THEY’VE MADE A REAL THINKING CAP! Can this gadget boost your brainpower and is it safe? p64
ASIA EDITION
Vol. 7 Issue 2
SCIENCE S CIENCE t HISTORY t NATUREE t FOR FO OR THE THE CURIOUS CURIOUS MIND MIN
MISSION TO THE
CENTRE OF THE EARTH Plans to drill deeper than ever will uncover clues to our planet’s past and reveal new forms of life p31
Light: Is It Waves Or Particles?
Alien Contact
The World’s Worst Smells
Nature’s most incredible phenomenon p58
Scientists decode mystery signals p69
Chemistry of pongs p74
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SCIENCE
On the cover
Vol. 7 Issue 2
HISTORY
64 The Real Thinking Cap
SCIENCE
58 The Nature Of Light
SCIENCE
69 Mystery Messages From Space
74 The World’s Worst Smells
31 To Go Deeper Than Ever Before Vol. 7 Issue 2
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Contents FEATURES
Vol. 7 Issue 2
31 Mission To The Centre Of The Earth
14 BBC Knowledge Magazine School Challenge 2014
ON THE COVER
31 Mission To The Centre Of The Earth What will we find in the bowels of the planet? Find out the inner workings of our planet as scientists begin a difficult exploratory journey, peeling back layers of the Earth
40 Fighting Fire With Fire
48 Language Evolution
50 Leopards In The Neighbourhood
SCIENCE
SCIENCE
HISTORY
HISTORY
A natural and at times, man-made occurrence that leaves a trail of destruction in its wake, see how scientists in Australia prepare to battle fierce bushfires
NATURE
SCIENCE
SCIENCE
Join the champions from Nanyang Girls’ High School as they embark on a journey of discovery in London, uncovering centuries-old traditions, famous landmarks and sights
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We communicate so effortlessly everyday in various languages, through the spoken or written word, find out how humans began to speak and when did languages evolve
Conflicts are bound to occur when the constantly expanding human population requires more space and encroaches into animal territory. Is it possible to live together in harmony?
ON THE COVER
58 The Nature Of Light Here is the story of how we figured out the nature of light, it wasn’t easy because this interesting phenomenon puzzled the best scientific minds for 2,000 years!
ON THE COVER
64 The Real Thinking Cap Could a headset boost your mental performance? We look at a few gadgets that promise to give your brainpower a boost, as and when you decide you need one
ON THE COVER
69 Mystery Messages From Space From ancient artifacts, temples and monoliths that seem to suggest alien origins, scientists are now trying to decipher weird cosmic signals from deep space Vol. 7 Issue 2
10 Snapshot
Our noses help us taste finer flavours and can distinguish over a trillion smells, that can be a good as well as a bad thing unfortunately, we highlight a few of the worst
SCIENCE
SCIENCE
40 Fighting Fire With Fire
74 The World’s Worst Smells
76 50 Apps For The New Year
SCIENCE
69 Mystery Messages From Space
ON THE COVER
80 Tech Hub
We sieved through the plethora of apps in the mobile application universe and selected these 50 fun, fascinating and essential apps that will help get you through the year
Worried about home or office security or what the children are up to at home when you are out or at work? Try these remote-viewing systems for size
REGULARS 6 Welcome A note from the editor sharing his thoughts on the issue and other ramblings
8 Snapshot Stunning images from the fields of science, history and nature that will astound you
UPDATE 22 The Latest Intelligence Isopropyl cyanide spotted 27,000 light-years away, invisibility cloak for surgical operations, polar reversal could take place sooner than expected…
30 Comment & Analysis The science of surface tension
83 Q&A Caterpillar webs, vacuum cleaners, addictions, wasabi, Wikipedia and more…
RESOURCE 92 Reviews A wider selection of the latest books reviewed to help start your year
96 Time Out Stretch your brain cells with our quiz and crossword
98 Last Word Is weather forecasting hard? Vol. 7 Issue 2
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SCIENCE
Down to Earth Falling from 3,000M above the Earth’s surface, this is a quarter-scale prototype of SpacePlane, Airbus’s potential vehicle for space tourism. “Comparing a spaceplane with a normal passenger plane is like comparing a dragster with a touring car,” says Richard Brown, director of the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Future Air-Space Transport Technology. “The airliner is optimised to carry a large number of passengers in relative comfort for several hours at moderate altitudes; the spaceplane is built for excitement, accelerating a small number of
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people very quickly, following an almost vertical trajectory to the edge of space and back again.” The drop tests seen in this still from an Airbus video were carried out of the coast of Singapore, and were designed to help engineers determine how the full-sized version may fare on its return trip to Earth. Next year, the company plans to repeat the trials from 10 times the height. It’s hoped that SpacePlane will eventually take four passengers to an altitude of 100km, where they will briefy experience weightlessness. PHOTO: AIRBUS
Vol VVo Vol. ol. 7 Issue Isssu Iss sue ue 2
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NATURE
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Slow grower The atacama desert in South America is peppered with odd, cushion-like plants known as the llareta, a spongy cousin of parsley. Despite the harsh weather conditions they have to endure, some of these plants are up to 3,000 years old. Despite looking like a rock blanketed by moss, the plant has a tightly packed structure of branches, each adorned with
clusters of tiny leaves. The resulting plant is so strong that you could comfortably stand on top of it. However, this hardiness comes at a price: the plants are thought to grow just 1.5cm a year. “I suspect that the llareta became so strong because of a combination of environmental stressors (cold at night and hot in the day) and grazing pressures,” says Catherine
Kleier, a researcher from Regis University, Colorado, who studies the peculiar plant. “The plant is compact to trap heat and decaying leaves, but the more compact the plant, the more successfully it protects itself against grazing from the native viscacha, a long-tailed, rabbitlike rodent.” PHOTO: RACHEL SUSSMAN
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HISTORY
Footprints on the Moon On July 20, 1969, more than a billion people watched Neil Armstrong take humankind’s first step on another world. The Apollo 11 mission fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s goal of reaching the moon by the end of the decade. PHOTO: NASA
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AN ENGLISH WINTER Join the champions of the 2014 BBC Knowledge Magazine School Challenge on their London Educational Tour By Melissa Lorraine Chua
SCHO OL
CHALLENGE 2014
risk winds and chilly weather greeted our young students as they took their first steps onto London soil, but none could dampen their spirits. Well-prepared with an arsenal of warm layers and a buzzing excitement, the champion team comprising Zhao Jiayi, Tng Pei Ling, Xu Xinyue Selina, and Gu Tianyi from Nanyang Girls’ High School embarked on their adventure to uncover the treasures of this timeless city.
B
Buckingham Palace Their first stop was the regal Buckingham Palace, where the students arrived early to grab a chance to witness the ceremonial Changing of the Guard. A practice that has spanned over 5 centuries since the time of King Henry VII, the first Changing of the Guard ceremony happened at the Palace of Whitehall, the Sovereign’s official residence at the time. In 1689, the Sovereign’s residence was moved to St James’s Palace, and then subsequently to Buckingham Palace in 1837, where it remains till this day. Today, the ceremony spans St James’s Palace, Wellington Barracks, and Buckingham Palace, where the Old Guard hands over responsibility to the New Guard in an elaborate showcase of precision drills and immaculate band music, a true epitome of all the military pomp and circumstance that Britain 14
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Victoria Monument in front of Buckingham Plalace
is famous for. Watch out for the Royal Standard flag atop the roof of Buckingham Palace – if it is flying, it means that Her Majesty The Queen is in residence, and the ‘Queen’s Guard’ will be beefed up to comprise 40 men instead of the usual 31. After the ceremony, the students took a leisurely morning stroll through the picturesque St James’s Park, located east from Buckingham Palace. They got a chance to meet the resident colony of swans and pelicans, the latter making their first appearance as a gift by the Russian ambassador in 1664.
Big Ben After a breakfast meal of fish and chips and traversing through St James’s Park, the team finally reached Parliament Square, where there were wonderful views of the iconic Big Ben and the London Eye in the distance, both significant symbols of the London skyline. The largest four-faced chiming clock in the world, ‘Big Ben’ is actually an affectionate nickname for the clock tower that extends from the Palace of Westminster, and features prominently in many films and popular culture. The London Eye, also known as the Millennium Wheel because of its debut
London Telephone Booth with Big Ben
The London Eye
Paddington Bear
in 2000, is a massive Ferris wheel perched on the southern banks of the River Thames. One of the most recognisable sights in London its passenger capsules offer some of the most stunning views of the city and its surrounds. The students took the opportunity to snap some pictures with the iconic red telephone booth, of course with Big Ben framed strategically in the background. Unique in 2014 was the Paddington Bear
statue, part of The Paddington Trail that ran from 4th November to 30th December 2014 in line with the release of the Paddington movie. The Paddington Trail features 50 statues scattered across the city, each uniquely designed by various artists, designers, and celebrities. After the Trail, the statues were auctioned off and proceeds went to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). Vol. 7 Issue 2
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CHALLENGE 2014
Natural History Museum
(affectionately referred to as Dippy), another iconic display is the massive parallel skeleton and model of a blue whale in the Large Mammals Hall, a tribute to the giants that still roam the Earth today! After a packed day and running on little sleep after their flight, the team adjourned to their comfortable accommodations for a good night’s rest.
BBC Broadcasting House
Natural History Museum
Natural History Museum Following lunch, it was time to visit London’s Natural History Museum, home to some 80 million items presenting this history of life and science on earth, such as botany, entomology (the study of insects), mineralogy, zoology, and palaeontology, the last striking a particular chord among the group. “Just one word: DINOSAURS!” enthused Tianyi. “The Natural History Museum definitely fired up my scientific interest!” Selina liked the exhibition on Homosapien’s Prehistoric counterparts, adding that, “The museum trips allowed me to get up close and see many famous, significant discoveries, inventions, and documentations of the modern world and ancient civilisations.” In addition to the colossal 32-metre long replica of a Diplodocus carnegii skeleton that hangs in the central hall 16
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BBC Broadcasting House
Indubitably the highlight of the London Educational Tour the students were given the opportunity to explore the internationally renowned BBC Broadcasting House in the heart of Greater London. Bright and early, the students made their way to the worldwide headquarters and registered
News Reporting
The One Show Studio
BBC Broadcasting House
off ice of the British Broadcasting Corporation, more commonly referred to as BBC. The Broadcasting House actually comprises two compounds; the original main building that was designed in Art Deco style and off icially opened in 1932, while the new eastern extension was completed in 2005 and named the ‘John Peel Wing’ in 2012, both buildings are joined by a large wing forming the grand plaza, which ushers visitors to its main doors. The students got to enjoy the entertaining and informative BBC Tour, which allowed them to go behind the scenes to see how live broadcasts are filmed and transmitted. Participants of the tour get the exclusive opportunity to participate in the making of a traditional BBC Radio Drama, where they try out making some unique sound effects with simple and unexpected props! Reflecting on the experience, Pei Ling remarks, “It was really an eye-opening experience to see the BBC news room and the different areas where different BBC programmes were filmed. It was also entertaining to watch people try out reading scripts over the radio.” Selina also found that the Tour was a great way to supplement what she learnt in school about European history. “The role BBC played in rallying the French Resistance efforts and giving General de Gaulle the platform to speak ties in inextricable with history, and perhaps played a vital role in the eventual success of Allied efforts.” Avid “Whovians” will be thrilled to see a replica of The Tardis near the Media Café and BBC Shop, while fans of the reality singing competition, The Voice, can cosy up to a life-sized judge’s
chair on display. The students also got the photo-worthy opportunity to get up close and personal on the lime couched set of The One Show, BBC’s daily programme that discusses current affairs and popular culture.
Cookery School Reluctantly departing the hallowed halls of the BBC Broadcasting House, the students embarked on their next adventure to Cookery School at Little Portland Street. As London’s only cookery school awarded the maximum 3-star rating for sustainability from the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA), Cookery School’s main mission is to demystify the
egg mayonnaise, and crab sandwiches with homemade bread; small savoury cheese and herb scones slathered in creamy organic English butter; sweet apple and sultana scones accompanied by quintessential English jam and whipped double cream; classic Caraway cake baked with a distinct flavour of caraway seeds; delectable Lemon tarts; and traditional homemade fudge. In the words of Tianyi, “Hands-on is always great!” Pei Ling also loved the Cookery School experience, “We got to make so much food (delicious food of course) and it was like we were in a tea room at the end when we laid out the table to savour the scones and lemon tarts.”
Singapore High Commission The champions of the 2014 BBC Knowledge Magazine School Challenge got the truly unique privilege of visiting the Singapore High Commission in London, where they met with political secretary Mr Mak Yong Yang. He shared with them the intricacies of the daily
Cooking Class
art of preparing honest, delicious food, and is committed to using primarily organic and sustainable ingredients for its classes. It was a delicious affair as the students embarked on a hands-on adventure to prepare their very own traditional English High Tea. The menu of the day comprised a selection of cucumber, smoked salmon,
Chefs for a day
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CHALLENGE 2014
running of the High Commission, and its main difference from the embassy; while they both function similarly as a diplomatic mission representing the home country’s interests overseas, the High Commission is usually reserved for countries that are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, an intergovernmental organisation of states that were former territories of the British Empire. The High Commission steps in during cases of emergency, like arrests, hospitalisation, or loss of passports. For Selina, it helped reaffirm her inclination towards taking up a career in foreign affairs. Jiayi also added, “It was nice to hear the distinctive Singaporean accent. The excellent ties between UK and Singapore is very heartening, especially when we learnt that our President and First Lady were granted the honour of a State visit to the UK. All in all, this visit to the High Commission was a really positive experience and a really enriching one.”
all its glory, with popular attractions such as the Ice Skating rink, the Magical Ice Kingdom, circus rides and games, and a bustling market hawking delicious fare to enjoy while strolling through the park. With overwhelming consensus, the group said it was beautiful experiencing winter in London, and the Winter Wonderland was a wonderful way to usher in the festive mood with loads of Christmas spirit and cheer.
British Museum The famed locale of the recent box office hit, ‘Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb’, The British Museum houses one of the world’s most comprehensive and awe-inspiring collections of artefacts and works from human history, illustrating and documenting the growth of culture from the cradle of humanity in Africa to the ancient antiquities of Asia to the great histories of Egypt and Sudan. The British Museum is a vast illustration of the human story, and
Winter Wonderland After a long day of educational experiences, it was time to take a leisurely break at the nearby Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. A spectacular festive destination with a plethora of attractions for all ages, the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland is the Christmas season in
Winter Wonderland
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British Museum
how we got to where we are today. All were amazed at the scale of the museum, and took great pleasure in meandering through its exhibits. Tianyi exclaimed, “The British Museum gave me a view of all the historical artefacts that I could only read about in class! Exhibits such as the Rosetta Stone do make history come very alive!”
Covent Garden Situated along the eastern edge of London’s West End, Covent Garden is a refurbished trading hub that is how a popular tourist and shopping attraction. Comprising the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, St Paul’s Church, and the London Transport Museum, Covent Garden is also a hot spot for street performances and entertainment. The students grabbed the rare opportunity to watch the theatrical performance of ‘The Woman In Black’, a spine-tingling tale that is the second-longest running play in the West End. Having watch the movie, Pei Ling was excited to see how the story
would unfold on stage, and was not disappointed. “I was so impressed by how well the two main characters carried the show,” she enthused. “I especially liked the plot twist at the end because it was so well executed.” “I would definitely watch more plays and musical in London if I had the time. London’s arts and culture scene is definitely worth the time!” agreed Tianyi.
The National Gallery Jiayi’s personal favourite during the trip, The National Gallery houses some of the most illustrious artworks in civilised history. Housing over 2,300 of the finest paintings that span the 13th to 20th century, the four spent an evening appreciating such iconic artworks as Vincent Van Gough’s “Sunflowers” and Monet’s series of “Water Lilies”. Also on special exhibition were Rembrandt’s emotive late works, and unique experience of the great Dutch master’s passion. On the front steps of The National Gallery is the popular Trafalgar Square, constantly buzzing with street performers and artists seeking to be the next artistic sensation. Crowning the centre of the Square is Nelson’s Column flanked by four
The National Gallery
Sherlock Holmes Museum
lions, a towering monument erected in dedication of the Admiral Horatio Nelson who died at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Sherlock Holmes Museum On the last day of their trip, the team visited a museum dedicated to one of British literature’s best-loved characters – Sherlock Holmes at “221B Baker Street”. Indubitably made even more famous with the recent BBC television drama series, this old converted Georgian townhouse is run by the non-profit Sherlock Holmes Society of England, and is dedicated to the more classic 1881 – 1990 depiction of the detective as originally articulated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The students immersed themselves into the life of Sherlock Holmes, including a plethora of photo opportunities with his wide array of relics and antiques on display, as well as his iconic pipes, magnifying glass, and hat. After an exciting morning, it was time to ease those stomach rumblings at nearby Chinatown. Tucking in to some familiar-tasting cuisine, the students took the time to reflect upon their trip. All were so grateful and enriched by this opportunity to visit London with their friends. “London is amazingly beautiful!” Jiayi adds. “It was my first trip to Europe and getting to go with friends was a really awesome and fantastic experience.” Tianyi acknowledged, “Wow, the experience has been a truly enriching and splendid one. This is the first time I’ve been in London and I had an amazing time.” “This is one of my first solo trips with friends of my age, so it was really fun beyond imagination and an awesome bonding experience,” raved Selina. “Many
think of team bonding through sports, but the BBC Knowledge Magazine School Challenge is one of the ways to bond with friends through knowledge-seeking, creative problem-solving, and the potential for globetrotting. One of the best decisions I made this year!” Always packed but always immensely exciting, this year’s BBC Knowledge Magazine’s London Educational Tour was a great way to give the students a tantalising taste of all the wonders that this city has to offer – the vibrancy, history, spirit, and depth of the British identity.
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CHALLENGE 2015
DATE: 30 & 31 MAY 2015
BBC KNOWLEDGE MAGAZINE SCHOOL CHALLENGE IS BACK! Educational tours and fantastic prizes to be won! Gather your teammates and sign up now! BBC KNOWLEDGE MAGAZINE SCHOOL CHALLENGE 2015 An educational project organised by BBC Knowledge Magazine to inspire youths and encourage curiosity. The project aims to provide an additional platform for learning through a series of interactive challenges related to Science, History and Nature to nuture and hone students’ thinking process. ELIGIBILITY Open to all Secondary School students in Singapore. Each team should consist of four students and one teacher-mentor from the same school. Each school is allowed to submit multiple entries but only one entry per school will be selected for the qualifying round. Registration form and more information can be found at: www.regentmedia.sg/bbcknowledgemag_asia For more enquiries, email
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Update SEE-THROUGH SURGEONS How an invisibility cloak could prove useful in carrying outdelicate operations
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THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
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FIELD SURVEY New research suggests Earth’s magnetic field could soon reverse
ROBOTS: ALL AT SEA Why robotics are the new frontier in oceanography
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MOLECULE DISCOVERY SUGGESTS PHOTO: ESO/JOSÉ FRANCISCO SALGADO, MPIFR/A/UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE/M KOERBER, PRESS ASSOCIATION, BASILICOFRESCO/WIKI
LIFE COULD HAVE STARTED IN SPACE Study of gas clouds where stars are forming could be the key to solving the mystery of where life began he largest and most complex organic molecule ever seen in interstellar space has been detected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. The molecule, isopropyl cyanide, was spotted 27,000 light-years (10 trillion kilometres) from
T
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The ALMA telescope in Chile has found organic material in an interstellar gas cloud
i-propyl cyanide
n-propyl cyanide
GOOD MONTH/ BAD MONTH It’s been good for: The hard of hearing
Sgr A* Sgr B2 Isopropyl cyanide molecules have been detected in the Milky Way (orange band). Sgr B2 is the star-forming region; Sgr A* is thought to be a black hole
300 light years
Earth, inside a star-forming giant gas cloud named Sagittarius B2. As stars are born in the cloud, they heat up microscopic grains of dust. Chemical reactions on the surface of this dust can result in the formation of complex molecules.Various types of molecule have previously been detected in space. But hydrogen-rich organic molecules – such as those most closely related to the ones necessary for life on Earth – appear to be most plentiful in the gas clouds from which new stars are being formed. The discovery of isopropyl cyanide in interstellar space suggests that the building blocks of life may be widespread throughout our Galaxy. Since the search for molecules in interstellar space began in the 1960s, around 180 kinds have been discovered. Each molecule emits light at particular wavelengths, giving it a unique pattern of electromagnetic radiation that acts as its ‘signature’.These signatures can then be detected
using a radio telescope, allowing researchers to determine the composition of interstellar space. “Understanding the production of organic material at the early stages of star formation is critical to piecing together the gradual progression from simple molecules to potentially life-bearing chemistry,” says lead author Arnaud Belloche. The discovery could mean that more complex organic molecules, such as amino acids, may also be present in interstellar gas clouds. Amino acids are the key ingredients of proteins, which played an important role in the evolution of life on Earth. “Amino acids identified in meteorites have a composition that suggests they originate in the interstellar medium," adds Belloche. “Although no interstellar amino acids have yet been found, chemistry may be responsible for the production of a wide range of complex molecules that eventually find their way to planetary surfaces.”
A history of organic compounds in space 1953 Stanley Miller and Harold Urey carry out an experiment in which amino acids are created by mixing water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen and subjecting them to strikes from simulated lightning.
Gamers Psychologists at the University of Toronto have found that people who play videogames seem to learn new ‘sensorimotor skills’, such as riding a bicycle or typing, more quickly than non-gamers. They set a group of 18 gamers and 18 non-gamers the task of tracking an icon on a computer screen with a mouse. Gamers improved more quickly than non-gamers.
It’s been bad for: The Guna people The indigenous people of Panama’s Guna Yala islands are being forced out of their land thanks to rising sea levels and extreme weather caused by climate change. “The situation in Guna Yala is the first case we are aware of in Latin America of large-scale climate displacement,” said Scott Leckie, of international NGO Displacement Solutions.
Shift workers
TIMELINE 1937 Methylidyne, a gas made up of a single carbon atom and a single hydrogen atom, becomes the first organic molecule to be observed in interstellar space.
Scientists at Harvard University have improved the hearing of partially deaf mice by boosting NT3 levels in the inner ear (pictured). This protein is used in brain-ear communication. The findings could lead to therapies to restore hearing loss in humans.
1969
2005
The Murchison meteorite lands near Murchison, Victoria, in Australia. When analysed, the space rock is found to harbour at least 15 different amino acids.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope finds polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, molecules critical to all known forms of life, in the spiral galaxy M81.
A team from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has discovered that gut microbes have circadian rhythms that are controlled by the biological clock of their host. Disruption of the host’s body clock due to jet lag or shift work can alter the rhythms and composition of the microbes, potentially leading to metabolic problems and obesity.
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Update
THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
PATENTLY OBVIOUS Inventions and discoveries that will change the world with James Lloyd
geophysics
Polar flip coming soon?
PHOTO: PAUL RENNE UC BERKELEY, NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHY CENTRE, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY ILLUSTRATOR: DEM ILLUSTRATION
UC Berkeley scientists point out a sediment layer from a previous magnetic reversal
In-flight immersion Long-haul flights are a lottery. Sometimes all you want to do is relax, watch a film and get some shut-eye, but there you are, sitting next to the most talkative person on the planet. Thankfully, Airbus feels your pain.The aircraft manufacturer has invented a high-tech headrest with a helmet that pulls down over your face, isolating you from your surroundings.The headrest incorporates glasses and earphones for watching films and listening to music, while the visor itself will be made from an optoelectronic material that can change from transparent to opaque at the flick of a switch. If that’s not enough, an air source in the backrest will keep you comfortably ventilated, a suite of connectors will let you plug in your gadgets, and the helmet will even pipe in pleasant smells – perfect if you want to erase the memory of that in-flight meal. Patent number: US8814266
Smarter yoga mat
Thermostat bracelet
Do you know your Downward Dog from your Peacock Feather? A new ‘smart’ yoga mat could help you become a supple-limbed sage in no time. Just like an ordinary yoga mat, the SmartMat is thin, flexible and lightweight, but it’s also embedded with tiny pressure sensors that link via Bluetooth to your phone or tablet.You calibrate the mat by keying in your vital statistics and performing some basic poses. It will then suggest real-time adjustments to your balance and alignment as you’re guided through a lesson.
Fed up with watches and loom bands? Then how about adorning your wrist with your own personal air conditioner? Wristify, the brainchild of four MIT students, is a bracelet that sends hot or cold thermal pulses to your wrist.The device is based on studies showing that a local change in skin temperature can leave your whole body feeling warmer or cooler. And because the bracelet has integrated skin and air thermometers, you won’t even need to tell it when you’re feeling chilly.
Patent pending
Patent pending
24
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A team from the University of California, Berkeley has discovered that the Earth’s magnetic field may flip sooner than previously expected. But don’t worry, it’s not time to buy a new compass just yet. The team measured magnetic field alignments from ancient lake sediments near Rome, Italy and found that the last reversal happened 786,000 years ago over a period of less than 100 years. “It’s amazing how rapidly we see that reversal,” said UC Berkeley’s Courtney Sprain. “This is one of the best records we have so far of what happens during a reversal and how quickly these reversals can happen.”
Combined with evidence that the intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field is currently decreasing 10 times faster than normal, this may mean that a flip could be happening within a few thousand years, researchers say. A magnetic reversal is a major planet-wide event driven by movement in the Earth’s iron core. The Earth’s magnetic field is dipolar like a common bar magnet and has flipped many times over the course of history. There are no documented catastrophes associated with past reversals. However, a reversal could potentially cause problems with the electrical grid and satellite networks.
Earth’s magnetic field during a reversal with outward (yellow) and inward (blue) components
Robots are set to rule the waves The Isles of Scilly had never seen anything like it.The slipway in the tiny village of Porthloo was jammed with highly unusual craft. Bemused dog-walkers and bird-watchers were witnessing the launch of the largest trial of marine robots in British waters. Most people think of robots as clumsy humanoids, or as drones buzzing through the skies over a war zone. But the US Navy and the oil and gas industries have invested heavily in a range of devices that can serve as eyes and ears in the deep – and now oceanographic researchers are catching up. The largest machine released off Scilly is the C-Enduro.With a distinctive wind turbine, it looks like a Florida airboat. Its British maker, ASV, has fitted it with cameras and an automatic winch system that can lower sensors into the water. Another British design, the AutoNaut, has a more slender shape like a hi-tech canoe and it harnesses energy from the motion of the waves.The company behind it, MOST, claims a potential endurance of up to a year. Both firms received government funding via the National Oceanography Centre. While the United States
THEY DID WHAT?! Fruit flies used to sniff out drugs and explosives What did they do? It has long been known that fruit flies are highly sensitive to the odour of wine, because it resembles their
DAVID SHUKMAN The science that matters
Robotic boats could soon be monitoring our oceans
dominates the market for underwater vehicles, British know-how could seize the lead in machines operating at the surface. Former science minister David Willetts identified robotics as one of “eight great technologies” and unmanned boats are now being trialled as a result. In theory, a fleet of relatively cheap machines could patrol vast areas, gathering data on everything
favourite food – fermenting fruit. Researchers at the University of Sussex wanted to see if the creaturess could detect other substances – in particular, the kinds of contraband that customs officers look for. Why did they find? By monitoring 20 neurones in the flies’ brains, the researchers were able to determine that the insects
from the currents to the weather to the state of the fishing grounds. This could potentially transform our understanding of the workings of the oceans – like a marine equivalent of CCTV. But there are drawbacks.The robot craft can be delicate: a ferocious storm tore through the trial area soon after the vehicles were launched, and three of the seven craft launched off Scilly
only lasted a week. Also, the lifeblood of an ocean science career has traditionally involved going to sea on expeditions – the prospect of sitting at a desk monitoring output from distant machines might seem rather drab in comparison.
DAVID SHUKMAN is the BBC’s Science Editor. @davidshukmanbbc
could recognise 21 out of 35 drugs and explosives, compared to 29 out of 36 wines. How might that be useful? It is hoped that the findings will eventually lead to the development of ‘e-noses’ – machines that can detect odour – that are more sensitive and faster than the technology that is currently used.
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PHOTO: J ADAM FENSTER/UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER, NICO ZEVALLOS/CHAOHUI GONG, DIGIZYME/WYSS INSTITUTE, JOHN BADDING LAB/PENN STATE, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, LI/WELLMAN CENTER FOR PHOTOMEDICINEUF/IFAS
Update
THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
DISCOVERIES THAT WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE
10
Efficient fusion concept It’s an environmentalist’s dream: a fuel with no greenhouse emissions or harmful waste. Now, engineers at the University of Washington have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that could be cheaper to run than fossil fuel plants. Fusion reactors force atoms together to create energy as opposed to splitting them like current fission reactors. The new design is cheaper to build than other current designs as it requires no large, expensive superconductors.
An ‘invisibility’ device could have useful applications in surgery
Invisibility cloak Ever wanted to disappear? A team at the University of Rochester has created an ‘invisibility cloak’ using a simple system of lenses and mirrors. The technology could be used to help
surgeons see through their hands while performing operations, they say. The system directs light around a ‘doughnut-shaped’ area that appears to be invisible when viewed through a lens.
Diamond weaver
Can peanuts be made safe for those with allergies?
Allergy-free nuts Peanuts: for some they’re a tasty snack to be enjoyed with a pint of beer, but for others one nibble can mean swollen lips, nausea or, in severe cases, death. Now, a team at the University of Florida has succeeded in removing 80 per cent of the harmful allergens from whole nuts, potentially helping in the creation of allergen-free foods. The allergen proteins were modified using concentrated bursts of light from xenon lamps, making them undetectable to human antibodies. 26
Vol. 7 Issue 2
Researchers have developed ultra-thin threads that could be the strongest material yet. A team at Penn State University compressed benzene under high pressure to create a pyramidstructured, diamond-cored thread. It could be used wherever a strong, light substance is needed and could perhaps even make building a space elevator possible, they say.
This fusion experiment is one-tenth the size of the University of Washington’s concept reactor
Day-glo dressings A new smart bandage developed at Harvard Medical School can measure the oxygenation of the tissue it covers. Oxygenation is a key indicator of the health of body tissue, and the bandage uses phosphorescent molecules that glow more brightly as oxygen concentration is reduced. Eventually, the technology could be used for ‘on-demand’ drug administration.
The new material was created by compressing benzene molecules The new bandage would need to be removed less often
Electricitygenerating material Researchers at Columbia University in New York have created a piezoelectric material just one atom thick. Piezoelectrics generate a charge when subjected to pressure. Using a material called molybdenum disulphide, the team created a very thin material that generates charge when stretched. It could be used in everything from transistors to tiny, selfpowered machines.
A new piezoelectric material is just one atom thick
Solar cell/battery combo Ohio State University scientists have combined a solar cell and energy storage into a single hybrid device that’s more efficient than separate solar cells and batteries. A solar panel allows light and air to enter the cell. Inside, photons from the light and oxygen enable electrons to move between the panel and the electrode.
Future Mars landers could mimic the motion of sidewinder snakes
Snake robot Roboticists at Carnegie Mellon have figured out how the sidewinder rattlesnake is able to slither so deftly up steep sand dunes. It moves by creating waves down its body both horizontally and vertically. By manipulating the vertical
Tractor beam
Nanoparts for future computers
So far, the tractor beam can only move the tiniest particles
In the latest sci-fi trope turned reality, physicists at the Australian National University have created a working laser tractor beam. The device works by heating up specific areas of the target particle. These in turn heat up
motion, the snake is able to alter the amount of its body that’s in contact with the sand, providing extra grip where needed. The discovery could lead to more effective search and rescue robots or even more advanced Mars rovers.
air particles around them, which shoot away, causing the particles to recoil. The system could be used to retrieve minute sensitive or delicate particles. It has so far moved 0.2mm-diameter particles a distance of 20cm.
Physicists have created intricate 3D nanoparticles using DNA as a mould. They planted tiny gold ‘seeds’ inside a mould and then stimulated them to grow. The gold took on the shape of the mould in the same manner as the cube-shaped watermelons grown in boxes by Japanese farmers. The technique could be used to create finely detailed parts for electronics.
In future, computer components may be moulded using DNA
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Update
THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
BIOLOGY
CLICK HERE New websites, blogs and podcasts NanoDoc nanodoc.org In NanoDoc, your mission is to make nanoparticles to kill tumour cells. You’ll need to balance dosage and specificity, among other things, just like a real bioengineer would when designing cancer treatments. You have to register, and the game can be tricky, but your efforts could lead to real-world breakthroughs.
How scientists feel bit.ly/1tsK5Yd You’ve heard scientists talking about climate change, but have you heard them say how they feel about it? One scientist describes the mix of “awe, hope, despair, frustration and anger” he feels; others talk of their own guilt about the issue. This collection of letters shows the people, and the feelings, behind the research.
We need us weneedus.org This is a living artwork that turns metadata from several Zooniverse projects (including the original Galaxy Zoo) into moving shapes. It’s a collaboration between artist Julie Freeman, The Space and the Open Data Institute. There’s sound, too, so make sure you have your speakers turned up or your headphones on.
Key step in evolution of life called into question Mitochondria, the so-called powerhouses of cells, are an essential part of life. But they may have started out as an energy-sapping parasite, researchers at the University of Virginia have found. These powerhouses are found within virtually all ‘eukaryotic’ cells – that is, animal and plant cells that contain a nucleus. They power the cells by providing them with adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a complex molecule considered by biologists to be the energy currency of life. “We believe this study has the potential to change the way we think about the event that led to mitochondria,” said lead author Martin Wu. “We are saying that the current theories, all claiming that the relationship between the bacteria and the host cell at the very beginning of the symbiosis was mutually beneficial, are likely wrong.
Instead, we believe that the initial relationship was antagonistic – that the bacteria were parasitic, and only became beneficial to the host cell later on.” Mitochondria first evolved roughly two billion years ago, and their emergence is considered a key event in the evolutionary history of life. Without mitochondria to provide energy to the rest of a cell, the rich biodiversity that we see in nature could not have evolved, Wu says. The team made the discovery by sequencing the DNA of the close relatives of mitochondria and reconstructing the genes to form a picture of its ancestor. They concluded that mitochondria evolved from a parasite that originally stole energy in the form of ATP from its host. This is the exact opposite of how current mitochondria functions.
PHOTO: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Floating forests floatingforests.org Think you could spot a forest in an aerial photograph? How about if that photo was taken from space? The scientists behind Floating Forests are asking people to help them discover forests of giant kelp floating in the ocean. Giant kelp can grow up to a foot per day and form huge canopies, providing food for fish, shrimp and sea urchins. Mitochondria inside our cells enable them to function, but may have arrived there as parasites
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GRAPHIC SCIENCE EBOLA OUTBREAK
1976
Transmitted by body fluids Fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family are thought to be the natural hosts of the virus that causes Ebola
The first recorded outbreak of Ebola claimed 280 lives in Zaire
The virus is spread through sexual activity or direct contact with infected blood, faeces, sweat or corpses
Progression of the disease DAY 0-6
DAY 7-9
DAY 10
DAY 11
DAY 12
DEATH
Symptoms can start to show in as little as two days
Joint pain, headache, muscle soreness, sore throat
Sudden high fever, diarrhoea, extreme fatigue, vomiting blood
Bruising, brain damage, bleeding from nose, mouth, eyes and anus
Coma, organ failure, seizures, massive internal bleeding
Up to 90 per cent of cases are fatal. Corpses are infectious
How the disease works West Africa 2014 †
1 2 3
1. The virus can enter the human body through the eyes, mouth or breakages in the skin
2. The virus latches onto a human cell, injects its genetic information inside and takes control of the cell
3. The hijacked cell creates copies of the virus. These are released into the body, and the cycle repeats
4,921
Previous outbreaks Zaire 1976
Sudan 1976
Democratic Republic of Congo 1995
Democratic Republic of Congo 2007 Cases outside of Africa 2014*
280
151
250
10,136
187 4
Key
Cases
Deaths
*Figure correct on 28/10/2014
†
Figure correct on 25/10/2014
Vol. 7 Issue 2
29
GEOPHYSICS
MISSION TO THE
CENTRE OF THE EARTH ILLUSTRATOR: MAGICTORCH
The mission: to go deeper than we’ve ever gone before. The goal: to discover how our planet evolved, and hunt for subterranean life. Jheni Osman looks down...
Scan this QR Code for the audio reader Vol. 7 Issue 2
31
GEOPHYSICS
iding on a wave of liquid iron, a grapefruit-sized probe is on a journey to the centre of the Earth. The immense weight of the 110,000 tonnes of liquid iron tears apart rock, forging a channel running deep into the very bowels of our planet. Inside the unmanned probe are all sorts of instruments to measure Earth’s core – and discover what really lies beneath. Just like Jules Verne’s classic 1864 novel Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, this is a work of fiction. But the concept wasn’t just dreamt up by some science fiction nut: the brain behind it is physicist David Stevenson from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Stevenson came up with the idea after producers of the science fiction movie The Core contacted him for feedback on whether the science in the script added up. It didn’t. But this nudged Stevenson to investigate whether we really could reach Earth’s core, publishing a letter in the journal Nature. “My letter was tongue-in-cheek,” says Stevenson. “The physics is sound, but the idea is unlikely to work in practice, as cracks aren’t controllable.Temperatures at Earth’s core are as hot as on the Sun’s surface. And pressure tends to close off any drill hole, unless it’s filled with material of the same density as the surrounding rock.You can’t have open spaces inside Earth, even at a mere 10km in depth. And the work you have to do just getting through the material is immense. A journey to the centre of the Earth would be more difficult than a mission to interstellar space, because space is empty.” But on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Verne’s novel, scientists are once more planning a subterranean mission – but with a closer target in mind.
R
Project Mohole Back in the ’50s, while the Space Race was in full swing, a motley crew of scientists came up with an equally ambitious project. Instead of going up to the Moon, they planned to go down – deep underground. In April 1957, over a boozy breakfast, the aptly named American Miscellaneous Society dreamt up Project Mohole.The aim: to go where no drill had ever gone before.The target: Earth’s mantle – or more specifically, the Mohorovicic discontinuity, nicknamed the Moho. In 1909, Croatian geologist Andrija Mohorovicic discovered the boundary 32
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Scientists and engineers hard at work onboard Cuss 1, the drilling ship that made the first attempt to drill into the Moho in 1961. Now a new generation of geologists is bringing the long-abandoned project back to life
between our planet’s crust and mantle – the Moho. He noticed that around 30km down, seismic waves caused by earthquakes sped up, suggesting that the rocks down there were completely different in composition from the ones higher up.We now know that the mantle lies 30-60km below continental crust, yet only around 5km below oceanic crust – within reach of drills. But before Project Mohole could start drilling, funding had to be found and the technology developed to keep a drill ship stable in swelling seas – no deep sea oil rigs existed at that time. Funding was secured in 1961, and the team developed a clever new system called ‘dynamic positioning’ to keep the
“A journey to the centre of the Earth is more difficult than a mission to interstellar space”
ship in place (see Know The Drill on p37). The first drilling mission was a success – boring to a depth of 183m. But then politics played a lethal hand: funding was cut and Project Mohole was canned.
Above: Caltech physicist David Stevenson, who sent a tongue-in-cheek proposal for core exploration to the journal Nature Below: Andrija Mohorovicic, who discovered the Moho in 1909, and (right) the sci-fi movie that prompted Stevenson’s letter
Mission Mohole Picking up where Project Mohole left off is a new project called Mission Mohole.The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), made up of scientists from the UK, US, Japan and Germany, plans to drill all the way to the Moho. But first the perfect site has to be found. As oceanic crust is much thinner than continental crust, the team has identified three potential sites at sea, all in the Pacific Ocean. But what’s the point of spending years and millions of pounds trying to drill to the mantle? Think of it like a moonshot – until we actually go there, we’ll never really have the answers to many geological conundrums. Just as we have meteorites, we have rock samples from the mantle, but Vol. 7 Issue 2
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PHOTO: GETTY, MISHA GRAVENOR, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, THE KOBAL COLLECTION
David Stevenson, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
GEOPHYSICS
PHOTO: ROB GILL/GEOSECSLIDES.CO.UK, WIKIPEDIA, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY ILLUSTRATOR: MAGIC TORCH
from the mantle, but they’re contaminated by the strata they passed through on their way up. “There are currently no pristine mantle samples, so we just have hints of what’s goingg on,” says Prof Damon Teagle from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.Teagle is part of the international team behind Mission Mohole. “A pristine mantle sample would be a geochemical treasure trove, like bringing back k the Apollo lunar rocks.” Meteorites give us some clues as to the composition of the mantle, as these extraterrestrial rocks were born from the samee
“It’s as demanding to explore the ‘innerspace’ of our planet as it is to explore other planets” Assistant Professor Matt Schrenk, Michigan State University
cosmic material as mantle rocks. Meanwhile, we see have a rough idea of the layers in our planet (see right) through tracking the speed of seismic waves, or by studying subatomic particles from m space called neutrinos that pass through Earth.. But it’s all still a bit of a guesstimate. tle The other big draw for drilling to the mantle is the possibility of subterranean life.While wee m won’t find the giant prehistoric monsters from ght Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, we might well find life on a much smaller scale.
Extreme extremophiles The deepest anyone has ever drilled is overr 12km. Life has been found 5.3km down in na borehole in Sweden. At that depth, pressuree is immense and temperatures are searingly hot. Forget superhumans, supermicrobes known as ‘extremophiles’ have impressive arsenals to survive in these unbelievably challenging conditions. Take Geogemma barossii. This single-celled microbe is found at hydrothermal vents on 34
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the sea floor, surviving and reproducing at a toasty 121°C. In the lab, Methanopyrus kandleri can withstand temperatures of 122°C. Then there’s Spinoloricus cinzia that doesn’t need oxygen to survive, while Picrophilus oshimae and Picrophilus torridus can grow at pH 0 – far more concentrated than battery acid.
PEELING BACK THE LAYERS Getting under Earth’s skin 5KM
670KM
2,900KM
5,150KM
MOHO 6,395KM CRUST
UPPER MANTLE
“My favourite subterranean organism is a bacterium that feeds off sulphate and hydrogen,” says astrobiologist Dr Lewis Dartnell. “The hydrogen is produced by the splitting of water from radiaoactivity in the rocks, and so it feeds indirectly on radiation. But one of the most impressive of all is a polyextremophile called Deinococcus radiodurans. This superhero organism can survive several different extreme conditions – being dried out, high doses of UV, and doses of ionising
LOWER MANTLE
OUTER CORE
INNER CORE
radiation thousands of times higher than what would kill one of us.” For life to exist in the Moho, microbes would need to be able to multi-task in a similar fashion to this polyextremophile. They would have to withstand extreme pressure and heat, while being on a
Metres below sea level 0
HOW DEEP IS THE MOHO?
JOIDES RESOLUTION
CHIKYU
DRILLING SHIPS CUSS 1 1957
70m x5,588
x2,169
x550
Crust rust The outer layer of our o planet is relatively vely thin, between 0-60km 0-60k thick. Sediments ts at the surface lie on top of lavas, which sit above gabbros – igneous rocks. Continental crust is much thicker than oc oceanic crust, whichh can be ar only around 5km deep inn places.
x29
The first deep-sea drilling ship, built by oil companies and used in the first attempt to drill into the Moho in 1961
Rocks
M vicic Mohorovicic Discontinuity D uity (MOHO) HO) T boundary between This ween the crust and the mantle lies es about 55km below the seaa bed. At th ht rocks the Moho, it’s thought position change in composition from crustal rocks to mantle tle ones.
GLOMAR CHALLENGER 1968
Some of the rocks that are likely to be encountered during the Moho attempt
120m
3,635
Glomar Challenger provided the first definitive proof of plate tectonics, as well as some key insights into the nature of Earth’s crust
3,910
Basaltic lava JOIDES RESOLUTION 1985
4,765 5,535
Mantle ntle The mantle makes es up 68 per cent of Earth’s ’s mass, making it thee largest component of ourr planet. The upper mantle is composed of hard rd rocks, while the lowerr mantle rocks are softer ofter and beginning to melt.
Dykes
143m Since launching in 1985, JOIDES Resolution has sailed on 132 scientific expeditions and recovered over 251kg of core samples
Outer core Made of iron andd nickel, we know the outerr core is liqui liquid, as seismic waves es travel th wly than through it more slowly throug through solid parts of ourr planet. The dyn dynamo theory suggests ests that heat rad ner core, radiating from the inner combined wi with Earth’s rotation,, causes the liquid iro ng weak iron to rotate, creating magneticc forces.
CHIKYU 2005
Gabbro
210m
Inner core Also made of iron and nickel, the inner ner core is solid. With tem temperatures reaching ng up to 5,500°C, it’s the engine room of Earth.
9,500
Peridotite
Currently the world’s most advanced drilling vessel, Chikyu displaces 56,752 tonnes and can drill at depths of up to 10km
10,000+
permanent diet, surviving on virtually no nutrients. With 6km of rock pressing down, you’d think that pressure would be the biggest problem for life at this depth. But in fact, lots of microbes can survive at high pressures. Lab microbes have been found to endure a whopping 1,000 atmospheres,
while microbes live perfectly happily under 11km of water at the bottom of the Mariana Trench – and can only grow at very high pressures. A bigger problem is heat. But pressure actually comes in useful
when dealing with extreme temperature, as it prevents water from boiling and producing lethal steam. With the hottest temperature any currently known lifeform can survive being 122°C, there’s hope extremophiles could survive in the Moho, where temperatures could be as low as 120°C. Vol. 7 Issue 2
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GEOPHYSICS
The biotic fringe Assistant professor Matt Schrenk, from Michigan State University, studies the microbiology of serpentinite rocks found on the seabed, similar to those that may be found at the Moho. “The attraction of this project is not the prospect of finding life in the mantle, but rather observing the transition between biotic and abiotic – habitable and uninhabitable. Mission Mohole may allow us to observe the ‘biotic fringe’ and understand the physiological limits to life.”
“It’ll be like lowering a hair into a two-metre deep swimming pool, and then drilling three metres into the foundations”
Rock samples collected by the drilling ship JOIDES Resolution await further examination and classification
Core conundrum
PHOTO: AMY WEST/IODP, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, ALAMY
Prof Damon Teagle, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton
Despite high costs, Schrenk believes that exploring the region could bring benefits to our understanding. He thinks the biggest Moho challenge to extremophiles would be a lack of nutrients, as fluid circulation at that depth is minimal. “There are so many basic science questions that need answering,” says Schrenk. “How deep is the biosphere? What is there? How related are these deep biosphere organisms to everything else on Earth? It’s as demanding to explore the ‘innerspace’ of our planet as it is to explore other planets.” “The organisms found may be evolutionarily distinct and retain clues to the ancient Earth, or conduct unique activities and possess unique enzymes that may be of use in biomedicine. And quantifying the extent and activities of the deep biosphere, and its interactions with deep carbon, may be important to finding alternative energy technologies, as well as strategies to combat global warming.” 36
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Deinococcus radiodurans is one of the most resilient extremophile life forms known to us today
Geomicrobiologist Matt Schrenk is keen to search for microbial life around the Moho boundary
Mission Mohole hopes to strike mantle gold sometime in the next decade.The IODP team is currently trying to get the cash together to carry out site surveys, so that there are no big surprises in store, such as large faults running through the rock at depth. Since the recession, getting funding for ambitious science projects has become even harder.The biggest expense will be the cost of running a drill ship – the research vessel Chikyu, which is lined up to carry out the drilling, costs around US$500,000 a day to run (see opposite). While the project waits for funding, there’s time to fine-tune the technology needed to drill 5km below the seabed while hovering over one spot as the sea swells and ebbs. “It’ll be like lowering a thin hair into a two-metre deep swimming pool, and then drilling three metres into the foundations,” says Teagle. Prof Julian Pearce from Cardiff University knows a thing or two about how tough it is to drill at sea. He’s currently onboard another research ship, JOIDES Resolution, which has drilled to a depth of just over 2km. “It’s more difficult than drilling on land because the drilling platform can move up and down. So it’s not possible to drill ‘hard rocks’ by diamond coring – the method used to drill deep boreholes on the land.This results in less material being removed and shallower, less stable holes. If you were to drill to the Moho, the deeper you go, the more difficult it is because of increased temperature and reduced hole stability.” So the big question is – if Stevenson’s idea of sending an unmanned probe to the core
KNOW THE DRILL Oceanic crust may be a lot thinner than continental crust, but drilling into it presents a whole list of problems… Drilling on the sea bed is no easy feat. To counteract the rise and fall of the swelling ocean, a system called ‘dynamic positioning’ is used. Sonar is bounced off six submerged buoys, and the data is fed back to the operations room, which controls the propellers that serve to keep the ship in position. At the drill site on the sea floor is a cone, with sediment packed around to hold it in place. A large steel tube called ‘surface casing’ is fitted inside, from which a second layer of casing can be hung. The casing prevents the hole from collapsing inwards. Inside the casing is a drill pipe with an uber-hard drill bit at the end. In such challenging conditions, all sorts of things can go wrong, from the hole collapsing in on itself to the drill pipe
The Chikyu deep-sea research vessel
getting stuck in the hole. And even if nothing goes wrong, the drill bit will simply grind itself down over prolonged use, so it needs replacing regularly. JOIDES Resolution is the world’s most successful research ship to date. As part of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) it’s drilled down to the gabbros layer at one of the potential drill sites for Mission Mohole. New ship on the block, Chikyu, is a step up in terms of technology – it has what’s known as a riser system. This works by lubricating mud being pumped down into the borehole, and flushing out chips of rock and other debris from inside. What’s needed now is for a 4,000m riser to be developed that could bore even deeper into our planet.
isn’t viable, could we ever drill to the centre of the Earth? “Getting more than 2,000m into the ocean crust has proved hard enough!” says Teagle. “So 3,000km into the Earth is beyond reality.” Pearce agrees: “Not a hope, I’m afraid! The drill bit and pipe would melt, and it wouldn’t be possible to keep a hole that deep stable and vertical.” Sadly, we’ll have to leave that mission to the centre of the Earth to Jules Verne’s Professor Von Hardwigg. JHENI OSMAN is a science writer whose books include 100 Ideas That Changed The World
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BUSHFIRES
WITH FIRE Bushfires in Australia are a major threat to life, the environment and the economy. Mun Keat Looi meets the scientists who are working hard to learn more about how bushfires start – and how they spread
PHOTO: ROHAN THOMSON/THE CANBERRA TIMES/FAIRFAX SYNDICATION
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Feeling the burn Australia became a furnace in late 2013 and early 2014. Parts of the country saw temperatures climbing above the 40°C mark. Adelaide reached an all-time high of 44.7°C in February, while hundreds of regions endured their driest periods since records began. This one-two combo of heat and drought turned Australia’s vegetation, which covers 91 per cent of the country, into kindling, fuelling what officials described as the worst wildfires in 40 years. The most recent Australian forecasts are predicting scorching summer weather once again, and researchers are racing to discover new ways to battle the wildfires. To gain the upper hand, scientists at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Canberra have created the machine pictured here, the Pyrotron. This indoor furnace simulates the infernos that tore through much of southern Australia last year.
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Inside the pyrotron The Pyrotron is a 25m-long combustion wind tunnel made of steel, aluminium and toughened glass. Costing A$190,000 (approx US$ 153,110), it is designed to simulate extreme weather conditions and the burning of bushfire fuels (vegetation) under safe and repeatable conditions. The tunnel boasts a 2-tonne fan able to shift 22m3 of air a second, and a variable wind speed of up to 5.5m/s – equivalent to roughly 60km/h in the open. But its real power lies in specialist instruments that measure the radiant heat of flames, their structure and their temperature profiles. It has high-speed and infrared cameras, as well as a GoPro camera whose footage can provide measurements of things such as flame position and depth. “We can do things in the lab that we can’t do in the field,” says CSIRO’s Dr Andrew Sullivan.
Recreating the forest floor
PHOTO: CARL DAVIES/CSIRO, ROHAN THOMSON /THE CANBERRA TIMES/FAIRFAX SYNDICATION X2
“We find it very difficult to get any decent information about what is happening in front of a major fire in the field,” says Sullivan. “There are just so many vagaries around the weather and the topography. And that’s where the Pyrotron comes in.” They fill the base with material you would find on the forest floor, such as leaf, bark, twigs – up to 15kg of the stuff, spread to around 2cm deep. “We can control the moisture content of the fuel, the structure and the amount,” says Sullivan. Pyrotron experiments last 15-20 minutes and can be repeated over and over. They yield about as much smoke as a wood-fired backyard barbecue. 42
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Physics, biology and chemistry collide Lead scientist Jim Gould demonstrates the Pyrotron to CSIRO visitors. “There is no one discipline that you can have studied in order to research bushfires,” says Sullivan. “The complexity of trying to predict the weather is compounded by the biological complexity of the vegetation it has to burn through, the physics of heat transfer from
flames to unburnt fuel, the chemistry of the combustion of that fuel, and the changes in the amount of energy that gets released by fire when it is burning. “We use a broad range of approaches in our work,” he continues, “one of which is conducting experimental fires in the field – lighting real bushfires under controlled conditions. One thing we’ve learned from our field work is that size matters – larger fires burn faster. A wind tunnel reduces the scale of things you can study, but also opens up new ways to study them.” Vol. 7 Issue 2
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Warning: high risk of sudden death October 2013. Firefighters battle flames in Bilpin, 75km from Sydney. Most firefighting deaths occur following a sudden change of wind direction, with radiant heat from flames, dehydration and asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation the major killers. “It’s important for firefighters to know how long they’ve got before a fire is too large to attack directly,” says Sullivan. “You might have as little as 20 minutes before that fire is too big to attack directly with water. What we did in the Pyrotron was investigate the rate of growth of point ignitions. Imagine you’d dropped a match: how quickly would that fire grow and reach what we call a ‘steady state rate of spread’? By varying conditions in the Pyrotron, we could actually build a relationship between the time a fire grows for, and how fast it spreads.”
Information gathering
PHOTO: GETTY X2, PRESS ASSOCIATION
A bushfire in Perth’s hills in January 2014. Sullivan says collecting data from actual fires is difficult, “because everybody concerned is trying to put the fire out rather than trying to take observations of what’s going on. We talk to as many people as we can, collect as many photos
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and videos as people have. These days, it’s phenomenal: there’s terabytes of data just sitting around on people’s phones.” But even a video is just one instance of fire behaviour in a particular location at a particular time. “It’s difficult to look at that and draw conclusions, because it’s a one-dimensional glimpse,” says Sullivan. “You have to stitch it all together and synthesise all that information to come up with an idea of how that fire progressed.”
Counting the cost of bushfires In October 2013, these wildfires in New South Wales were captured by a satellite tuned to the red band of the colour spectrum, which makes it easier to pick out smoke plumes. In terms of total area burnt, the largest fires Australia has experienced are in the Northern Territory and northern areas of Western Australia and Queensland. Most loss of life and economic damage occurs on the fringes of the country’s cities, where homes are close to flammable vegetation. ‘Black Saturday’ was the worst ever bushfire in Australian history. Brought on by the 2009 drought, it claimed 173 lives and over 2,000 homes.
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Fighting fire from above
with the flames, it’s essentially wasted,” says Sullivan. “By the time the fire gets to the water, it will have evaporated away. So what they’ve been doing in the last five or so There are two ways of fighting fires from years is adding things to the water… actually the air. One (pictured) is to drop retardant the same sort of substance that you find in – a material that inhibits flame. This doesn’t disposable nappies.” actually get applied to the fire itself, but This added material turns the water into a downwind of it – the fire is meant to run gel that can stick to things, and that retains into the retardant. its moisture a lot longer than normal water. A more direct approach is to drop water Sullivan’s team has been testing various gel on the flames. “But what they find is if the additives to see how they could be applied water drifts or doesn’t actually make contactto fires.
PHOTO: GETTY X2, ANDREW HALSALL
Fire-resistant homes This “smart house’ in Western Australia is built on steel stumps, and the floor is suspended and protected from flames by fire-resistant cement sheets. It has doubleglazed, fire-resistant glass, and roller shutters to shield fromembers and radiant heat. Sprinklers protect the decks, and the roof is fire-resistant with no eaves, to prevent embers from settling. “This is a very windy, coastal place, so keeping the geometry simple makes sense from a maintenance point of view,” says Dr Ian Weir of the Queensland University of Technology. This approach means that the house has no nooks and crannies in which flammable material can build up. 46
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Like a phoenix from the ashes... As devastating as bushfires are, forests can recover from them, though it depends on the type of vegetation and what stage it is at when the fire occurs. If a bushfire occurs in ash forests when seed is not present or mature, it will not regenerate, as was the case in many Alpine ash areas in the
Victorian Alps after the 2006 Great Alpine Fire. Eucalyptus trees, however, thrive in fire. Their bark acts as a natural insulating agent, protecting the tree, which can then regenerate once the fire has passed using its ‘lignotubers’ – woody swellings on the roots or stems containing bud and food reserves. In fact, eucalypt leaves contain highly flammable oils, which may be an evolutionary way of encouraging fire, and so eliminating competing plants.
MUN KEAT LOOI is a science journalist, senior editor at The Wellcome Trust and co-author of the book Big Questions In Science
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HISTORY
LANGUAGE EVOLUTION We chat to each other every single day, but how did we learn to communicate so effortlessly? Mark Pagel explains the intriguing origins of the spoken word When did human language evolve?
PHOTO: ALAMY
Human language is distinguished by having what linguists call compositionality and recursion. Compositionality refers to the fact that we tend to speak in sentences that have subjects, objects and verbs – for example, “I kicked the ball”. Recursion means that one part of the sentence can refer to earlier parts of the same communication – “I kicked the ball over the fence”. Compositionality and recursion allow humans to effortlessly generate an infinite variety of sentences. So far, no one has observed compositionality or recursion in animal communication outside of humans. But many primates communicate with gestures and sounds, and in some cases these sounds can take on language-like properties. Vervet monkeys in Africa give different alarm calls for snakes than for aerial predators such as eagles, giving these sounds a noun-like quality – they identify an object or thing. There is even a suggestion that some parrot species learn and use each other’s names! Our closest living genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, can be taught some sign language, but their use of it is almost exclusively to acquire food or toys. Chimps do not show the almost effortless facility with language that a normal human three-year-old has. The absence of language, even in the chimpanzees, tells us that language evolved at some point between the time of our last common
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ancestor, about six million years ago, and the appearance of modern humans, or Homo sapiens, around 200,000 years ago. Language does not leave traces in the fossil record, but the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of the brain seem to be involved in speech, and in humans these regions are enlarged, leaving a noticeable indentation in skulls. Fossilised skulls of our Homo erectus ancestors also have these indentations, leading some to speculate that language evolved up to two million years ago in these upright hominids. But these two brain areas are also enlarged in living apes – which do not have language.
Were the Neanderthals able to speak? Neanderthals are our closest evolutionary relatives. This enigmatic species (Homo neanderthalensis) lived in Europe from around 350,000 years ago, going extinct around 25,000 years ago. DNA from Neanderthal bones shows them to be around 99.7 per cent identical to us in the sequences of their genes, and we now know that we shared a common ancestor with them as recently as 500,000 years ago. Neanderthals had large brains and heavy, muscular physiques. What do genes tell us? A gene known as FOXP2 is sometimes called the ‘language gene’. Actively expressed in the brain, it is found in all mammals, but the particular variant of it found in humans has been implicated in the fine control of facial
Although closely related to modern humans, Neanderthals are not believed to have had the ability to use language
muscles used for speech. People who carry a rare mutated version of the human FOXP2 gene have problems speaking and understanding language. When the normal human FOXP2 is inserted into a mouse, it changes the way they squeak! Humans differ from chimpanzees at two key markers in this gene. The discovery in 2007 that Neanderthal FOXP2 also had these same two changes led many people to conclude that the Neanderthals must have had language. But having the same genetic variant doesn’t prove that they had language, and the Neanderthals’ relative lack of cultural
sophistication compared to humans living at the same time isn’t consistent with having language. Archaeological studies show little evidence that Neanderthals had art or musical instruments like ancient humans. This conclusion is supported by new evidence that the human FOXP2 is expressed in our brains differently from the Neanderthal version, despite sharing those two key changes. On current evidence, Neanderthals did not have language, and our language capacity probably evolved around 200,000 years ago with the rise of modern humans.
Does human language imply the existence of an innate or universal grammar? Unlike chimpanzees, whose limited capacity with sign language requires years of training, human infants can learn language just by being surrounded by other speakers, even without any specific teaching. This has led some linguists, most notably Noam Chomsky, to propose that our human brains are endowed with an innate linguistic ability known as the ‘universal grammar’.
Supporters of this idea propose that such a hard-wired capacity is needed because languages themselves do not contain enough information to allow infants to discriminate among all the possible languages they could be confronted with – in theory, an infinite number of possible languages. This is sometimes known as the ‘poverty of the stimulus’ argument. According to adherents, the universal grammar works by putting a limit on the number and kinds of languages. It is like having a series of switches in our minds whose various combinations of ‘off’ or ‘on’ define the set of possible grammars our minds can learn. None of the switches are set at birth, but because people share the universal grammar, all human languages with which an infant will be confronted conform to one of the universal grammar’s possible types (the settings of the switches). Language learning in infants is therefore just a problem of using the patterns in the data (the language a child hears) to set the switches in their minds. As these switches have a finite number of possible settings, the poverty of the stimulus problem is solved. The universal grammar theory has been influential since the 1960s, but it has recently begun to lose favour. It is criticised for making no testable predictions because all of the features that it postulates are derived from observations of actual languages rather than from a priori predictions from the theory. The universal grammar idea is now being replaced by the view that humans have a unique set of general cognitive and perceptual abilities that allow them to learn language. Therefore, human languages have become adapted to our minds, rather than the other way around. This is an exciting new idea, suggesting that the reason we learn language so readily is that the languages we have retained over the millennia of our existence were the ones that were easiest to learn and use.
Mark Pagel is a fellow of the Royal Society, professor of evolutionary biology at Reading University and the author of Wired For Culture, published in 2012.
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URBAN LEOPARDS
Unnecessary conflict: in March 2009 a leopard mauled three people in Guwahati, Assam, before it was tranquillised
Barely a month goes by without reports of leopard attacks on people in India. But, says Janaki Lenin, it’s perfectly possible for us to live alongside these big cats – even in such a densely populated country
LEOPARDS
IN THE
NEIGHBOURHOOD 50
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This leopard was photographed in Ranthambore National Park, Rajasthan. But big cats don’t have to be confined to parks – with a few precautions, people can live safely alongside them
Main: Aditya Singh/Alamy; inset: AFP/Getty
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URBAN LEOPARDS
Clockwise from top: Hindustan Times/Getty; Praveen Siddannavar; Caisii Mao/Corbis; Biju Boro/AFP/Getty; Dhritiman Mukherjee
In February 2014 this male leopard caused chaos in Meerut, northern India, injuring several people. Locals were told to stay indoors, while schools and shops were shut
eopards seem to be popping up everywhere in India, and if the media are to be believed they are up to no good. In February this year one created panic in the city of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, and in August a middle-aged woman made headlines around the world when she single-handedly killed a leopard that had attacked her.The incident took place in Uttarakhand,not far from the setting of Jim Corbett’s 67-year-old tale The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. India hasn’t conducted a leopard census, but one estimate puts its population of these big cats at 10,000–20,000. With numbers of tigers, their mortal enemies, shrinking drastically in the country to 1,520–1,909 (2010 figures) over the past century, leopards may have gained ground. Not only do they prowl through forests – they also sneak stealthily through agricultural land, villages, towns and even major metropolises.
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Out-of-date thinking Those who believe wild animals ought only to live in wilderness areas doubt that leopards and humans can co-exist peacefully. Surely these predators do not belong in farmland and urban parks where they are likely to cross paths with hapless humans? India’s Forest Service, conservationists and public certainly thought so in the past, and many still do today. Wildlife managers feared that leopards roaming fields meant nothing but trouble, so caught them for release in reserves. Sometimes, to prevent a feline exodus, they also introduced captive-bred deer as prey and dug water holes in the forests. 52
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For years, few considered what became of these relocated animals. Most assumed that they were relieved to get a lift to their old homes and settled down happily ever after. If any leopards attacked people, disturbance in forests and lack of prey or water were reckoned to be the causes. But in the early 2000s, for no apparent reason, leopards suddenly turned on humans in rural Junnar, in the Pune district of Maharashtra state.They killed 18 people and injured 33 more between 2001 and 2003. Junnar valley was no wildlife tourism destination d – it was a fertile valley of sugar cane, bananas, n corn, onions nas, and cauliflowers. There were no forests ass far as the eye could see, not even on the low hillocks on o the horizon, and the only large animals here were cows, sheep, goats, pigs and dogs. Satellite maps of preceding decadess showed the landscape had not altered for 20 years, so it was not clear why the leopards’ behaviour had changed. Then wildlife ecologist Vidya Athreya, who lived near Junnar at the time and now works for Wildlife Conservation Society India, discovered that the state’s Forest Department had trapped leopards from farmland and released them in forest areas. The numbers were staggering: between 2001 and 2003 it trapped leopards on 103 occasions within 4,300km2.
Leopards often visit villages in Assam, north-east India, but this one was sadly killed by local people
Leopards may be active by day or night, modifying their behaviour to fit around human activity. This one is pictured with a female jackal
C A S E S T U DY
Mumbai’s city forest
A te a c Th 6 o c s c lo
An innovative scheme called ‘Mumbaikars for Sanjay Gandhi National Park’ helps residents on the outskirts of this city forest in Mumbai to live with leopards, by addressing their legitimate concerns about large predators prowling their apartment complexes. The project has organised better rubbish collections, provided a bus service for children who would otherwise have to walk to school through tall grass, and installed streetlights at strategic locations. The result is that the big cats and people are less likely to encounter each other. O Visit www.mumbaikarsforsgnp.com
The cats were set free in two wooded areas 40–65km away – a small forest in Malshej Ghats, and the larger Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary. Leopards trapped in neighbouring districts were also released in the same locations. Overzealous forest officials were taking the strategy of dealing with leopards living among humans to a whole new level.
Deadly mistakes D Ab Above: b officials transfer tra a an adult male to Nagaland ma m Zoological Zo o Park, Rangapahar. Ra a Right: Ri ig another photograph ph ho of the th he leopard in the th he inset picture on n p50, before was caught it w by y the Forestry De e Department
T project had tragic and unforeseen This consequences, unleashing a bunch of cats.They co at attacked humans within a region the size of G Greater London, close to the forests where they had been dropped off.“It’s puzzling why th leopards started attacking people in a region that le had seen few incidents prior to the large-scale h ttranslocation exercise,” says Athreya.“Perhaps it w was down to the stress of being displaced.This is a highly territorial species with a social system.” Territory is key to a leopard’s survival: it pprovides security, food and mates. Outside it, leopards are all too vulnerable. Malshej Ghats and Bhimashankar had their own Vol. 7 Issue 2
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A leopard rubs his cheek against a tree in Nagarhole National Park, Karnataka, to scent-mark his territory
leopards that would have been possessive of their turf. Rather than risk battling residents, the displaced animals tried to walk back home, often travelling hundreds of kilometres past unfamiliar villages, noisy highways and busy railway lines. The Junnar leopards were not refugees from a forest; they belonged there, according to Forest Department records. Until the relocation project the animals were only a minor nuisance, taking occasional livestock. Finally the department re-caught about 60 leopards and sent them to a lifetime-care rescue centre for wild animals not open to the public, and the spate of attacks on humans at last abated. Camera-t
Mayhem in Mumbai The management of nearby Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai followed a similar trend. Leopards found outside the park were caught and dumped inside the forest. In June 2004 alone leopards killed 10 people, and as a result more than 30 leopards were then removed to a rescue centre. The leopard density here, about one per 2.5km2, is the highest in the world. Athreya believes that the wildlife managers need to remember their history. “India has to look to its past 54
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when people managed to live alongside large carnivores,” she muses. “We just need to accept these animals as part of the landscape. There is hope: even today a country with a billion-plus people and the world’s highest numbers of livestock still retains the largest population of wild tigers and the sole surviving – and growing –population of Asiatic lions. In countries with far fewer humans, lions and tigers are fast disappearing.” While working in Junnar, Athreya heard of the neighbouring valley of Akole in Ahmednagar district, where
raps are now recording leopards in built-up parts of Mumbai
5 reasons why leopards flourish close to people
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Diet - Leopards will eat almost anything, from insects to frogs, calves and deer, and they are also scavengers. Though Indian cities seldom support many deer, they do have booming populations of stray dogs and feral pigs because of inefficient waste removal. These are a ready source of prey.
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Habitat - Provided there is shelter, leopards can use a wide range of landscapes – forested as well as open, and wet as well as arid. India’s farmland offers plentiful cover in the form of dense stands of tall crops such as banana trees, sugar cane and corn. In urban areas, parks and rocky hillocks with caves provide safe hideaways.
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Protection - Since the 1970s, India’s wildlife legislation has outlawed the killing of leopards. This represents a reprieve from campaigns in the 19th century, when the cats (along with tigers, wolves and other predators) were declared vermin and poisoned, trapped or shot. In some parts of India, leopards and tigers are venerated.
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leopards lived in farmland without coming into conflict with humans.This area looked no different from Junnar. In the early morning men drove motorbikes laden with milk canisters down dirt paths, children walked to school past marigold fields and groups of women in bright saris crouched on the ground laughing and chatting as they weeded vegetable plots. And a short distance away, hidden by a thick curtain of sugar cane stalks, leopards slept, often on their backs with their legs in the air. By fixing GPS collars on two leopards, a male and a female, Athreya studied their movements.While hunting among people, not once did these cats mistake an adult or child for prey.The leopardess gave birth to cubs in a sugar cane field within 100m of a school’s entrance, where hundreds of children ran back and forth on weekdays. The leopard wandered through the school’s courtyard at night when silence ruled. But these were not quiet-seeking country leopards.They were at home in the bustle of Akole. While humans slumbered indoors, these leopards lounged on rooftops, watching the streets and bylanes below for stray dogs and feral pigs.They often made their way to the market in the town centre, where fishmongers and chicken vendors threw fish heads
Above: a varied diet enables leopards to live close to human settlements in farmland or on the fringes of cities. This individual has killed a large spotted deer stag
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Tolerance - This is arguably the most important factor. Even where there is a happy combination of abundant prey, shelter and protective wildlife laws, these adaptable cats still cannot thrive if their human neighbours feel that the danger they pose is too high.
Imagine seeing a leopard on your roof! The cats regularly stray into Mumbai parks and gardens from the adjacent Sanjay Gandhi National Park
“The leopardess gave birth in a sugar cane field within 100m of the entrance to a school” Vol. 7 Issue 2
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Clockwise from left: Praveen Siddannavar; Dhritiman Mukherjee; Zeeshan Mirza; Krishna Tiwari
Adaptability - Leopards are remarkably adaptable animals. Often diurnal in forests, they will switch to a completely nocturnal lifestyle in villages and towns. Being solitary hunters that prey on a variety of small and medium-sized animals, they’re able to maintain a lower profile than tigers or lions despite living among humans.
URBAN LEOPARDS
Coyote: T Kitchin & V Hurst/Photoshot; bear: D M Jones/Minden/FLPA; cougar: Steve Winter/Getty; hyena: Daryl Balfour/photoshot
BIG URBAN PREDATORS WORLDWIDE
Coyote
Black bear
Coyotes have never been more widespread in North America. Their expansion was helped by the 19th-century extermination of cougars (below) and wolves, their main competitors and predators, and coyotes are today thriving in many metropolitan areas. Up to 2,000 are said to live in the greater Chicago area alone, living on rodents, fruit, white-tailed deer, cottontail rabbits and birds.
Black bears raid rubbish tips and fruit trees in the urbanised northeastern USA and the western states of Montana and Colorado. Meanwhile Anchorage in Alaska is known for both its black and grizzly bears, which may be seen rummaging through dustbins on the outskirts of town, while the remote Canadian town of Churchillis popularly called the polar bear capital of the world.
Cougar
Hyena
Mountain lions, often known as cougars in North America, are the same size as leopards with a similarly catholic diet. Wiped out across the continent over preceding centuries, they are now steadily gaining ground and are increasingly seen crossing suburban roads. One even frequented Griffith Park in Los Angeles; others have been spotted outside Baltimore and Washington DC.
Spotted hyenas range across much of sub-Saharan Africa and about 1,000 are reported to live in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Since they scavenge anything even vaguely edible, people tolerate them as walking waste disposal units; they also prey on stray dogs and cats. Another species, the brown hyena, lives near urban centres in southern Africa, such as Johannesburg.
and offal at the far corner of a patch of open ground the size of a football pitch. Clouds of dust rose as pigs and dogs fought over the stinky mess, unaware of leopards watching the melee. But few townspeople saw these large predators. Much to Athreya’s amusement, camera-traps snatched images of the secretive animals in places where people insisted no leopards lived. But livestock owners in the outskirts knew of the predators. They herded their stock through the day and secured them in sturdy barns for the night, not giving leopards a chance at a free meal. Indeed, by studying the cats’ scats, Athreya found that more than half of their diet consisted of domestic dogs and cats, even though
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goats were seven times more numerous. In cases when farm animals do get taken, most Indian states recompense the owners. To put this unique situation in perspective, a high density of people (266 per square kilometre, according to the 2011 census) live in the same area as a large number of leopards (five per 100km2). By comparison, the Chilla mountain range of Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand state, where there were no people, no farmland and few tigers, had a density of nine leopards per 100km2.
Plan for peace Leopards are the most adaptable of cats. As long as their human neighbours do not raise a big fuss, they can thrive across diverse Indian landscapes while people go about their daily lives.We just have to remember that.
A leopard passes Mumbai apartment blocks after dark
Karnataka Two researchers at India’s Nature Conservation Foundation, MD Madhusudan (‘Madhu’) and Sanjay Gubbi, won a prestigious award from the Whitley Fund for Nature in 2011 to study the factors influencing human–leopard conflict in the south-west state of Karnataka. The researchers are using GPS collars to understand how leopards captured in well-populated areas and released into more natural habitats respond to such translocation, which is widely used as a conflict-management tool in Karnataka. The project also encourages the media to provide less sensational accounts of encounters with leopards, and runs a public-awareness campaign, distributing pamphlets and posters to over 200 villages. “We should never forget the devastating cost that some of our poorest people pay for wildlife conservation,” says Madhu. “So it’s crucial to get local people on board.” O Visit www.ncf-india.org and www.whitleyaward.org
Above: provided there’s shelter, leopards can raise young in a wide variety of landscapes. Left: Sanjay Gubbi examines a male leopard wearing a radio-collar.
Easy living The question is whether people in other parts of India with different cultural backgrounds, such as Assam,Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, can be convinced to live with leopards. “Humans and leopards are probably managing this more peacefully than we give them credit for,” smiles Athreya. “Sadly conflict is the dominant discourse in the media today, so as readers we focus on the most negative form of interaction between the two.” Researchers can help by focusing less on conflict and more on neutral interaction. Athreya adds, “The media need to help people live with these animals, and forest departments need to change their management from reactive to proactive measures, where sympathetic dialogue with locals is crucial.” Authorities have now stopped moving leopards around at Junnar and Sanjay Gandhi National Park. A decade after the deadly attacks of the early 2000s, the predators have returned to both places, and the big cats and humans manage to share the neighbourhood once again.
“People have to live with leopards. The good news is that it’s possible to do so with little conflict”
JANAKI LENIN is a journalist wholives south of Chennai, India. Her book My Husbad and other Animals relates her life with herpetolosgist Romulus Whitaker (Westland, Rs250).
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From top: Praveen Siddannavar; Krishna Tiwari; Arun Kumar
C A S E S T U DY
During the 19th century, the British colonial government declared tigers and leopards to be vermin, offered bounties and employed people to wipe them out.Today extermination is out of the question, for leopards enjoy the highest level of protection under Indian wildlife laws. Meanwhile keeping farmland leopards in captivity and giving them a decent quality of life there is prohibitively expensive, and as we have seen moving the big cats can cause deadly problems. So the inevitable conclusion is that people, both in the countryside and the suburbs, have to live with leopards. There is no other option.The good news is that it’s possible to do so with little conflict.While the risk of a run-in with a wild leopard is never zero, if people are careful the chances can be kept low. As Athreya says, “The Akole area is not always peaceful, but the local residents – like people in most parts of India – are rarely antagonistic.”
HOW DO WE KNOW?
THE NATURE OF
LIGHT BY ANDREW ROBINSON What is light? It’s puzzled some of humanity’s greatest thinkers for 2,000 years, especially since it appears to behave like waves as well as particles
hat is light? The question has fascinated scientists – and painters, poets, writers and anyone who’s ever played with a prism – since classical antiquity. Pythagoras, Euclid and Ptolemy, for example, accepted that light moved in straight lines. But rather than assuming that light rays travelled from an object to the eye, they believed the eye emitted visual rays, like feelers, which touched the object and thereby created the sensation of sight in the mind. Drop a needle on the ground, Euclid noted in the 3rd Century BC, search for it, and wonder why the needle is not immediately visible. If light rays are emanating instantaneously from an object to the eye, he hypothesized that you should see it immediately. He decided the reason for the delay must be that the visual ray, searching the ground, is yet to touch the needle. Then, in a flash, you spot it. This ancient idea of light and sight was taught in the West in various forms until the 12th Century AD. It was rejected by Ibn al-Haytham, a 10th Century scientist from what is now Iraq. Al-Haytham was known in the West as Alhazen, with the nicknames ‘Ptolemy the Second’ and ‘The Physicist’.
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He noted that you cannot look at the Sun for long without great pain; and if you stare at a bright object for half a minute and then close your eyes, a coloured image of the object floats into view. In each case, something emitted by the object must have entered the eye. The later translation of Alhazen’s Book Of Optics into Latin led to its being read by, among others, artist Leonardo da Vinci, physicist Galileo Galilei, astronomer Johannes Kepler, philosopher René Descartes and mathematician Christiaan Huygens, all of whom contributed to our understanding of light and vision. Da Vinci suggested that the eye is a camera obscura – literally, ‘a darkened chamber’ – into which light rays
A page from one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s late 15th Century notebooks, showing his musings on the nature of light
penetrate via a small aperture (the pupil) and create an inverted image of an exterior scene on the back of the eye (the retina). First adopted as a term by Kepler in 1604, the camera obscura became the dominant model of human vision in the 17th Century.
Competing ideas Two theories of light, apparently incompatible, were in competition by 1700. The first, proposed by Huygens in 1678 and published in 1690, was an undulatory theory: light transmitted as waves. Light waves spread in all directions from a light source, and were detected by their creation of vibrations in the retina. They were regarded as analogous to sound waves spreading from a tuning fork, with the retina rather than the tympanum as detector. With sound, the undulating medium was the air; with light it was supposed to be an invisible, mysterious medium known as ‘the ether’. In contrast, Isaac Newton, who began his optical experiments in 1666, favoured a corpuscular theory: light as particles. Light rays spread from a light source in a stream of minute particles or ‘corpuscles’, shooting
> IN A NUTSHELL
This prism is both refracting light that passes through it (causing the spectrum) and reflecting it internally
Light is a somewhat confusing phenomenon, in that it can behave both as a wave and as a particle. This counterintuitive property of light kept some of our brightest minds (pun intended!) guessing for 2,000 years…
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through empty space (rather than the ether) like bullets, and were detected by their impact on the retina. That said, Newton was far from certain. He waited until 1704 before publishing his Opticks, and presented his ideas as a series of ‘Queries’ with answers that, far from being definitive, occasionally favoured the undulatory theory. Of course, the real test of the two theories was experiment. How effective was each theory in explaining reflection, refraction and diffraction? The simplest phenomenon was the transmission of light in straight lines, as in shafts of sunlight through a cloud or solar eclipses. Such behaviour was
THE KEY DISCOVERY
expected for a stream of corpuscles, but not for a wave. Water waves rippling from a stone dropped into a pond could be seen to spread in all directions and bend around obstacles to some extent. Sound waves could be heard to bend. Light, however, did not appear to bend. In Newton’s emphatic words: “Sounds are propagated as readily through crooked pipes as through straight ones. But light is never known to follow crooked passages nor to bend into the shadow.” What about reflection? When light strikes a mirror, the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. In the corpuscular theory, the explanation
was straightforward: the corpuscles must behave like billiard balls bouncing off the cushion of a billiard table at equal angles. The undulatory theory, too, had no real difficulty. Once Huygens assumed that a light ray could be mathematically modelled as the path of a point on a wave front, he could easily deduce the law of reflection. Refraction was a more decisive test. When light strikes the surface of water and passes through it, the angles of incidence and refraction differ. The angle of refraction is less than the angle of incidence, and so a ray is bent towards the normal (the perpendicular). Although their
The interference of water waves on a pond’s surface is a familiar phenomenon. Thomas Young showed that the same thing happens with beams of light
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In 1802, in a lecture at London’s Royal Institution, Thomas Young demonstrated a new device now known as a ripple tank. Its basic principle is that water is stirred up in a trough with a glass bottom illuminated from below, so that the water waves and their patterns cast shadows onto a white screen above the trough. When two sets of ripples are created, they interfere with each other, producing a pattern of agitated water known as constructive interference – where the wave peaks coincide. A pattern of smooth water is known as destructive interference – where a wave peak is cancelled by a wave trough. If light were a wave, Young thought that it, too, might demonstrate constructive and destructive interference. A year or two after his lecture, working at home, Young split a beam of light using two narrow slits. As the two beams were diffracted by the slits, they interfered with each other and created a pattern of bright and dark stripes on a screen. Thus, light added to light could produce more light or, more surprisingly, darkness. To Einstein, Young’s experiment was “the next great theoretical advance” after Newton’s work on optics, while physicist Richard Feynman said it was the “heart of quantum mechanics”. Young’s double-slit experiment at the turn of the 19th Century proved decisive in showing that light can behave like a wave
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relationship had been formulated in 1621 as Snell’s Law, it still required a physical explanation. Newton’s attempt was not very convincing. He proposed that light’s velocity in water was faster than in air – a counter-intuitive idea, given that water is a denser medium. Once they entered the water, said Newton, the corpuscles were acted upon by a force which increased their velocity and altered the direction of their motion. However, the nature of this force was inexplicable, and it had no supporting evidence from other phenomena. Huygens, by contrast, assumed that light travelled more slowly in water than in air. He then used the undulatory theory in a direct and simple way, without postulating any new force, to calculate Snell’s Law. But this verdict was by no means conclusive. What precisely was the velocity of light in air and in water? Ole Rømer made the first modern estimate of light’s velocity in the 1670s using astronomical measurements, but not until 1850 was it measured accurately enough to prove that light moves more slowly in water than in air, as Huygens had assumed.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) This farmer’s son became president of the Royal Society and needs no introduction as a mathematician and physicist. His laws of mechanics and theory of gravitation are his lasting monument, but his research into optics was also highly influential, despite his dogged adherence to the corpuscular theory of light.
Fringe theories Finally, there was diffraction, a phenomenon first observed by Francesco Grimaldi in the mid-17th Century. He allowed a beam of light into a darkened room through a small circular aperture, then passed it through a second aperture and onto a screen. He noticed that the spot of light on the screen was slightly larger than the second aperture, and had coloured fringes. When he placed a thin obstacle in the beam, its shadow was not sharp: there were bright bands, very narrow and coloured, following the outer edge of the shadow. In other words, light could be bent – diffracted – by apertures and obstacles, even if only very slightly. When Newton repeated Grimaldi’s experiments, he too observed coloured fringes. Perplexed, he claimed that the edges of an aperture or obstacle interfered with the paths of the corpuscles. Although the
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) Maxwell was a Scottish physicist who founded the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. He made key contributions to thermodynamics, the kinetic theory of gases and colour vision, but he’s principally remembered for his field equations of electromagnetism, which defined light as an electromagnetic wave.
Five great minds who contributed to our understanding of how light behaves Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) This mathematician, physicist and astronomer came from a rich and influential Dutch family. He is perhaps best known for his invention of the pendulum-regulated clock, but also improved the lenses of his telescope and discovered the rings of Saturn. His greatest achievement was his wave theory of light.
Thomas Young (1773-1829) This child prodigy born in modest circumstances to English Quakers became probably the greatest polymath of his age. ‘The last man who knew everything’ was a London physician by profession, but his reputation was made in physics, the physiology of the eye and colour vision, and Egyptology.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Einstein is generally regarded as the greatest physicist since Newton, for his General Theory of Relativity and for his contributions to quantum theory. Born in Germany, he worked in Switzerland as a patent clerk, returned to his homeland as a professor and finally emigrated to the United States to avoid Nazi persecution of Jews.
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TIMELINE
It took centuries to arrive at our current understanding of light – even today, the picture isn’t entirely clear
Ibn al-Haytham shows that vision depends on light rays reflected from objects, not visual rays emitted by eyes. His work is translated into Latin in the 13th Century, influencing later European thinkers.
1690
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Christiaan Huygens publishes a wave theory of light. It explains refraction and diffraction, but depends on the existence of an ‘ether’, for which there is no evidence. After decades of experimentation, Isaac Newton publishes his Opticks. It explains some optical phenomena (but not others) with a particle theory of light, which does not require the existence of an ether.
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Electromagnetism
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Thomas Young establishes beyond doubt that light can behave as a wave by passing a light beam through two narrow slits and observing an interference pattern on a screen. Building on the work of Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell predicts the existence of electromagnetic waves of varying frequency and wavelength, including light waves.
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Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity postulates that light moves at a speed independent of the observer and does not require Maxwell’s ether. Separately, he uses the photoelectric effect to postulate light quanta.
undulatory theory could not explain the colours, it explained diffraction better than its rival. Nevertheless, Newton’s prestige allowed his theory of light to dominate the Age of the Enlightenment. In 1771, the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica boldly declared: “Light consists of an inconceivably great number of particles flowing from a luminous body in all manner of directions; and these particles are so small, as to surpass all human comprehension.” Not until the early 19th Century were corpuscles seriously challenged by undulations. Around 1804, Thomas Young demonstrated the interference of light, in which two overlapping beams of light produced bright and dark stripes, comparable to the interference of two water waves (see ‘The Key Discovery’). Corpuscles could not produce such patterns. Subsequent experiments on polarised light by French physicist Augustin Fresnel suggested a transverse light wave. Its components oscillate at right angles to each other and to the direction of propagation, as opposed to a longitudinal wave such as sound, which oscillates only in the direction of propagation.
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In the 1830s and ’40s, Michael Faraday demonstrated the inter-relationship of electric and magnetic fields of force. James Clerk Maxwell then took Faraday’s fields and merged them mathematically into a single concept: an electromagnetic wave with transverse electric and magnetic components, which Maxwell calculated would propagate through the ether at a speed similar to the measured speed of light, around 300,000km/s. Different colours of light now corresponded to different wavelengths and frequencies. In the 1880s, German physicist Heinrich Hertz proved such waves’ existence experimentally. Maxwell solved one problem brilliantly, but offered no physical explanation for the ether. If light was a wave, what was vibrating? Persistent attempts to detect the ether failed during the latter part of the 19th Century. After 1905, with the arrival
NEED TO KNOW Key terms relating to the behaviour and study of light
1REFRACTION
Light passing from one medium to another is bent by refraction – hence the ability of lenses to focus light rays, and the fact that a pencil placed in a half-glass of water looks bent. The refractive index of a medium is the ratio of the velocity of light in a vacuum to its velocity in the medium.
2 DIFFRACTION
Diffraction is the bending of all waves by apertures and obstacles. The diffraction of light is not so obvious in ordinary life as its refraction, but it can be observed in the iridescent colours formed by a CD or DVD under visible light. The surface of these discs is ruled with very close lines, which form a diffraction grating.
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PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT
High-frequency electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays can displace electrons from certain metals. However, this occurs only above a certain threshold frequency, never below it, regardless of the intensity of the radiation. The explanation for this requires the radiation to be quantised, with the energy of each quantum dependent on its frequency.
of Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, Maxwell’s ether was abandoned as an unnecessary concept. Relativity started with Einstein’s ‘thought experiment’ in 1895 about chasing a light ray. Ten years later he wrote: “If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwell’s equations.” Were we to travel faster than light, Einstein imagined a situation in which we might run away from a light signal and catch up with previously sent light signals.
A young Isaac Newton conducting light experiments using a prism in the mid-17th Century. Newton favoured a corpuscular theory of light, and his great standing ensured that idea dominated scientific thought for many decades
The most recently sent light signal would be detected first by our eyes, and then we’d see progressively older light signals. “We should catch them in a reverse order to that in which they were sent, and the train of happenings on our Earth would appear like a film shown backwards, beginning with the happy ending.” The idea of catching or overtaking light was clearly absurd. Einstein postulated that the speed of light is always the same, independent of how the emitting source or the detector move, and without the need for any universal frame of reference such as the ether. If this were not radical enough, in 1905 Einstein also proposed a comeback for Newton’s corpuscular theory in a more modern form. Instead of corpuscles, there were now light ‘quanta’ (later termed photons). In 1900, Max Planck had postulated that the electromagnetic spectra from red-hot bodies could be explained only if radiation could be emitted or absorbed in discrete packets, or ‘quanta’. Now Einstein, after considering the photoelectric effect – the way in which certain metals emit electrons when exposed to radiation – proposed that not only were the emission and absorption
of light quantised (formed into quanta), light itself was quantised. Between them, Planck and Einstein launched a theory that would determine the course of 20th Century physics. Today, physicists are compelled to accept that light behaves as both a particle and a wave, depending on how they choose to measure its phenomena. But its underlying physical nature remains a puzzle. A few years before his 1955 death, Einstein remarked: “All the 50 years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to the answer to the question, ‘What are light quanta?’ Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.” Since the 1980s, delicate experiments have replayed a version of Young’s key experiment and shown that a single photon can somehow interfere with itself. In his much-praised study Catching The Light, quantum physicist Arthur Zajonc admits: “Light remains as fundamentally mysterious as ever”.
ANDREW ROBINSON’s books include biographies of Einstein and Thomas Young
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Is your brain feeling the strain? What if you could pop on a headset that would help boost your mental performance? Christian Jarrett investigates some gadgets that claim to do just that...
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If you apply an electrical current through the scalp and into the brain you can potentially give your mental agility a jump start ou’re shopping on the high street. After passing the optician and the pharmacy, you reach the brain stimulation store with its headbands and skullcaps. They are designed to boost your mental performance or alter your mood by manipulating the activity of your brain. Sounds farfetched, doesn’t it? In fact, the technology is already here and available to buy – but does it really work and is it safe? An online company called Foc.us [no connection to this magazine] offers a brain stimulation device, available in black or red for £179, that promises to “overclock your brain” and “make your synapses fire faster.” At a more experimental stage, there is the Halo headband. The San Francisco start-up company behind the Halo claims it will elevate your cognitive performance via neuromodulation. Meanwhile, the Boost app from NeuroSky works together with the MindWave mobile headset (available from Amazon) to “increase the frequency of electrical oscillations in your brain, improving short-term memory, attention and alertness.”
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Most tDCS devices feature two electrodes – an anode and a cathode – that deliver mild electrical currents through the scalp and into the brain. Applying stimulation through the anode is thought to increase the excitability of neurones (brain cells), while cathodal stimulation has the opposite effect. It is believed that tDCS alters the baseline levels of
activity of neurones, so that they are more or less likely to fire. It’s also thought to change how neurones behave at synapses. Synapses are the gaps over which neurones communicate with each other. Activities you do after brain stimulation – even going for a walk – can potentially reduce or reverse the effects. The tDCS devices have an anode and a cathode that pass electrical current through the brain
Current
Anode
Cathode
How do they work? The Foc.us and Halo devices use weak electrical stimulation to either increase or decrease neuronal activity in the brain near where the electrodes are placed on the head. This is known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). The claims made by the companies touting these devices are rather vague. They refer to increasing your brain’s plasticity and enhancing your mental performance. This may sound like neuro-bunk, but there is peer-reviewed evidence suggesting that tDCS is associated with mental enhancements in healthy participants, the precise nature of which varies according to the site of stimulation. Researchers have shown that zapping the brain with tDCS can improve memory, language learning, problem solving, visuo-spatial processing (such as the ability to detect targets on a computer screen) and even some social skills. Nonetheless, sceptics argue that few of these studies have controlled sufficiently for placebo effects. The NeuroSky headset and app are based on different technology. Devices like this record the waves of electrical activity that are emitted by your brain. They then feed this information back to you together with certain sounds and visuals. The idea is that you can then learn to control the frequency of your brainwaves, and in particular increase the amount of waves that you generate in the so-called alpha range (8 to 10Hz).
“Any technique which directly affects brain tissue should be treated with the same respect as any surgical technique” Dr Nick Davis from Swansea University on the dangers of brain stimulation
NeuroSky claims that increasing your alpha brainwaves is associated with a range of cognitive benefits, especially enhanced short-term memory. The evidence here is contentious. Many studies that are fully randomised and placebo-controlled have failed to observe any benefits from alpha training. Sceptics say using devices like this amounts to little more than a form of technology-assisted relaxation. The only things at risk from the NeuroSky feedback device are likely to be your wallet and your schedule. Interestingly, the simple act of closing your eyes is known to increase brainwaves in the alpha range, so this is not a dangerous effect. The situation with tDCS and devices like the Foc.us headset is more complicated. While there Vol. 7 Issue 2
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have been no documented cases of serious adverse effects in over 100 studies, experts have issued a number of warnings about the possible risks of the technology. This includes the fact that the optimal dose of electricity is different from person to person. When using a device at home, there’s no way for you to know how much power you’ll need. Even the amount of hair on your head can interfere with the dose. Another factor is that the long-term effects are unknown. Besides the risk of headaches or scalp burns, at least two studies have shown that by enhancing mental agility in one domain, you also impair performance in another. Based on these uncertainties, experts have begun to ramp up their cautionary rhetoric. Dr Nick Davis, a neuroscientist at Swansea University, published a paper arguing that tDCS shouldn’t be referred to as a noninvasive technology. “Any technique which directly affects brain tissue to generate such powerful, acute and long-lasting effects should be treated with the same respect as any surgical technique,” he and his colleagues wrote. Others have likened the risks of tDCS to those associated with pharmaceutical drugs. “Meddling 66
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Brain stimulation devices top to bottom: NeuroSky, SpringTMS and foc.us Above right: SpringTMS
with the tDCS dose is potentially as dangerous as tampering with a drug’s chemical composition,” wrote Prof Marom Bikson at the City University of New York. Other concerns are more ethical and philosophical. By using a brain stimulation device to alter your social skills, are you changing your identity or personality? If we can use these gadgets to boost our mood at will, might we lose our drive to fight injustice? Could we become addicted? Lastly, some have raised the spectre of unwanted brain stimulation. Choosing to enhance our brains with a headset is one thing, but what if such interventions were eventually imposed on criminals to correct their immorality, or made compulsory for pupils struggling at school?
Other technologies Transcranial direct current stimulation and alphabased neurofeedback are not the only tricks in town when it comes to real-life thinking caps. Another technology that shows promise is known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in
Professor Marom Bikson researching transcranial direct current stimulation
NEUROSCIENCE
which a magnetic field is used to alter neuronal function. Although it’s more expensive and less portable, TMS – like tDCS – has been reported to have a number of positive effects, especially as a potential treatment for depression and chronic pain. One study even claimed that TMS can unlock hidden savant-like skills in all of us, such as the ability to count a large array of objects in an instant. However, the evidence base is preliminary. UK health advisory body NICE says that, for now, TMS should only be used in depression research and not as a clinical tool. In relation to pain management, it warns that any benefits are likely to be modest and that more research is needed. But this hasn’t stopped at least one commercial handheld device from appearing on the market. The SpringTMS system is produced by Californian company eNeura, and is touted as “the only non-drug therapy clinically proven to effectively stop or reduce migraine at the first sign of pain.” It’s revealing to note
that the small print on the company’s website states that in the US the device is only licensed for investigational use. Finally, there is one other real-life thinking cap that deserves a mention. Although widely derided, neuroscientist Michael Persinger claims his God Helmet can help wearers achieve union with the Almighty. Like TMS, it delivers magnetic fields to the brain, but they are far weaker and of a different kind.
“Meddling with the tDCS dose is potentially as dangerous as tampering with a drug’s chemical composition” Prof Marom Bikson from the City University of New York on the risks associated with tDCS
Some brain enthusiasts are taking matters into their own hands by making their own stimulation devices. But are they safe? It’s not that complicated to create your own tDCS device, and there are plenty of videos online to show you how it’s done. Perhaps it’s little wonder that a community of DIY brain-zapping enthusiasts has developed. For example, there’s an online subreddit of over 6,600 members who share tips and articles with each other about the technology. One article worries about foc.us, noting with alarm that they’ve been out of stock of headsets for some time. Part of the reason there is so much enthusiasm is that media reports are biased. After analysing press coverage of tDCS since 2006, a group of Canadian neuroscientists found that most reports focused on the benefits of
In fact, psychologist Craig Aaen-Stockdale has pointed out that the magnet on your fridge is 5,000 times stronger than the God Helmet. Perhaps it’s no surprise that a study by Swedish researchers found no evidence that a device similar to Persinger’s invention was able to help wearers have any kind of enhanced religious experience. For his part, Persinger said the Swedish device obviously wasn’t working properly.
Proceed with caution
Would you attach one of these to your head?
brain stimulation without noting the potential drawbacks. The team called for more balanced reporting on brain stimulation. Indeed, experts warn that the science behind brain stimulation is still immature, and long-term effects of its use are unknown.
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Pictured is a simple diagram for a homemade tDCS device. Building the circuitry is quite simple, but safely applying it is a little more complex
Although the commercial release of brain stimulation devices is arguably a little premature, it’s almost inevitable that their use is going to become more widespread in the coming years. Looking ahead, there are likely to be both clinical applications of these devices and lifestyle- or performance-enhancing products. In a clinical context, researchers are busy conducting more robust, controlled trials to establish exactly what kind of applications are genuinely effective, and how best to apply the technology safely. However, when it comes to brain stimulation in sport and education, the home and the workplace, the outlook is far more unpredictable. There will undoubtedly be plenty more commercial hype about the technology’s benefits, and it will be difficult to control how people choose to use it. Whether used as a clinical tool or to boost healthy performance, it’s worth remembering that the brain stimulation devices of today or tomorrow are unlikely to offer a quick fix. It’s better to see these thinking caps as offering a technological tail wind, giving a fillip to our own hard work, whether that be in the context of studying, sports practice or rehabilitation from illness.
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CHRISTIAN JARRETT is a neuroscientist and author of Rough Guide To Psychology and Great Myths Of The Brain
ASTRONOMY
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MYSTERY MESSAGES FROM SPACE Strange signals from outside our Galaxy have scientists baffled. But are they of alien origin? Hazel Muir investigates Vol. 7 Issue 2
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cientists revisiting archived observations made by the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia in 2007 noticed something odd. They saw a brief, yet extremely bright burst of radio waves that lasted just five milliseconds. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. But in April this year, a similar signal was reported on the other side of the world at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo radio telescope. Researchers now think there’s good evidence that these ‘fast radio bursts’ (FRBs) are not only real, but very common – and they come from vast distances far beyond our own Galaxy. Nobody knows what causes them, but could they possibly be evidence of intelligent aliens trying to get our attention? The Parkes Observatory has a vast 64m-diameter radio dish, which is one of the world’s oldest large movable dishes. It recorded an FRB in 2001, although it wasn’t until several years later that astronomers noticed the strange signal. Since 2007, they have shown that the Parkes radio dish has spotted at least half a dozen FRBs, all of
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The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has detected an FRB similar to those picked up by Parkes
SIGNAL FROM ALIENS? In 1967, a possible alien signal appeared in the constellation Vulpecula. Jocelyn Bell of Cambridge University (now Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell) picked up regular radio ‘beeps’ that occurred every 1.3 seconds. They looked artificial, so her team named the source LGM-1 (for ‘little green men’). However, LGM-1 turned out to be a rotating neutron star – the first one ever discovered.
Jocelyn Bell, discoverer of pulsars, in 1968
FACE ON MARS In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft spotted a shadowy feature on Mars that looked uncannily like a human face. Many people jumped to the conclusion that it was an alien monument, possibly designed to send a message that a civilisation once existed on the planet. But the excitement was brief. Later images showed it was simply a Martian mesa (a high plateau with steep sides) that was casting peculiar shadows, making it look like a human visage.
This ‘face’ on Mars (above) turned out to be a natural rock formation (below)
them lasting just a few thousandths of a second. They have all come from different directions on the sky. All the Parkes observations suggest that the FRBs come from sources that are very far away, according to Prof Benjamin Stappers from the University of Manchester, whose team has analysed the bursts. “Radio waves are dispersed by electrons in interstellar and intergalactic space, like light shining through a prism to give you the different colours,” he says. “This causes low-frequency radio waves to arrive at the telescope later than highfrequency waves.”
“Our result is important because it eliminates any doubt that these bursts are truly of cosmic origin” The amount of dispersion the team measured in the FRBs suggests that the radio bursts came from sources millions or even billions of light-years away. “They must be outside our Galaxy,” says Stappers. Until now, the findings have been controversial, because no other radio telescope had seen the peculiar short bursts. There was always the possibility that the Parkes dish had just picked up some local interference – maybe from a satellite or radar station – or that there was some kind of glitch with its electronics.
Another signal Earlier this year, however, the plot thickened. Analysis of observations by the giant 305m-diameter Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico have shown that it has also spotted a fast radio burst. It occurred on 2 November 2012 and had the same hallmarks as the Parkes FRBs, suggesting it came from far beyond the Milky Way. “Our result is important because it eliminates any
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doubt that these radio bursts are truly of cosmic origin,” says Professor Victoria Kaspi from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who headed the Arecibo survey that detected this FRB. “The radio waves show every sign of having come from far outside our Galaxy, which is a really exciting prospect.” Dr Laura Spitler from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, who led the analysis of the Arecibo signal, adds that
“The radio waves show every sign of having come from outside our Galaxy, which is a really exciting prospect”
the observations now look extremely compelling. “The brightness and duration of this event, and the inferred rate at which these bursts occur, are all consistent with the properties of the bursts previously detected by the Parkes telescope in Australia,” she explains.
Possible causes
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So what causes these extremely bright radio bursts? So far they’re a complete enigma, says Stappers. Possibilities include a range of exotic astrophysical objects, such as evaporating black holes or mergers between neutron stars. Neutron stars are the collapsed remains of the cores of massive stars that imploded during supernova explosions. “Another possibility is that they are bursts much brighter than the giant pulses seen from some pulsars,” adds Professor James Cordes from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit radio beams from their poles, and these can appear as radio pulses as they
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Could FRBs come from a previously unknown type of pulsar? It’s one of several possibilities
FALSE ALARMS At the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, false alarms of alien communications happen regularly. Often, the dish picks up a narrowband signal that doesn’t look like anything natural. But it usually takes just minutes to rule out alien communications because the signal persists even when the telescope monitors a different patch of sky. This suggests that the message is coming from a satellite or one of Puerto Rico’s many radar and telecoms installations – a bugbear for SETI researchers.
THE ALIEN HUNTER Douglas Vakoch is Director of Interstellar Messagee Composition at the SETI Institute in California What would convince you that a signal was potentially alien? We’d get excited if the signal looked different from anything that nature can make and if it came from a specific point in outer space, like a nearby star. Also, the signal would need to repeat.
How would you decode it? First we’d look for patterns in the signal, like simple counting. And then we’d look for ways to connect those patterns to the real world. We can use counting, for example, to organise the chemical elements into the periodic table, and we’d hope scientists on other planets would recognise this pattern in nature, too.
What would you expect the message to say? A message from extraterrestrials won’t be in English or Chinese or Swahili. But if we get a message from aliens, we know they can build
radio transmitters. They’d need to know basic maths and science, like ‘1 + 2 = 3’, so that’s how a message might start. But if they only told us about things we already know, then what’s the point? I hope they’d also tell us something about their culture, like their art or music.
What would convince you that you’d cracked an alien code? I’d be convinced that we understood the message if it showed us something new – something we could later confirm with our own science. Then we’d know we weren’t just projecting our own hopes and desires onto this alien message.
After decoding, what would you do about it and who would you tell? Decoding a message could take decades. Long before then, we’d have told the whole world about it. But then we’d face the most critical questions: should we reply, and if we do, what should we say?
multiple wavelengths. According to researchers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), another problem is repetition. No one has seen any FRBs repeat in the same patch of sky. However, it’s impossible to rule out the idea that they never repeat. Maybe the repetition just takes a very long time, and repeats could be detected in future. For now, interpreting the bursts is just too difficult. Telescopes under construction in Australia and South Africa have the potential to detect more FRBs, and this could clarify the nature of these odd events. Another observatory that should pick them up is CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) in British Columbia. CHIME is an innovative new radio telescope that will have five cylindrical reflectors with the approximate dimensions of snowboarding half-pipes, with radio receivers along each one’s focus. The reflectors won’t actually move, but they’ll detect radio signals from half the sky each day as the Earth rotates.
Ongoing mystery sweep across Earth like lighthouse beams. But is there any chance that the fast radio bursts are messages from extraterrestrials trying to contact us? It seems unlikely. One reason is that the bursts are probably very common and seem to come from random directions on the sky. Scientists have only detected a handful of them so far, but they think that if huge radio telescopes were monitoring all of the sky all the time, they’d see roughly 10,000 of the bursts each day. It seems odd that aliens on thousands of planets in different parts of the cosmos would all contact us in the same manner. The natural-looking patterns of the FRBs are further evidence that they are not of alien origin. Light emissions from natural astronomical sources are usually broadband, and smeared out over a wide band of wavelengths. Narrowband signals with a waveband spanning only a few Hertz wide or less are typical from a purpose-built transmitter. That doesn’t fit with the FRBs, which have
Stappers says he has no personal hunch about what the sources of FRBs are, but he hopes that detecting more will resolve the issue. “We are working very hard to find more of them, and also to pinpoint them in the sky more accurately to try and find their host location,” he says. “Are they in galaxies? And if so, where in the galaxy – in the centre?” Until then, FRBs will have to be filed among unsolved mysteries, alongside the ‘Wow! signal’. This strong, narrowband radio burst lasted more than a minute and was detected by Ohio’s Big Ear radio telescope in 1977. Jerry Ehman, the astronomer who spotted it, wrote ‘Wow!’ on a printout of the signal. The Wow! name has stuck, but the signal has never been seen again. The chances are that the fast radio bursts are something natural, rather than signals from little green men. But what causes them will no doubt baffle astronomers for some time.
HAZEL MUIR studied astrophysics before becoming a science journalist and author
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CHEMISTRY
THE WORLD’S WORST SMELLS
PHOTO: ALAMY X2, THINKSTOCK X2, MICHAEL & PATRICIA FOGDEN/FLPA, ROBERT HARDING, GRAEME SANDERSON/YOUTUBE.COM, GETTY, NATUREPL.COM X2
Our noses can distinguish over a trillion different smells. But what are the most pungent pongs? David Busse and Lauren Hoskin investigate... The ‘Corpse Flower’
The Durian Malaysia
Indonesia The titan arum plant, Amorphophallus titanum, is indigenous to rainforests in Sumatra, Indonesia. It has a humongous 3m-tall (10ft) flower that kicks up an almighty stink when it blooms. Fortunately for those living in the immediate vicinity, titan arum can go for many years without flowering. The smell of rotting flesh is due to a mixture of sulphur-containing compounds (pungent cheese), trimethylamine (rotting fish) and isovaleric acid (sweaty socks). This repugnant stench is thought to attract pollinating insects such as ‘flesh flies’ and carrion beetles.
Some describe the durian as the ‘king of fruits’, but many are put off by its stink, which has been likened to rotting onions, faeces and gym socks. The fruit, native to Malaysia but now common across southeast Asia, owes its smell to 44 compounds such as methanethiol (rotten cabbage) and ethanethiol (onion). Three of these had previously sly never been known n in nature until researchers analysed ed the durian.
Century Egg China This unusual Chinese delicacy consists of an egg preserved for several weeks or even months in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, quicklime and rice hulls. The alkaline preservatives raise the pH of the egg, breaking down many of its proteins and fats. The result is a grey-green yolk suspended in a dark brown white that reeks ks of ammonia and hydrogen sulphide – substances whose smell is described, unsurprisingly,, as that of ‘rotten eggs’. 74
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The Zorilla Central And Sub-Saharan Africa Also known as the Cape polecat or African skunk, this furry fiend produces a nasty stench from its backside that can be readily detected up to half a mile away. Much like the betterknown American skunk, the zorilla has anal glands that release a blend of chemicals to defend against predators by temporarily blinding them. Sulphur-containing compounds make up a large part of these eye-watering fumes – hence the stink.
Sulphur City New Zealand Rotorua, a city in northern New Zealand, has acquired the nickname of ‘Sulphur City’ due to its geothermal activity and subsequent aroma. Large numbers of geysers and thermal springs in the nearby countryside pump hydrogen sulphide into the air, resulting in the fragrance of rotten eggs. Since almost 70,000 people live there, though, it would seem that the residents get used to it.
Seal Island
Surströmming
South Africa
Sweden
Seal Island, a tiny landmass measuring just 50x800m and lying 5.7km off the coast of South Africa, is home to over 60,000 Cape fur seals living in close proximity, and the decomposing fish and putrid faeces of their tight living quarters combine to make a colossal stench. The stink of decaying fish arises when an odourless chemical called trimethylamine oxide in the fish’s flesh is exposed to air and broken down by bacteria. This produces trimethylamine, which has a reeking, ammonia-like odour that is found in abundance on Seal Island.
Vieux Boulogne
This Swedish delicacy is made by fermenting raw herring for at least six months.The process relies on the production of lactic acid bacteria and an enzyme in the spine of the fish to convert sugars into acids and alcohols. Species of the bacteria Haloanaerobium help ripen the fish, giving it a sour taste, but also cause the production of hydrogen sulphide and butyric acid.
The Stinkbird South America
France In 2004, scientists labelled Vieux Boulogne the smelliest cheese on the planet after a panel of judges and an ‘electronic nose’ rated the olfactory strength of 15 cheeses. This pongy fromage even beat Époisses de Bourgogne, another cheese so pungent it’s banned on local buses. The rind of the cheese is washed in beer, and the aroma comes from the beer’s bacteria reacting with the enzymes in the cheese.
Also known as Opisthocomus hoazin, this bird from the Amazon Delta is so stinky it is only hunted by humans in dire need.The stinkbird owes its manurelike stench to an aromatic diet of leaves and its unique digestive system, which uses bacterial fermentation to break down food. Its food fermentation chamber is so enlarged to accommodate decomposing plants and stinky gases that its flight muscles and sternum are reduced, making it a weak and clumsy flyer.
The Fatberg UK In 2013, sewer workers removed a 15-tonne ball of fat lodged in London’s pipes. “It’s a heaving, sicksmelling, rotting mass of filth and faeces. It’s gross,” said a Thames Water spokesperson. The fatberg, a bussized toxic mix of congealed fat, oil, nappies and faeces, took three weeks to clear. Vol. 7 Issue 2
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BU BUSHFIRES SMARTPHONE USHFIR RES APPS
APPS FOR THE NEW YEAR Boost your brain and supercharge your smartphone with these fun, fascinating and essential apps for 2015 LIFE SCIENCES MITOSIS FREE; IOS
ENVIRONMENT RIPPL FREE; IOS
Built for biology students, this detailed app takes you, stage by stage, through the process of cell division using interactive graphics and macrophotography.
Learn some green habits with this app. Enter your daily tasks, and Rippl will work out their environmental impact and suggest some cleaner alternatives.
ONSCREEN DNA MODEL
EARTHVIEWER
US$3.99; IOS
FREE; IOS, ANDROID, KINDLE FIRE
How much do you really know about life’s building blocks? Discover how simple proteins make up our genetic material in this comprehensive reference app.
See how Earth looked millions and even billions of years ago, with simple graphics that explain how current data gives us a snapshot of our planet in its infancy.
BUILD A BIRD FREE; IOS, ANDROID Understand how well adapted different species of birds are to their environments by making a designer avian friend of your very own.
PREGNANCY+ FREE; IOS, ANDROID, WINDOWS This app helps you track milestones in your pregnancy. It will then share the experiences of other women and provide incredible images of the different stages.
NHM ALIVE US$4.99; IOS Let Sir David Attenborough take you on a virtual tour of some of the Natural History Museum’s most precious artefacts, with exclusive CGI recreations of many of its specimens.
LEAFSNAP UK FREE; IOS Explore the local flora through your phone’s camera. The app can identify up to 156 species in the UK, and will show you the flowers and fruit of whatever you’ve found.
DARK SKY US$3.99; IOS Get to know the weather better than you know your own family. With beautiful air pressure maps and graphics, this app reports the weather with up-to-the-minute accuracy.
LOSS OF THE NIGHT FREE; IOS, ANDROID This app helps you assess just how dark the sky is in your area, then report back as part of a worldwide research project to help create a fuller picture of the night sky. 76
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SPACE SKYSAFARI 4 PRO US$39.99; IOS This Pro version of the app contains data on 25 million stars and over 740,000 galaxies. It’ll also show you what the sky looked like millions of years ago.
KHAN ACADEMY FREE; IOS, ANDROID, WINDOWS, KINDLE FIRE Join four million other users in enjoying free online lectures on anything from magnetism to modernism, and from cosmology to computing.
GEOM-E-TREE US$0.99; IOS Relax by creating an infinite number of fractal-like trees using simple gestures. You set up some basic geometric parameters, then watch your creation come to life.
ISEISMOMETER FREE; IOS, ANDROID Place your phone on your desk and this app will spot if there’s an earthquake by monitoring the accelerometers inside the device (you might be waiting a while).
NASA
GEOLOGY SAMPLE COLLECTOR
FREE; IOS, ANDROID
FREE; ANDROID
A must for those who love space exploration, this app gives you updates on current missions, and live feeds from NASA TV and NASA’s own streaming radio station.
Use this app to set yourself off on the path to becoming an amateur geologist. It’ll track your routes and help you identify what you find.
GOSATWATCH
PLANE FINDER
US$9.99; IOS
US$4.99; IOS
Track dozens of satellites in space as they whizz over your head. From communications satellites to the ISS, you’ll be amazed by just how much man-made stuff is up there.
Next time you see a plane fly over your head, hold your phone up to the sky and this app will let you know which airline the plane belongs to and where it’s heading.
GALAXY COLLIDER
THE PARTICLES
US$0.99; IOS
US$8.99; IOS
Smash the Milky Way into the Andromeda Galaxy in this sandbox app that simulates the cosmic forces that shape the Universe around us.
Learn to tell your bosons from your baryons with this visual guide to the world of particle physics, complete with details of each particle’s mass, lifetime, charge, spin and more.
EXOPLANET
SPYGLASS
FREE, IOS
US$3.99; IOS
This app is constantly updated with details of the hundreds of exoplanets that are being discovered. It even has a model of 67P, the comet visited by the Rosetta spacecraft.
When you’re off the grid this compass app can help you find your way. It’ll track waypoints, check your speed and altitude, and can even help you navigate using the stars.
MISC PAPERS US$9.99; IOS Search leading scientific databases for the latest research. You can organise the results by different categories, and create a citation by pressing a button – perfect for students.
WOLFRAM ALPHA US$2.99; IOS, ANDROID, KINDLE FIRE A cheat sheet for almost everything! This app will solve complex equations, work out your mortgage, tell you what breed of cat your neighbour has and much, much more.
CHEMIST - VIRTUAL CHEM LAB US$4.99; IOS, ANDROID See what happens when you add magnesium to water or what happens when you mix potassium and hydrogen peroxide (it’s good) with this virtual lab. Vol. 7 Issue 2
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SMARTPHONE APPS
PHOTOGRAPHY
PLAY
PHOTO SPHERE CAMERA
VIVINO
FREE; IOS, ANDROID
FREE; IOS, ANDROID, WINDOWS
Ever wanted to take 360-degree photos like Google’s Street View cars? This Google app lets you recreate those perfect ‘sphere’ photos and upload them to Google Maps.
Perplexed as to which bottle of wine you should buy? Take a picture with this app and it’ll show you reviews, ranking and prices in other stores.
CLOAK FREE; IOS The anti-social network. This app scans social media to draw up a map of the last places the people you know have visited... so you can avoid them.
WHO SAMPLED US$2.99; IOS, ANDROID This app helps you discover new music by scanning your music library to reveal which tracks been sampled by your favourite artists.
SEENE FREE; IOS This clever software snaps 3D photos. Once you’ve captured a ‘Seene’ you can look at your subject from different angles by tilting your iPhone.
SNAPCLAP
FREE; IOS, ANDROID, WINDOWS Never get caught out at the cinema again! Just tell it what film you’re watching and RunPee will pop up a timer that counts down to the next lull in the movie’s story.
FREE; IPHONE, ANDROID
MONUMENT VALLEY
Group selfies have never been so easy. This app lets you leave your smartphone somewhere and start the camera’s timer with a clap of your hands.
US$3.99; IOS, ANDROID, KINDLE FIRE
VSCO CAM FREE; IOS, ANDROID VSCO is crammed full of filters and effects that are used by professional photographers to showcase their work. Think of it as Instagram for grown-ups!
SNAPSEED FREE; IOS, ANDROID The most powerful photo editor app going. Snapseed puts advanced picture manipulation tools at your fingertips with its simple, smart interface.
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RUNPEE
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In this deceptively simple game, you have to solve beautiful puzzles inspired by Escher to save the princess. Easily one of the best smartphone games of the year.
PRODUCTIVITY
VIDEO
WRITING AID
REPLAY
US$0.99; IOS
FREE; IOS
Like a reverse thesaurus, this app helps you simplify your language, or helps you clear that mental block by letting you search for descriptions of words.
The simplest, most powerful video editor outside of a PC. Select videos and pictures, and Replay will stitch them together and let you add finishing touches.
NORMAL: BATTERY ANALYTICS US$0.99; IPHONE Make sure your iPhone battery survives the day with this app. It’ll show you which apps are energy hogs, and how much battery life you could save by deleting them.
YOUCAM SNAP FREE; IOS, ANDROID Want to capture a slide from a meeting or lecture? YouCam Snap will take a picture of a whiteboard from any angle, flatten the image and turn it into a PDF.
SICKWEATHER FREE; IOS, ANDROID This app helps you literally dodge the flu by using social media reports to create a ‘heat map’ of the worst outbreaks in your area.
MR NUMBER
CINEMAGRAM FREE; IOS, ANDROID Record a video, then select an area by rubbing it out with your fingers. This area of the video will loop, while the rest of the image remains still.
FREE; ANDROID Look up unknown callers so you can spot telemarketers before picking up. And if you do answer, and want to block that number, you can do so at the press of a button.
PQ CHAT
MOVIE PRO US$4.99; IOS This software gives you full control over your iPhone’s camera when you hit ‘record’. You can separate the camera’s focus and exposure and even film in 3K resolution.
FREE; IOS, ANDROID This ‘Post-Quantum’ messenger is like Snapchat on steroids. It uses five-key passwords and encryption at every stage to deliver your messages securely and privately.
MICROSOFT OFFICE
INSTAGRAM HYPERLAPSE FREE; ANDROID, IOS This update to Instagram helps you spruce up your videos. The app lets you transform long, dull videos into touching, snappy timelapse sequences.
FREE; IOS, ANDROID, WINDOWS Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office software is now free on all phones and tablets. Massively useful if you need to work on the move.
ACOUSTIC RULER PRO
FIXIEGIF FREE; ANDROID Share your videos as short, moving GIFs with this handy app. You can even add text and after-effects to the footage before converting it.
US$1.99; IOS This app measures distances for you by timing how long sound takes to travel between one iPhone and another (or an iPhone and a microphone attached to headphones).
DESSIN US$2.99; ANDROID A simple way to automate your phone. By linking tasks and places, you can tell the app to silence your phone in certain locations, only turn Wi-Fi on at home and more.
PHOTOMATH FREE; IOS, WINDOWS Take a picture of a maths problem, whether it’s a sum or a simple linear equation, and this app will solve it. It’ll even show you its workings if you like! Vol. 7 Issue 2
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TECH HUB
PHOTO: THESECRETSTUDIO.NET
yet? d’ n i t ca ‘clou e r h t o s p? I etection e e l s d ids a motion r home k e re th ireless t in you A ? e n w f e sa sts four oveme m o m ur h r te ect Is yo e Carte can det i t Jam ras tha e cam
While we live in an era of low crime rates, in the UK, the Inspectorate of Constabulary recently found that some forces ask burglary victims to turn detective and investigate their 80
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own crimes. Cue these off-theshelf cloud cameras. Just put the camera on a wall or hard surface, attach it to Wi-Fi, and see what it sees via a smartphone app.They all have night vision and motion detection; as soon as they sense movement, most of these cameras send you an email, a text message
or an alert on your smartphone. You then open an app and watch what just happened.Whether it’s a thief caught red-handed or Tiddles coming through the catflap, a cloud camera gives you live and recorded video of your home. We’ve reviewed four onecamera packages, but they’re all modular systems so you can easily add extra cameras to watch multiple rooms.
PHILIPS IN-SIGHT
SWANNSECURE
M120 HOME MONITOR
NV W-470
Works with iOS and Android, philips.com.sg
Works with iOS, Android and Windows, swann.com
Offering good value and using the slickest app of all, Philips’ In-Sight M120 is a cloud camera that’s easy to use, but does come with some unexpected costs. Its technical highlight is arguably HD video, with its 1,280x720 pixel resolution footage bright and smooth even at night, but it’s the In. Sight+ app that makes this product a standout. Set-up is a cinch, with the app generating a QR code on a smartphone that just needs to be held up in front of the In-Sight M120’s camera lens to link to a home Wi-Fi network. The camera itself is small but stable, and is flexible enough to
point at a specific area of a room. The app offers live streams and even conversations with whoever’s at home, but it’s only possible to send a maximum 14-second recorded voice message. The app will send you a message whenever the camera detects movement, but the videos it records are locked away in a paid cloud account to access, depending on how far back you want to go – either seven or 30 days. That all means you’re paying quite a high price to watch what could just be your dog jumping on the sofa, though a single subscription does give full access for up to 16 people.
As well as an outdoor-grade 1,280x720 resolution HD camera that must be fixed to a wall, the NVW-470 includes a seven-inch tablet for taking around the house. That tablet can be attached to a TV via an HDMI cable for truly big-screen security, but it’s not much fun to operate: it uses an ancient form of Windows and has a low resolution 1,024x600 pixel touchscreen that’s also the least responsive we’ve tested in years. Setting it all up is also long-winded and complicated. The SwannView Link app for smartphones and tablets offers live streams of video as well as access to motiondetected sequences, which are saved to the included 8GB
microSD card, so there are none of the monthly charges that the Philips and Belkin cloud cameras demand. Since cameras can easily be added to the NVW-470 – even the app is designed to allow the viewing of four streams simultaneously – this makes a good option if you’re set on expanding. However, the tablet proves an expensive drawback; video looks better through the app both during the day and in night-vision mode, and all settings for the system must be done via its poor touchscreen. If the SwannView Link app played a bigger role, the NVW-470 would be much less painful to use.
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PHOTO: THESECRETSTUDIO.NET
TECH HUB
BELKIN
D-LINK
NETCAM HD+
DCS-942L
Works with iOS and Android, belkin.com
Works with Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android, dlink.com
Offering exactly the same video quality as the Philips (1,280x720 pixels), Belkin’s NetCam HD+ adds the ability to take remote snapshots of your home. The NetCam HD app uses Wi-Fi Direct for an easy set-up, with the camera quickly finding its way onto a home network. The night vision mode works well, as does a two-way microphone for conversations; the app’s live feed page includes a speech button that you press to talk. The NetCam HD+ is sensitive to both motion and sound, which sends alerts to your email address. It’s possible to share that live feed with others, see a timeline of
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movement detections, and view, share and download both videos and photos from the cloud – but only for a price. The latter requires a subscription to Belkin’s NetCam Cloud+ Premium service, which is free for only 30 days. NetCam HD+ is the most future-proof of all the cameras here. It’s compatible with Belkin’s WeMo range of smart home products including LED lights, a switch and the Crock-Pot smart slow cooker. So any motion detected by the NetCam HD+ could trigger a hi-fi, flashing lights… or a casserole. It’s a smart home concept that’s both bizarre and intriguing.
Here’s a decent budget option, though this camera isn’t the easiest to use. Set-up means connecting the DCS-942L to a Wi-Fi router using a cable and desktop software rather than an app, but Wi-Fi is configured easily enough and the mydlink app – which displays live streams and recordings – is reasonably slick.Video quality isn’t the most detailed, though the non-HD 640x480 resolution pictures do have a higher frame rate than most. Using the app to have two-way conversations, watch (and even record) live video and take photos is easy, but not stealthy. With the night vision mode come flashing LED lights,
which could disturb whoever’s at home. Like the SwannSecure, the DCS-942L ignores the cloud to instead record all video to an included 16GB capacity micro SD Card stored in a slot in the camera’s side. Alerts about motion detection are sent by email, while videos can be viewed via the app with no restrictions, which is a great reason to go for the DCS-942L, though set-up is tricky and the software looks dated. Best viewed as a solution for desktop or laptop computers, the slightly dated DCS-942L will appeal to those wary of the cloud or not keen on cloud storage fees, and not addicted to a smartphone.
YOUR QUESTI0NS ANSWERED BY OUR EXPERT PANEL
&
SUSAN BLACKMORE Susan is a visiting psychology professor at the University of Plymouth. Her books include The Meme Machine
DR ALASTAIR GUNN Alastair is a radio astronomer at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester
ROBERT MATTHEWS After studying physics at Oxford, Robert became a science writer. He’s a visiting reader in science at Aston University
GARETH MITCHELL Starting out as a broadcast engineer, Gareth now writes and presents Digital Planet on the BBC World Service
LUIS VILLAZON Luis has a BSc in computing and an MSc in zoology from Oxford. His works include How Cows Reach The Ground
[email protected]
Several moths have web-spinning caterpillars, including the lackey moth, brown-tail moth and small ermine moth. Instead of using camouflage to remain inconspicuous, these moths
synchronise their development. The eggs all hatch at once and the caterpillars emerge in huge numbers. They form feeding colonies on a tree or hedge, and spin a silk canopy above
PHOTO: FELIX CLAY/EYEVINE
Why do caterpillars make webs? their heads as they go. This makes it harder for birds and parasitic wasps to get to them. Webs of the bird cherry ermine moth (shown here) can cover entire trees in May and June. LV
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& In Numbers
100km is the number of Devil’s Hole pupfish left in their Mojave Desert habitat. They are believed to be the rarest fish on Earth.
Why do some people get more stressed than others?
PHOTO: THINKSTOCK X5, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Their brains and hormones react differently. Stress causes the adrenal glands to release hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol (a corticosteroid). People vary in how their ADRA2B receptors react to adrenaline and in the response of their amygdala – the brain area involved in emotional memory. People who get more stressed secrete more cortisol and stay aroused for longer after the stressful situation has ended. The stress hormones evolved to help animals cope with threats by increasing vigilance, reducing sensitivity to pain, releasing fat and sugar into the blood stream and preparing us in other ways to fight or flee from danger. But fighting and fleeing are not options in a modern workplace. So the hormones build up, unless we can take exercise or relieve the stress in other ways. Sadly, some people think being constantly stressed shows how important or hard working they are, which is an attitude that only makes things harder. SB
Cortisol crystals: surprisingly beautiful when viewed through a microscope
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Condition your hair regularly to have shiny locks like this tamarin
Why, uniquely among primates, does our head hair keep growing? Other primates have long head hair too – lion tamarins, for example – the contrast is just more striking against our relatively hairless bodies. Long hair isn’t a universal trait either. The races that never left Africa have shorter, curlier hair. Exactly why the humans that migrated to colder climates evolved long hair is still debated. There seems to be a nearly universal male preference for women with long hair, perhaps because men lose their
hair as they get older and so lengthy locks are associated with femininity and youth. One possibility is that in hot climates, the disadvantage of lots of head hair outweighed its sexual desirability, but as soon as our ancestors moved north, they were free to choose mates based on the appearance of their hair. It could also be that once we started wearing clothes, the head was the only thing that still needed long hair to keep it warm. LV
Habit or addiction – what’s the difference? Although the extremes are different, there is considerable overlap. A habit is an action repeated so often that it becomes automatic, such as cleaning your teeth or making tea. The brain learns to treat the series of movements as one chunk and can complete them without further thought. Habits are rarely harmful and can be controlled or changed. An addiction, by contrast, controls you. Drugs, watching porn and other activities can all become addictive when the addict loses control of their cravings, often with terrible consequences. Many addictive drugs show increased tolerance, which means more is needed each time. This can be
Some people prefer a tipple before bedtime
combined with withdrawal symptoms such as ‘cold turkey’ from heroin or ‘delirium tremens’ from alcohol, but this is not always the case. First time cannabis users often report no effect, and withdrawal symptoms are usually mild. Between the extremes are habits that are hard to break or mild addictions that do little harm. SB
Why does wind blow in gusts and not at a steady rate?
Meteors look pretty, but do they make a noise as they streak through the sky?
Wind is simply the flow of air from areas of high pressure to those of lower pressure, and obeys the same laws of physics as fluids. Wind is no more likely to flow steadily and smoothly over the Earth than water, and we experience the resulting changes in flow as gusts. RM
The team are unimpressed with their new office clock
Why do you feel wasabi on your nose and chilli on your tongue?
Can you hear a meteor? Meteors are able to create sound waves. As they tear their way through the atmosphere they can create a sonic boom in the same way a fast-moving aeroplane does. However, since meteors are generally 100km or more in altitude and sound travels much more slowly than light, such sonic booms would not be heard until many minutes after the meteor appeared to viewers on Earth. Furthermore, the sound may not be loud enough to be heard at
all. Some people claim to have heard hissing or buzzing noises simultaneously with seeing a meteor. These may be caused by the very low frequency radio waves that are generated by meteors, which will arrive at the same time as the observer sees the meteor passing overhead. It has been demonstrated that these waves can cause things like glasses, plant foliage, pine needles and even hair to vibrate. This goes some way to explaining the hissing noises. AG
The active ingredient in chilli is capsaicin, which is a waxy substance that is solid at room temperature. It dissolves in fats but not water, so it tends to stay put, coating your tongue and the roof of your mouth. Wasabi, on the other hand, contains allyl isothiocyanate, which is a much lighter molecule with a freezing point below -100ºC. Although it is still liquid at body temperature, it’s much more volatile and some of the allyl isothiocyanate will always evaporate and make its way up into your nasal passages. LV
They both blow your head off, but in very different ways
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TOP TEN
BIGGEST OPTICAL-REFLECTING TELESCOPES
PHOTO: KEPPET/FLICKR, PRIS PAR DENYS/FLICKR X2, AXEL TAFERNER/FLICKR, PENN STATE, TIM RAWLE/FLICKR, ANDREW WEBSTER/FLICKR, NASA X4, ESO, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, ALAMY
(BY APERTURE SIZE)
How can we protect against the effects of a huge solar storm?
1. Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) Aperture size: 10.4m Location: Canary Islands Completed: 2008
2. Keck I and Keck II Aperture size: 10m x 2 Location: Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA Completed: 1993 (I); 1996 (II)
3. South African Large Telescope (SALT) Aperture size: 9.2m Location: South Africa Completed: 2005
4. Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) Aperture size: 9.2m Location: Texas, USA Completed: 1997
5. Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) Aperture size: 8.4m x 2 Location: Arizona, USA Completed: 2004
6. Very Large Telescope Aperture size: 8.2m x 4 Location: Antofagasta, Chile Completed: 2001
Coronal mass ejections can burst out from the Sun and interfere with communications
Every few days the Sun spews out huge bursts of particles and electromagnetic energy known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Most shoot harmlessly into space. But if directed at the Earth, the fast-moving particles can smash into satellites, interfere with communications and damage groundbased electronic devices. Major CMEs trigger violent changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, creating geomagneticallyinduced currents (GICs). These can surge through pipelines and high-tension power cables, damaging transformers and triggering mass blackouts. CMEs were
responsible for the notorious Carrington Event of 1859, which blacked out telegraph systems in Europe and America. Efforts to minimise the effects of CMEs focus on early warning and damage limitation. Space-based observations can spot CMEs a day or more before they strike. This allows power operators to take measures, while satellites can be re-orientated to reduce the risk of damage. Some power networks are being fitted with GIC surge detectors – these mop up the currents and protect transformers at key points in the electric grid. RM
7. Subaru (JNLT) Aperture size: 8.2m Location: Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA Completed: 1998
8. Gemini North Aperture size: 8.1m Location: Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA Completed: 1999
9. Gemini South Aperture size: 8.1m Location: Cerro Pachón Coquimbo, Chile Completed: 2000
10. Magellan 1 and 2 Aperture size: 6.5m x 2 Location: Las Campanas Coquimbo, Chile Completed: 2000 (1); 2002 (2)
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What’s the best way to brush your teeth? A recent study by Prof Aubrey Sheiham and colleagues at University College London found an “unacceptably inconsistent array of advice” from dental associations, dentists and toothbrush companies. Some dentists claim a side-to-side motion is fine, while others insist on different actions in different parts of the mouth. The most common advice is jiggling the brush back and forth. According to Sheiham, there’s no evidence any of these are better than just scrubbing. He recommends brushing from side to side, with the brush at a 45-degree angle and held lightly. He suggests focusing on where plaque is most likely to collect, which is biting surfaces and where teeth meet gums. RM
Brushing your teeth can be a confusing business
Is the amount of matter in the Universe infinite?
How exactly is the accuracy of Wikipedia articles maintained? Anybody can write or edit Wikipedia articles. In August 2014, a YouGov poll concluded that Wikipedia is more trusted than the BBC. Specifically, 64 per cent said they trust Wikipedia “a great deal” or “a fair amount”. The figure for BBC News was 61 per cent, and 13 per cent for red top tabloid newspapers. Wikipedia has three core policies: neutral point of view, verifiability and data coming from published and reliable sources. An
article’s revised section is displayed alongside the previous version so erroneous contributions are rooted out. Wikipedia’s writers and editors create watch lists and are alerted whenever an article in which they have some expertise has been modified. Wikipedia also has a style manual to ensure control of language and layout. GM
from predators. Moths don’t fly towards the Moon, either; the idea that moths are trying to navigate by the Moon has been disproved. Exactly why moths fly towards artificial lights still isn’t understood – all we know is that artificial lights confuse them in some way. LV
Did you know? Most moths are nocturnal, so during the day they keep still to avoid detection
There’s a lot of matter out there, but is it infinite?
Watch lists are valuable in raising the alarm when Wikipedia entries have been vandalised
Why don’t moths fly towards the Sun? Moths seem to be confused by artificial light
Only if the Universe itself is infinite. Whether it is or not depends on the average density of matter in the Universe. If the density of matter is less than the so-called ‘critical density’, the Universe is infinite. If the density is greater than the critical density, then the Universe is finite. While the average density is not yet known, it appears to be annoyingly close to the critical density; so close that we cannot distinguish between the two possibilities. AG
The biggest ever lasagne was made in June 2012. It weighed 4,865kg and was divided into 10,000 portions.
Do we utilise all of our genes in our lifetime? Some genes are permanently switched off. For example, males all have an X chromosome and yet the genes on this chromosome that code for female reproductive organs are inhibited early in foetal development. Females have two X chromosomes, but only one is active in any given cell. We have some genes that don’t get used because mutations have rendered them faulty. A 2012 study at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute found that we have an average of 100 broken genes each. LV Vol. 7 Issue 2
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& Is a vacuum’s suction linked to its power? The EU-imposed import ban on vacuum cleaners rated 1.6kW prompted outrage, but is based on science. Electrical power is a poor measure of suction power (measured in air watts). Well-designed 700W appliances can be as effective as those needing more power. RM
Are there some colours that humans can’t perceive?
Low-power appliances don’t always suck… except vacuum cleaners
The retina’s cone cells (purple) detect colour, while the rods (grey) detect light and dark
PHOTO: THINKSTOCK X2, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, GETTY ILLUSTRATOR: PAUL WESTON
How does a touch lamp work? Touch-sensitive lamps rely on capacitance: in other words, a device’s ability to store charge. Most objects have capacitance. You can think of them as sponges that soak up electrons. When we touch the lamp, the total capacitance becomes that of us, and the device itself. A chip detects the lamp’s changed electrical properties and a part of the semiconductor acts like a gate that lets mains electricity through, illuminating the Touch-sensitive lights bulb. GM are surprisingly smart
In Numbers
2,743m The height at which scientists have flown unmanned ‘octocopters’ to gather samples of the atmosphere above the South Atlantic.
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Yes – a potentially infinite number. A colour is not the property of an object but the result of different wavelengths of light interacting with an animal’s eyes and brain. The number of colours an organism can see depends on this system. Most human eyes have three colour receptor types in the retina. The relative stimulation of these is compared and coded, and the information is then sent to the brain’s visual areas. About one in 12 men has only two receptor types and some have
only one. So they see fewer colours. Very rarely, people have four and can see colours that others cannot. Indeed, everyone’s vision is slightly different. So the range of colours you take for granted may be unique to you. Some animals can see ultraviolet or infrared, while others have more receptor types than humans. The mantis shrimp has 12 types but a far simpler system of analysis. Their world must appear totally different from ours in ways we cannot even imagine. SB
Can you train yourself to get by on little sleep? Yes, but you’ll be unhappy. Psychologists have long studied sleep deprivation by keeping people awake. A surprising finding was how well people cope after very little sleep. However, they lose concentration, make more mistakes and become grumpy and miserable. Occasional deprivation does little harm and we recover after a good night’s rest. But continued lack of sleep has long-term effects including obesity, diabetes, heart disease and shortened life expectancy. The immune system is put under strain, hormone levels are compromised, sex
Too little sleep and your eyes will begin to look like this
drive can fall and depression and anxiety are common. If you think you’ll get more work done or have more fun by sleeping less, think again. SB
HOW IT WORKS
FINGER VEIN AUTHENTICATION Although they require the unique input of a user’s finger, the security of current fingerprint scanners used in banks, airports and even personal computers is not flawless. With the right technical knowhow, expert forgeries of fingerprints can be created in order to fool security systems and access secure data and information. On a more gruesome note, current finger scanning technology doesn’t necessarily require the appendage to be attached to the owner in order for a print to be matched.
The company Hitachi hopes to solve these security flaws with its new VeinID technology. Instead of scanning the user’s fingerprint, this new device will instead recognise a vein pattern in the finger itself. Blood will need to be flowing through a presented finger in order for the device to identify the unique arrangement of blood vessels within. Vein recognition works by shining near-infrared light through a finger, which is partially absorbed by haemoglobin in the blood. A CCD (charge coupled device)
camera then measures the intensity of the light that has travelled through the finger and converts it to an electrical signal, which is then used to produce a unique vein pattern image. This is crossreferenced with a database in order to find the identity of the user. The technology has been a massive success globally and is being used for financial security in places such as Japan, America and Europe. In the UK, Barclays hopes to make VeinID available to its corporate banking clients from 2015.
Near-infrared LED lights are directed onto the finger
The electrical signal from the CCD camera creates a vein pattern image, which is unique to each individual
A CCD camera measures the transmitted light and converts it to an electrical signal
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& Could the Phantom of the Opera survive with part of his brain exposed, as shown in the musical?
A cool-looking mask is no substitute for a covering of skin
No. One of the most important functions of the skin is to keep out bacteria. If the brain or any other internal organ is left exposed to the air, bacteria would cause a fatal infection within days. But provided the skin can be closed around the wound, it is possible to survive with large chunks of your skull missing. In 2012, a 36-year-old woman had a quarter of her skull removed to ease swelling in her brain after she fell and hit her head. Surgeons sewed the section of skull into her abdominal cavity to keep the bone tissue alive and left it there for 42 days until it was possible to reattach it. Congenital birth defects can also cause missing sections of skull under the skin. Children can sometimes live like this for more than 10 years, until they are old enough for corrective surgery. LV
PHOTO: GETTY X2, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, THINKSTOCK, NASA, ALAMY
Fibre broadband beats wireless with plenty of bandwidth
When will fibre broadband be made redundant by wireless? Wireless will not kill fibre. Radio waves cannot reach underground or penetrate rocky terrain. Neither can wireless channels match the bandwidth of cable. In July 2014, researchers achieved 43 terabits per second over a fibre optic connection. Even experimental wireless networks have only achieved a fraction of that, at 0.1 terabits per second. Wireless networks are comparatively expensive and energy intensive. The other limiting factor is frequency spectrum. There is only finite space within the crowded radio channels that carry mobile broadband through the air. Fibres carry signals as light, far higher up the electromagnetic spectrum than radio waves. Thus, a single strand of fibre has virtually infinite bandwidth. GM
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Is there a limit to the human population on Earth? In 2002, Harvard University sociobiologist Edward Wilson estimated that the amount of available arable land in the world would be enough to feed a maximum of 10 billion people. This assumed that they were all vegetarians. However, if everyone on the planet had the same eating habits as the average American, then there would need to be four Earths to support them. Drinking water may be more of a constraint since only 3 per cent of the Earth’s water is
freshwater and most of that is locked in ice caps or other inaccessible places. In principle, these problems could be overcome. The Earth receives more energy from the Sun in an hour than humanity uses in a year. If we harnessed more of this energy, we could produce drinkable water from the sea and create food from bacteria or algae. But this assumes that our species will multiply indefinitely, and that isn’t borne out by current trends. According
to the United Nations Population Division, the rate of growth of the human population has been falling since 1963. As countries become more industrialised and infant mortality rates fall, the birth rates seem to drop as well. By 2050, the population is predicted to stabilise at between 8 and 10.5 billion and it may even decline after that. The limit to human population may be our own desire to reproduce, rather than the Earth’s capacity to support us. LV The human population is expanding, but it won’t necessarily continue to do so indefinitely
Why is garlic so sticky when you cut it?
Are there rainbows on other planets?
Fresh garlic gets its smell from a chemical called allyl mercaptan. At one end of this molecule there is a sulphur atom and a hydrogen atom, which together form a sulphydryl group. When two sulphydryl groups come together, they form a relatively strong bond, called a disulphide bridge. These bonds are what hold together the complex 3D structure of protein molecules. When you get allyl mercaptan on your fingers, the sulphydryl groups form disulphide bridges with the proteins in your skin. The stickiness is the resistance you feel when you try to break the bonds. LV
The ingredients required to make a rainbow are sunlight and raindrops. Currently, there is no other planet known to have liquid water on its surface or in sufficient quantities in the atmosphere to make rain. However, other liquid droplets could refract sunlight and spread it out into its component colours, just as water droplets do on Earth. On Saturn’s moon Titan, for example, the atmosphere is rich in liquid methane droplets that almost certainly form rain. Titan’s atmosphere is extremely hazy, meaning that direct sunlight is probably uncommon, but there is still a chance that methane rainbows could form. If they do exist, they would look very similar to terrestrial rainbows, but would be somewhat broader due to the different refractive index of methane compared to water. Another similar phenomenon, called a ‘glory’, occurs on Venus and is caused by droplets of
Stinky and sticky, but oh-so delicious
The beautiful ‘glory’ of the planet Venus
sulphuric acid that are present in the planet’s atmosphere. AG
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED ¶
Email to
[email protected]. We’re sorry, but we cannot reply to questions individually.
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Resource
A feast for the mind Hardback
Solving Evolution’s Greatest Puzzle
Paperback
MEET THE AUTHOR
Andreas Wagner Oneworld
How could evolution have produced something as wondrous as a butterfly’s wing or a human eye? If you’re tempted to answer this by invoking the power of natural selection, then The Arrival Of The Fittest should be mandatory, corrective reading. Over the last 15 years, Andreas Wagner, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Zurich, has been trying to figure out a set of natural principles that can accelerate life’s ability to create. Wagner begins by reflecting on the origin of life. Rather than the “warm little ponds” that Charles Darwin envisaged, over the last few decades it has become increasingly clear that deep-sea hydrothermal vents were probably key to the origin of life. Any self-replicating molecule that emerged in a pond would rapidly consume all the raw materials available, fizzling out “like a wet match, moments after it had ignited.” In a hydrothermal vent, by contrast, a never-ending supply of chemicals seethes through the Earth’s crust at searing temperatures and extraordinary pressures. These “primordial pressure cookers”, suggests Wagner, are the perfect laboratories for the creation of the chemical reactions – the metabolism – necessary for the emergence of life. With organic molecules in place, Wagner turns to the meat of his
“Theseprimordial pressurecookers aretheperfect laboratories forthe emergence of life”
Andreas Wagner
argument, introducing it by way of the recurring metaphor of “a universal library”. In one such example, he explores the library of all possible combinations of metabolic reaction, almost all of which have never come into existence and most of which would not meet the requirements for life.Yet with some nifty thinking, clever experiments and cutting-edge computing, Wagner reveals a hidden architecture to his library, a connected network of paths in hyperdimensional space along which organisms can travel in safety, tinkering with new combinations of metabolic reaction along the way. The universal library metaphor also applies to genes, proteins and the machinery that regulates gene expression. Once Wagner has finished a mind-bending tour round one of these libraries, an organ as complex as the eye seems inevitable. None of this is going to convince a young Earth creationist. But for anyone seriously interested in how the world came about, this book will be tremendously exciting.
HENRY NICHOLLS is a science journalist and author of The Galapagos 92
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You say that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is incomplete. What’s missing? Let me use an example. There’s a fish called the winter flounder that lives near the Arctic Circle, where the waters are so cold that our body fluids would freeze. Yet some ancestor of the fish came up with a class of molecules – antifreeze proteins – that stop it freezing. Darwin’s theory is still central to biology, but it doesn’t tell us anything about how innovations such as these antifreeze proteins originate in the first place. You need the knowledge we have today. So it’s not just random mutations? Random mutations are important, but if we only had these then life as we know it wouldn’t exist. For example, there’s a protein called opsin that’s responsible for detecting light at the back of our eyes, and is made from 20 different kinds of building blocks. We can view this as a text string in a large library of all possible proteins, but if we ask how long it would take to randomly find this one text, the numbers don’t add up – it’s too unlikely. What have you found out? Nature’s libraries are organised very differently to human libraries. With opsin, there’s not just one text string that specifies its ability to detect light – there are more strings than there are stars in our Galaxy. So there are many different texts that specify opsin, connected and spread out all over the library. This kind of organisation means that if you’re part of a population that stumbles through the library, you’re much more likely to encounter a new and useful text.
FAVOURITES
Molecules M
You Are Here: Y
TTheodore Gray
Around The World In 92 Minutes A
Black Dog & Leventhal B
Chris Hadfield C Macmillan M
F the sequel to his bestselling For Elements, Theodore Gray looks E beyond the periodic table to b the t thousands of molecules and compounds formed by atoms. c Lavish L photos and diagrams bring laureth sulphate (artificial soap), b i the h likes lik off sodium di l calcium magnesium silicate (ceramic wool) and acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) to life. The molecules DNA and RNA code instructions akin to computer data, and Gray even speculates that life could have started from a soap-like molecule, which forms a spherical wall around organic molecules just like a human cell.
C Chris Hadfield is best known for ttwo things: his cover version of David D Bowie’s Space Oddity and t thepictures of Earth’s surface he tweeted t from the International S Space Station. He didn’t tweet all his photos, though. Around a thousand, previously unseen, space snaps have made it into this collection, from crop circles in the deserts of Libya to the brightly coloured lagoons of Ukraine. Whether it’s picturesque rivers, volcanoes or city lights, Hadfield’s images offer a new perspective on natural and human phenomena.
Daniel Bennett, FOCUS Reviews Editor
Graham Southorn, FOCUS Editor
Knowledge Is Beautiful K
Animalium A
David McCandless D
JJenny Broom
William Collins W
Big Picture Press B
Five years ago, David McCandless F p published his hugely popular infographics i bible, Information Is B Beautiful. Now he returns with aanother collection of endlessly iinventive stat-based illustrations. IIn his easily digestible style, McCandless tackles everything from the correct posture to maintain when meditating to the size and frequency of nearEarth asteroids. Like its predecessor, it is ideal coffee table fodder and a pleasure to thumb through in spare moments.
J Jenny Broom encourages you to iimmerse yourself in a trip around yyour very own museum, all from the ccomfort of your home. Over 160 ddifferent species are just waiting to be eexplored in these pages, and have all bbeen beautifully illustrated in great ddetail by Katie Scott. The lifelike images are backed up with oodles of scientific facts and tit-bits that will delight nature-loving children – although adults will also find themselves rapturously poring over this massive tome.
Jason Goodyer, FOCUS Commissioning Editor
Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, FOCUS Production Editor
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
TThe Ultimate Book About Me B
Discover The D Mega World M
SuperHuman S EEncyclopedia
Richard Platt R
Miles Kelly M
DK D
Carlton Kids C IInspired by an exhibition at London’s e Science Museum, this S book explores what it means to be human, from our senses and power of speech to body language and emotions. The mirror on the cover is pretty cool too.
This celebration of T everything enormous e ttakes in football sstadiums, science labs and skyscrapers as well as space. Discover the fearsome 3.6m-long ‘terminator pig’ which lived 25 million years ago and plenty of dinosaurs besides it.
Y Your body can do a amazing things, a as revealed in this book’s colourful illustrations. Your eye, for instance, is shut for 30 minutes each day just because you blink. And be thankful for your liver – a super organ that performs 500 functions.
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A feast for the mind
BIG MYSTERIES BY BBC PRESENTERS
Human Universe Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen William Collins B Brian Cox has many questions about q humans as he tracks hu our journey from ape o to astronaut, while reflecting on the fact re that we are nothin nothing but piles of atoms.
The Incredible Unlikeliness Of Being Alice Roberts Heron Books A Alice explores the quirks of the human q body, from blind spots b to back pain. Subtitled Evolution And The Ev Making M Of Us, she illustrates ill it with her own wn anatomical anato atomi t mical drawings.
Is There Life On Mars?
100 Things You Will Never Find
Britain’s X-traordinary Files
Stuart Clark
Daniel Smith
David Clarke
Quercus
Quercus
Bloomsbury
FOCUS contributor Stuart Clark answers 20 cosmic questions with his usual thoroughness. They include: ‘Are there alternative universes?’, ‘What is a black hole?’ and even ‘Is there cosmological evidence for God?’ And for readers who write in with pet theories of the Universe, there’s a chapter just for you: ‘Was Einstein right?’ Buy this for anyone who asks lots of questions and wants to know if science can answer them.
Where is JFK’S brain? What is Google’s search algorithm? Who is the real King Arthur? If you want to find the answers to these questions, this isn’t the book for you. Subtitled Lost Cities, Hidden Treasures And Legendary Quests, it contains 100 secrets and mysteries.Take the dodo – no complete skeleton of the bird exists. Or the Lost City of Z – mentioned by 18th Century explorers but undiscovered since.What you will find, though, is a fascinating read.
For years people have shared spooky tales around the campfire. This book assembles many of the more recent mysteries from documents contained in the National Archives. From the Beast of Bodmin Moor to headless women in St James’s Park, this is a fascinating trawl through things we’d love to be true but sadly aren’t, as well as unsolved mysteries like the Mary Celeste and phantom helicopters.
HISTORIC SCIENCE AND ICONS
Inventions That Didn’t The Great Archaeologists Change The World Julie Halls
Brian Fagan
Thames & Hudson
Thames & Hudson
This book is a love letter to odd Victorian inventions, like the artificial leech. Since their inventors applied for copyright, the original drawings bring them to life.
Archaeologists and their feats are celebrated here, including Wilhelm Dörpfeld who excavated at Troy and Giuseppe Fiorelli, who preserved Pompeii.
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Einstein
Charles Darwin
Walter Isaacson
Stephen Webster
Andre Deutsch
The History Press
He turned our ideas about space and time on their head, but how? This hardback biography – supplied in a handsome slipcase – explains it all with the help of scientific apparatus, diagrams and archive documents.
This introduction to one of history’s greatest scientists is an ideal stocking filler. The man who explained evolution is revealed, tracking his life from his childhood in Shrewsbury to his voyage on the HMS Beagle.
COFFEE TABLE
Deep Space Govert Schilling Black Dog & Leventhal
You might think the subtitle, Beyond The Solar System To The End Of The Universe And The Beginning Of Time, is a tad grand for a coffee table book. But top astronomy author Govert Schilling’s tour of the cosmos is a tour de force. There are beautiful photos, plus diagrams to explain variable stars, sunspots and cosmic voids. And a star chart section should inspire you to get into astronomy.
Remarkable Plants That Shape Our World Helen and William Bynum Thames & Hudson
BOOKS ABOUT NUMBERS
Numericon Marianne Freiberger and Rachel Thomas Quercus 43 was the biggest number b of McNuggets you couldn’t get yo from boxes of 6, fro 9 and 20. Facts like this abound lik in this book on numbers and what 24 special number they mean to maths.
Things To Make And Do In The Fourth Dimension
This beautiful book tells the stories of plants that have healed, harmed and fed us, from the rice eaten by half the world to cash crops such as sugar cane. Like us, you’re bound to come across things you didn’t know. For example, linseed oil forms the basis of lino floors, while tobacco is in the same family as tomatoes. Appropriately for a coffee table book, we learnt that most of our brews come from just two species.
Matt Parker Particular Books O stage, Matt On Parker serves P up science u with a slice w of comedy – just like his ju book. From b tying knots to ty cutting pizza, it’s maths but not as you know it.
The Book of 365 Hugh Brazier and Jan McCann Square Peg
Fiona Sunquist and Mel Sunquist
A History Of Life In 100 Fossils
University of Chicago Press
Paul D Taylor and Aaron O’Dea
The Wild Cat Book
Natural History Museum
The cat family tree, recently derived from DNA studies, contains a total of 37 species in eight related groups. All are included here, complete with photos and maps showing the location of their natural habitats.
Take a whirlwind trip back through 3.5 billion years of Earth’s history and find out the stories behind some of the most important fossils ever found.
The Planets Dorling Kindersley
With the subtitle, The Definitive Visual Guide To Our Solar System, this is the ultimate present for any space fanatic. This book has been updated with new 3D graphics, covering various moons and asteroids as well as planets.
The book of 365 actually contains 366 numbers and avowedly isn’t about maths. Instead, there’s a story for every number between 1 and 366. Take 155 – it’s the height a dog flea can jump in mm. Enough to keep you occupied for, well, a year.
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Time Out In the know
SET BY DAVID J BODYCOMBE
Which scientist recently decided to
1 auction off their Nobel Prize? a) James Watson b) Peter Higgs c) Steven Weinberg
This spectacular image is a
6 newly reprocessed view of
Scientists in Israel found that
11 children can start expressing
which of Jupiter’s moons?
pleasure at another’s misfortune at what age?
a) Ganymede b) Io c) Europa
a) Two b) Six c) Ten
Daredevil François Gissy recently
2 set a new world record with his
Complete the recent headline: “The
rocket-powered bicycle. What was his top speed?
12 British are born to be ______, new research finds”
a) 333km/h (207mph) b) 366km/h (227mph) c) 422km/h (262mph)
a) Brave b) Miserable c) Boring The red streaks are an iconic feature of…
3
According to recent research, coffee tastes more bitter in what colour mug?
a) Blue b) White c) Orange
4
What odd sexual behaviour was recently filmed on Marion Island?
a) Unusual horrible hand b) Strange stripy hump c) Bizarre muscular tail
Another headline to complete:
13 “British novelist sends ______ ______ According to Dutch researchers,
into the stratosphere”
during a 10-second kiss?
a) Boiled egg b) Roast chicken c) Lamb chop
7 how many bacteria are transferred a) 20 million b) 50 million c) 80 million
14
image of planets forming around a young star. Approximately how far away is the star, HL Tauri?
a) 250 light-years b) 450 light-years c) 650 light-years
a) ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ by Aerosmith b) ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls c) ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by The Human League
In November, the UK’s first
8 poo-powered bus went into service between which two cities?
a) London and Brighton b) Bristol and Bath c) Liverpool and Manchester
15
Captured by Chile’s ALMA
5 telescope, this is the clearest ever
When Italian astronaut Samantha
9 Cristoforetti travelled to the ISS in November, what luxury item did she bring aboard?
a) A make-your-own pizza kit b) A bottle of amaretto c) A zero-gravity coffee machine
According to an online experiment, what is the UK’s catchiest song?
This photo, which came third in the 2014 Nikon Small World prize, shows the eyes of what kind of spider?
a) Black widow spider b) Tarantula c) Jumping spider
Which of these technological
10 terms was the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2014? How far away is this emerging solar system?
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a) Contactless b) Vape c) Bitcoin
Which spider has these shiny peepers?
Crossword No.173 ACROSS 8 9 13 14 15 16 17 18 20 22 23 25 27 30 31 32 35 36 37 39 41 42 43 44
Plague gets cub in trouble with hygiene problem (7) Paste contains strange marine element (9) Children’s edition (5) Mouth made daughter terribly late (5) Pair has time for some poetry (7) Lie and cuss about how hot it is (7) Money for a large animal (5) Discover a tiny amount (5) Transaction includes British fur (5) Agreement that at least three notes were heard (6) Some fruit caught one form of rust (6) Involved brute in machine (7) Animal encounters barrier around bay (7) Motorist controlling software (6) Man forced to charge for a membrane (6) Bone incorporated by you and me (5) Discovery includes European monster (5) Imagine putting additive into drink (5) A Pole wandered around church, having a lot of time (7) Some heat generates a recoil (7) Cancel making a ring without last two (5) Tidiness between class and family (5) Ordain odd new church regulation (9) Nowadays set trap with old useful device (7)
DOWN Last excursion finds us inside with a cough (6) Sticking together, chose to run – I have to follow (8) Holy site suffering inland fires (11) A derelict form of measure (9) Greek character finds only a tiny bit (7) Manufacturing river experiment (10) Flier meets German university students (4) Fish leave a sign (6) Artist’s broken leg about to get firm (2,5) Underline anxiety (6) A bore worked in charge of oxygen (7) Turn exit round after graduate finds ore (7) Made a picture of aristocrat and butterfly (7,4) Tree providing money and food (10) One politician to point to routine opposition (9) Did moan about form of carbon (7) Change sides by mistake (6) Room is varying acidity, but it’s the same shape (8) Clears away part of vision (6) Learn about following notes about a gland (7) No hard new particle (6) Fun bird (4)
SOLUTION TO CROSSWORD 170
QUIZ ANSWERS 1a, 2a, 3b, 4a, 5b, 6c, 7c, 8b, 9c, 10b, 11a, 12b, 13c, 14b, 15c
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 11 12 19 21 24 26 28 29 30 32 33 34 38 40
HOW DID YOU SCORE? 0-5 6-10 11-15
Two legs bad Four legs good Eight legs even better
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The Last Word The Met Office is upgrading its weather modelling systems, but is that a good thing? here are few more worrying phrases that can appear on a screen than “downloading upgrade”. Whether it’s a smartphone app or a global intranet, you just know that something that once worked fine, now won’t. Sure, the new version has more bells and whistles, but since you never used the original ones, that hardly compensates for being forced to relearn all the vital stuff that’s also been ‘enhanced’. I get the impression there are armies of programmers out there sitting around munching pizza and dreaming up upgrades simply to justify their existence. I’m sure they’re all trying to give us the perfect tech experience; the thing is, though, all too often the perfect becomes the enemy of the adequate. Which is why I was deeply disturbed to learn that the UK Met Office has recently ‘upgraded’ its computer models of the weather. Forecasting the weather is mind-bendingly difficult, and I think the Met Office generally does an adequate job of it. But sometimes it goofs really badly – as it did last winter, when it predicted a much higher chance for a dry winter than the apocalyptically wet one we actually got. The Met Office now hopes it will do much better with a software upgrade dubbed ENDGame (for ‘Even Newer Dynamics for General atmospheric modelling for the environment’, apparently). The laughably unhelpful description on the Met Office website reveals that ENDGame is a “finitedifference model discretised on a latitude-longitude grid and is based on the fully compressible, nonhydrostatic Euler equations”. Well, whatever; the question is, will all this make forecasts any better? My guess is that they’ll just get fuzzier, with forecasters increasingly talking of “a chance of rain in some areas around the early part of the day” – leaving us to guess the location of “some areas”, when the “ early part” of the day is, and whether “a chance of rain” is even worth worrying about. I’m basing my forecast partly on cynicism – I get the feeling the Met Office has become increasingly wary of making clear statements, for fear of being held to account for blunders. But my forecast is also based on one of the most important scientific issues you’ve probably never heard of: the bias-variance dilemma. This is a nasty trap that awaits those trying
T
ILLUSTRATOR: ROBERT G. FRESSON
“The bias-variance dilemma is a nasty trap that awaits those trying to make really sophisticated models of anything”
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Vol. 7 Issue 2
to make really sophisticated models of anything – including the weather. You’d think you can’t have enough sophistication in a computer model. Surely the more variables, the more accurately you’ll reflect reality? And it’s true that as complexity increases, inaccuracy (“bias”, in the jargon) decreases. But there’s a catch: include too many variables, and you run out of data for pinning them down precisely. As a result, the model’s predictions start to get fuzzier – or, in the jargon, the “variance” increases. The bias-variance dilemma is all about finding just the right amount of complexity to keep the bias low without driving the variance so high the forecast becomes useless. Finding this balance is often very hard. Recently, the journal Nature carried a paper by researchers calling for computer models of the climate to include the effect of humans adapting to climate change. Adding this extra layer of complexity may well prove too much for models already struggling with the biasvariance dilemma. Has the Met Office hit the right balance for predicting Britain’s weather with ENDGame? Only time will tell, but I suspect it will struggle to cope with effects of the, um, ‘upgrade’ we humans seem to have imposed on the climate.
ROBERT MATTHEWS is Visiting Reader in Science at Aston University, Birmingham
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