set up not to ensure pristine accuracy of information, but instead
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to provide a fair playing ground for elaborate information-based games. The freedom and equality of participants are deeply valued because this is really the only way to build a large, active group. The needs of the community as a community strongly outweigh any countervailing requirements of information quality. To put it another way, the internet has two competing purposes: communication and information. What works excellently as a communication game frequently outputs a rather poor information resource. Examples of misinformation online are legion. Earnest bloggers feel no more pressure to check their facts than they do in face-to-face conversation. Why should they? It’s just a conversation. We are shaping for ourselves a brave new world in which we increasingly depend on freelydonated information that has never properly been checked for accuracy or fairness, one in which we increasingly form our opinions on the basis of discussions dominated by the loudest, most persistent, most motivated voices, not necessarily the most reasonable and well-informed ones. I do worry that what we value, and how we form beliefs that deeply guide our lives, might be changing without our being adequately aware of its happening – at least, so far as we increasingly plug ourselves into a group mind that does not have the truth, rationally arrived at, as its uppermost value. In 2005, newspaperman John Seigenthaler Sr called me up to complain that he had been dreadfully libelled by his Wikipedia biography. The experience of a confrontation with this distinguished gentleman mortified me. This is part of what led me to start Citizendium, a new
wiki which requires real names and allows a modest role for experts. I would like to see more such projects, but they may never be more popular than the faceless information
Most communities are set up not to ensure pristine accuracy of information engines of the world. More effective would be a system that allows people to rate websites and automatically post their ratings publicly for general use. Search engines would be able to aggregate these ratings, giving users much more guidance on the accuracy of what they are reading. Not only that, we could instruct search engines to seed rankings with data from those sources we trust. The internet really is astounding, but that’s old news. It’s time we dropped the hype, faced up honestly to its limitations, and sought better ways of organising ourselves. Larry Sanger is an American philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001. More recently he created another free encyclopedia, Citizendium.
Email:
[email protected]
people are killed annually by climate change, according to a report by the Global Humanitarian Forum led by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan. By 2030, the number of victims will be 500,000, it predicts.
60,000 years is the age of a piece of Neanderthal skull found in the North Sea. Discovered off the coast of the Netherlands, it’s the oldest human bone recovered from beneath the waves.
4600m (15,000ft) is the height of a volcano discovered off Indonesia’s western coast. The phenomenon – about half the height of Everest – was spotted by scientists carrying out a survey of the Indian Ocean floor.
385 body lengths per second is the speed of male hummingbirds performing a dive during their courtship ritual – making them the fastest vertebrates relative to their size.
200 milliseconds are all that’s required for the brain to gather most of the information it needs to determine someone’s emotional state from their facial expression, according to a study at the University of Glasgow.
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WHAT DO YOU THINK? Have we become lazy as a result of the internet? Or does it help us to better understand our world?
300,000
Can we trust what sites such as Wikipedia tell us, given the lack of editorial control?
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is the place on the periodic table that has been officially filled by a newly recognised element, tentatively known as ununbium.
SCIENCE
MONSTERS
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THE SCIENCE OF PLUS
4
MORE MONSTERS EXPLAINED
Matt Kaplan discovers that the beasts of piercing stare and hooked claw that walk your nightmares are based on science fact
he half-man, half-beast minotaur, the fire-breathing dragon, the werewolf and its corrupting bite… all the stuff of utter fiction. Surely the monsters of campfire stories and Hollywood horror can have no basis in reality? That would be ridiculous. This is what we have deluded ourselves into believing but it is, astonishingly, wrong. While there never was a real werewolf that could curse others by biting deeply into their flesh, this is not how our ancestors saw things. Once upon a time, diseased wolves ran rampant across the European landscape. Countless souls were mauled and the pain of such attacks was far greater than the mere tearing of flesh. Just a single bite from these beasts would spread
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their infection and, within months, a contaminated person would be stripped of their humanity, snarl, hiss and ultimately be driven to bite others around them. Today, our understanding of epidemiology allows us to see this hideous transformation as the result of the rabies virus. But long ago it was the curse of the werewolf. Make no mistake, monsters are fictional creatures, but they did not emerge from nothingness. Our very worst nightmares have their origins firmly rooted in reality, taking form from terrifying phenomena that our ancestors were seeing but could not understand. So here, armed with today’s scientific knowledge, we’ll shed light on the birth of these horrific beasts.
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Even the creatures of your nightmares have a logical explanation… well, we hope so anyway
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SCIENCE
MONSTERS
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ZOMBIES On a Caribbean island, zombies walk the streets The island of Haiti is rich with legends of the dead being brought back from the grave, but these were thought to be nothing more than myths until a remarkable story started to unfold. In May 1962, a man turned up at an American-run hospital in Haiti sick with fever, spitting up blood and suffering terrible body aches. His condition deteriorated and he was declared dead several hours later. The doctors noted that he had very low blood pressure, hypothermia, respiratory failure and numerous digestive problems. His sister identified the body and made arrangements for his burial. In 1981, the sister was approached by a man at her village market who introduced himself using the boyhood name of her dead brother. She was stunned. This was a name that only she and a few family members knew. The man said that he’d been made into a zombie and forced to work on a plantation until his zombie master died. The media went crazy over the story and Dr Lamarck Douyon, director of the Psychiatric Institute in Port-au-Prince, made up his mind to test whether this zombie tale could possibly be true. Extensive psychiatric tests proved that the man really was the brother. This led Douyon to conclude that there
had to be something real about zombie mythology – something must have made the man appear dead when he actually was not. So he contacted thethen Harvard ethnobotanist Edmund Wade Davis – currently the explorer in residence at National Geographic – to investigate what it was that these zombie masters were actually doing. Deadly Concoctions Having carried out numerous interviews with the masters, Davis discovered that they were developing complex poisons from local ingredients (see ‘Zombie chemistry’, opposite), which the victim inhaled or absorbed through their skin. This brought them to the brink of death; actually feeding the poisons to victims would have meant they were dead rather than just looking it, so they would have been of no use to their masters. These poor souls were then buried alive and later dug up. The zombie masters told Davis that they then had to beat the zombie to drive off its old spirit, tie it to a crucifix, feed it a paste made from hallucinogenic cucumbers and then baptise it with a zombie name. Davis realised that after this ordeal, victims were so mentally damaged that they would do whatever they were told. And while they were not the undead, they might as well have been.
WHEN PATIENTS RISE FROM THE DEAD
ILLUSTRATOR: NATHAN MCKENNA
Funeral home workers in the Colombian city of Cali got the shock of their lives when an apparently dead 45-year-old woman being prepared for burial started breathing again. Noelia Serna had been admitted to hospital after suffering a heart attack and was declared dead. After coming back to life in the funeral home, she was duly transferred back to hospital. This apparent miracle, back in 2010, is an example of the Lazarus syndrome, where a patient’s circulation returns some time after attempts at resuscitation have failed. But
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far from being animated corpses like the zombies we often imagine, these patients are very much alive. At least 25 incidences have been reported since 1982, and why it happens is far from clear. One suggested mechanism is a delay in adrenaline administered by medical staff reaching the heart. In a report on one incidence of the Lazarus effect in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia, doctors in Pittsburgh say it makes the timing of organ harvesting for transplants more ‘problematic’.
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WorldMags.net If anyone offers you a hallucinogenic cucumber, say no, unless you want to end up like this
* ZOMBIE IE CHEMISTRY C H EM The poison that creates the undead INGREDIENTS
MIXING
Toxins from the toad known as Bufo marinus. It is known for being something of a chemical nightmare, producing both numbing agents and hallucinogens.
The animal components are heated together with human remains before being placed in a mortar with the plant components and pounded to a granular consistency. The concoction is then sifted to produce the final product.
Puffer fish have toxins that cause paralysis, depress respiration, reduce circulatory activity, and cause patients to believe they are floating over their own bodies. The fish are a critical component of a zombie potion. Some species of plant used, such as Albizia lebbeck are unstudied and their chemical effects are unknown. Others are better understood – Mucuna pruriens, for example, has hallucinogenic effects.
+
APPLICATION Give someone the poison to drink and it “kills them too completely,” a witch doctor told Harvard ethnobotanist Edmund Wade Davis. Instead, the poison is applied repeatedly to the victim’s skin, an open wound, or it is blown across the victim so they inhale it. Some witch doctors add broken glass to the brew, so if it is placed on a doorknob the skin will be broken and the poison is more likely to take effect.
+ Frying, stewing, boiling and baking do not denature the tetrodotoxins within the zombie-inducing brew
So potent is the concoction that witch doctors wear face masks and cover exposed skin with an oily emulsion to ensure they do not succumb to the toxins themselves
*A warning to all would-be witch doctors – creating a zombie-inducing cocktail is dangerous and illegal. We have not listed all of the ingredients here.
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SCIENCE
MONSTERS
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MINOTAUR
Could subterranean bellows be the result of geothermal activity or a demented man-bull? If you’re reading BBC Knowledge you know the answer
A half-man, half-bull that tore its quarry to pieces
ILLUSTRATOR: NATHAN MCKENNA
At first glance, the minotaur seems absurd. A half-man, half-bull creature? The idea is as ridiculous as it is biologically impossible. However, writings from the 3rd Century BC hint that the fears behind the myth were real enough. While most descriptions of the minotaur’s physical form are vague, its bellows were described as so terrible that they could be heard for miles emanating from the labyrinth on the Greek island of Crete where it was imprisoned. Bellows coming from an underground maze… might the rise of the minotaur be linked to earthquakes? Subterranean roar Crete is tectonically active, but so are many locations around the globe that do not have minotaur myths associated with them. Yet a 2007 study by an international team of researchers published in Nature Geoscience hints that Crete has had earthquakes of truly epic proportions. The study analysed the carbon isotopes of fossilised marine organisms along the island’s coast to work out when they died and through this analysis the team discovered something staggering. Countless animals died at precisely the same moment in 365AD. As the team looked closer, it became clear that the animals perished because they dried out when Crete was pushed nearly 10m out of the ocean in a single moment. Ten metres of uplift from a single earthquake… that really is the stuff of nightmares. But 365AD is long after the days when the minotaur came to be. Crucially though, this tectonic incident wasn’t just an isolated event. A 2008 paper published in Earth And Planetary Science Letters by an international team of scientists identified boulders along the Greek coast with shelled marine animals attached to them. The boulders had been thrown out of the sea by earthquake-induced tsunamis, and the animals attached to them quickly desiccated. Carbon analysis of these animals allowed the team to date the moments when the tsunamis took place. As expected, some boulders dated to 365AD, but many had been thrown from the sea thousands of years earlier when the minotaur was only just emerging as a monster. 34
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DID YOU KNOW? The god Poseidon was responsible for creating the bull that inseminated the queen of Crete, leading to the birth of the minotaur. Known as the god of the ocean, Poseidon was also the god of earthquakes. Mere coincidence? Doubtful.
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LEVIATHAN
The Leviathan would eat Jaws as an appetiser
Familiar sea creatures or Biblical beast?
DID YOU KNOW?
DRAGONS
Some of the earliest dragons of mythology were constrictors from Assyrian legend. A 2011 study may show why, revealing that over the last 100 years pythons have eaten more than nine per cent of people born to each generation in hunter-gatherer tribes in the Philippines.
A fire-breathing beast that rises from the ground Dragons of medieval legend are not described much physically. It was their fiery breath that drew attention. The tales of the historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived in the 12th Century, hint that there might be some truth behind this. In Monmouth’s writings, ancient British King Vortigern was forced to flee to Welsh hills as the Saxons invaded. Near Snowdonia, he demanded that a fort be built. Yet every time his men began constructing the walls they fell over. Vortigern sought advice from his wise men who told him he needed to spill the blood of a child not born from the union between man and woman. Vortigern sent them off to find such a child and, when they came to Carmarthen, they discovered two boys arguing. One of the children insulted the other as a bastard with no father. Bingo! The wise men grabbed the kid and ran for it. Upon meeting Vortigern, the boy told him it was the dragons below the ground that were
responsible for the tumbling walls. Vortigern ordered his men to dig into the ground and, sure enough, they found dragons ‘panting’ flame. People assume Monmouth made this up, but there is science here. Wales has many regions where coal gas collects in underground pockets. People who went digging into them with tools that sparked against the rocks would have caused explosions. We understand this as mere combustion today, but back then, the blasts of foul smelling fire belonged to the deadly breath of a monster.
It was a horrid sea monster of incomprehensible size with ‘rows of shields tightly sealed together’ on its back and smoke that poured from its nostrils. This beast in the pages of the Bible sounds terrible. But the elements of the natural world that led to the imagining of the Leviathan of the Mediterranean are easy to identify. While the image of an animal with shields for skin is vivid, it is hard for a biologically-trained mind not to wander to thoughts of reptiles, or more specifically, to think of the large and hard scales of crocodiles living in the Nile. Smoke pouring out of nostrils had to have emerged from people seeing whales blasting air out of their blow holes and this goes along with the description of the beast rising up out of the water and thrashing about – it’s typical whale-breaching behaviour.
DID YOU KNOW? Contrary to what a lot of people believe, there really are whales in the Mediterranean. And some of the whales living there are really big animals, including fin whales and the carnivorous sperm whales responsible for the tales surrounding Moby Dick.
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Ah, so that’s what all that liquid molten rock is – of course, it’s the fiery secretions of a gigantic reptile
SCIENCE
MONSTERS
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THE FUTURE OF MONSTERS What new horrors will our imaginations create?
ILLUSTRATOR: NATHAN MCKENNA
Given the trends of the past 100 years, people in the future will likely be scared witless by a monster spawned from science. Books like Frankenstein and The Island Of Dr Moreau were only the beginning, with people fearing what transplants and blood transfusions were capable of bringing into our world. Now films like Jurassic Park, Species, and Splice scare us with genetically manipulated horrors and it appears to be a recurring nightmare. Genetic horror A team of scientists at the University of Tokyo is already raising mice that have been genetically altered to carry the pancreas of rats. This might not sound like much of a feat, but mice and rats are more distantly related than humans and chimpanzees. So how would people view a human grown with several organs belonging to a chimpanzee or some other mix of animals? Or worse, how might a chimpanzee grown with a human brain be viewed? Certainly, such a creature would have to be given the same civil rights as a human being, but what would a mind placed in such an environment endure? Thankfully, this is still just the stuff of science fiction but, in the next 100 years, it might not be. As these areas of science march ever closer to reality it is only natural for our fears of how such experiments might go very wrong to make their way into literature and film with everincreasing frequency. Indeed, this is why monsters are so valuable. They provide a face for our fears, allowing us to see them more clearly, and perhaps most importantly, understand what it is about the world that truly terrifies us.
You’d be annoyed too if you woke up to find that they’d transplanted your brain into the body of a gorilla
Matt Kaplan is a science journalist living in London. He is the author of the book Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters, which explains with help of facts, the origin and evolution of monsters. 36
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Monsters don’t come a knockin CAN WE TRUST THE INTERNET? Asks Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger p38 www.knowledgemagazine.in
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NATURE
MEGATSUNAMI
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Are we in danger of a giant tidal wave causing mass destruction worldwide? Bill McGuire reveals how it’s only a matter of time before such a surge is unleashed
ecent events in Japan and southeast Asia have ensured we are all too aware of the tsunami-triggering potential of enormous, submarine earthquakes. Less well known, however, is the fact that volcanoes are also very effective tsunami generators, with ‘flank collapse’ – when a sizeable chunk of a volcano collapses into the sea – spawning tsunamis that have taken close to 20,000 lives in the last 400 years. In 1979 a tsunami caused by the collapse of Indonesia’s Iliwerung volcano took several hundred lives. And in 1792, the failure of part of Japan’s Unzen volcano launched a tsunami that battered coastal villages, resulting in 14,000 deaths. Now scientists say a collapse of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands could create a tsunami that would devastate the East Coast of the USA and batter the UK’s western shores. More often than not, volcanoes are not solid, unmoving bastions of strength, but wobbly piles of ash
ILLUSTRATOR: MONDOLITHIC STUDIOS
R
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and lava rubble just looking for an excuse to collapse. The evidence for this is all around us, with many hundreds of massive landslides now identified at volcanoes right across the planet. Typically, these leave behind enormous collapse scars, such as the great rocky amphitheatre torn from the east flank of Mount Etna and, most recently, the 3km-wide bite taken out of the north flank of Mount St Helens by the landslide that triggered its 1980 eruption. Slippery slope Once a volcano’s flank has become unstable, it can be shaken off by an earthquake, pushed off by an injection of new magma, or sometimes just fall off as the flank becomes too steep. It doesn’t even need an eruption to start things moving. As the extraordinary footage of the collapse of Mount St Helens north flank reveals, once a volcanic landslide gets going, there is no stopping it. The mass of moving rock hurtles downslope at velocities matching those of a Formula 1
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WorldMags.net A tsunami triggered from a volcanic landslide could send a colossal wave crashing into the American coast
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GERARD FRYER/SOEST/UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII, PRESS ASSOCIATION ILLUSTRATOR: RICHARDPALMERGRAPHICS.COM
NATURE
MEGATSUNAMI
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racing car, typically travelling many kilometres before coming to rest and obliterating anything and everything in its path. With a volume of a couple of cubic kilometres, the Mount St Helens landslide was just a tiddler. Compare this with the 45km3 prehistoric flank collapse at neighbouring Mount Shasta, or the staggering 5,000km3 volume of the Nuuanu landslide, which took an enormous bite out of Hawaii’s Ko‘olau volcano a few million years ago. But the Nuuanu landslide is just one of around 70 mammoth collapses whose debris is scattered about the sea floor surrounding the islands of Hawaii. Another, known as the Alika 2 slide, formed about 100,000 years ago when a monumental chunk of the Big Island’s Mauna Loa volcano fell into the Pacific, sending a towering tsunami surging throughout the archipelago. Marine shell deposits now stranded up to 60m above sea level on the flanks of neighbouring Kohala volcano testify to colossal waves, but this is only half the picture. Over the last hundred millennia, the Kohala volcano has actually been subsiding, so that the true height of the tsunami looks as if it was nearer 400m. That’s a quarter as high again
Geologist Dave Tappin examines fossilised shells on Hawaii; evidence that a tsunami struck 120,000 years ago
“In the future, the west flank of Cumbre Vieja will fail, plunging into the North Atlantic” as London’s Shard – Western Europe’s tallest building. It’s difficult to grasp the impact such an event happening today would have on our world’s crowded coastlines. But with major collapses of ocean island volcanoes taking place somewhere on
On 11 March 2011, Japan was hit by a huge tsunami triggered by a magnitude 8.9 earthquake, resulting in a death toll of over 15,000
the planet as often as every 10,000 years or so, it may not be too long before we find out. One prime candidate for the next big collapse is the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Canary Island of La Palma, which has been behaving in a rather disturbing manner since an eruption in 1949. Then, the eruption was accompanied by some particularly strong earthquakes beneath the volcano’s western flank, together with the opening of a 3kmlong line of fractures along the crest of the volcano, down which part of the west flank dropped seawards by a few metres. This might have been no big deal but for the results of a survey of the volcano, undertaken by my research team between 1994 and 1997. It hinted that the west flank of the Cumbre Vieja might still be on the move, albeit extremely slowly. More than a decade on and we are convinced that something a bit special is going on. Comparisons between GPS readings undertaken in 1997 and 2007, designed to monitor relative displacements, reveal some astonishing results. Not only is the entire west flank of the volcano deforming independently of the rest of the edifice, but over the intervening decade it moved westwards and upwards by more than 10cm. This may not sound like much, but it means that Cumbre Vieja’s west flank qualifies as the most recently activated giant landslide, albeit moving at an incredibly slow speed… for now. Atlantic alarm While the current rate of seaward movement is tiny, all the evidence points to the likelihood that at some time in the future, the west flank of Cumbre Vieja will fail, plunging into the North Atlantic. No one has ever observed the formation of a megatsunami as a consequence of such an event, but we can build a realistic picture of what it might look like. For a terrifying worst case, which envisages 500km3 of rock sliding into the sea at 100m/s, a computer model built by Steve Ward at the University of California, Santa Cruz predicts
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THE ULTIMATE WAVE MACHINE
A massive landslide in the Canary Islands is set to cause a devastating tsunami
Below is a worst-case collapse scenario based on the rapid entry of 500km3 of rock into the North Atlantic from the Cumbre Vieja volcano. It predicts an initial bulge of water close to 1km high. As the bulge subsides, waves race outwards that, within 10 minutes, inundate the shores of La Palma and neighbouring islands to a height of several
Cumbre Vieja
hundred metres. An hour after collapse, waves 60-100m high crash onto the West African coast. As the tsunami spreads outwards like a series of giant ripples, it encounters the UK after about six hours, with wave heights of 10-20m. To the west, a huge ‘train’ of widely dispersed waves heads for North America. Arriving first in
Newfoundland, it works its way down to low-lying Florida, which faces the prospect of wave waves 20m high or more. For a smaller collapse of rock of, say, 150km3, predicted wave heights are scaled down, but would still be extremely destructive. Along the coast of North America, for example, they would perhaps be 3-8m high rather than up to 20m.
La Palma
The Canary Islands
Two minutes after the collapse of the Cumbre Vieja a huge tsunami forms, with a wave cresting at nearly 1km high
The Canary Islands
Five minutes after collapse, the trough of the wave reaches a staggering 1.3km below sea level
As it spreads out into the Atlantic the crest of the wave is still hundreds of metres high
A quarter of an hour after the landslide, the front of the tsunami is nearly 100m high, while the trough is close to 300m below sea level
Half an hour after collapse, and the tsunami forms a devastating ring of waves around the Canary Islands
Just one hour after the collapse of Cumbre Vieja and 50100m waves crash into mainland Africa along the coast of Western Sahara
The tsunami spreads out across the Atlantic with peak wave heights of 60m, with Spain and the UK hammered by 7m waves
Six hours after the landslide, Newfoundland is hit by 10m waves before larger 15-20m waves strike the north shores of South America
Florida then takes the brunt of the tsunami, with wave after wave hitting the coast, some reaching 20-25m in height
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FIRST PUBLISHED IN GEOPHYSICAL LETTERS. THIS MATERIAL IS REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION OF JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.
Western Sahara
NATURE
MEGATSUNAMI
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The destructive power of tidal waves laid waste to the city of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in December 2004
PHOTO: GETTY X2, NASA X3, USGS
A US Navy airman surveys the devastation in the Indonesian city of Meulaboh after a tsunami hit in 2004
an initial bulge of water close to a kilometre high, subsiding into waves merely hundreds of metres high. This may sound like something from a science fiction film, but tsunami deposits identified more than 180m above sea level on the neighbouring island of Gran Canaria show that something similar has happened before. A wave of this size would have been unleashed after one of at least 14 collapses of volcanic flanks that occurred in the archipelago during prehistoric times. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that the future collapse, when it comes, will be smaller than the worst case, as a consequence of which the resulting tsunami will be reduced in 42
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height. Certainly, marine geologist Dr Russell Wynn and colleagues at the UK’s National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton have provided evidence for at least one ancient collapse in the Canaries occurring in a piecemeal manner. If the Cumbre Vieja were to fail in the same way, with the rock making up the flank sliding into the sea bit by bit over a period of hours, then although there would be more tsunamis, each would be smaller and less destructive. However, everything we know about past volcano collapses points to the fact that when a volcano sheds a part of its flank, it usually does so very quickly, with most of the material sliding off in one go. While we can’t be certain, the weight of evidence suggests that when the west flank of the Cumbre Vieja eventually plunges into the North Atlantic, the resulting tsunami will be prodigious and unprecedented in the historical record.
“The waves will remain big enough to cause major destruction as far away”
UK: Disaster zone This news is not good for the Canary Islands, but what about further afield? One of the controversies about tsunamis is just how well they conserve their energy as they travel further and further from the source, and how high they will be when they
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reach distant shorelines. The original tsunami model for a future collapse of the Cumbre Vieja, published in 2001 by the aforementioned Steve Ward and University College London’s Dr Simon Day, supports the idea that sufficient energy is conserved as the tsunami spreads out across the North Atlantic so that the waves remain big enough to cause major destruction as far away as the UK, West Africa and even the east coast of North America. Other experts disagree, suggesting that a future megatsunami would lose energy more rapidly as it travelled, resulting in waves along the east coast of North America that were just a few metres high. Ward and Day, however, stick to their guns. As Steve Ward observes: “The 2011 Japan tsunami struck a few hundred kilometres of coast.
F LU VAC C I N E
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The waiting game But when is this all going to happen? Unfortunately, we don’t know. The average frequency of flank collapses in the Canary Islands is about every 100,000 years, but given that the Cumbre Vieja’s west flank is already on the move, it is likely to meet its watery grave much sooner. We might well have to wait thousands of years, but the collapse could happen at any time. As Dr Simon Day points out, this is most likely to happen ano during an eruption, “when the volcano is subjected to the additional forces imposed upon it”. ng In theory, there should be warning signs in the form of an acceleration in cano the rate of sliding. Provided the volcano w an is being monitored, this should allow uation alert to be raised, ensuring the evacuation ntime, of threatened coastlines. In the meantime, don’t be dissuaded from visiting the beautiful island of La Palma. Soak upp the Sun and visit the volcano.You’d be very unlucky to get caught up in a megatsunami-forming landslide. Bill McGuire is professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London.
MEGATSUNAMI WATCH
Around the world, huge landslides are set to wreak destruction on coastal settlements SUMATRA A segment of the Sunda Megathrust Fault off the coast of Sumatra (Indonesia), which has not ruptured since 1797, is fully primed and ready to go. When it does, it’s predicted to trigger a massive earthquake – as high as magnitude 8.8 – as well as a 5–6m-high tsunami. The devastating waves will reach the Indonesian city of Padang – population – within 30 minutes. While close to 1 million m preparations are being made to some prepa counter the threat of this sleeping giant of a disaster, the chances are that the level of death and destruction d will be very high.
Off the coast of Sumatra, an unstable undersea fault could cause disaster
CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE The Cascadia Fault extends northwards for more than 1000km along the west coast of North America, from northern California to midway along Vancouver Island in Canada. In 1700 the fault ruptured, generating an earthquake of around magnitude 9, which triggered a massive tsunami that was destructive even as far as Japan. A major earthquake hquake of a comparable size has a fair ir chance of happening within the next 50 years or so, leading to a potentially devastating tsunami striking the Pacific coastline of the United States and southern ern Canada. Cuba
Puerto Rio Virgin Islands
The Californian coast sits on tthe he Cascadia Fault, F ault, which could c ould generate a devastating ttsunami sunami
THE PUERTO RICO TRENCH
Puerto Rico Trench
The Caribbean islands sit precariously on the edge of the Puerto Rico Trench
GREENLAND Eight thousand years ago, an earthquake caused by melting of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet triggered the great Storegga landslide, off the coast of Norway, spawning a tsunami that inundated the Shetlands and the east coast of Scotland. As Greenland’s 2–3km-thick ice cover melts at an increasingly rapid rate, the faults beneath, which have been locked under the weight of the ice for tens of millennia, will be able to move more easily. Resulting earthquakes could, in turn, trigger submarine landslides similar to Storegga, capable of sending tsunamis surging across the Atlantic.
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The Puerto Rico Trench marks the join between the Caribbean Plate to the south and the North American Plate to the north. With a maximum depth of more than 8km, it forms the deepest part of the Atlantic Basin. Submarine imagery reveals numerous giant landslides in the trench that were triggered by ancient earthquakes. eart It is now more than 200 years since a major quake struck the region, and there is some concern that a future combination of a huge quake and a resulting landslide could co trigger a tsunami that could be destructive destructi across much of the Caribbean. Greenland’s melting ice could release powerful tsunamis across the Atlantic
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Imagine the same level of damage spanning shores 10,000km long – from Nova Scotia to Brazil, from Casablanca to Keflavik.” Ward and Day do have some independent support for their predictions. Far out in the middle of the Atlantic, the island of Bermuda sits bang in the path of any tsunami heading west. In addition to its eponymous shorts, the island is also known – among geologists, at least – for some enigmatic deposits exposed along its coastline. These take the form of shell and coral debris resting 20m above sea level. Gary McMurtry of the University of Hawaii and Dave Tappin of the British Geological Survey are of the opinion that this material was dumped by a passing tsunami hundreds of thousands of years ago. The obvious source is an ancient collapse of one of the Canary Island volcanoes. Should this prove to be the case, then it will go a long way towards supporting the idea that a future collapse of the Cumbre Vieja could present a serious threat to the entire Atlantic Basin.
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CANADA’S WILDEST WATERS
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PORTFOLIO
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NATURE
The Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia’s north-west coast is one of the few remaining places where a wild land meets a wild ocean: a marine biodiversity hotspot that is home to many unique species. This sunflower sea star – the world’s largest, growing up to 1m across – is endemic to the eastern Pacific. But coastlines are magnets for development; wilderness is constantly pushed further and further into remote areas of the interior. Now this wonderful natural realm may be at risk: a proposed oil pipeline across the rainforest raises the prospect of tanker traffic in these waters and the environmental threats that could bring. My aim when creating these images was to illustrate how interconnected the sea and the land really are. This split photo perfectly illustrates the point.
Unique images of the Great Bear Rainforest showcase the diversity and fragility of its wild inhabitants. XXX
Photographs by Thomas P Peschak
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NATURE
PORTFOLIO
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One of the most striking aspects of these waters is the incredible array of rich colours. I spotted this contrasting scene of purple sea star and green surf grass (above) from far away, and fought the incoming tide to reach them. The fish-eating anemone (left) is among the largest in the world. Growing up to 30cm across, this dinner-plate-sized predator carpets the rocky reefs of exposed outer coasts, using its crown of tentacles to catch small fish and shrimp.
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PORTFOLIO
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S At the estuary’s mouth, where the river meets the sea, I came across a massive swarm of jellyfish trapped by a strong tidal flow. The seas of the Great Bear Rainforest are home to more than 75 species of these gelatinous creatures; this dense fluther was made up of lion’s mane and moon jellyfish. To capture this photograph I had to descend through a tannin-stained freshwater layer and then a 2m thick crowd of jellyfish before reaching the colder, clearer water just above the seabed.
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NATURE
PORTFOLIO
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The dungeness crab has been described as the most delicious crustacean in the world. The local stocks of these tasty creatures are an important food source for the Gitga’at First Nations people, who have lived in harmony with the ocean here for many generations, taking only as much as they need from the marine and freshwater realms to feed themselves every year. These crabs are not found clumped in large swarms, but spread out across the seabed. Most flee when approached but a few stand their ground; this one even leaped all the way over my underwater camera housing.
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X Salmon are the keystone species of this region. Every summer they return to spawn in the rivers in which they were born. I found two deep pools at the base of a small waterfall alive with pink salmon preparing to leap the cascades and continue their upstream migration. Here I wedged myself into a crevice – the only way I could hold my position in the freezing, fast-flowing water. Salmon bring life, not just to seals, bears and wolves but also to the rainforest trees, which assimilate nutrients from the fish once they have died after spawning.
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PORTFOLIO
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PORTFOLIO
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NATURE
Two different races of orca feed in the coastal waters off the Great Bear Rainforest. So-called ‘residents’ prefer a diet of fish, feeding exclusively on salmon during the summer months. ‘Transient’ individuals have slightly more pointed dorsal fins, but the real difference lies in their behaviour: they prefer to eat marine mammals, including sealions, porpoises, dolphins and even grey and minke whales. They are also much less vocal than resident whales, probably because travelling in silence enables them to sneak up on prey – essential for a successful co-operative hunt. A planned pipeline through British Columbia would transport some 5,25,000 barrels of petrol each day from Alberta’s tar sands across the Great Bear Rainforest. Supertankers would navigate treacherous coastal waterways to reach this pristine region. The proposed routes for these vessels would traverse the habitat of many species of cetaceans, notably humpback whales and orcas. Any oil spills from tankers would threaten all of the creatures pictured here and, by extension, the livelihoods of the Gitga’at First Nations.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER Thomas P Peschak is a fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers and spends most of each year documenting marine conservation issues.
FIND OUT MORE www.thomaspeschak.com Thomas Peschak’s official website
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NATURE
ANIMAL EXTREMES
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FEMALE
MALE
OPPOSITES
Size matters, or at least it does in the animal kingdom. Daphne Fairbairn looks at some of nature’s oddest couples
TROY BARTLETT, GETTY, GREG ROUSE, E A WIDDER, NICK GOTELLI
BLANKET OCTOPUS TREMOCTOPUS VIOLACEUS The males and females of this graceful denizen of the open ocean are strikingly different to one another, more so than in any other octopus species. Females reach lengths of more than 2m and weigh up to 40,000 times more than males. The tiny males, which grow to no more than a few centimetres long, drift in the surface currents and sometimes catch rides on the bells of floating jellies as they search for a mate in the vast expanse of the open ocean. The males carry their sperm at the
ATTRACT end of a long, specialised arm called the hectocotylus, and mating involves depositing this inside the female’s mantle. Loss of the hectocotylus is fatal for males, so like the yellow garden spider, mating is their final act. Females, in contrast, often accumulate several hectocotyli before spawning hundreds of thousands of eggs, and it is thought that they need to indulge in multiple matings before they achieve full fertility.
YELLOW GARDEN SPIDER ARGIOPE AURANTIA This orb-web spider is commonly found across much of the USA. The plump, brightly patterned females are about 2cm long (not counting legs) – more than five times longer and 50 times heavier than their diminutive mates. They spend their lives hanging in the centre of their webs, capturing prey and producing batches of hundreds of eggs, which they pack into globular silk cocoons. By contrast, the tiny males are thin and drab and abandon their webs as soon as they mature. They scramble through the vegetation in search of a mate, not eating and risking both predation and starvation. The few that do find a mate and succeed in mating will die in the act. After inserting the second of his two palps (his copulatory organs) the male’s heart simply stops, leaving his lifeless body hanging from the copulatory duct. The giant females live on and often reproduce again, but for their dwarf partners, life ends with a single mating. 52
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ANIMAL EXTREMES
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NATURE
BONE-EATING WORM OSEDAX RUBIPLUMUS This tubeworm colonises the bones of whale carcasses that lie on the ocean floor. Female bone-eating worms have delicate red palps, thin transparent tubes about 4cm long, and branching, greenish roots that extend deep into the bone. The males, in contrast, are only about 0.1cm long and never develop this tubeworm morphology. They settle out of the plankton as larvae, attach themselves to the inner wall of a female’s tube and immediately begin to make sperm. They never feed and simply convert the nutrients in their yolk, simultaneously digesting yolk and making sperm. A single male could not possibly produce enough sperm to fertilise all of a female’s eggs, nor could he sustain himself long enough to do so. Females therefore collect new males continually and typically have tens to hundreds of males in their tubes at any one time.
BURROWING BARNACLE TRYPETESA LAMPAS Inside the calcium-rich shells of large marine snails lurk these burrowing barnacles. Female T. lampas reach diameters of 1cm, which is large for a burrowing barnacle, and weigh up to 500 times more than their males. The females settle on shells as larvae, attach themselves and then gradually burrow into the shell wall as they grow, forming snug, protective burrows. Male larvae follow a very different path. They settle on the mantle sacs of the females and rapidly metamorphose into stripped-down dwarfs consisting of little more than a large testis and an enormous penis. To fertilise the female’s eggs, the penis elongates and snakes its way into the mantle cavity, a journey many times the male’s body length. The males never feed, fuelling all of their reproductive activity with the yolk provided to them in the egg. The giant females clearly need multiple mates to ensure full fertility with older, larger females typically hosting harems of 7-15 males.
GIANT SEADEVIL CERATIAS HOLBOELLI Out of all the vertebrates, the males and females of deep-sea anglerfish are the most different from each other. Females reach lengths of up to 1.3m and can be 500,000 times heavier than their mates. The tiny males never develop the distinctive anglerfish form. Once they reach adulthood, they abandon feeding and devote themselves to searching for a female in the gloomy depths. If successful, they latch onto the female’s belly and metamorphose into permanently attached parasites, obtaining all their nutrition from the female’s bloodstream. From then on, their only function is to fertilise the eggs of their giant mate. Daphne Fairbairn is professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside and author of Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences Between The Sexes In The Animal Kingdom.
IF THESE MALES WERE HUMAN, THEIR FEMALE COUNTERPARTS WOULD BE THE WEIGHT OF... 500x heavier
40,000x heavier
Burrowing Barnacles 35 tonnes = Mechanical digger
Blanket Octopus 2,832 tonnes = Saturn V rocket
200,000x heavier (est)
500,000x heavier
50x heavier
Yellow Garden Spider 3.5 tonnes = Large Ford Transit van
Bone-Eating Worm 14,160 tonnes = The Shard
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Giant Sea Devil 35,400 tonnes = Tanker ship
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Average adult male = 70.8 kg
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HISTORY OF THE WORLD
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THE FIVE BIG QUESTIONS IN GLOBAL HISTORY Odd Arne Westad introduces five major themes in humanity’s wider story that strongly divide academic opinion
What is ‘global history’?
DREAMSTIME/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
What do we mean when we say ‘global history’ – or indeed ‘world history’, ‘transnational history’ or ‘international history’? These are surprisingly tricky terms to pin down. Here’s what historians do agree upon: we are dealing with issues that are bigger than those contained within one state or one nation. In most cases, we’re also talking about issues that have participants from different societies. To be more specific, global history has come to mean an emphasis on comparative aspects
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e broadest of human activities in the sense. World history is often about ticular view histories that take a particular mankind ankind as to what connects humankind over time. Transnational history is y and people e about how ideas, money ommunities travel, and about how communities are constituted outside the frameworks of empire, state orr nation. ntres on International history centres unities, relations among communities, peoples and states. These are vague and contested ast helpful definitions. But it is at least here we’re to know a little about where ebates… starting from in these debates…
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HISTORY OF THE WORLD
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Why have Homo sapiens proved so overwhelmingly successful?
Thee story of humankind is at a root the tale of cclever apes spreading across the globe.We know that the first humans of our own species, Homo sapiens or anatomically modern humans, walked out of their African homeland around 65,000 years ago.What we know lless about is what ha happened appened to them dur ring the first few during mille ennia of their odyssey. millennia The sp peed with which they speed spread is astonishing. Within less than 20,000 years they had reached Au ustralia, which Australia, they bbegan egan to explore at around the same time as they spread sppread to most of Europ pe. Europe. Whatt accounts for our massive an nd almost instant and success as a species? Our capacity to learn and to adapt iis, s, of course, at the bottom of this. But the size of our brains, historians agree, is n not enough in itself to explain what happe ened. Diet most happened. certainly played a role. ro ole.The first humans chanced upon the pprotein-rich foods of the coastal zone, andd it’s quite likely that of the world was their colonisation o dietaary needs (or linked to their dietary exxplains why they preferences).This explains followed the coasts everywhere and why b it took a long time before they began to penetrate the interiors. interiiors. Life on the beach beach certainly pushed humans in the direc direction ction of life on the water, not just alo along ong its edges.Within geenerations or so of a hundred generations first them fir rst venturing outside Africa, simple boats had madee their appearance, although alth hough historians d over how far disagree the first humans
could cou travel by water. It is likely that our forebears’ maritime skills skil developed incrementally, but that tha this knowledge spread fast. Our ancestors could communicate through anc language, and it is quite possible that the lang idea ide of a boat may have been familiar to people peo who had never even seen one. Some historians claim that even in our early history similar tools appear in different diff population groups, with the knowledge kno of how to build these tools spre via word of mouth rather than spread thro through hard-and-fast experience. But could all humans communicate? We do not know when language
Some of the most important disease-fighting genes we now carry evolved outside our own subb species
our view of – and our debates about – early humanity.We know that Homo sapiens and humans of what we broadly call Neanderthal groups interbred – up to four per cent of our own DNA is of Neanderthal origin. But was such intermingling also common with other groups, whose identity we still cannot trace for certain? It will take a bit of time before we can determine where and with what results different groups of humans interbred after our ancestors left Africa.This is one of the most exciting fields of prehistorical research and one that is going to have great consequences for our understanding of humans living today. After the Neanderthal genome was mapped a couple of years ago, it became clear that some of the most important disease-fighting genes humans now carry originated from outside our own sub-species. Some researchers think the very fact that we could interbreed with other human groups contributed massively to the peopling of the Earth, because it provided ‘hybrid vigour’ to help us become ubiquitous on all continents save Antarctica.
diff differentiation appeared (‘very earl is most people’s guess), early’ alth although we know a bit about how languages developed. It’s a sub subject complicated by the factt tha our immediate ancestors that wer not the only humans were aro around in the new terr territories they colonised. E In Eurasia, at least one of our genetic cousins was alre already resident. Recent adv advances in human DNA rese research have deeply influencedd This Cro-Magnon skull, which dates tes from c28,000 years ago, was found d in the Dordogne region of France nce
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HISTORY OF THE WORLD
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Why did we swap huntergathering for farms and villages?
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, AKG IMAGES/DREAMSTIME
The first humans were all hunters and gatherers.There is no doubt that our steadily increasing abilities to hunt large animals – based on our tool-making and communication skills – contributed significantly to the increase in our intake of nutrients.We therefore became bigger and this also enabled our brains to develop to their full potential.We probably became healthier too, because we had a more regular intake of food. But did the next step in human food production, agriculture, which started about 10,000 years ago, also lead to improvements in human health? Agriculture has been seen by historians in the past as possibly the biggest breakthrough ever for humankind. In terms of civilisation, this is undoubtedly true. In order to sustain agricultural gains, a large number of people had to congregate in villages. They co-operated and innovated. Out of this process arose states and empires. However, historians have recently found that a move to agriculture did not necessarily improve human health. On the contrary, the first villages or towns, like our cities today, were not very healthy places. Hunter-gatherers were, in many areas, likely to have longer and healthier lives than farmers. This raises two big questions. The first is, of course, why on Earth did people embrace agriculture if it didn’t improve their chances of survival? The answers here vary. Some historians stress the push factor: lords and nobles forced the farming population together by
Historians have recently found that a move to agriculture did not necessarily improve human health using authority and force. And life in the wild was, after all, a pretty brutal kind of existence. Another group could easily attack you and take your food stores. Villages offered protection, even if safety often came at the price of subservience. Others stress the pull factors: villages provided the opportunity to acquire goods that a hunting band could not make for themselves.Villages also maximised resources. Grain stores – as the story of Moses tells us – could help large groups of people pull through lean times. But recent research shows that, just as nomads led healthier lives than settled peoples, for a long time hunters got the better of bartering exchanges
with farmers because they got more calories in return for their meat than they provided. So how did settled societies manage to overcome this health deficiency over time? This has a lot to do with our ever-increasing resistance to epidemics. Like those of other animals, the human immune system is adaptive, it ‘learns’ a lot about illnesses that have been around for a while and this increases our chances of survival. Ironically, human cohabitation in large units therefore, over time, strengthens our immune responses. Sustained levels of nutrition, even in hard times, also helps protect against illness. And perhaps most important of all, increasingly these groups of villages did not live in isolation. Instead, they became part of networks that eventually would come to cover much of the Eurasian continent.
A replica of a Paleolithic cave painting at Lascaux in south-western France. Such paintings appear to celebrate the hunt, central to pre-agricultural life
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HISTORY OF THE WORLD
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A medallion depicting d Attila the Hun, A leader of an le empire that e encompassed e Hungary, parts H of Germany, o the Balkans th and Ukraine a
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What drove the great migrations of the first millennium AD?
We all ‘know’ that the Roman empire collapsed because of ‘barbarian’ invasions. Those with an interest in matters outside Europe also know that the Han empire in China collapsed around the same time for the same reasons.What historians are debating today is what caused these massive migrations, which centre on the years AD 400–800.We also don’t know why theses exoduses lasted so long, or why some groups settled (often in places that seem incongruous based on their origins) and others went on almost to the other end of the Eurasian landmass.What drove people to act as they did? Some historians emphasise fear. Changes in climate or epidemics may have made aggressive neighbours more powerful and forced tribes out of their native lands. When fleeing, these tribes in turn came across others less skilled in war – or maybe simply unaccustomed to the kind of warfare they were facing.These groups could then be robbed and plundered, and in some cases subjugated to form new states.The Huns, who hit Europe and the Middle East in the late third century, were probably driven west. But having previously lost the contest for resources in their native central Asia (somewhere around where the western part of
Mongolia is now), they were victims no more. Attila, their chief, became one of the greatest (and most brutal) conquerors the world has seen. Other historians talk about the push of groups coming out of central Eurasia (roughly the area between Mongolia and the Caspian Sea), which forced other nations east, west and south.This may explain the Germanic invasions of western and southern Europe. Forced from their homelands in the east, the Germanic peoples invaded other territory occupied by peoples who seemed weaker – or at least a less fearsome alternative to those pushing from the east. It was as if there was a great central Eurasian conveyor belt of peoples sending different groups off east towards China, west towards the Roman empire and south towards India.These invaders in turn pushed other peoples ahead of them, which then – in some cases – broke into established empires for protection. The Völkerwanderung, as the Germans call it, or the great
HISTORY
migration of the peoples, made some groups fetch up in the strangest of places, as modern DNA research reveals. Persianspeaking Alans ended up in what is today north-eastern France and Belgium – their genes are still left in the population, although their language has disappeared. Germanic Vandals went to north Africa, where they constructed an empire; the local Berbers still carry a very high percentage of their genetic composition. For a while migration became the done thing – even peoples who had been settled for a very long time got the taste for it, as opportunities opened up. The ‘conveyor-belt’ idea isn’t universally accepted. Another group of historians argue that the weakness of empires created the migration period, rather than events working the other way around. People began breaking into the rich lands of the east, west and south because they could, because the empires that held these lands had become too weak to defend their territories. In this reading, a combination of climate change, epidemics and shifts in military power caused imperial instability. This decline of empires in turn created unwanted immigration. Power protects. Weakness invites others in. Looking at the great migrations after the Völkerwanderung does pose a few questions about both of these general explanations.What, for example, did non-material factors, such as culture and religion, have to do with what happened? If we look at the creation of the Muslim empires, or – before them – of the Turk expansion of the fifth to the eighth centuries, it seems that material factors may have been less important than a religion that inflamed the minds of men or a culture that seemed trendy and inclusive. Muhammad’s armies swept everything before them not because of their military innovations, but because their commanders knew they were right. And for a brief moment many young people in a vast area – from Manchuria to Anatolia – wanted to be Turks.We don’t know why, but then we don’t know why so many young people across the globe today want to be American gangster rappers either.
Changes in climate or epidemics may have made aggressive neighbours more powerful
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HISTORY OF THE WORLD
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Why did the Chinese stay at home? importantly, they managed to put many of their ideas into practice. One thing that really stands out when looking at the era is Song technological innovation – gunpowder, movable type and the sternpost can all be traced to the Song period. Uniquely for the premodern world, economic growth in China seems for a long period to have outstripped demographic trends. One change making this possible was certainly the discovery and adoption of a rice variety that permitted two crops a year. But China was also producing nearly as much iron as the whole of Europe six centuries later.Textile production too underwent dramatic development, and it is possible to speak of Song ‘industrialisation’ as a recognisable phenomenon. But Song China did not have a missionary zeal to drive it towards militarisation and world conquest. Its focus was on growth at home and – first and foremost – on developing Confucian ideals as to how society should be organised and on how civilised people should live their lives. It preferred peace deals to conquest.
Historians still debate how important these ideals were for what Song China actually did.Was the lack of expansion based on a Confucian emphasis on moderation and restraint, and therefore deliberate? Or was it the by-product of a love of luxury and a not insignificant portion of sloth, and therefore (at least in some ways) accidental? Perhaps not surprisingly, the Song empire fell to its more aggressive northern neighbours. In fact, it fell twice, because the northern part was conquered by the Jin in 1127 and the southern rump by the Mongols 150 years later. But the dynasty bequeathed to its successors a Confucian ideology, which would remain largely intact until the collapse of the Qing dynasty in the 20th century. Is it possible that the culture and the ideals the Song created prevented China’s expansion even in those later dynasties when such immoderation would have been militarily plausible?
ALAMY/DREAMSTIME, MARY EVANS/BRIDGEMAN/DREAMSTIME
Why did China, when it was the most powerful country in the world, not expand? Why did Europeans, in another great migration, populate three continents, while the Chinese mostly declined to travel? One key line of discussion on this question concerns technology in comparative terms, and we will return to this in box 5. However, it’s a discussion that needs to be seen in conjunction with controversy over interpretations of Chinese history – controversy focused on the Song dynasty, when China was at the peak of its power in terms of culture and administration. Later Chinese dynasties were more militarily powerful (the Ming and the Qing) but it was the Song, many historians now claim, that set China on the path to prefer domestic finesse over limitless conquest. In all of China’s long history, there is something special about the Song dynasty, which ruled, in one form or another, from AD 960 to 1279. It came to power after a long series of destructive civil wars.The main aim of its leaders was to postulate and construct a comprehensive set of ideas around which society should evolve.The Song reformers wanted a reinvigorated economy, an integrated government and welldefined laws based on obligations and responsibilities. Most
Song China did not have a missionary zeal to drive it towards militarisation and conquest
Part of a Taoist mural from the Song dynasty era. Did the Song emphasis on the domestic sphere lead to China’s failure to expand?
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Dark satanic mills were key to European prosperity, but how far do they explain the continent imposing a global order?
5
Why did Europe dominate the world from the 18th to 20th centuries?
In contrast to China, many European states expanded globally. But why precisely have states of European origin largely dominated the world since (at least) 1700? There are plentiful explanations for this, all of them contested.The historian Niall Ferguson sets out what he calls the west’s six ‘killer apps’: competition, science, property, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. But it is hard to see how these – even in combination – should propel the kind of extraordinary expansion that created the global European empires. One key issue here is religion.Together with Islam, Christianity has a missionary zeal at its core, the kind of zeal that historically has often pushed ideologies of conquest. Gaining territory overseas was not just about material advantage, it was about winning souls for Christ.This provided a justification for expansionist foreign policies and imperial ambitions. Unlike China, European states in the early modern era became skilled at warfare through inter-state competition. But as China shows, a motive was needed that went beyond skills and
weapons. Christianity supplied such a motive in abundance. But even if religion and bellicosity spread trouble-making Europeans around the globe by the 18th century, the era of total European predominance still lay in the future. Here, the view that European science, medicine, consumerism and attitudes to work somehow predestined global dominance does not hold up to scrutiny. The Chinese economy, on its terms, was doing at least as well as the European in the early 18th century. But then something happened. Between 1750 and 1850, parts of Europe went through cataclysmic change, which made states of European origin able to impose the first global order, an order that has lasted up until our own time. Again, what happened? Some historians, such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Bin Wong, have tried a comparative approach between China and Europe, which emphasises the unique advantages the most advanced p g European states gained from the middle of the 18th century onwards. One key factor seems to have been cheap energy in the form of
Gaining territory was not just about material advantage, it was about winning souls for Christ
HISTORY
coal. Another was access to plentiful resources from the Americas. Both these factors favoured new technologies over old and spurred the expansion of integrated capitalist markets. An age of political ferment and massive inter-state wars may also have led to the main European countries, Britain and France, looking outwards rather than inwards. It was, in other words, not decline and fall elsewhere that made Europe’s global expansion possible.The stress, at least in historians’ debates at the moment, is on parts of Europe being an exception to what had gone before. In this context, Ferguson is right about Europe’s strengths, but these were also available elsewhere, albeit in slightly different forms. By themselves – even in combination with religious zealotry – such strengths cannot explain how the European world system came into being. Something truly exceptional in other fields (such as an energy revolution and access to virgin lands, such as the Americas) had to happen for these advantages to develop as they did. Our debates about the rise of Europe must also be influenced by how relatively brief the European age turned out to be. By the late 19th century, non-European peoples had acquired much of Europe’s military technology and were gradually learning how to use it. By the late 20th century, even the most powerful European offshoot, the USA, was feeling the pressure of an Asian resurgence. If the debate on the causes for the rise of the west teaches us anything, it is that in history even the most exceptional advantage tends to be transient,, transformable and transitional. Odd Arne Westad is professor of international history at LSE. He is the author of Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (Bodley Head, 2012).
FIND OUT MORE X A New History of the World by Andrew Marr (Macmillan, October 2012)
An 18th-century painting showing
Dominican missionaries baptising WorldMags.net a Native American in Mexico
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HISTORY
JEWELS OF THE NIZAM
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-(:(/6 OF THE 1,=$0 Usha Balakrishnan opens the Nizam of Hyderabad’s treasure box to reveal some invaulable gems n 1937, the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, reputed to be the richest man in the world, was featured on the cover of Time magazine. The article estimated his daily income to be in excess of $5,000, his jewels were valued at $150 million and he was believed to own gold Descen bars worth $250 million. Descended from the Asaf Jah dynasty, n in the early 18th century as viceroys of who came to the Deccan he Jewels of the Niz the Mughal emperor, the Nizam were once part of on of the Nizams of Hyderabad Hydera the fabulous collection Comprising b turban ornaments, necklaces, earrings, armbands, bracelets, belts, buttons and cuff links, anklets and rings, there are m more than 300 items in the collection – each one spectacular and ed. exquisitely crafted.
I
A Anwatt PPaon JJaravi T Purdah or seclusion from public view was strictly observed in the Nizam’s court and the women’s quarters were out of bounds to all except the closest. Nevertheless, they adorned themselves with collar type necklace, armbands and bangles, waist belts set with diamonds and anklets with rows of rubies, emeralds and diamonds. This is a rare surviving pair of toe-rings (anwat paon) in the form of flower-heads, each kundan-set with 11 foiled old-cut diamonds in pear-shaped petal surrounds. The reverse and the hinged band enamelled with red and green floral motifs with touches of white. The Deccan idiom is apparent in elegant forms and delicate detailing on the gold; the enameled surface is rarely over crowded and the emphasis is on flower studies and details. Toe-rings such as these th were only worn by important women in the royal household.
ts reflect the ethos of a powerful and wealthy The ornaments se roots were firmly entrenched in Mughal culture; dynasty whose ems that display p y distinct indigenous g influences there are items t and many that manifest the Europeanisation characteristic of th he late te 19th and early 20th centuries. the
JEWELS OF THE NIZAMS BY DR USHA BALAKRISHNAN
Kanthi Goshwara-I-Marvreed Wa Almas W The Mughal emperors had an infinite passion for emeralds, which was eventually acquired by the maharajasPG*OEJBBTXFMM'SPNUIFT XIFO the Muzo and Chivor mines of Colombia were discovered, emeralds poured into India by way of Portuguese trade through Goa and the Deccan ports. This necklace (kanthi) of 24 graded emerald drops is styled to resemble the champakali or buds of the Michelia champaca flower. The irregular shapes and sizes of the beads came about because the Indian gem cutter avoided unnecessary cutting and faceting and the rough gems were tumblepolished, drilled and used as beads. Each bead was then capped with diamonds set in gold, surmounted with a round diamond and a pearl finial set in a gold cup, which was then strung on fine gold wire interspersed with emerald beads. The quality of the stones used in this necklace are testimony to the vast quantities of loose gems that were held by the Nizams. 60
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WorldMags.net Angushtari Zamurrud X This emerald ring (angushtari) belongs to a small group of carved Indian gemstones in the world. The Mughals perpetuated the practice of carving emeralds with floral motifs and inscriptions. Designs were selected after consultation with astrologers, and inscriptions were added to immortalise lineage. The emerald weighs approximately 20 carats and is carved on both sides and set in a pierced gold mount. The front of the gem is carved with a flowering lotus bloom with leaves and a chevron border around the four sides and the reverse is also decorated with a similar flowering plant. The band is also carved with a pierced trellis design and decorated with red and imperial green enamel. As a favourite envoy of the Mughal emperor, and as caretaker of the imperi ial realm m in the Deccan, the carved emerald ring originally set in an armband might have been ssent as a Hyderabad special acknowledgement of service and recognition of loyalty to the Nizam of Hy yderabadd
S Sarpech Yakhoot Wa KKanval Almas T Of all the regalia of Indian royalty, turban ornaments or rnaments (sarpech, sarpatti, kalgi, jigha an nd turra) w and were the most visible symbols of monarchy, ppower and wealth. As insignia of m rooyalty, the Nizam’s collection has a spectacuroyalty, lar laar range of turban ornaments ranging from thhe 17th cen the century to the late 19th century. The later Nizams did not wear turbans – yards of laater Nizam cloth tied ar cloth around the head – in the traditional format. Instead, the court headgear was a long fo ormat. Inst co onical cap against which the jewels sparkled. conical This Th his piece iin a floral design brings together Burmese pigeon-blood Bu pi Burmese rubies three large golden-yellow goolden-yello briolette diamonds. The setting of claws and an boxed gold mounts is typical of of the cross-fertilisation of Indian and European thhe cross-fe workmansh in the late 19th and early 20th w workmanship century. ceentury. The entire sarpech can be separated innto six smaller sma into constituents which could be used ussed as a bbrooch, pendant or as a jewel for thhe hair. the
KKanthi anthi Marwareed Kanval Almas Mai Padak This necklace (kanthi) is one of the most important jewels in the collection. The design of the necklace reflects the growing infusion of English customs and European fashion among Indians since the arrival of the British in the 19th century. antage of this interest, European jewellery firms TTaking adv advantage established businesses in Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai to cater initially to European residents and inevitably to a local populace who increasingly sought British goods. In course of time, many of them became the preferred jewellers of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Although, the necklace was made in the late 19th century, the golden coloured Golconda diamonds and pearl buttons must have been a part of the Nizam’s treasury. The gradual gradation in size and colour that has been achieved in the necklace could only have been done if the jeweller had a vast number of such gems to select from and none but the Nizam of Hyderabad could have had such a large selection of Golconda diamonds. The briolette diamond pendant weighs approximately 130 carats and is perhaps the only one of its kind in the world.
Usha R Bala Balakrishnan akrishnan iis an art historian, specialising in jewellery. Indian jewe ellery. She hhas evaluated and catalogued the collection jewellery co ollection of the Nizam of Hyderabad and has documentedd it in her bbook The Jewels of the Nizams.
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URI GOLMAN
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The Indian rhino is one of two ‘unicorn’ species (the other is the Javan). Here, a mother and calf are pictured next to a stand of elephant grass 4–5m high in Kaziranga National Park 62
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CONSERVATION OF INDIAN RHINO
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SAVING
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THE
UNICORN In the fertile floodplains of Assam, men risk their lives every day to poach – or protect – the few surviving Indian rhinos. Andrew Balmford reports from conservation’s front line
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WorldMags.net A poached rhino lies in a pool of its own congealing blood while one of Kaziranga’s armed guards looks on. Rising floodwaters had forced the animal to seek shelter outside the core area of the reserve, where it was more vulnerable to attack
y first encounter with one of conservation’s great success stories begins 3m above a mist-bound sea of grass. I’m on the back of a freckle-eared, 40-year-old mother of three called Mohan Mala – one of a herd of working elephants that, each dawn, transports wide-eyed visitors into Kaziranga National Park in Assam, north-east India. Our line of giants descends with surprising grace to cross the muddy margins of a beel, or shallow lake, then snakes for a while longer through the shrouded grassland. We reach a second beel – and, suddenly, there it is. Bellydeep in the mud, a great armourplated beast, almost as vast and more extraordinary still than the elephants we’re riding, is peering myopically at us: an Indian rhino. It’s a male – almost 2m at the shoulder and weighing about the same as two family cars. For a time he gazes at us through the morning dampness. Then, apparently content that we’re not a threat, he settles back to his wallow. We make our way across a broad plain. As the mist thins, steel-blue hills appear in the distance. Our guides spot a pair of brown-tufted ears, goldenedged in the early light: another rhino, this time a female, with a young calf in tow. As we approach, the pair trundle into a pool, the mother watching us warily. It’s the same at the next water hole: another female and another youngster – this one only a few months old, with the tiniest nub of a horn.
SANDESH KADUR (X2); URI GOLMAN; SANDESH KADUR; URI GOLMAN
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Reversal of fortune Kaziranga is one of the best places to see Indian rhinos – all told, about 2,000 of them lumber around the place.Yet in 1905, when it became one of the world’s first formally protected areas, fewer than 20 rhinos remained, thanks to centuries of habitat clearance for farming combined with sporthunting by powerful elites. The threats have since changed: the 64
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A SINGLE KILOGRAM OF RHINO HORN CAN FETCH $65,000. HOUSEHOLD INCOMES ARE OFTEN UNDER $10 A MONTH, SO THE INCENTIVE TO POACH IS OBVIOUS
Only a tiny proportion of poached Indian rhino horn is recovered. The vast majority ends up in China, where it is sold in powdered form as a ‘fever-reducing’ agent
rhinos’ greatest problem is now poaching for their horns, which are sold for use in oriental medicine and are worth even more than those of African rhino species. Contrary to some reports, the main use is not as an aphrodisiac (though it’s a grim irony that the adjective for rhinoceros-like is ‘rhinocerotic’) but as a fever-reducing agent. The growth of China’s middle classes has seen the price of Asian
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rhino horn soar: a single kilogram can fetch $65,000 – more than gold. In a region where household incomes are often under $10 a month, the incentive to poach is obvious.Yet a century of conservation efforts has increased Kaziranga’s rhino population a hundred-fold; two-thirds of all Indian rhinos now live here. I’ve come to find out for myself how this extraordinary turnaround has been possible.
CONSERVATION INDIAN RHINO
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NATURE
Wallowing in muddy pools may offer rhinos relief from biting insects
Annual rhino-poaching rates have been limited to single figures for most of the past 15 years, though they are now increasing again. In reality, it’s an unending low-level war. To find out what it’s like to be a rhino guard, I have been granted permission to visit an anti-poaching camp on the banks of the Brahmaputra River. Life on the front line We drive north, along a track littered with elephant droppings like giant Christmas puddings; the snow-clad peaks of the Tibetan Himalaya are just visible in the distance. Signs of rhinos are all around.Their well-trodden trails and enormous latrines (the accumulation of months of nightly outpourings) testify that Kaziranga’s rhinos are creatures of habit – and thus easy targets for poachers. The camp consists of a hut raised on 3m concrete stilts to withstand the river’s floodwaters.This is conservation’s front line, barely a few minutes by boat from the islands where the poaching gangs await their chance. I meet its guardians – men in khaki with old .315 rifles.They spend a month at a time at this spartan outpost. By local standards the job is well paid, but it can be lonely – and dangerous.The guards tell me that they patrol their area in groups of three.They walk for 10–15km alongg the roads and rhino trails,
Kaziranga’s guards patrol the huge wetland reserve in groups of three. They can earn about $160 a month: a decent wage, though it’s dangerous work
sectors, searching for poachers while trying to avoid tigers, sloth bears and wild elephants. There are frequent gun battles – and both sides shoot to kill. Four guards have died since the mid-1980s, and twice as many have been seriously injured.Yet the poachers usually come off worse. During the same period, more than 100 of them have lost their lives; in excess of 600 have been arrested.
Indian rhinos’ horns are up to 25cm long, though in combat they use their lower outer incisors
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Two key factors have contributed to this achievement. One is the support of the majority of local people. The other is the sophisticated, almost paramilitary, anti-poaching operation at Kaziranga. Developed during the 1980s in response to the intensifying slaughter that was claiming almost 50 rhinos a year, the park’s ranger system currently deploys nearly 500 front-line staff. Every night the guards patrol their
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WorldMags.net Among all rhinos alive today, the Indian species has the most luxuriantly knobbly, folded skin, which droops over its front and back legs
THE WILDLIFE TOURISM BOOM Local demand for wildlife-watching holidays is soaring. Since the 1990s, wildlife tourism in India has grown enormously – at 15 per cent or more in many protected areas. Visitor numbers at some of the most popular destinations, such as Kanha, Periyar and Ranthambore, have more than doubled in a decade. In marked contrast with the situation in Africa, in most parks over 80 per cent of visitors are now Indians. Tourism thus has the potential to play a vital role in building domestic support for conservation. But pressure from visitors
also increases disturbance of sought-after species – a worry that triggered a temporary ban in 2012 on tourists in some tiger reserves. Another concern is the shift to luxury tourism, which makes visits prohibitively costly for many Indians. One radical suggestion is to encourage tour operators to restore farmland around parks for ‘high-end’ tourism, mirroring private reserves in South Africa. This would create more habitat for squeezed wildlife and more space for Indians to visit reserves.
URI GOLMAN X3, WWW.RHINORESOURCECENTER.COM, SANDESH KADUR
Elephant rides to see rhinos and tigers are highlights of many wildlife tours
finding poachers every few weeks. The ensuing gunfights seem to be chaotic affairs. One man – recruited, like most, from a nearby village – recalls an example from one September night. “It was 1am, and there was a full moon. Poachers tried to kill a rhino.They missed, but we heard the shot.Then we waited for a long time… “At 4.45am, some men moved towards our group. There were six of them and only three of us. They were wearing khaki, so at first we thought they were guards and shouted ‘Stop!’ When they didn’t, we knew who they were. One of them had a .303 rifle, so I shot him. He died.” The other guards tell similar stories – of dark encounters, of confusion 66
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punctuated with gunshots, of people dying over rhinos. I’m struck by how matter-of-fact their accounts are: no euphemisms; no tall tales. This is simply what these men do in the name of conservation. But there’s something else, besides brute force and bravery, that explains why there are still rhinos at Kaziranga:
THERE ARE FREQUENT GUN BATTLES – AND BOTH SIDES SHOOT TO KILL. FOUR GUARDS AND MORE THAN 100 POACHERS HAVE DIED WorldMags.net
the people of Assam want them. You don’t have to spend long here to realise that they are tremendously proud of Kaziranga and its rhinos. The species is the state animal and the logo of choice for almost all enterprises Assamese, from bus companies to the local squadron of the Indian Air Force. Respect for big, distinctly dangerous creatures – not just rhinos, but elephants, wild water buffalos and tigers – is also manifest in extraordinary tolerance of the damage that they cause.The contrast in attitude with Britain, where many of us seem to find it difficult to co-exist with hen harriers, foxes or badgers, is striking.When I ask local people why this should be so, everyone attributes it to a religious belief in the rights of other creatures. For most Hindus and Buddhists, all animals are divine. Even in an Indian context, however, the Assamese pay a high price for such acceptance of their fellow creatures. The state is home to one-fifth of all of India’s elephants; they kill on average 60 people a year, and the death rate is rising. Crop-raiding is less devastating,
CONSERVATION OF INDIAN RHINO
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FACT FILE
WE REACH A SECOND BEEL AND THERE IT IS – A GREAT ARMOURPLATED BEAST, ALMOST AS VAST AS THE ELEPHANTS WE’RE RIDING
INDIAN RHINOCEROS S Rhinoceros unicornis
OTHER NAME Greater one-horned rhinoceros. WEIGHT 1,500–2,100kg. LENGTH Head to tail: 3.1–3.8m. ID TIPS Has a single horn, huge skin folds and wartlike bumps on the legs and shoulders. DIET Mainly grasses, also fruit, tree leaves and branches; raids rice, corn and other crops. LIFE-CYCLE Male is solitary and territorial; usually begins breeding only after 15 years of age. Female has a single calf after a 16-month gestation; remains with young for up to 4 years.
The carcass of an old rhino (which died of natural causes) provides a meal for one of Kaziranga’s tigers
but much more common. Around Kaziranga, villagers report that over a quarter of their rice harvest is lost to wildlife each year. Elephants are the chief culprits, but rhinos, wild boar, deer, buffalos, monkeys and parakeets all raid the fields, too. Crop raiders Farmers defend their crops as best they can.The flat paddyfields are punctuated with rickety look-out posts from where dusk-till-dawn sentries shout warnings of approaching animals.Villagers try to chase away the would-be raiders with burning torches, drums and firecrackers. Sometimes they succeed, but often they don’t. Gesturing at a paddy flattened by elephants 15 days earlier, a slight 56-year-old farmer in a jumper and dhoti (a piece of cloth worn like a skirt) explains the impact of crop-raiding: “The elephants came in the night – six or seven of them. They ate only some of the rice, but they trampled a lot more.” With the remainder of his crop now ripening,
HABITAT Floodplain grasslands, swamps and forests. STATUS Vulnerable; wild population about 2,900.
he’s expecting the pachyderms back soon. I look around at the destruction, and try to comprehend what losing the return on months of hard work, time after time, must be like for someone struggling to feed his poor family. What does he feel about elephants and Kaziranga? The man breaks into a broad smile, then says something that staggers me. “We don’t want to hurt the elephant. We also care for the elephant. If he comes and eats our crops, we feel angry. But not all the elephants or rhinos are doing that – we’re only angry with the ones that come to eat.” Back in my comfortable tourist lodge, I reflect on what I’ve just heard. I am shocked, amazed and humbled. Achieving the improbable So can Kaziranga’s rhinos survive? The challenges seem overwhelming: keeping well-armed, profitable poaching operations at bay; maintaining good relations with tens of thousands of local people
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who can’t afford to continue losing their crops to wildlife; and stemming fresh threats from dam proposals, highway expansion and pollution from agricultural intensification upstream. But think back to just over a century ago, when there were fewer than 20 rhinos, no official protection for them and lots of trigger-happy autocrats. If the immense dedication of Kaziranga’s conservation professionals continues, and the extraordinary respect of its people for their fellow creatures endures, then my guess is that their great-grandchildren will be lucky enough to live in a world that still has space for unicorns. Andrew Balmford is professor of conservation science at the University of Cambridge. He visited the rhinos of Kaziranga National Park to research his latest book.
FIND OUT MORE X Andrew’s recent book Wild Hope (University of Chicago Press, `1,562) celebrates conservation success stories from around the globe. August 2013
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Dorian Gray eventually realises the only way to redeem his soul is to kill himself
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AN EXCERPT FROM A BOOK YOU SHOULD READ
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HISTORY
INSIDE THE PAGES
THE PICTURE OF
DORIAN GRAY BY OSCAR WILDE
A
nd, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in. A cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in a flame of murky orange. He shuddered. “Shut the door behind you,” he said, as he placed the lamp on the table. Hallward glanced round him, with a puzzled expression. The room looked as if it had not been lived in for years. A faded Flemish tapestry, a curtained picture, an old Italian cassone, and an almost empty bookcase, - that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and a table. As Dorian Gray was lighting a half-burned candle that was standing on the mantel shelf, he saw that the whole place was covered with dust, and that the carpet was in holes. A mouse ran scuffling behind the wainscoting. There was a damp odour of mildew. “So you think that it is only God who sees the
soul, Basil? Draw that curtain back, and you will see mine.” The voice that spoke was cold and cruel. “You are mad, Dorian, or playing a part,” muttered Hallward, frowning. “You won’t? Then I must do it myself,” said the young man; and he tore the curtain from its rod, and flung it on the ground. An exclamatiom of horror broke from Hallward’s lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous thing on the canvas leering at him. There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! It was Dorian Gray’s own face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely marred that marvelous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual lips. The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble
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GETTY
In this excerpt, Dorian Gray’s grotesque corruption is finally revealed to Basil Hallward
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AN EXCERPT FROM A BOOK YOU SHOULD READ
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curves had not yet passed entirely away from chiseled nostrils and from plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done it? He seemed to recognise his own brush-work, and the frame was his own design. The idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized the lighted candle, and held it to the picture. In the left-handed corner was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion. It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire. He had never done that. Still, it was his own picture. He knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed from fire to sluggish ice in a moment. His own picture! What did it mean? Why had it altered? He turned, and looked at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man. His mouth twitched, and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate. He passed his hands across his forehead. It was dank with clammy sweat. The young man was leaning against the mantel-shelf, watching him with that strange expression that is on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when a great artist is acting. There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in the eyes. He had taken the flower out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do so. “What does this mean?” cried Hallward, at last. His own voice sounded shrill and curious in his ears. “Years ago, when I was a boy,” said Dorian Gray, “You met me, devoted yourself to me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. One day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment, that I don’t know, even now, whether I regret or not, I made a wish. Perhaps you would call it a prayer…” “I remember it! Oh, how well I remember it! No! The thing is impossible. The room is damp. The mildew has got into the canvas. The paints I used has some wretched mineral poison in them. I tell you the thing is impossible.” “Ah, what is impossible?” murmured the young man, going over to the window, and leaning his forehead against the cold miststained glass. “You told me you had destroyed it.” “I was wrong. It has destroyed me.” “I don’t believe it is my picture.” “Can’t you see your romance in it?” said 70
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Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful Dorian, bitterly. “My romance, as you call it…” “As you called it.” “There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. This is the face of a satyr.” “It is the face of my soul.” “God! What a thing I must have worshipped! This has the eyes of a Devil.” “Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil,” cried Dorian, with a wild gesture of despair. Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it. “My God! If it is true,” he exclaimed, “and this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!” he held the light up again to the canvas, and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful. His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor, and lay there sputtering. He placed his foot on it and put it out. Then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table and buried his face in his hands. “Good God, Dorian, what a lesson! What an awful lesson!” There was no answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window. “Pray, Dorian, pray,” he murmured. “What is it that one was taught to say in one’s boyhood? ‘Lead us not into temptation. Forgive our sins. Wash away our iniquities.’ Let us say that together. The prayer of your pride has been answered. The prayer of your repentance will be answered also. I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.” Dorian Gray turned slowly around, and looked at him with tear-dimmed eyes. “It is too late, Basil,” he murmured. “It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we can remember a prayer.
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Isn’t there a verse somewhere, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow’?” “Those words mean nothing to me now.” “Hush! Don’t say that. You have done enough evil in your life. My God! Don’t you see that accursed thing leering at us?” Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him. The mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table, more than he had ever loathed anything in his whole life. He glanced wildly around. Something glimmered on the top of the painted chest that faced him. His eye fell on it. He knew what it was. It was a knife that he had brought up, some days before, to cut a piece of cord, and had forgotten to take away with him. He moved slowly towards it, passing Hallward as he did so. As soon as he got behind him, he seized it, and turned round. Hallward moved in his chair as if he was going to rise. He rushed at him, and dug the knife into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man’s head down on the table, and stabbing again and again. There was a stifled groan, and the horrible sound of someone choking with blood. The outstretched arms shot up convulsively three times, waving grotesque stiff-fingered hands in the air. He stabbed him once more, but the man did not move. Something began to trickle on the floor. He waited for a moment, still pressing the head down. Then he threw the knife on the table, and listened. He could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet. He opened the door, and went out on the landing. The house was quite quiet. No one was stirring. This excerpt is published with permission from Hachette India. No part of this excerpt may be quoted or reproduced without prior written consent from Hachette India. A Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde (Hachetter India, ` JTPVU now in bookstores.
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To make summer time more fun for our readers, BBC Knowledge ran the Curious Mind of the Week contest on its Facebook page from May-June 2013. A question was posted every day of the week and the winners were selected on points tabulated at the end of each week. The response to the contest was stupendous, with over 4,000 entries. The winners selected had the opportunity of having their photograph as the profile image of BBC Knowledge’s page for the week.
We have always tried to make BBC Knowledge an interactive read. Here’s just a snippet of what we’ve been upto
WorldMags.net THE BIG IDEA EXPLORING LIFE’S GREAT MYSTERIES
ROBERT MATTHEWS INVESTIGATES
CATASTROPHISM The devastating effect on life caused by events such as meteor impacts and great floods has only recently begun to be accepted by science. But what does this mean for the future of our planet? t could have been a scene from
II a Hollywood disaster movie: a
SPL, BRIDGEMAN
former NASA astronaut brandishes a report calling on the United Nations to take urgent action in order to prevent a global catastrophe. But this was no fictional encounter. At a meeting held in Vienna, Austria, last November, ex-astronaut Russell Schweickart told UN officials that global efforts must be made to deal with the very real threat from cosmic impacts. According to an expert study presented at the meeting, a collision with a socalled Near Earth Object (NEO) – one of thousands of chunks of rock orbiting the Sun close to the Earth – could cause
Remains of the epic Gilgamesh telling the Babylonian legend of the Great Flood 72
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“terrible destruction, dwarfing that caused by more familiar natural disasters”. Not so long ago, such statements would have been ridiculed by the scientific community as quasi-religious paranoia. But no longer. The view of the Earth as a cosmic haven shaped by the slow, steady processes of geology has been undermined by evidence that our planet regularly suffers catastrophes of a magnitude thought to be the preserve of ancient myth. From Babylonian manuscripts to Dark Age chronicles, descriptions of disasters striking with devastating consequences have long been a feature of accounts of ancient Earth history. Many describe fires that rain down from the skies. The legend legen of Gilgamesh, which originated M in Mesopotamia over 4000 years ago, desccr describes how “seven judges of hell” raised their torches, lighting the land with flame, their and ssent a storm that turned day into night. Wriiti more than 2000 years later, the Writing Dark Age British cleric Gildas described Dark fir “a fi fire that fell from heaven” around the 4 yearr 441AD that led to dark skies and miggr migrations out of England, with the land still iin ruins a century later. Th dramatic view of Earth history T The w emerging could hardly be more now diffe fer different from that held by modern scho ol even as recently as the 1980s. scholars For ccenturies, the idea of cosmic events affecct affecting life on Earth was viewed e as h heretical by the Church, which regaar regarded catastrophes as proof of divine intervention, and also by the scientific establishment, which dismissed it as
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IN A NUTSHELL
What is catastrophism? Devastation descending from the heavens, dramatic eruptions, global upheaval: these are the classic ingredients of catastrophes of biblical dimensions. And for thousands of years such events featured in the mythology of many ancient cultures. Yet scientists long dismissed them as mere scare-stories, the Earth’s past history being determined, they argued, by slow, steady action of forces such as erosion. In recent years this view has been challenged by mounting evidence for global catastrophes which devastate life on Earth. Their cause is eerily reminiscent of the ancient fears of our forebears: heavenly devastation wreaked by giant meteor impacts, and titanic volcanic eruptions. Scientists now recognise that such ‘catastrophist’ effects have played a key role in history of the Earth and the fate of life upon it.
mere superstition. Yet over the last 20 years or so, the sheer weight of evidence has confirmed the reality of heaven-sent catastrophes – and revealed just how close we have come to them in the recent past – such as the Tunguska incident (p74) 100 years ago. Suspicions that the ‘myths’ of global catastrophes should be taken seriously actually date back to the dawn of modern science itself, in the 17th century. Following the publication of Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation in 1687, British astronomer Edmond Halley decided to apply them to the mystery of comets. By studying records of their appearance, Halley argued that the bright comets of 1456, 1531, 1607 and 1682 were in fact the same comet, following a vast elliptical orbit around the Sun in
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This layer of rock in Italy gives evidence of impact 65 million years ago
An artist’s impression of the Chicxulub Crater in Mexico shortly after impact
agreement with Newton’s laws. But Halley noted something else as well: a comet crossing the orbit of the Earth might one day collide with us, with potentially devastating consequences. In December 1694, Halley gave a lecture at the Royal Society of London in which he claimed that the biblical Great Flood may have been caused by the impact of a comet. He even argued that features like the Caspian Sea might have been formed by such cataclysmic events. Within days, he had recanted his claim, apparently under ecclesiastical pressure. The Church viewed catastrophes such as the Great Flood as proof of the power of God, and any attempts to explain them using science were not to be encouraged. Even so, Halley’s lecture would prove to be a turning point, highlighting for the
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first time the vulnerability of the Earth to cosmic forces. Over the next century, others would also attempt to put biblical accounts of catastrophes on a scientific basis, with the Cambridge, UK, mathematician William Whiston claiming that an analysis of cometary orbits showed that the Great Flood had occurred in 2349 BC. By the early 19th century, eminent French zoologist Georges Cuvier appeared to have found rock-solid evidence for the Great Flood – quite literally. By studying the geological strata around Paris, Cuvier had found that fossils of sea creatures in one ancient layer of chalk were overlaid by those of land creatures. Then, just as abruptly, the layer above contained sea creatures again – with the top layer showing evidence of a vast and rapid August 2013
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WorldMags.net inundation around present-day Paris. Cuvier took these sudden changes in the fossil record as evidence for sudden catastrophes which devastated life on Earth, of which the Great Flood was just the most recent example.
Soviet researchers take soil samples at the impact site of the Tunguska meteorite TUNGUSKA
TOPFOTO, ART ARCHIVE, GETTY X2, SPL X3
The Tunguska incident On the morning of 30 June 1908, villagers in a remote part of Northeast Siberia witnessed the terrifying effects of catastrophism at first hand. Eyewitnesses reported seeing a huge fireball tearing across the sky before exploded in a blast that could be heard over 800km (500 miles) away. It took another 20 years for the first clues to the cause to emerge, when scientists reached the epicentre of the event, north of the Tunguska River. They found a scene of utter devastation covering hundreds of square kilometres, with thousands of scorched trees lying like matchsticks, pointing outward from the centre of the blast. Analysis of samples taken at the site suggests the cause was the break-up of a 50m (164ft)-wide asteroid with the violence of a 15-megatonne H-bomb.
TIMELINE MAKING SENSE OF GLOBAL CATASTROPHE
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Solid backing Cuvier’s discoveries, published in 1812, won backing from a number of eminent scientists, such as the geologist James Hall, and the ‘catastrophist’ movement was born. Others were deeply sceptical, however, pointing out that the evidence of a global flood was far from conclusive. Most sceptical of all were the followers of the Scottish geologist James Hutton, founder of the ‘uniformitarian’ view of Earth history. In 1795, he had published a two-volume text based on the view that the slow, steady processes that shape our planet today were also crucially important in the distant past. Uniformitarianism was a powerful idea, allowing geologists to extrapolate from what they could see today to probe questions about the Earth’s history. Its most important advocate was another Scot, lawyer and geologist Charles Lyell, who saw catastrophism as an attempt by religious zealots to win scientific credibility for their beliefs. Lyell showed that Cuvier’s ‘evidence’ for the Great Flood could be explained by gradual changes in sea level, attacking catastrophists for being too keen on supernatural explanations. By the 1830s, Lyell’s influential book, Principles of Geology, had ensured that claims of global catastrophe were immediately linked to wild-eyed superstition. Yet while Lyell had shown
that the evidence for past catastrophes was not conclusive, he had not shown that they were impossible either. What he had done was to ensure any challenge to uniformitarianism would get a very rough ride for the next 150 years. Hints of where that challenge would come from were emerging even as Lyell built his case against catastrophism. For centuries there had been reports of stones falling out of the sky, but these had been dismissed as folk stories – until 26 April 1803, that is, when meteorites rained down on the village of L’Aigle, in Normandy, France. An investigation held by the leading French astronomer Jean Biot showed that the stones had indeed come from space. Scientists took much longer to accept that larger meteors could also strike the Earth. In the late 1890s, Grove Gilbert, chief geologist of the US Geological Survey, decided to investigate reports of large numbers of meteorites being unearthed around a 1.2km (0.75 miles)wide crater in the Arizona desert. Failing to find a giant meteor buried in the crater, Gilbert argued it must have been formed by a bubble of steam in once-molten rock – overlooking the possibility that the meteor could have been vaporised on impact. In 1906, Daniel Barringer, an American mining engineer, published evidence linking the Arizona crater to an impact, but failed to convince the scientific establishment – not least because in his scientific paper describing his claim, he derided Gilbert’s conclusions. Not until the 1950s would a new generation of geologists recognise the cosmic origins of what is now called Meteor Crater.
1694
1795
1812
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Sir Edmond Halley informs fellow scientists at the Royal Society, London, of the catastrophic effects of a comet impact, which he claimed could trigger a flood of biblical proportions
Scottish geologist James Hutton establishes uniformitarianism, stressing steady and gradual changes in geology through processes like erosion, which he viewed as taking place over unimaginably long periods of time
Studies of the fossil record in rocks near Paris lead Georges Cuvier to put forward the case for several extinctions of life during Earth’s history, including a Great Flood
Charles Lyell’s hugely influential work Principles of Geology puts forward simple explanations for the supposed evidence for the biblical Great Flood, and thus shifts thinking away from catastrophism
American mining engineer Daniel Barringer publishes evidence that Arizona’s mile-wide Meteor Crater was created by the impact of an iron meteorite, rather than by some terrestrial upheaval
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WorldMags.net THE BIG IDEA EXPLORING LIFE’S GREAT MYSTERIES
TWO KEY THEORIES CATASTROPHISM The view that catastrophic events have played a major role in Earth history. Despite being the dominant view for thousands of years, catastrophism fell out of favour during the early 19th century. Recent recognition of the role of cosmic impacts have led to its revival, albeit in far more scientific form.
After the flood waters have subsided, the animals leave Noah Ark
Another clue pointing to a cosmic origin of global catastrophes emerged in the 1930s, with the discovery of the first asteroids on orbits crossing that of the Earth. This prompted the American astronomer Harvey Nininger to point out that such asteroids could occasionally hit the Earth, with catastrophic results. In 1942, he suggested that such impacts might explain the otherwise puzzling gaps in the fossil record, which hinted at mass extinctions of life several times over the last few hundred million years. By the mid-1950s, some scientists were suggesting that a meteor impact 65 million years ago might have ended the 100-million-year reign of the most successful creatures ever to live
1980
1994
Nobel Prizewinning American physicist Luis Alvarez and colleagues put catastrophism back in the limelight by linking the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago to a cosmic impact
Astronomers observe debris from comet ShoemakerLevy 9 smashing into Jupiter. The largest impact released as much energy as six million H-bombs and left a dark area some 7000 miles (11,265km) across
on Earth: the dinosaurs. While intriguing, however, the idea remained speculative and the evidence inconclusive. That changed in 1980, when a team of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, finally unveiled evidence powerful enough to break the 150-year stranglehold of uniformitarianism. Led by the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Luis Alvarez, the team had been studying the fossil record of the extinction of the dinosaurs. They found that clay samples from around the time of the event contained very high levels of iridium, an element relatively common in meteors. The implications of such high levels of iridium were dramatic, pointing to the impact of a huge meteor between
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C.2300
On April 13, a small asteroid called Apophis comes closer to the Earth than many satellites, and has a 1 in 45,000 chance of striking with the violence of 1000 H-bombs
Approximate earliest date of the next impact of a Tunguskalike NEO, of the kind that exploded over Siberia in 1908, devastating a vast area of forest
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UNIFORMITARIANISM 18th century Scottish geologist James Hutton suggested that processes which shape our planet today, such as erosion, were crucially important in the distant past. Taken up by many influential geologists, uniformitarianism hardened into the view that global catastrophes are little more than frightening superstitions.
five and 10km (3-6 miles) across. Such an event would have triggered a global conflagration, with smoke and debris blotting out sunlight for months, causing the collapse of food chains. Could this explain the disappearance of the dinosaurs? The mere hint of a return to catastrophism provoked a bitter response from many scientists. Critics argued that the iridium layer could have come from huge volcanic eruptions known to have taken place around the same time, and pointed out that the dinosaurs were already dying out before the supposed impact. Even so, further evidence pointing towards a global catastrophe 65 million years ago started to emerge. In 1988, an international team of scientists revealed the existence of a layer of soot just above the iridium layer at many sites around the world – apparently caused by a global fire. Others found evidence of a huge tsunami created in the Gulf of Mexico around 65 million years ago. The clincher came in 1990, when American geophysicists at the University of Arizona revealed the existence of a vast circular impact structure buried on the coast of Mexico. Measuring 180km (112 miles) across, the Chicxulub Crater is just the right size, and in the right place, to explain all the other anomalies – and it too is 65 million years old. Faced with such compelling evidence, most scientists now accept that a huge meteor did strike the Earth 65 August 2013
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MASS EXTINCTION
THE BIGWorldMags.net IDEA Catastrophism isn’t EXPLORING LIFE’S GREAT MYSTERIES
all bad news
Scientists are still not certain what wiped out the dinosaurs
Despite its negative-sounding name, catastrophism also has a more positive side. Indeed, we humans may owe our current supremacy to the catastrophic meteor impact and volcanic eruptions that helped push the dinosaurs into extinction 65 million years ago. With these supremely well-adapted creatures gone, others could flourish – and within 10 million years mammals had become the dominant life-form on Earth. Dinosaurs can hardly complain about their fate, however: they too seem to have benefited from the biggest mass extinction event in the history of our planet, when around 70 per cent of terrestrial vertebrates were killed off around 250 million years ago. Known as the Permian-Triassic extinction, its cause remains the subject of much research, with multiple meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions and dramatic climatic change among the likely suspects.
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, GETTY
million years ago, triggering a global catastrophe, and that it could happen again. While uniformitarian processes like erosion undoubtedly play the major role in shaping our planet, catastrophist events have clearly had a dramatic effect as well. The fossil record shows evidence of at least five mass extinctions, with the largest taking place 250 million years ago, eliminating 70 per cent of land animals and 95 per cent of marine life. Such mass slaughter is not an unmitigated disaster, however: mass extinctions often allow once downtrodden life-forms to flourish – their predators having been wiped out. The re-emergence of catastrophism as a scientifically credible concept was signalled in spectacular fashion in July 1994. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter with greater violence than the detonation of the entire world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. Many scientists hoped the event would alert governments to the need to take action to prevent humans suffering the fate of the dinosaurs. Yet so far, attempts to deal with this threat have been muted. Projects such as NASA’s Spaceguard Survey have so far identified only around 80 per cent of NEOs whose impact would trigger a global catastrophe. Yet, as the UN officials heard at last November’s meeting, the impact of NEOs as small as just 50m (164ft) across can devastate huge areas – as seen at Tunguska. To date, only a tiny fraction of such objects has so far been catalogued and tracked. In the meantime, NEOs continue to spring nasty surprises. Shortly before the UN meeting, an astronomer in Tucson,
Arizona, discovered an NEO on a collision course with the Earth. Fortunately, the object – code-named 2008 TC3 – was just a few metres across. Even so, within 24 hours it had plunged into the atmosphere over Northern Sudan, Africa, and exploded with the violence of 1000 tonnes of TNT. With uniformitarianism now revealed to be a comforting myth, such events may regain their ancient significance – as portents of the future, which are ignored at our peril.
Robert Matthews is a science journalist and Visiting Reader in Science at Aston University, UK. www.robertmatthews.org
FIND OUT MORE
neo.jpl.nasa.gov NASA’s Near Earth Object resource site Catastrophism: asteroids, comets and other dynamic events in Earth history by Richard J. Huggett (Verso, 1998)
SPACEGUARD SURVEY
Looking for trouble: the Spaceguard Survey
Comet to get you? Space is full of uncharted objects
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In 1989 a small asteroid zoomed past the Earth – and triggered a scare that led to an international effort to catalogue all such Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that pose a threat to our planet. The 300m (984ft)-wide rock at the centre of the scare, 4581 Asclepius, avoided a collision with the Earth by less than six hours. Had it struck, the devastation would have been equivalent to the detonation of thousands of H-bombs. To avoid future scares, NASA set up the Spaceguard Survey, with an initial goal of discovering and tracking every NEO above 1km (0.6 miles) in diameter – big enough to cause destruction on a global scale. Around 950 such objects are thought to exist, and to date around 80 per cent of them have been found. NASA has now embarked on the second phase of the survey, which aims to find and track 90 per cent of all NEOs down to just 140m (460ft) across. So far, however, barely 10 per cent of the expected numbers of such NEOs have been located.
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Principal Speak Padma Negi, Principal of Billabong High International Juhu, Mumbai, believes that the big challenge teachers face today is to help students move forward despite dejection
“As a school we have actually set a precedent of the student teacher ratio” What according to you is good education? Good education is learning important lessons of life. It is something that prepares a student to handle situations to the best of his/her ability, be it a written, oral assessment or a simple task like interacting with a caller on the phone.
care of discipline in daily routine matters. At Billabong, each student is encouraged to assess his/her own conduct within and outside the classroom. They reflect upon themselves and write a line, in the report card, about what they hope to achieve in specific time period. Administrative intervention is the last resort in extreme cases.
What is Billabong High International School’s approach towards a child’s education? At Billabong, we endeavour to provide our students a stimulating, enriching and intellectually challenging learning environment. How is this imparted through a daily school day? The curriculum is designed meticulously and implemented in an engaging manner; students are encouraged to play at least one sport and/or participate in one performing art activity on a weekly basis. They are also encouraged to take individual and collective responsibility for specific routine tasks. How is the student’s progress measured? In addition to written assessments, students are graded according to their attitudes and understanding of various skills in mathematics, social science, EVM etc. We also look at their practical application of knowledge in science and computer laboratories. We also lay an equally important emphasis on their progress in extra-curricular activities such as debating, role-play, group discussion, performing arts and poetry rendition. How involved would you have parents of students be when it comes to their education? We encourage parents to participate in
their child’s learning process not just by pushing for completion of their child’s homework, but by helping the child relate the theories taught to real life. Also, our parents come to school to speak to the students in their area of expertise. Parents are also actively involved in implementing the school discipline policy. How do you encourage discipline in students? The student council members take
Good education is learning important lessons of life WorldMags.net
In Billabong High, the ratio in the teacher: student is 13:1 in primary HSBEFTBOEJOUIFTFDPOEBSZ grades? What was the decision behind these ratios? Since we set a lot of store by activitybased teaching it is not possible to achieve objectives with large numbers hence as a school we have actually set a precedent of the student teacher ratio. What are your views on the current perspective towards education in the country? The pedagogy in aware and resourceful institutions is acquiring an international hue resulting in a learner-oriented teaching atmosphere. However, the larger picture continues to be cause for concern as school and college graduates are still seen as unskilled and unemployable by the majority of employees. Compared to five years ago, do you see a change in the challenges you face when you deal with students now? The gap between aspirations and actual potential has widened discernibly making it more and more difficult for students to reconcile themselves to reality. For teachers the big challenge is to help students move forward despite the daily dejections. August 2013
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WorldMags.net Science Olympiad Foundation S
Guests of honour on stage at the Science Olympiad Foundation’s 15th International Awards Ceremony held at the Chinmaya Mission Auditorium, Delhi on Sunday 16 June 2013
Winners seated in the auditorium
The Science Olympiad Foundation (SOF) organised a felicitation function to award the international winning students, teachers and principals of the Olympiad exams for the academic year 2012-13. Awards were given to the top three international rank holders from classes one to twelve for the four Olympiad exams conducted by SOF. Winners from classes seven to twelve won `50,000 each, the rank two
th their awards
Winners pose wi
holders won `25,000 each and rank three holders won `10,000 whereas, winners from classes one to six were awarded iPads. In addition, attractive gifts were given to all winners. The top ten principals and top forty teachers whose students put up an excellent performance were also felicitated with cash awards, mementos & citations.
Registrations are open for the current academic year For further information please visit www.sofworld.org www.facebook.com/sofworld WorldMags.net t'PSFORVJSZXSJUFUPJOGP!TPGXPSMEPSH Call 0124-4951200
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Promotional Feature
International Olympiad winners for 2012-13
Y.S. Rajan, Hon. Distinguished Prof ISRO, Chairman, NIT Manipur awarding a winner present with his family
Charlie Walker, Di rector Programmi ng stage with an aw ardee and her fam , The Biritish Council on ily
Swami Nikhilananda Saraswatiji, Chinmaya Mission presenting a winner and his family with an award
ith Justice on stage w d his family an r a ne di in In w An award ef Justice of Former Chi RC Lahoti,
Mahabir Singh, Founder and Executive Director, SOF awarding a winner present with his family
Winning teachers and prin cipals at the awards functio n
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MP3 players in the market that will get your groove on
Yes it is pebble-shaped and you probably think that it doesn’t pack a wallop when it comes to music. But it does. The Samsung Muse, comes with a SoundAlive Optimized Audio technology, which adjusts the sound quality and clarity as you listen. The cherry on the cake for Samsung loyalists is the Music Sync feature that allows you to transfer your playlist directly from your Samsung smart phone. Price: ` tXXXTBNTVOHDPN
NEW NANO When you talk about music, it is rather hard to ignore Apple. With a larger display and a thinner body, iPod Nano has been improved to provide a better music experience. This sleek device allows easy browsing according to genres, artists, albums and songs. And if you are not sure of what to hear just shake the device to shuffle. The Nike+ fitness app takes care of your daily workouts. The Nano has also been made user-friendly with the voice over function, which reads all the songs and artists on the screen with a tap of a finger and the Mono audio which helps direct both the audio channels in either ear. Price: ` tXXXXXXBQQMFDPN
GROOVE UNDERWATER Winner of the 2013 Red Dot Design Award, Neptune by Finis is designed especially for underwater athletes. Lacking ear buds, its innovative bone conduction technology transmits music through your cheekbones directly into your inner ear, giving you clear sound underwater. A high contrast OLED screen lets you browse through your playlist. You can now easily listen to music while swimming or scuba diving. Just remember to look out for the sharks. Price: ` tXXXýOJTJODDPN
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WorldMags.net PLAY WITH EASE Creative Zen Style M300 shows you that you needn’t be afraid of technology. This user-friendly gadget is perfect for luddites all around. It is equipped with Bluetooth wireless connectivity, built-in FM radio and 32GB of expandable memory. Compact, light and stylish, this player is easy to carry anywhere. The touch-responsive navigation makes for hassle-free use for children as well. It plays multiple format files, which can be transferred from your PC. It comes with a built in voice recorder, 20 hrs of battery life and 8GB storage. Not very fancy, yet not very modest, it is value for your money. Price: ` tJODSFBUJWFDPN
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SMALLEST IN THE WORLD Good things come in small packages and this rings true for the New Kube from Bluetree electronics. Claiming to be the smallest Mp3 player in the world and weighing in at just 18 grams, it allows you to store 8000 songs! You can arrange your music into folders for easy navigation and enjoy a high quality audio experience thanks to its inbuilt equalizer with seven settings. The other best part - six hours of uninterrupted music for just one hour of charge Price: ` tXXXOFXLVCFDPN
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Resource
WorldMags.net A FEAST FOR THE MIND Do reports of white light and long tunnels indicate the existence of an afterlife?
The Lazarus Effect The Science That Is Rewriting The Boundaries Between Life And Deathh
DAN DRY
Dr Sam Parnia with Josh Young Rider, ` 1,177
Dr Parnia is a resuscitation specialist, a medical professional with a deep knowledge of the body systems that support life. Along with Josh Young, he has written a scientific adventure story that is well informed and gripping. It is also fundamentally wrong-headed. Mixing tales from the emergency ward with the latest medical research, Parnia reveals how a battle against the factors which damage the body during the death process has made it possible to push back the point at which people can be restored 84
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to life. People are brought back to life hours after their hearts and all medical signs have stopped. Accompanying this medical ‘miracle’ is an increase in the number of people who report near-death experiences. Dr Parnia discusses the remarkable similarities among these reports (tunnels, white lights, encounters with benevolent beings), as well as related research concerning out-of-body experiences and consciousness during coma. This is where the book goes wrong. The research
is fascinating and clearly presented, but Parnia wants to interpret it as showing that consciousness persists independently of life and brain activity. These experiences are genuine reports of an afterlife, he claims. I’m sceptical. The plural of anecdote is not data: 100 people telling you they have fairies living at the bottom of their gardens isn’t good evidence, even though it is 100 people. Psychology research shows that false memories and confirmation bias are common factors, often
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producing unreliable accounts, especially for events in which awareness is disrupted. Also, many who have ‘near death’ experiences are not really near death. You need hard evidence for remarkable claims. When he’s off the topic of emergency care, Parnia doesn’t provide it. Dr Tom Stafford is a psychologist and the co-author of Mind Hacks.
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Get your clicks Paleofantasy
E Earthmasters
Weird W i d Lif Life
What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet And How We Live
The Dawn Of The Age Of Climate Engineering
The Search For Life That Is Very, Very Different From Our Own
Marlene Zuk WW Norton & Company, ` 1,630
Clive Hamilton Yale University Press, ` 1,812
David Toomey WW Norton & Co, ` 1,630
Nostalgia, so they say, isn’t what it used to be. Adverts and the internet are overstuffed with paeans for the Good Old Days. To be specific: the Stone Age. A time when human beings only ate ‘natural’ foods and got plenty of exercise, before agriculture came along to ruin things with its restricted and starchy diet and sedentary habits. How we yearn for our Palaeolithic peak, when men were men and mammoths were nervous. Ourconstitutions are Palaeolithic, unsuited to our fretful modern lifestyles. It says so in our genes. Au contraire says Marlene Zuk in this refreshing book. Human evolution didn’t stop in the Palaeolithic. Why would it? Evolution is the moving finger. Having writ, it moves on, just as it did when we were climbing trees or swimming in the primordial slime. We are now as genetically mismatched to the ‘paleofantasy’ of Stone Age life as giraffes are to unicycles. As such, Paleofantasy is a necessary corrective to so much new-age nincompoopery. Besides, you’ve got to love any book that starts: ‘the first thing you have to do to study 4,000-year-old DNA is to take off your clothes’.
While the issue of climate change may have slipped down the political agenda, the problem of global warming remains. One day, Hamilton says in this superb book, we will realise that the question has changed. It is no longer a matter of whether we can prevent a climate crisis, rather if we can cope with the effects. Geoengineering is one way to try. In its broadest terms, it encompasses all the possible techno-fixes that could help us escape rising temperatures. They are all discussed here – from sucking carbon dioxide from the air to spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to block sunlight. What makes this work stand out is its exploration of the people, politics and power that lie beneath. From the nuclear weapons scientists of the Cold War to wealthy philanthropists, Hamilton shows how control over the atmosphere is a seductive and enduring fascination. And, like one of the mirrors that could be erected in space to bounce back sunlight, in the dynamics of geoengineering we can see reflected the special interests, money, power and societal blinkers that got us into this mess in the first place.
This book could only have been written in the last few years, now that we’ve come to appreciate the sheer diversity of life on Earth, and the possibility of something altogether weirder. By first explaining the molecular machinery that drives life as we know it and the ‘extremophile’ organisms tolerating the most hostile environments, Toomey is then able to discuss ways in which other life might be considered to be weird (at least compared to us!). For example, life might use a chemical other than DNA, or something other than water to fill its cells, like liquid methane. And as Toomey argues, this isn’t merely idle speculation – by understanding the limits of terrestrial life we gain crucial insights into the possibility of extraterrestrial life: organisms inhabiting perhaps Mars, or the moon Titan. In the later chapters, Toomey allows himself to venture into the realms of science fiction, which makes for a fascinating aside. He discusses the feasibility of machine life, or organisms residing right on the brink of a black hole to sip the trickle of available energy.
creating expectations that none of us can live up to?’ From the title you can guess how he answers that question. He is honest enough to admit that as a clinical psychologist, his clients have had to put up with his own ‘psychobabble’ and he has even written the odd self-help book. But he doesn’t just pick on obvious targets such as ‘you can do anything you want’ or ‘your inner child needs a hug’; he
also raises questions about mainstream psychology, including the effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). He acknowledges the contribution that CBT has made to our understanding of the mind, but makes a convincing case that it’s not all it is sometimes cracked up to be. I would have preferred it if he had spent longer on fewer chapters, but this is fascinating reading for anyone who has ever wondered about the reality behind the claims of the self- help industry.
Psychobabble Exploding The Myths Of The Self-Help Generation Dr Stephen Briers Pearson, ` 996
This is a wonderfully provocative book, attacking the many myths of popular psychology. ‘Is our culture of self-help really helping,’ Dr Briers asks, ‘or is it just
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Get clicks Getyour your clicks Our pick of internet highlights to explore
Website
Website
WEBSITE
Chaos rules
An institution
Debunking the myths
dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/ www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/History_ index.html and_Culture/
www.pantheon.org
Anarchism, generally defined as the opposition to any form of state or government, has a very long and involved history. Here there’s a hoard of information on the various political philosophies of anarchist movements, if that’s what you want, but also biographies of leading lights and a nation-by-nation state of play in the respective anarchist movements.
The Smithsonian’s history and culture section has a myriad of pages on the history of subjects ranging from advertising to jazz. Examine the life of Abraham Lincoln, or the genesis of the electric guitar. Be sure to check out ‘HistoryWired’, a collection of the Smithsonian team’s own favourite objects. Kermit the Frog is, of course, included.
Everyone, it’s said, loves a good story, and Encyclopedia Mythica has more than most. Moreover, it also offers a look at the sources of the great mythological tales, and will have you wondering how much of the fiction is grounded in fact. You can look up myths by geographical region, or by pantheon. The Greek, Roman, Norse and Celtic mythologies are all well represented.
Website
Website
Website
The Virtual Body
RACE
Kurzweil AI
www.medtropolis.com/vbody.asp
www.understandingrace.com
www.kurzweilai.net
An interactive tour of the human body, featuring sections on the brain, the heart, the digestive tract and the skeleton. You can watch animations of organs in action, and zoom around the inside of a human body, navigating with your mouse. There are tours to help you get under the skin, and games to test whether you’ve been paying attention.
The three strands of this eye-opening site deal with the scientific understanding of racial differences, a look at the molecular level, and an in-depth history of the way we humans have dealt with race throughout our existence. There’s also some imaginative animation and 3D modelling, lots of personal blogs and anecdotes, and interactive games.
While this site features plenty of useful links and discussions of ongoing scientific issues, the main draw is Ramona, an artificially intelligent conversation-bot. She’s the brainchild of scientist Ray Kurzweil, known for his bold statements on the likelihood of man and machine merging within the next 30 years, and talking to Ramona is certainly an interesting – if slightly unsettling – experience.
If you have a favourite website, blog or podcast that you’d like to share with other readers, please email
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Games
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REVIEWS
Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Pocketwatch Games, ` 1,361
Have you ever watched Ocean’s Eleven and thought, “Hey, I could do that!”? Well, you probably couldn’t, but it’s certainly fun to make believe. Just picture it: the glamour, the danger… the Hollywood A-listers goofing around in expensive hotels. Well, Monaco won’t let you clink glasses with George Clooney or Brad Pitt, but it will let you indulge your daydreams of being a master thief. And just like any good heist movie, much of the fun lies in the fact that your carefully laid plans will invariably go wrong. Monaco doesn’t just flirt with disaster, it sweeps disaster off its feet and gives it a whopping great snog on the lips. It’s the distinctly odd art style that’s likely to grab your attention first. Monaco’s levels resemble a set of black-and-white blueprints, viewed from above. As your
ALSO OUT Injustice: Gods Among Us
diminutive crook scampers around the level, the world bleeds into colour according to what they can see; moving into a new room will cause it to bloom into life, just as the path behind you fades to a monochrome gloom. At first this aesthetic may seem confusing, but once it clicks you’ll see Monaco for what it really is: a stealth game where uncertainty and chaos lurk around every corner. If you’re blessed with skill and luck then everything will run like clockwork, but it’s far more likely that something will slip. An alarm gets tripped, the guards swarm in, and suddenly you’re scrabbling to save your no-good hide. There’s a whole rogue’s gallery of scoundrels to play as, ranging from a charming impersonator (think Tom Hardy in Inception) to a pickpocket with a malevolent pet monkey. Up to three friends can join you on a heist too, but never forget – there’s no honour among thieves.
PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, Warner Bros. Interactive, ` 3,631 This game brings together some of the biggest names in DC Comics, then goads them into smacking the living daylights out of each other – it’s the gaming equivalent of that kid at school who was always provoking fights and then running away when the teacher showed up. While hardcore gamers will stick to Street Fighter IV, this offers the chance to duff up The Joker as Batman, or to pitch Wonder Woman against Lex Luthor. Take that, slaphead!
Deadly Premonition: Director’s Cut PS3, Rising Star Games, ` 2,360 Deadly premonition is one of the best and worst games you’ll ever play. The graphics are woeful, the controls are sloppy, and it’s a massive rip-off of Twin Peaks. On the other hand, it’s also a game where you control an unhinged FBI agent whose beard grows if you don’t shave him. It’s hilarious, creepy and utterly baffling – the definition of a cult classic. This new version fixes a few flaws, but it’s still something of a curate’s egg.
Star Command
GAMESPRESS X4
iOS / Android, War Balloon Games, ` 272
In reality Clooney and his suave crew of thieves in Ocean’s Eleven would have spent 50 years in a supermax prison; it’s much safer to rob a casino from the comfort of your sofa 87
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As with recent with Focus favourite FTL: Faster Than Light, Star Command places you in charge of your very own starship. But where FTL focused on your ever-vulnerable craft, Star Command is all about your crew - cute little folk in coloured jumpsuits. You’ll order them about your vessel, assign them jobs and beam with pride when they get promoted. And then you’ll openly weep when they get vaporised by invaders. It’s a sci-fi tragicomedy delivered in bite-sized portions – ideal for your daily commute.
The
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last word
Dr Dibyendu Nandy writes about the inevitable demise of the Sun
“...(it) will start expanding, heralding the end and creating what is known as a Red Giant” wo important, often competing forces, play a defining role in the life of stars. One is gravity which attracts and binds together anything that has a mass. For example, a large-scale distributed system of many particles or gas would converge towards a compact spherical configuration due to their self-attraction through a process known as gravitational collapse. This process of convergence does not proceed indefinitely though because of another competing outward force due to pressure, which arises due to large density and temperature (or quantum mechanical effects) in the core of this collapsing system. The solar system was born about 4.6 billion years ago due to a similar gravitational collapse of a part of a very large cloud of gas known as the presolar nebula. This embryonic solar system was in the form of a disk of gas surrounding a central, dense, spherical core. The latter - often referred to as a protostar (take it as a baby star)- would have become more and more compact until the pressure and temperature rose to a point where nuclear fusion initiated, converting hydrogen to helium. This nuclear reaction continuously released a large flux of energy, creating enough pressure to hold the system against further collapse. A stable star, the Sun, was born. This phase of the Sun when hydrogen is fused together at its
NASA/HUBBLE
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A beautiful end? An image of the Ring Nebula (M57) taken by the Hubble Space telescope reveals what the future solar system could look like about 8 billion years from now – when the Sun is in its final death throes having evolved into a White Dwarf star (the small white dot at centre of the image) and ejected its outer shell of material
core to produce helium is known as the Main Sequence phase and lasts about 10 billion years; this is the primetime of a solar-like star’s life cycle, but age is fast catching up! As the Sun burns more and more hydrogen and accumulates helium, the rate of nuclear reaction increases, increasing its energy output. In a billion or so years from now, the Sun will be so hot that the Earth will no longer be in its habitable zone. The Earth’s atmosphere and surface will heat up, its oceans will evaporate and the water-vapour so generated will trap more heat making our planet’s environment unsuitable for life as we know it. But Mars, which is presently too frigid, will warm up and if the water that is buried beneath its surface is somehow released and oxygen created, then Mars may become habitable. Now you know why trying to reach the Red planet is not just another crazy exercise
dreamt up by nutty scientists! Further in the future about 5.5 billion years from now, the core of the Sun will run out of hydrogen and cannot be supported against gravitational collapse. The contracting core will release energy which will ignite nuclear fusion of hydrogen which still remains in the outer shell of the Sun. The heated outer shell of the Sun will start expanding, heralding the end of the Sun and creating what is known as a Red Giant. The expanding giant’s hot atmosphere will slowly gobble up Mercury, Venus and then Earth and other planets. The contracting core of the Red Giant will become so dense and hot that helium will start fusing to form Carbon. But the helium fusion reaction will not last very long and eventually there will be nothing to hold the star together. Its outer layers will be ejected away forming a planetary
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nebula such as the Ring Nebula and its dense core will become a White Dwarf. The White Dwarf, similar in size to the Earth, but almost half the weight of the Sun, and made up mostly of Carbon will radiate initially and light up the surrounding nebula in a cosmic spectacle of unparalleled beauty. Eventually, however, it will cool off and become dark. The cosmic dance of birth and death would have come to a full circle and continuous survivability of life - originated here - would necessitate getting out of the solar system well before this happens. Luke Skywalker watches a double sunset from his homeplanet Tatooine in Star Wars IV: A New Hope. Would there be a future generation of displaced humans in such a planet? I do not know; but I sure hope that someday, far, far away in time and space, a boy and a girl will peer into the darkness towards the faint rays of a White Dwarf and whisper “from thence we came, far, far back in time...”. Our future reality - complemented by scientific discovery - may surpass anything that we can currently imagine, and therein lies hope for humanity faced with the vagaries of the dying Sun. Astrophysicist Dibyendu Nandy is Associate Professor and Ramanujan Fellow at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata. He heads the CEnter of Excellence in Space Sciences, India (CESSI), and is also the Chairman of the International Astronomical Union Working Group on solar–stellar environments.
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SCIENCE t HISTORY t NATURE t FOR THE CURIOUS MIND
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