BBC Knowledge IN 2013-10 (Vol. 3 Issue 6)

Is Evolution Dead?

Has the human species reached the zenith of evolving? p30 www.knowledgemagazine.in

Volume 3 Issue 6 October 2013 `100

SCIENCE • HISTORY • NATURE • FOR THE CURIOUS MIND

B Y Happiness Discover the secrets of smarter spending and sail through a happy life p32

The Fiercest Predator Of All p40

10 Most Annoying Noises p46

Introducing The Bugs In Your Home p58 R.N.I.MAHENG/2010/35422

On the cover Is Evolution Dead?

science Science

Comment & Analysis

Is evolution dead? It’s supposed to be an unstoppable force of nature. But with huge advances in medical care, technology and social support, most humans today live long enough to pass on their genes. Has evolution come to a standstill in our species? Two of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists argue the case

What is the future going to be like? If YES you believe science fiction it is

ALAMY, GETTY, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London, UK. He is the author of Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated (Ballantine, 2001).

34

not going to be very different from today – tribes, empires, wars, with a little decorous love interest on the way. However familiar their behaviour, though, the imagined heroes and villains of years to come tend to look quite different from ourselves – giant green skulls, massive brow ridges and tentacles, perhaps even wheels. Natural selection – the process that would drive this progression – ultimately results from inherited differences in the ability to reproduce. Once, it raged through most nations. In Shakespeare’s day two out of every three babies died before they were 21 and even in Darwin’s time almost half did. Many of those deaths came from disease, starvation or violence, and there are inherited components in the ability to withstand all of them, such as the

variant that gives resistance to smallpox. Now, most babies in the developed world, once they have survived the difficult first few months, survive until they are grown up, so the differences that once fed Darwin’s mechanism have largely gone away. But while staying alive is relatively straightforward nowadays, finding a willing mate is more difficult. The range of success is wider, too, particularly for males. Each time a man has sex he makes enough sperm to fertilise every woman in Europe. In the old days, sexual inequality meant that was almost possible: Moulay Ismael of Morocco admitted to 888 children. There was, needless to say, more than one Mrs Moulay. As a result, around 100 of his male fellow citizens must have had no wives, so no children at all. What did that mean for natural selection? It meant there were

great differences in reproductive success. And any variation in the ability to attract a mate is raw material for selection. Now, that pattern has changed: variation has all but disappeared. Most people have zero to four offspring, with the reproductive Lotharios almost extinct. If natural selection favours variation in the ability to stay alive and to have sex, then once that variation has gone it loses its power. Put the figures for survival and for reproduction together, and you come up with a statistic, the ‘opportunity for natural selection’. In the developed world, it has declined by around ninetenths in the past few centuries. The result: for the time being at least (and keep your fingers crossed) there is no selection, and evolution on the Darwin model is over. In other words, if you are worried about what Utopia is going to be like, calm down – you are living in it now.

Has the human species reached the zenith of evolving? p30

NO

PZ Myers is associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris. His blog, ‘Pharyngula’, can be found at http://scienceblogs.com/ pharyngula/

There are two things that must happen for human evolution to come to an end: 1) everyone must be genetically identical, and 2) the copying of DNA from one generation to the next must become flawless. The former is simply not the case, while the latter is physically impossible – and these facts of life are the two engines that drive the appearance of anything new during the process of evolution. Genetic diversity is propagated by the reshuffling of alleles (all the different possible forms of a gene). We human beings do this by using sex. Every child is the product of the random assortment of alleles from two individuals, producing a unique combination of alleles every time. This is a significant source of new variants and forms. We owe the fact that the copying of DNA between generations is imperfect to the phenomenon of mutation. This is a change to the sequence of ‘letters’, called nucleotides, in DNA, and it is unavoidable. The most common mechanism is simply errors in copying. No machine can be immune to error, and that goes for the biological machinery of the cell, which is responsible for copying each of the

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For human evolution to come to an end: 1] everyone must be genetically identical, and 2] the copying of DNA from one generation to the next must become flawless

novelty. So less selection allows greater amounts of genetic diversity in a population. Not that we’ve actually eliminated selection, of course. Perhaps we don’t have to outrun sabre-toothed tigers anymore, but our offspring still have to overcome the hurdle of acquiring skills that will get them a good job and finding a mutually fertile mate sometime before they die. Selection can be a subtle force, and you can’t escape it. There is one way we could see human evolution end: if we became extinct. Otherwise, evolution is a natural and unavoidable property of living, replicating systems, and it is absurd to talk of any living population as not evolving.

SCIENCE • HISTORY • NATURE • FOR THE CURIOUS MIND

With survival now easier, have we stopped evolving?

October 2013

35

October 2013

30 Comment & Analysis

Have humans reached the last stage of evolution? Read on to find out NATURE SCIENCE

A 4m great white breaches at Seal Island in False Bay. The waters around this tiny 400m-long shelf of rock are the best place on Earth to witness this behaviour, which Chris discovered in 1996. It’s the final act in a seal-hunting manoeuvre, though (like many shark photographers) he also tows neoprene seal decoys to attract the mighty fish

XXX

The southern tip of Africa hosts one of the largest gatherings of big marine predators on the planet. Explore the bay where sharks, killer whales, dolphins and seals fight for food – and supremacy

XXX

on the cover: 123rf.com; Tod duncan, steph stevens, wikipedia, the white balance, science photo library, chris fallows

nature

PREDATOR BAY

47

October 2013

40 Predator Bay

science

ACOUSTICS

6

FLATULENCE

10

PERSISTENT MUSIC LATE AT NIGHT

VICIOUS DOG BARKING

XXX

A dog’s bark has almost everything: it can be loud and surprising, it has associations with danger and threat. People’s mental connections to the sound of a dog barking make them feel bad, because vicious dogs conjure up unpleasant memories. The actual sound itself is also irritating because of its rough quality; for most sounds, roughness makes the sound more grating. Acousticians define roughness as rapid fluctuations in how powerful a sound is (20-200 cycles per second). The fluctuations have to be fast enough that they are heard as part of the sound’s texture, rather than as individual changes in the sound’s loudness.

2

MICROPHONE FEEDBACK

The sound of a woman screaming is even more upsetting than a baby crying. Evolutionarily, this alarm call would highlight danger to the tribe, in order to attract aid or instigate retreat. In one of my own experiments, participants occasionally smiled at a female scream because it reminded them of horror movies. This probably happens because cultural associations can reverse the alarming effects of a piercing scream.

One of the most widespread complaints received by the Noise Abatement Society concerns loud music being played by neighbours at night. For the partygoers the music is pleasurable, while for the complainants it is unbearable. Context and control determine how people emotionally interpret the soundscape; a ‘noise’ can be thought of as a sound that is out of place. People can be sensitised to a persistent sound that is out of their control, even if the sound is quiet — this is why some people find a dripping tap so grating.

9

5

WOMAN SCREAMING

8

THUNDER

The main reason thunder is so frightening to small children is because it suddenly becomes so loud. Similarly frightened responses can arise from fireworks or loud gun shots. Any sound can be aversive if it is loud enough. The cochlea, the sensory organ for sound in the inner ear, can be damaged by loud sounds. As the amplitude of sound waves in the cochlea approaches the threshold for this damage, the sounds cause pain.

When you hear the high-pitched sounds of microphone feedback, does it make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, or do you just want to stick your fingers in your ears? Of all the sharp noises reproduced in the lab this is loudest and sharpest and, when tested, a University of Salford experiment rated it number two for horribleness.

4

KNIFE ON A BOTTLE

1

VOMITING

3

Happiness

SCIENCE

BABY CRYING

Evolution has made us particularly sensitive to the sound of a baby crying. The sound spectrum of crying is composed mostly of frequencies from 2000 to 4000 cycles per second. These frequencies are perceived as ‘sharp’, an unpleasant acoustic property. The evolutionary reason for being more sensitive to sharp and rough sounds is probably so that we are roused to action by human shrieks and babies crying.

Volunteers in an experiment by Trevor Cox at the Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford ranked the noise made by a whoopee cushion as one of the most irritating. It’s not loud but its association with embarrassment is likely to be the root of its annoyance. Some sensitive souls find the sound of flatulence unpleasant to hear – although for many flatulence is a staple of comedy, from Dekh Bhai Dekh and Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai. In Japan, women in public toilets found the sound of urination so embarrassing that they would run the electric hand driers to mask the tinkling. The Japanese solution has been to pipe singer Barry Manilow’s records into public loos.

B Y Discover the secrets of smarter spending and sail through a happy life p32

See marine predators fight for supremacy at the southern tip of Africa 7

Volume 3 Issue 6 October 2013 `100

Even ‘identical’ twins can have small genetic differences

three billion letters in the human genome each time a cell divides. And cells have to divide or we couldn’t produce populations of sperm and egg cells. Our cells are actually very good at copying, but there’s still a new mutation roughly once every three cell divisions, and it takes many divisions to make a sperm or egg. Most of these don’t have any effect, but it does mean that every single one of us is a mutant in the purest sense of the word. In spite of this, one common argument for the end of human evolution is that we’ve loosened the constraints of natural selection with our technology and social support systems. That does not imply an end of evolution though: selection is a conservative force that culls

The Fiercest Predator Of All p40

10 Most Annoying Noises p46

Introducing The Bugs In Your Home p58 R.N.I.MAHENG/2010/35422

FINGERNAILS ON A BLACKBOARD

In a study of piercing sounds by Dr Sukhbinder Kumar and his colleagues at Newcastle University’s Medical School, the noise of a knife scraping a bottle was rated as even more annoying than fingernails on a blackboard. Other sharp and rough sounds that have been rated as highly irritating include railroad brakes, grinding machinery and a metal rake against a slate stone.

Does the sound of vomiting make you feel queasy? In a study of 385,000 internet responses to 34 unpleasant sounds, vomiting was rated as the worst. The sound of vomiting is so nauseating because of your mental associations to it. It brings up people’s most repulsive feelings of bodily discharge — in all its unhygienic glory. Interestingly, the acoustic properties of vomiting are not particularly noxious: it is neither rough nor sharp. Sensations associated with disgust are especially well learned by mammals because this skill is necessary to avoid poisonous foods.

This is a grinding sound in the frequency range associated with sharp noises. However, sharpness alone is not what makes this sound excruciating. It’s also very rough. The effect of nails on a blackboard is very difficult to reproduce with a recording, so although many lab studies using recorded sounds find this sound to be less annoying than others, it’s often reported to be individuals’ number one hated noise.

science

Dr. Harry Witchel is the author of You Are What You Hear (Algora Publishing, £1349). He is Discipline Leader in Physiology at Brighton & Sussex Medical School, where he researches the effects of music and noise.

50

51

October 2013

46 10 Most Annoying Noises

Harry Witchel presents the list of infuriating noises that will drive you up the wall

MEET THE LODGERS Our homes are our castles: places where we feel safe. But we are seldom at home alone… Thanks to the wonders of the scanning electron microscope, we have unprecedented views of the tiny creatures with which we coexist. We share our homes with a diverse array of organisms that take full advantage of the warm, safe, food-rich habitats we provide. As we move into the warmer summer months the numbers of these rent-free lodgers often increase dramatically. So, take this safari around your own home – you may be repulsed to find out who you’re sharing it with.

32 How To Buy Happiness

X 45

CAT FLEA These highly specialised wingless insects are ectoparasites – parasites that live on the outside of their host. The mandibles – the saw-like structures protruding below the jaw – pierce the host’s skin allowing the flea to get a blood meal. The cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis) does not generally infest humans. However, they can bite us and cat owners will be only too aware of the problems fleas can cause their animals. Fleas develop from eggs that hatch to form larvae that resemble tiny maggots. Larvae feed on dried blood from adult flea faeces before pupating, eventually emerging as adults and jumping onto a host. Although fleas are the vectors of disease, they are beautifully adapted for their parasitic lifestyle.

October 2013

58 Meet The Lodgers

Adam Hart focuses his microscope in the niches of your house to find your uninvited guests 2

SCIENCE

October 2013

PHOTO: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

science

MICROSCOPIC BUGS

57

Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton teach you how to spend your money to experience happiness

Contents

October 2013

FEATURES Science Nature

40 Predator Bay

46 10 Most Annoying Noises

science

science

science

nature

science

history

science

32 How To Buy Happiness

science

ON THE COVER

Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton share a new science of smart spending that allows you to get the most out of your money

46 10 Most

Annoying Noises Is late night party noise a nuisance?

ON THE COVER

Wildlife photographer Chris Fallows gets up close and personal with sharks, whales and dolphins as they fight for supremacy ON THE COVER

Do certain noises bring out the devil in you? Read on to see if your pet peeve has made it to Harry Witchel’s list of exasperating sounds

48 Our Future Underground

22 Snapshot The James Webb Space Telescope will make it easier to detect distant stars and galaxies

Does the solution to overcrowding lie beneath our feet? Daniel Cressey digs deep to find out if subterranean future is a possibility

54 Discovering Shahjahanabad

Discover Shahjahanabad - once the capital city of India. Historian Swapna Liddle takes you down history’s lane ON THE COVER

58 Meet The Lodgers

Do you believe your house is clean as a whistle? Barely visible to the naked eye, some creatures might already be prowling in your home

48 Our Future

Underground

Will we be burrowing underground in the near future?

66 Portfolio: Otters

Celebrated photographer Charlie Hamilton James presents candid shots of his favourite mammal, scampering behind his house - The Otters

72 Inside The Pages

An excerpt from physicist Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: From Big Bang to Black Holes, where the understanding of the universe is alluded to the Doppler effect

76 Inside The Human Brain

Find out how the process of memory, emotion, responsiveness and logic works in your brain

80 Big Idea: Gaia Theory

Robert Mathews talks about the Gaia Theory, which explains about interaction of organisms with the inorganic environment

80 The Big Idea

Can organisms have influence over non-living things?

40 Predator Bay Meet the marine predators of Predator Bay

64

History Of The World Is the conventional literature on global history correct?

October 2013

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Volume 3 Issue 4 Volume V June 2013 `100

FOR THE CURIOUS MIND

RISE OF THE

SUPERHUMAN Bionic technology turns science p40

CAN WE TRUST THE INTERNET?

HOW DINOSAURS CONQUERED THE WORLD LD

Asks Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger p38

Brute force or sheer luck?

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p Mar-Apr the t med Blue whale ins i ide callendar

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FOR THE CURIOUS MIND

W What hat ha h at is is iit? tt?? Wher Wh W heer ere re d does do oeess iitt cco come om mee ffrom? rom? rro om m?? Where And An A n nd dw what wh haatt d does oes ooe es iitt m mean? ean? eea an n??

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A Robot With Muscles, Bones aand Tendons? p46

10 Unintentional p56

The Ranthambhore Tigers by Valmik Thapar p78

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inbox From the editor Abe Lincoln had famously said, “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.” A simple idea but one that overflows with gravitas. How interesting a thought – that despite failures, hardships, tribulations, traumas…you can will your own happiness. Another American President, George Washington’s wife, Martha had said, “I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery and unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.” Disposition is defined as a habit, a preparation, a state of readiness, or a tendency to act in a specified way. And it is a certain part of our ‘disposition’ that Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton try to address in the cover story How To Buy Happiness (pg 32). Doable things, basic lifestyle habits that have been scientifically known to increase our happiness quotient. Follow this up by Norton’s fantastic Ted talk at www. ted.com/talks/michael_norton_how_to_buy_ happiness.html New issue, new stories. But some are off the cuff: 10 Most Annoying Noises, Our Future Underground and Meet the Lodgers (that happen to be the microscopic bugs in our homes). And the Gaia Theory. This month in the Big Idea (pg 80), Robert Matthews writes about this controversial theory, which suggests that organisms relate to their inorganic environment in a self-regulating way that maintains a balance that sustains life on Earth. That the man-made greenhouse effect may actually have prevented the next ice age.

Mrigank sharma (India Sutra)

Happy reading.

6

October 2013

Dr Swapna Liddle is co-convener of Delhi Chapter at The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and has been conducting heritage walks for over a decade. Her book, Delhi: 14 Historic Walks, gives the historical and architectural significance of the various monuments in Delhi. In this issue, she highlights Shahjahanabad’s heritage and existence as the capital city of the Mughals. See page 54 Charlie Hamilton James, is a wildlife photographer. Author of books like The Matewix, Kingfisher – Tales from the Halcyon River and Halcyon River Diaries, his works have also been published in the National Geographic magazine. In this issue, he offers a closer look at the life of the Otters in their natural habitat. See page 66

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Elizabeth Dunn, associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and Michael Norton, associate professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School, Boston, have co-authored the book Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, which talks about five core principals of smarter spending. Both authors have been published in The New York Times, Time, Forbes magazine and many more for their individual works. In this issue, they explain how choosing to spend money on experiences over materials or products can give you more happiness. See page 32

Enjoy your favourite magazine wherever you are

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Editorial, advertising and subscription enquiries BBC Knowledge Magazine, Worldwide Media, The Times of India Building, 4th floor, Dr. D. N. Road, Mumbai 400001 www.knowledgemagazine.in Printed and published by Joji Varghese for and on behalf of Worldwide Media Pvt. Ltd., The Times of India Building, 4th floor, Dr. D. N. Road, Mumbai 400001 and printed at Rajhans Enterprises, No. 134, 4th Main Road, Industrial Town, Rajajinagar, Bangalore 560044, India. Editor- Preeti Singh. The publisher makes every effort to ensure that the magazine’s contents are correct. However, we accept no responsibility for any errors or omissions. Unsolicited material, including photographs and transparencies, is submitted entirely at the owner’s risk and the publisher accepts no responsibility for its loss or damage. All material published in BBC Knowledge is protected by copyright and unauthorized reproduction in part or full is prohibited. BBC Knowledge is published by Worldwide Media Pvt. Ltd. under licence from Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited. Copyright © Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without permission. The BBC logo is a trade mark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence. © British Broadcasting Corporation 1996 February 2013

7

Q2 Chain Words: Dorsal, Swallow, Lowest, Ester, Errand, Random, Omen, Enact, Acted, Edger, German, Mango, Godown, Downward, Warden, Enter, Terrain, Rainbow, Bowling, Lingers Q3 Deductions: Limited, Futon, Air

Q5 Pick and Choose: Murray, Temporary, Deadlock, Canberra, Reindeer, Garrison

123rf.com X23

Solutions:

Picture Search: Anchor, Bandage, Basket, Bicycle, Bread, Cauliflower, Clock, Cushion, Dancer, Diamond, Flowers, Guitar, Italy, Map, Rabbit, Rocket

Q4 Mensa Puzzle: L. Starting at the top of each triangle, letters move forward by three places going clockwise, ending in the centre

October 2013

Q1 Go Figure: Easy: 4 + 7 + 7 – 7 = 11 Medium: 3 + 4 – 9 + 6 = 4 Hard: 4 x 9 - 2 - 7 = 27

8

Q6 Head & Tail: Not-Broken-Heart-Attack-Force-One-Day-Of Q7 Enigma Code: Compose, Comport, Promote, Forceps, Flipped, Deposit, Isotope Q8 Double Barrelled: Long

In the jumble below, the words represented by each of the 16 pictures are hidden either horizontally, vertically or diagonally forward or backwards but always in a straight line. See how many of them you can find? Look out for descriptive names.

PICTURE SEARCH OUT

Find your way out.

MAZING

In

Puzzle pit

Questions and challenges guaranteed to give your brain a workout

Q7 Enigma Code

Q1 Go Figure

Each colour in our code represents a letter. When you have cracked the code you will be able to make up seven words. The clue to the first word is given to help you get started.

Place the four numbers in the first, third, fifth, and seventh boxes and whatever operators you care to use in the second, fourth and sixth boxes in the correct order to get the answer. Use the numbers only once. The operators: ÷

X

+

The Clue: Produce a literary word

–

Easy

P

= 11 4

7

7

P

7

Medium

P

=4 3

4

6

9

P =27

Hard 2

4

6

P P

9

Q2 Chain words

Solve the six clues by choosing the right combination of letter sets given below. Each of the letter set can be used only once and only in the order given. The number at the end of the clues specifies how many sets of letters are used in the solution.

Form a continuous path of words from START to FINISH by connecting the word parts given in the boxes. There are two parts to each word and the second part of one word is the first part of the next. You won’t necessarily need to visit every box to achieve your aim. Start

1. 2013 Wimbledon Champion (2)

DOR SAL ACT ED ITS

3. Impasses or stalemate (3)

EST

4. Capital of Australia (3)

LOW

EN

GER MAN

ER RAND OM DOWN GO `MED

TER

EN

WARD ER

Q3 Deduction

S H O T B O W B O A T RIS

DE

POR

ER

DLO

GAR

ARY

BER

DEA

RAY

RE

RA

CK

IN

MUR

ON

H A N D

Q6 Head and Tail

Look at the clue to solve the answer in the form of a compound word. The second part of the next answer is the first part of the next answer. Working Properly

N

Not

The result of breakup Coronary failure

Q4 Mensa Puzzle

Offensive military power

Which letter goes in the middle of the third triangle?

B K

H O R N

CAN

I

H

What word can be placed in front of the five words shown to form in each case another word?

TEM

D

T

Q8 Double Barrelled

2. Not permanent (3)

6. Fortified military post (3)

You are given a 9-letter word. Your job is to break up this word into 9 separate letters and place them on the dashes to spell a 7-letter word, a 5-letter word, and a 3-letter word. You can use each letter only once. FORMULATE I

P

5. Santa Claus’ transport (4)

AL RAIN BOW LING ERS FINISH

I

P

Q5 Pick and Choose

P

E

V

Y

Air

C

S

I

?

(movie) Eventually

F

reckoning

of October 2013

9

Puzzle pit Q9 SCRAMBLE

Solve the four anagrams and move one letter to each square to form four ordinary words. Now arrange the letters marked with an asterisk (*) to form the answer to the riddle or to fill in the missing words as indicated. Now arrange the letters marked with an asterisk (*) to form the answer to the riddle or to fill in the missing words as indicated. ARERS

*

*

*

NTXIO

*

BGHILT

*

IKRSFY

* * *

*

Q11 Suspended sentence

You’re writing the ____ of your ____ one moment at a time. (5,…,4)

Each of the words at the top of the columns has to be placed in one of the boxes directly below, but not necessarily in the same order as they appear. When you’ve got them correctly arranged, they will form a quotation, which can be read line by line from left to right. THINGS WHO ESCAPE ARE DREAM OF THOSE COGNIZANT DREAM WHO WHICH ONLY

Q10 One Letter Crossword A

N

D

A

A

O

S

N

P

E

B M

T

A

A

N

R

K

Q12 Today’s Teaser

Q13 Hidato

1) I am a three digit number. My tens digit is five more than my ones digit. My hundreds digit is eight less than my tens digit. What number am I?

The goal of Hidato is to fill the grid with consecutive numbers that connect horizontally, vertically or diagonally from the first to the last number in the grid. The first and last numbers of the puzzle and some others are already filled in.

2) A mother gave birth to twin boys, but they were born in different years and on different days. And no, the boys are not part of 2 sets. How can this be possible?

O A

T

P

BY DAY THOSE MANY BY NIGHT

3) If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter “A”? 4) This is a test to gauge your mental flexibility, creativity and cunning. Good Luck! (Example: 16 O in a P. Answer: 16 Ounces in a Pound) 50p make H a R

Q9 Scramble: Rears, Toxin, Blight, Frisky – You’re writing the story of your life one moment at a time. Solutions:

Q12 Today’s Teaser: 1) 194 2) One was born on December 31 at 11:59 p.m. and the other January 1 at 12:00 a.m! 3) One Thousand 4) 50 paise make half a rupee

Q13 Hidato: October 2013

Q10 One Letter Crossword: Wand, Wasp, Cat, Cone, Boar, Moat, Top, Tank

123rf.com X2

Q11 Suspended Sentence: Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who only dream by night. 10

Think n Win Crossword NO.17

Pens at the ready and solve!

Solve crosswor d & Win Exciting Prizes

✂

Across 1 City in Uttar Pradesh (6) 5 Refrained, abstained or halted (8) 9 Plain and unsophisticated (8) 10 Powerful celestial radio source (6) 11 ___ ___ of : observe, act upon

1. C. S. Sharath, Vidyavardhaka College of Engineering, Mysore 2. Pranav Ahlawat, Rashtriya Military School, Bengaluru 3. Kshitij Tripathi, St. Cecilia’s Public School, New Delhi

(4,6) 12 Boxing contest (4) 13 D-Day landing site (8) 16 By fits and ___ : spasmodically? (6) 17 Loose skin on throat (6) 19 Something served alongside the main course (4,4) 21 Greek letters - “seat” changed? (4) 22 Pertaining to food or nutrition (10) 25 Pious or holy (6) 26 Raising or hauling up (8) 27 One who resists attacks (8) 28 Roland ___ : famous venue of the French Open Tennis Championships? (6)

4. Bhanu Garg, St. John’s School, Faridabad 5. Garima Talwar, Convent of Jesus & Mary, New Delhi 6. Swarleen Virk, Yadavindra Public School, Patiala 7. Ummesalama S. Karu, Sardar Dastur Girls High School, Pune 8. Rizza A. N., Student, Chennai 9. Yash Jain, Student, Indore 10. Shayari Kolathaya, Puttur 11. Sankalpa Keshari, Bhopal 12. Sutirtha Bharati Das, Gospel Home School, Hooghly

Down

2 Deadly African virus (5) 3 A chief officer or magistrate of old (5) 4 Tropical cyclone; hurricane (7) 5 Mass divided by volume in physics? (7) 6 Follow-ups of stories or novels (7) 7 Right nautically (9) 8 Appraises, surveys or assays? (9) 14 At that place, yonder (4,5) 15 Significant event or stage in life or history (9) 18 Established or stationed? (7) 19 Mr Dhawan in our cricket team (7) 20 Following a food regime (7) 23 Private teacher (5) 24 ___ Starr : one of the four Beatles? (5)

Those who also got it right!

13. Pranav Nambiar, Udayachal High School, Mumbai 14. Sanakriti Jain, Student, Faridabad

Your Details Name:

15. Mohit Aggarwal, Banker, New Delhi

Age:

16. Mrs. Shubhra Jain, Teacher, MES Kishore Kendra, Bengaluru

Address:

17. Ojaswi Bhatia, Housewife, Noida PinCode: Tel:

18. Varun Karmakar, Retired, Secunderabad

School/Institution/Occupation:

19. Andrew Williams, Marketing Manager, Mumbai 20. Hiteshwari Reddy, via email

Email:

How to enter for the crossword: Post your entries to BBC Knowledge Editorial, Crossword No.15 Worldwide Media, The Times of India Bldg, 4th floor, Dr Dadabhai Navroji Road, Mumbai 400001 or email bbcknowledge@ wwm.co.in by October 10, 2013. Entrants must supply their name, address and phone number. How it’s done: The puzzle will be familiar to crossword enthusiasts already, although the British style may be unusual as crossword grids vary in appearance from 11

October 2013

country to country. Novices should note that the idea is to fill the white squares with letters to make words determined by the sometimes cryptic clues to the right. The numbers after each clue tell you how many letters are in the answer. All spellings are UK. Good luck! Terms and conditions: Only residents of India are eligible to participate. Employees of Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. are not eligible to participate. The winners will be selected in a lucky draw. The decision of the judges will be final.

Announcing the winners of Crossword No. 16

Solution of crossword NO. 16

Vaishnavi Mahimkar Parle Tilak Vidalaya English Medium School, Mumbai • Om Nair Euro School, Navi Mumbai • Ashcharya Chaubey ONGC, Andhra Pradesh

xxx

123rf.com

✂

June 2013

11

QA &

Your Questions Answered [email protected]

HIGHLIGHTS EWhat is an itch? p14 E Why do we forget things? p15 E Could there have been more than one Big Bang? p16 E How many people can use a cafe’s Wi-Fi at once? p18 E Why do we read from left to right and top to bottom? p20 E What is the best way to build a sandcastle? p21

Expert PANEL Stuart Blackman A zoologist-turned-science writer, Stuart is a contributor to BBC Wildlife Magazine.

Susan Blackmore (SB) A visiting professor at the University of Plymouth, UK, Susan is an expert on psychology and evolution.

Can dogs sense fear? Yes, in at least two ways. First they are highly sensitive to body language, as were their ancestors, grey wolves. Like them, domestic dogs have the instincts needed to hunt in packs and organise themselves into a hierarchy. So each dog needs to know its place and respond to how others behave. All this can be seen in their reactions to us. People who fear dogs often stiffen up and stare straight at them, which dogs can interpret as aggression. Whether smell is involved remains unproven, but when we are afraid we sweat more and secrete different chemicals onto our skins. So it’s not impossible that dogs can literally smell our fear. SB

Alastair Gunn Alastair is a radio astronomer at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, UK.

Robert Matthews Robert is a writer and researcher. He is a Visiting Reader in Science at Aston University, UK.

Gareth Mitchell As well as lecturing at Imperial College London, Gareth is a presenter of Click 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.

thinkstock X2, NASA/CHANDRA, GETTY

KNOW SPOT The first planet to orbit to stars, like Luke Skywalker’s home of Tatooine in Star Wars is Kepler-16b.

Ask the Experts? Email our panel at [email protected] We’re sorry, but we cannot reply to questions individually.

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October 2013

“Funny? I’m funny how? What, I amuse you?”

What’s the best way to defog a mirror?

A mirror fogs up because glass has a much higher specific heat capacity than air. In other words, the hot water from the shower heats up the surrounding air more quickly than the glass of the mirror. When water vapour from the shower reaches the glass, it cools down and condenses. But the surface tension of the water causes it to form as tiny droplets and these create thousands of lenses that refract the light into a homogenous grey blur. If you play a hairdryer against the

Surprisingly, putting shave foam on your mirror as well as your face will make shaving easier

mirror, you’ll evaporate the existing water and heat the glass to prevent more condensation forming. Alternatively, prevent the mirror from misting up in the first place by rubbing shaving foam onto the glass and polishing lightly without rinsing. This leaves a thin detergent film that breaks up the surface tension of the water droplets. Now condensation forms as a continuous sheet, rather than droplets, which means your mirror shouldn’t fog up for a week or so. LV

How do X-rays escape a black hole? Material pulled off a nearby star is superheated as it enters a black hole, giving off powerful beams of X-rays

Nothing can escape a black hole, and that includes X-rays. The high-energy X-rays associated with black holes aren’t actually emitted from the black hole itself. Instead, material in the vicinity of these compact, dense objects is subjected to extremely strong gravitational forces. The resulting turbulence and friction

heats the material to millions of degrees, creating very strong X-ray emissions. Black holes can’t be seen directly since not even light can escape them, but the X-ray radiation is convincing evidence for their existence because nothing else creates such huge amounts of energy. AG

Green sky at night, tourist board’s delight

Why are aurorae mostly green? Aurorae are caused by energetic particles bombarding the atmosphere. These particles excite atoms such as oxygen and nitrogen, resulting in wonderful displays of light. The colour of auroral light depends on the specific atom or molecule involved and the degree of excitation, and there are a number of reasons why green is the predominant colour. Firstly, the change in the oxygen atom that creates this colour requires relatively low levels of energy to excite compared to other abundant elements such as nitrogen. Secondly, at the altitude where most aurorae form, atomic oxygen is the densest component of the atmosphere and so is most likely to be excited by incoming particles. Thirdly, other oxygen excitations (that can produce red light) are quenched by collisions between the atoms and other particles. And finally, the human eye is naturally more sensitive to green light, so other, subtler colours can easily go unnoticed. AG

October 2013

13

QA &

Your Questions Answered [email protected]

Can you save fuel by slipstreaming other vehicles? Yes. vehicles create a region of relatively low-pressure air behind them, and it is indeed possible to reduce fuel consumption by getting into this ‘slip-stream’. According to research published last year by the University of Aachen, Germany, lorries can save around 17 per cent in fuel by tailgating each other. Don’t try it yourself, though. RM

As the Universe expands, objects become further and further apart

STATS VITAL

33.8pro6cessing

e ese ps is th petaflo corded by Chin 2, speed re mputer Tianhe superco was declared which d’s fastest the worl June on 17

How rapidly is the Universe expanding? Explanations of how the Universe expands often draw analogies with a balloon being inflated, with coins stuck on to represent clusters of galaxies bound together by gravity. While this gets across the idea that it’s the space between clumps of matter that’s expanding, it doesn’t capture the special way in which the expansion takes place. The cosmos expands ‘isotropically’, keeping the same appearance in all directions. This means that on the largest scales, every point moves away from every other according to a simple law which states that their relative speed is proportional to the distance between them. This is measured by the so-called Hubble constant, which is worked out by observing the speed of galaxies moving away from us by their distance. The results show that on the biggest scales, every point in the Universe moves away from every other at a speed of 1km/h for every 13 light years of distance. RM

Alamy x3, nasa, press association, Thinkstock X2

Why does a tortoise live so long? Tortoises are only at significant risk of predation for the first few years of their life. After that, their hard shell and the fact that they spend most of the day in their burrow keeps them safe. Tortoises can endure long periods of drought and also have very slow metabolisms. Most live for 70 years but the record is 188 years. LV A pet tortoise will probably outlive you

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October 2013

What is an itch? An itch is anything that makes you want to scratch. We have itch receptors in the top two layers of our skin and they look very similar to pain receptors – essentially they are just bare nerve fibres. But itches are transmitted to the brain in a different way and whereas pain causes us to reflexively pull away from the source, an itch makes us want to get in there and give it a good old scratch. Itching probably evolved as a way of coping with biting insects and other ectoparasites. The itch encourages us to swat mosquitoes, and pick lice and ticks off ourselves and each other. Itches can be triggered by the central nervous system as well, even if nothing is touching your skin. This is why itches can be contagious like yawns. It might have warned our ancestors to start swatting flies proactively, or encouraged mutual grooming sessions. LV

Now all you’ve got to do is remember what you tied the string around your finger for

The dead outnumber the living by 14 to 1

How many people have ever lived? The US population Research Bureau estimates around 107 billion, but this figure involves a lot of assumptions. For one thing, how do you define when humans first began? For another, population records didn’t get anywhere close to reliable before 0 AD. Even population estimates for the comparatively well-documented Roman Empire can vary by a factor of two. Plagues in Europe in the 14th Century and the Byzantine Empire in the 6th Century had a huge effect on world population, but there may have been other more ancient catastrophes that we don’t know about. LV

Does gravity affect electric current? Despite its ubiquity, gravity is in fact a very feeble force – indeed, it’s the weakest of all the so-called ‘fundamental forces’ at work in the cosmos. More specifically, it’s around a billion billion billion billion times more feeble than the electromagnetic force that drives electrons in circuits, and so has a negligible effect on electricity. RM

Why do we forget things? How could we not? Taking vision alone, our eyes make saccades (large eye movements) about five or six times a second, and take in vast quantities of information each time. The visual system in the brain then begins throwing away most of that information in order to select what it needs us to see and respond to. If we had to remember everything we looked at in a single minute, it would mean several hundred highly detailed images. Our brains would be completely swamped and we would be unable to understand what we saw. As for life events, the problem is not just how much information is stored, but how it can be retrieved. We may hold memories for some fact or event but then be unable to find them fast enough when we want to. And then there might be ‘motivated forgetting’, when we simply do not want to remember something painful or unpleasant. Memories may not be completely lost even when they seem to be forgotten. SB

KNOW SPOT Electricity is unaffected by the relatively feeble force of gravity

On 8 March 2011, Jayasimha Ravirala of India memorised a 264-digit binary number in one minute – a world record.

October 2013

15

QA &

Your Questions Answered [email protected]

Why do moths eat clothes?

Why do some people feel sick if they read in a moving vehicle?

The adult clothes moth Tineola bisselliella doesn’t eat at all. But its larvae do, and they can digest the protein keratin that is found in wool, silk and leather. The larvae can’t drink water directly and need a food source that contains moisture: wool is particularly good for this, and a dark wardrobe is an ideal spot. After about two months, they pupate into the adult form, fly off to find a mate and repeat the cycle. LV

Motion sickness in general is caused when your inner ear and your eyes disagree about whether you’re moving. When you read in a car, your visual field stays still but your inner ear detects the twists and turns. This sensory conflict triggers nausea, possibly because the brain thinks you’ve eaten something toxic that’s making you hallucinate. About a third of us are more prone to motion sickness, with children aged 2-12, the elderly, migraine sufferers and pregnant women among the high risk groups. LV

It’s the clothes moths’ larvae that like to tuck into your jumpers

getty, thinkstock, press association, alamy

Could there have been more than one Big Bang? A common misconception is that time itself began with the Big Bang. There is, in fact, no physical reason to suppose this was the case. So some scientists have postulated that the Universe might be infinitely large and infinitely old. In one theory, matter and energy are continually replenished in an endless cycle of Big Bangs. Although such theories offer tantalising clues to some puzzling aspects of modern cosmology, observational evidence for them is extremely hard (if not impossible) to come by. AG

Could the Big Bang happen over and over again?

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October 2013

Sick bag at the ready…

Can financial crashes be predicted? Financial crashes occur when investors the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology suddenly decide prices are too divorced claims to have found a tell-tale sign. from the true value of some asset. Over They look for a wave-like pattern in the the centuries, crashes have taken place rising price of the asset, whose peaks in everything from stock markets to the get closer together according to a price of tulips. With even Isaac Newton certain rule. Prof Sornette and his losing a fortune by failing to spot colleagues have used this so-called a market crash in 1720, log-normal periodicity to Traders in Manila it’s clear that predicting predict some famous react to the global them is far from simple. crashes, including the financial downturn, Even so, a team led by 2008 global financial 2008 Prof Didier Sornette at crisis. RM

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HOW DINOSAURS CONQUERED THE WORLD Brute force or sheer luck?

p72

www.knowledgemagazine.in

Volume 3 Issue 3 April 2013 `100

Life

SCIENCE t HISTORY t NATURE t FOR THE CURIOUS MIND FREE !

Mar-Apr med the Blue whale inside calendar

t What is it? t
Where does it come from? t
And what does it mean?

R.N.I. MAHENG/2010/35422

A Robot With Muscles, Bones and Tendons? p46

10 Unintentional Scientific Discoveries p56

The Ranthambhore Tigers by Valmik Thapar p78

QA &

Your Questions Answered [email protected]

How fast is a chameleon’s tongue? It’s around 21km/h (13mph) depending on temperature and other conditions. This speed is hard to measure as chameleon tongues shoot out to a distance of up to one and a half times their body length, catch an insect prey on the sticky end and then retract back into their mouth in a flash. Yet, using X-ray film and high-speed video (up to 3,000 frames a second), researchers have managed to capture how this feat is achieved. The tongue accelerates from zero to six metres a second in about 20 milliseconds – a rate far faster than any known muscle can achieve. Instead, the chameleon has a kind of spiral spring or catapult inside its mouth that is made from elastic collagen tissue. This lies between its tongue bone and the accelerator muscle, and stores energy so that it can be released very fast – rather like the way a bow stores energy to release an arrow. SB

Press association, solent news agency, alamy, ILLUSTRATOR: PAUL WESTON

Quick-tongued insurance salesman have nothing on the chameleon

A protestor throws a tear gas canister back at riot police in Istanbul

How many people can use a café’s Wi-Fi at once? Most routers will handle 255 simultaneous users, more than enough for the average coffee shop. The main limiting factor is the cafe’s incoming broadband. If it has a cable connection offering 50mbps and wishes to keep its customers happy by offering a consistent speed of at least 1mbps per user, then the coffee shop’s limit is 50 people. GM

Café society proved not to be that social

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Why does tear gas irritate your eyes? The most common form of tear gas used by riot police is 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, called CS gas after the scientists who discovered it, Ben Corson and Roger Stoughton. When it comes into contact with wet skin, such as the eyes, nose, throat or even sweaty skin, it dissolves and reacts with the sulfhydryl

chemical groups that are present in many of the enzymes in the body. In particular, CS gas affects the ion channels responsible for nerve conduction in the trigeminal nerves of the nose and face. The over-stimulation of these nerves triggers sudden tear and mucus production, as well as stinging pain. LV

how it works The Nanopatch It’s amazing to think that while we now have the ability to print out body parts from a 3D printer, we still have to deliver medicines to our bodies by stabbing a needle into our flesh. It’s painful. Enter the Nanopatch - a revolutionary new vaccine-delivery system from medical technology start-up Vaxxas. The Nanopatch is an array of about 20,000 tiny ‘microprojections’ that are able to fit onto a piece of silicon measuring just 1cm2. These microscopic pins are coated in a dry form of a vaccine. When the patch is applied they penetrate just beneath the outer layer of the skin, the epidermis, which is rich in immune cells. The high number of immune cells just beneath the skin enables the Nanopatch to be much more effective at creating an immune response than a needle injecting into muscle. It means that a much smaller amount of a vaccine, as little as 1/100th of a typical dose, can be used to the same effect. This is especially important in the developing world, where vaccines against diseases like malaria can prove costly. The Nanopatch is currently undergoing a usability study in Papua New Guinea, where vaccines are in short supply.

The 20,000 microprojections only pierce the top layer of skin, as can be seen in this magnified view

The Nanopatch is smaller than a postage stamp

The microprojections are held in a 1cm2 sliver of silicon

There are over 20,000 microprojections on each Nanopatch Immune cells

The epidermis – the outer layer of skin

The inner layer of the skin, the dermis, is rich in immune cells

October 2013

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QA &

Your Questions Answered [email protected]

STATS VITAL

n 11’s blateislt lesitiomate oonf

“My second language is Chinese don’t you know?”

ti N is the U world’s popula ase e re c th t in a n h a w y 2100 – ate will be b previous estim e th n o lion il b .1 0 of 1

Why do we read from left to right and top to bottom? It’s a mainly a matter of convention. Egyptian hieroglyphs could be written in either direction, with the animal and human shapes facing towards the start of the line to show you which way to read it. The advantage of the left-toright system used in most of the world is that a right-handed person doesn’t cover or smudge what they have just written, but there isn’t any very good evidence that this is why it is so widely used. Arabic script is still written right-to-left, and Chinese and Japanese can both be written either from left-to-right in horizontal rows, or from top-to-bottom in vertical columns. LV

What was the first ever language? There are currently around 6,000 different languages spoken around the world. Using statistical techniques to analyse the rate at which words and dialects mutate, it has been calculated that it would have taken at least 100,000 years for a single language to have diversified that much. That would take us back to the middle of the Stone Age, around the time that Homo sapiens first emerged as a species. It’s possible that earlier human species such as Homo heidelbergensis (600,000 years ago) or even Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) had language, but the evidence for this is much weaker. If language evolved before the human migration from Africa, 120,000 to 150,000 years ago, it is possible that all the

languages spoken today have evolved from a single root language, in the same way that all humans alive today have a common maternal ancestor. But even if this is true, we have no way of knowing if there were other, older languages in use at the time of that migration that have subsequently died out. There have been several attempts to trace the family tree of our languages and find ancestral vocabulary and grammar. In 1994, Stanford University linguist Merritt Ruhlen suggested several root words that may have belonged to this ancestor language, including ‘ku’ (‘who’), and ‘ma’ (‘what’). But this is still controversial and many linguists regard the search for a ‘first’ language as pointless. LV

getty X2, alamy x2, thinkstock, superstock

What makes a rooster crow at dawn?

Japanese text is read from top to bottom

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October 2013

Mainly his biological clock. Roosters or cocks typically begin to crow about two hours before dawn, and until recently no-one knew why. Since roosters also crow at other times of day, it seemed possible that their morning call was a response to external cues such as sound and light, rather than being internally generated. To find out, scientists from Nagoya University in Japan isolated two groups of roosters; one was given 12 hours of bright light and 12 hours of dim light. The other lived in continuous dim light. The first group crowed before ‘dawn’ as expected but so did the others, which had no external cues to go on. As the days went by their timing became less accurate. So it seems that, as in humans, a chicken’s biological clock needs to be reset by the Sun or it will gradually get out of sync with the real world. SB

Some people just have to show off, don’t they?

Are people who live in hot places more hot-headed? In general, yes. Various studies have shown that violent crime rates rise in warm weather – up to a point. In the US, crime rates rise as temperature increases up to around 26°C, but start to fall again at around 32°C. Hot weather makes us more stressed, which raises adrenalin levels and reduces our ability to think rationally. We also spend more time outdoors when it’s hot and so interact more with others generally. If you plot global homicide rates on a map, you’ll find that the most violent countries do tend to cluster toward the equator (Russia is a notable exception), but this has a lot to do with deprivation in tropical countries as well. LV

“I said only a sprinkling of parmesan!”

What’s the best way to build a sandcastle? Amazingly, scientists have only recently got to grips with this – despite the importance of understanding the behaviour of sand and similar ‘granular’ materials in civil engineering. As every kid who’s played on a beach knows, dry sand refuses to form anything but a pathetic cone-shaped heap, while wet sand just slumps. Clearly there must be an optimum water content, and last year, researchers at the University of Amsterdam showed that this is around just 1 per cent. That’s enough to ensure the water molecules

bridge the gaps between the sand grains, gluing them together by capillary attraction. They’re amazingly effective at doing so, too. The team found that by using the optimum amount of water they could create a vertical column of sand that was 2.5m (8ft 2in) tall yet only 40cm (15in) in diameter before it collapsed. Formed into a traditional sandcastle shape with sloping sides, the tower could be even taller. So, the best way to build a sandcastle is to add just a dash of water to your sand mix. RM

How much can a human sweat? During exercise, most of us will sweat no more than 1.4 litres per hour. The highest sweat rate recorded by an athlete was 3.7 litres per hour by the marathon runner Alberto Salazar in 1984. But unless you drink to replenish lost fluid and electrolytes, you will suffer seizure and heart failure once you have lost around 25 percent of your bodyweight in sweat. That’s about 17.5 litres for a 70kg adult – but you’d be in no shape to run quite a while before that. LV

Sweating excessively can kill you in the long run… but it would have to be a very long run

Snapshot Touring telescope Model Scope

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This is NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, but it will never reach space. That’s because this is only a model of the real thing, pictured at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival which took place recently in Austin, Texas. The model is life-sized, measuring 24m long, 12m wide and 12m tall. The structure is dominated by the telescope’s array of hexagonal mirrors and the multilayered sunshield beneath. On the real telescope, the sunshield will protect the mirror and instruments from the heat of the Sun – and the relatively puny amount of heat released by Earth – making it easier for the scope to detect faint infrared light from distant stars and galaxies. “The structure that goes into space will mostly be made out of lightweight composite materials, similar to what you find in golf clubs or even car bodies,” says Scott Willoughby, James Webb Space Telescope Program Manager at Northrop Grumman, the company that built the model and is leading the telescope’s construction. “The model, however, has to survive the Earth’s wind and rain, so it’s made from aluminium and steel.” The model has been on tour since 2005. You can watch a timelapse video of it being assembled at bit.ly/15ICnBI The real thing, costing an eye-watering $8bn (£5.2bn), is still being built and is pencilled in for a 2018 launch.

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SCIENCE Nature

nasa

Snapshot

October 2013

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Science NATURE

Snapshot

Slaughter in the water Raising a stink

reuters

This is Rio de Janeiro’s Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, the venue for rowing competitions in the 2016 Olympics. It required an extensive clean-up in March after tens of thousands of fish died due to low levels of oxygen in the water. The causes of such piscine carnage, known as ‘fish kills’, are usually “a combination of factors linked to not only the geography and hydrology [properties and circulation] of the water, but also the meteorological conditions,” explains Dr James Ebdon, an expert in water quality at the University of Brighton. “It is the decomposition of biological material such as dead algae by bacteria that most commonly leads to oxygen depletion and mass fish kills,” Ebdon says. Just before this kill in Brazil, heavy rain washed rotten algae into the lagoon, which is connected to the Atlantic via a canal that splits the Ipanema and Leblon beaches. “Warm, shallow waters, such as those present in the lagoon, have less capacity to carry dissolved oxygen than cooler waters. This means that such fish kills can occur more readily,” says Ebdon. An estimated Photo: Reuters65 tonnes of dead yellowtail, catfish, tilapia and sea bass had to be scooped out of the lagoon’s waters.

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October 2013

Snapshot

Nature

Crop circles in the desert In a strip of desert that stretches 2000km from Angola to South Africa are these strange circles of bare ground surrounded by a ring of plants. Known as ‘fairy circles’, their origin has baffled scientists for years. But now one ecologist says he has the explanation. “I started to use long winter nights at home in Germany to fly with Google Earth over the whole sub-continent,” says Professor Norbert Jürgens at the University of Hamburg. He found some of the fairy circles to be as large as 50m2. “That really attracted me, so I went on the first expedition to Angola in 2006, immediately after the end of the civil war.” Jürgens found that one species is nearly always present within the circles – sand termites. He says they munch away at the roots of grasses, which kills the plants so they aren’t around to gulp up the paltry 100mm of rainfall that falls annually. The termites maintain these grass-free patches so they have a moist environment to live in, says Jürgens. Other ecologists think the termites are innocent, and that the formations are a result of plants competing for resources. Jürgens is convinced he has the right answer, but says: “Many research questions are left, especially as regards the behaviour of the termites and their communication.”

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Norbert Juergens

Sand designs

Comment & Analysis

Is evolution dead? It’s supposed to be an unstoppable force of nature. But with huge advances in medical care, technology and social support, most humans today live long enough to pass on their genes. Has evolution come to a standstill in our species? Two of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists argue the case

What is the future going to be like? If you YES believe science fiction it is not

alamy, getty, science photo library

Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London, UK. He is the author of Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated (Ballantine, 2001).

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going to be very different from today – tribes, empires, wars, with a little decorous love interest on the way. However familiar their behaviour, though, the imagined heroes and villains of years to come tend to look quite different from ourselves – giant green skulls, massive brow ridges and tentacles, perhaps even wheels. Natural selection – the process that would drive this progression – ultimately results from inherited differences in the ability to reproduce. Once, it raged through most nations. In Shakespeare’s day two out of every three babies died before they were 21 and even in Darwin’s time almost half did. Many of those deaths came from disease, starvation or violence, and there are inherited components in the ability to withstand all of them, such as the

variant that gives resistance to smallpox. Now, most babies in the developed world, once they have survived the difficult first few months, survive until they are grown up, so the differences that once fed Darwin’s mechanism have largely gone away. But while staying alive is relatively straightforward nowadays, finding a willing mate is more difficult. The range of success is wider, too, particularly for males. Each time a man has sex he makes enough sperm to fertilise every woman in Europe. In the old days, sexual inequality meant that was almost possible: Moulay Ismael of Morocco admitted to 888 children. There was, needless to say, more than one Mrs Moulay. As a result, around 100 of his male fellow citizens must have had no wives, so no children at all. What did that mean for natural selection? It meant there were great

differences in reproductive success. And any variation in the ability to attract a mate is raw material for selection. Now, that pattern has changed: variation has all but disappeared. Most people have zero to four offspring, with the reproductive Lotharios almost extinct. If natural selection favours variation in the ability to stay alive and to have sex, then once that variation has gone it loses its power. Put the figures for survival and for reproduction together, and you come up with a statistic, the ‘opportunity for natural selection’. In the developed world, it has declined by around ninetenths in the past few centuries. The result: for the time being at least (and keep your fingers crossed) there is no selection, and evolution on the Darwin model is over. In other words, if you are worried about what Utopia is going to be like, calm down – you are living in it now.

There are two things that must happen for human NO evolution to come to an end: 1)

PZ Myers is associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris. His blog, ‘Pharyngula’, can be found at http://scienceblogs.com/ pharyngula/

everyone must be genetically identical, and 2) the copying of DNA from one generation to the next must become flawless. The former is simply not the case, while the latter is physically impossible – and these facts of life are the two engines that drive the appearance of anything new during the process of evolution. Genetic diversity is propagated by the reshuffling of alleles (all the different possible forms of a gene). We human beings do this by using sex. Every child is the product of the random assortment of alleles from two individuals, producing a unique combination of alleles every time. This is a significant source of new variants and forms. We owe the fact that the copying of DNA between generations is imperfect to the phenomenon of mutation. This is a change to the sequence of ‘letters’, called nucleotides, in DNA, and it is unavoidable. The most common mechanism is simply errors in copying. No machine can be immune to error, and that goes for the biological machinery of the cell, which is responsible for copying each of the

For human evolution to come to an end: 1] everyone must be genetically identical, and 2] the copying of DNA from one generation to the next must become flawless

Even ‘identical’ twins can have small genetic differences

three billion letters in the human genome each time a cell divides. And cells have to divide or we couldn’t produce populations of sperm and egg cells. Our cells are actually very good at copying, but there’s still a new mutation roughly once every three cell divisions, and it takes many divisions to make a sperm or egg. Most of these don’t have any effect, but it does mean that every single one of us is a mutant in the purest sense of the word. In spite of this, one common argument for the end of human evolution is that we’ve loosened the constraints of natural selection with our technology and social support systems. That does not imply an end of evolution though: selection is a conservative force that culls

novelty. So less selection allows greater amounts of genetic diversity in a population. Not that we’ve actually eliminated selection, of course. Perhaps we don’t have to outrun sabre-toothed tigers anymore, but our offspring still have to overcome the hurdle of acquiring skills that will get them a good job and finding a mutually fertile mate sometime before they die. Selection can be a subtle force, and you can’t escape it. There is one way we could see human evolution end: if we became extinct. Otherwise, evolution is a natural and unavoidable property of living, replicating systems, and it is absurd to talk of any living population as not evolving.

With survival now easier, have we stopped evolving?

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psychology

SCIENCE

y u b o t How s s e n i p Hap any people say it, but few believe that money can’t buy happiness. After all, have you ever met anyone who’s turned down a raise? And yet, decades of research show that the relationship between income and happiness is surprisingly weak. A 2010 Princeton University study of almost half a million Americans found that once individuals were earning $75,000 (£49,000) per

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year, additional income had no bearing whatsoever on their day-to-day feelings of happiness. In fact, how much money you make may matter less than what you do with the money you have. A tide of new research provides insight into how to use money in happier ways, whether you have a little or a lot. So read on to find out how to spend your way to a happy life. October 2013

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Todd Duncan, Steph Stevens

Money can buy you happiness. You just have to know how to spend it. Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton share the surprising new science of smarter spending

Science

psychology

Nicole Mantie, 37, and her husband Dean, a couple we met during the course of our research, dreamed of going on safari in Africa. But they had bought a house with a bathroom in a dire state, so they figured the safari would have to wait. After hearing their friends’ stories of a magical five-star safari, though, they decided to go for it, bathroom be damned. While it’s tempting to judge splurging on a safari as less sensible than investing in a better bathroom, a decade of scientific research reveals the surprising wisdom of their decision. Study after study shows that people get more happiness from buying experiences than from buying material things. Why? Experiences are more likely to bring us together with other people, whereas material things are often enjoyed alone (thankfully, in the case of bathrooms). In fact, research carried out by the College of Business at Stony Brook University, New 34

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York, found that a solitary experience made no more difference to a person’s happiness than buying a physical item. Experiences also make for better stories. In one study, researchers from the University of Colorado discovered that pairs of strangers enjoyed talking more when they discussed experiential (versus material) purchases – and ended up liking each other better. Nicole giddily recounts getting kissed by a giraffe while on safari. No matter what your stance on interspecies saliva swapping is, you must admit this experience makes for a more interesting story than fitting a new loo. The experience CV In fact, some people seek out extreme, memorable – and even unpleasant – activities to add to what researchers call the ‘experiential CV’. In Kenya, Nicole and Dean stayed at an unusual hotel called

The Ark, where guests are regularly roused from their beds in the middle of the night. Although rude awakenings don’t sound like the makings of a great vacation, Nicole and Dean were thrilled. They wanted to see The Big Five (elephant, rhino, cape buffalo, leopard, and lion) and were happy to leap out of bed if it meant adding a new animal to their ‘collection’. A sign on the hotel wall explained that the buzzer would go off once for an elephant, twice for a rhino, three times for a leopard, and four times for an ‘unusual sighting’. At 3am, the buzzer went off four times and Nicole and Dean rushed out to see the unusual sighting. What was waiting for them? Nicole laughs, “A porcupine.” And that’s another property of experiences that makes them superior to material things – we can often see the positive (or at least funny) side of experiences, even when they don’t work out as planned.

Looking back on their trip, Nicole says she has no regrets. Recent research conducted at Cornell University shows that people are much less likely to regret buying experiences than buying material things. The researchers asked students to think back on their past spending decisions and describe their biggest single regret. When it came to material purchases, most students described something they regretted buying. But when it came to experiential purchases, over 80 per cent described an experience they regretted not buying when they had the chance. Because experiences seem unique and irreplaceable, we feel more remorse when we let them pass us by. While Nicole is glad she jumped on the chance to go on safari, her bathroom remains unrenovated two years later. Yet she says, “I wouldn’t trade those memories of that trip for anything in the world. Not even a brand new home.”

For a happy life, build up your ‘experience CV’ – a safari will provide you with good memories long after the paint has dried in a new kitchen, for instance

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A new speaker system or more free time? Studies show that time will make you happier in the long run than a material object

Aside from enabling you to go on great adventures, money can also transform the more mundane moments of daily life, by allowing you to outsource your most dreaded tasks. One of us (Mike) experiences what he describes as ‘existential terror’ while doing the dishes. Although most people aren’t launched into their own private Sartre play by a sink full of suds, a study by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, which tried to characterise the average day, showed that housework ranks among the least enjoyable of activities (hardly surprising). But new research by Kahneman suggests that our daily moods depend more on what exactly we do with our time – and whom we spend it with – than on the broader circumstances of our lives. So, rather than spending money on fancier cars and bigger houses, we’re better off using our cash to reduce the amount of time we spend on things that drag down our happiness on a typical day. Time is money After one of us (Liz) had a baby, she found herself lying awake most nights with the sleepless infant. Having tried every sleeptraining strategy on the internet, Liz called in the big guns: a woman named Claudia with a reputation for being able to teach any baby to sleep. Claudia doesn’t come cheap – for about the same price as a night with Claudia, Liz could’ve purchased the fancy new speaker system they’d been eyeing for months. But by teaching the baby how to sleep better, Claudia did something that a speaker system never could: she transformed Liz’s insomnia-ridden nights into hours of blissful sleep. Many of our purchases – even those as nice as a speaker system – have little bearing 36

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“Focusing on time, rather than money, pushes people towards happier activities”

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on the way we spend our time on a typical day. But it’s easy to inflate the potential benefits of a tantalising new purchase. Immersive surround sound! Cinema-like experience! This is amplified by comparison shopping, which can make the 10-speaker system seem infinitely better than a sixspeaker system – and well worth the extra £200. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that when people try to visualise how these differences will make their lives happier, they over-inflate the sense of well-being those extra four speakers will bring them. So, when contemplating a new purchase, we suggest applying the Tuesday Test: think about how the purchase will affect the way you spend your time next Tuesday.

psychology

SCIENCE

buy now, consume later It’s not just what you buy – experiences and time-changers – but how you buy that matters too. It’s always tempting to whip out the plastic in a shop, or take a new PC home today and pay for it later in monthly instalments. But debt creates a serious drain on happiness. A study of over 2,000 people by researchers at the University of Sheffield found that individuals with unsecured debt were significantly less happy than those who were debt-free. We prefer to offset payments because paying in smaller amounts feels instinctively better. In fact, neuroeconomists have found that there’s an actual ‘pain of paying’ that we try to avoid. Scientists from Stanford University discovered that shoppers inside an MRI scanner experienced a pattern of brain activity akin to stubbing a toe when they were shown a high price. So even though it may feel worse at the time, paying up-front to avoid debt paves a better pathway to happiness. While delaying payment isn’t such a great idea, delaying consumption

Research shows that this simple thought exercise eliminates our tendency to overestimate how much any one thing will affect our happiness. Thinking about how purchases will affect your daily life turns decisions about money into decisions about time. This shift comes with a hidden bonus: focusing on time, rather than money, pushes people towards happier activities. In a study conducted at a café in Philadelphia, researchers prompted people to think about time or about money. Individuals with money on their minds ended up working more while they were at the café, whereas those prompted to think about time devoted more of their stay to socialising, one of the happiest activities in most people’s days.

can be a boon for happiness by allowing us to enjoy the pleasure of anticipation. When researchers from Breda University in the Netherlands tracked the happiness of more than 1,000 holiday-goers in the weeks before and after their trip, they found that people actually experienced their biggest mood boost before departure. Looking back on a pleasurable experience can make you happy, but looking forward to it is even better. Delaying gratification improves the actual enjoyment of what you’re buying too. Research published in the Journal Of Consumer Research found that students who had to wait as little as 30 seconds before eating a chocolate bar reported enjoying it more than those who were allowed to scoff it right away. Drooling really does make food taste better. Unfortunately, the students who had been forced to wait told the researcher that they would have preferred to avoid the delay altogether – they didn’t think they’d enjoyed the chocolate any more than usual. The ‘power of now’ had dwarfed all else.

` Making a payment can be as excruciating an experience as stubbing your toe

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Science

psychology

Less is more when it comes to treating yourself

make it a treat We can sometimes get more happiness not only from delaying consumption, but even reducing consumption. To explore this idea, our student Jordi Quoidbach asked chocolate lovers to come into the lab and eat chocolate on two occasions, one week apart. During the intervening week, he instructed some of them to abstain from eating chocolate. He sent others home with a big bag of chocolate bars and told them to eat as many as they could, while a final group got no special instructions. At the second tasting, the abstinence group got the most pleasure from eating chocolate. This simple study upends the basic assumption that getting more of what we like makes us happier – challenging a central premise of modern economies. This observation holds true in the real world. A group of motorists with cars ranging in price from $400 (£258) to $40,000 (£25,860) were asked by researchers from the University of Michigan to think back to the last time they had driven their car and rate how much they enjoyed the drive. The experiment found that there was no relationship between the value of a car and how much enjoyment the driver got out of it (perhaps they should have quizzed some McLaren owners). But when the same group was asked to recall the last time they had driven their car just for fun, owners of more expensive models were much happier. So, the occasional treat can make the extra money you spend translate into extra happiness. Knowing that consuming more won’t necessarily buy us more happiness suggests it’s time to re-think the spending choices we make every day.

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Strange ATMs recently appeared in cities around Spain. The machines spit out envelopes filled with €100, no card or PIN needed. The only requirement: visitors to the ATM had to click ‘yes’ when asked whether they were willing to spend the money on others. After coming across one of these mysterious machines planted by Coca-Cola, people went on their way, using the windfall in a variety of ways. Some of their good deeds were captured on video: a young man left a shiny red tricycle at a child’s doorstep, another handed theatre tickets to an elderly couple in the park. These small acts of generosity succeeded in embodying Coke’s marketing ploy: ‘share happiness’. Coke’s free money machines are reminiscent of an experiment we conducted several years ago. Like an ATM sprung to life, our graduate student Lara Aknin approached people in Vancouver, Canada and offered them

$5 or $20, which she asked them to spend by the end of the day. She told half to spend the money on others, and half to spend the money on themselves. That evening, we got in touch with each person to ask about their day. Those who spent the money on others felt significantly happier than those who had spent it on themselves. Of course, it’s rare that ATMs or graduate students shower you with free money. But research shows that spending money on others will provide happiness even when you use your own hard-earned cash. In fact, the warm glow of giving emerges even in poor countries where many people struggle to meet their own basic needs. Using data from the Gallup World Poll, we found that individuals who had given money to charity were happier in both poor and rich countries around the globe. So, the tendency to experience joy from giving might just be a fundamental part

psychology

SCIENCE

Don’t spend it all on yourself - give yourself a happiness boost by giving your hard-earned cash to others

of human nature. The gift of giving If this is the case, even very young children might get pleasure from helping others. To test this idea, we teamed up with developmental psychologist Kiley Hamlin. We started by giving toddlers Goldfish crackers. Sure, their faces lit up when they received these fish-shaped treats for themselves, but they were even happier when they got the chance to give these treats away to a friendly puppet. If you’ve ever seen a toddler dissolve into fits of tears after being asked to share, you might be wondering whether kids – or adults, for that matter – always experience joy from giving to others. Our research shows that such joy is not inevitable. You are most likely to feel good about giving when you can see how your generosity has made a difference for someone else. In the case of the toddlers, they got to see the puppet making happy munching noises after

“Joy from giving might be a part of human nature” getting their Goldfish. Charities can apply this knowledge by making it easy for donors to see how their contributions are being used. For example, Spread the Net promises to provide one malaria net to protect children in Africa for every $10 donated. We’ve found that people get a bigger happiness bang for their buck when they donate to Spread the Net than when they donate to UNICEF. Even though UNICEF shares the same overarching mission of helping children in need, giving to this large organisation makes it harder for donors to see the difference their money is making.

Our research also suggests that it’s easier to feel good about spending money on others when we spend time with them, too. So, if you buy your nephew a football for his birthday, you’re more likely to experience the warm glow of giving if you take the time to kick it around the pitch with him. The next time you reach for your wallet, ask yourself: is this happy money? Elizabeth Dunn is an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Michael Norton is an associate professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, USA.

find out more  Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton are the authors of Happy Money: The New Science Of Smarter Spending (Oneworld, £10.99). October 2013

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NATURE Science

predator bay The southern tip of Africa hosts one of the largest gatherings of big marine predators on the planet. Explore the bay where sharks, killer whales, dolphins and seals fight for food – and supremacy

A 4m great white breaches at Seal Island in False Bay. The waters around this tiny 400m-long shelf of rock are the best place on Earth to witness this behaviour, which Chris discovered in 1996. It’s the final act in a seal-hunting manoeuvre, though (like many shark photographers) he also tows neoprene seal decoys to attract the mighty fish October 2013

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Photographs by Chris Fallows

Science NATURE

predator bay

Powerful upwellings churn up nutrients that feed seasonal algal blooms, sustaining huge shoals of bait fish

ABOVE Four killer whales in False Bay, all members of the same group, have become specialist dolphin hunters. Chris has watched them pursue the smaller cetaceans on 22 separate occasions. The killer whales launch spectacular breaches into the dolphin pods, crippling their targets with the brute force of the strike.

LEFT Working as a team, common dolphins round up terrified fish into a bait ball. They fire powerful bursts of sonar, then pick off their disorientated prey.

predator bay

ithin sight of Cape Town’s golden eastern beaches, an unassuming stretch of water hosts some of the largest, most diverse gatherings of big marine predators on the planet. False Bay is dramatically framed to the west by the rocky Cape Peninsula, dominated by the hulking Table Mountain, but otherwise looks ordinary enough. It is what lies beneath the surface that makes this 1,000km2 inlet a veritable ‘Serengeti of the Sea’. Poised between the cool Benguela and warmer Agulhas currents, the bay has water temperatures of 11-23°C, one of the widest annual ranges anywhere. Powerful upwellings churn up nutrients that feed seasonal algal blooms, sustaining huge shoals of sardines, anchovies and other bait fish.These attract predatory yellowtails, bluefish, leervis and kabeljou, which in turn lure countless larger mouths. The ‘Bite Club’ cast list includes a dazzling variety of sharks – great whites, bronze whalers, threshers, blues, hammerheads and several others – plus killer whales (Chris has seen five different groups here), Cape fur seals and five species of dolphin.The

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common dolphin megapods are often a thousand strong, whisking the ocean into a froth. Three species of great whale – Bryde’s, southern right and humpbacks – also frequent these waters regularly. Bryde’s are semi-resident but mostly seen February to June, while humpbacks call in during their northbound migration in May and June, and again in October and November en route to the Southern Ocean. Southern right whales appear from August to November to mate and calve. Piscivorous bird life is equally abundant, featuring more than 100,000 Cape cormorants, plentiful albatrosses of various species, a colony of 1,000 pairs of African penguins at Boulders Beach and squadrons of dive-bombing Cape gannets. Chris has been studying False Bay’s wildlife for two decades, yet still its fecundity never fails to amaze. The complex web of interactions between predators – breaching great whites hurling seals skywards, killer whales charging helter-skelter into pods of dolphins, and fur seals that have learned to kill blue sharks – keeps him coming back for more. LEFT A barnacle-encrusted southern right whale shows its comb-like baleen plates. Reaching 18m in length, these giants visit False Bay in the southern spring, having spent several months in colder, food-rich waters near Antarctica. BELOW Some of the 60,000 Cape fur seals at Seal Island keep a wary eye on a great white circling just offshore. From May to August, these sharks patrol the colony during daylight hours to pick off the inexperienced, recently weaned yearling seals returning from fishing trips.

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Remarkably, some fur seals have learned to kill sharks – mostly small species such as catsharks, but also (as here) blues up to 1.5m in length. They target the oil-rich liver, removing it with a surgeon’s precision, then often discarding the rest of the shark. Some fur seals specialise in killing gannets and penguins to eat their stomach contents.

predator bay

Nature

Ever playful, young seals never miss an opportunity to frolic in the shallows off Seal Island. A great white could appear out of the blue at any moment, but the seals are often able to outmanoeuvre their much larger, faster adversaries

THe information FALSE BAY A natural harbour fringed by dramatic cliffs and wide sandy beaches, to the east of the Cape of Good Hope

the navigator 10km

Robben Island

Seal Island Take a boat trip from Simon’s Town Harbour to this low-lying granite outcrop to see Cape fur seals (pups are born November–December) and breaching great whites. The sailing time is 40 minutes each way.

Table Bay

Table Mountain

Mid-bay area

w e st e r n c ap e

CAPE TOWN

In the southern autumn, fish massing in False Bay are attacked by hordes of Cape cormorants, Cape gannets, bronze whalers and common dolphins. Killer whales hunt the dolphins. Boat trips run from Simon’s Town.

False Bay Simon’s Town

Seal Island Boulders Beach

Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve

One of the few mainland colonies of African penguins, with 2,000 pairs in the February–August breeding season. Also look out for rare African black oystercatchers.

Cape Point Atlantic Ocean

Cape Hangklip Hermanus

Chris Fallows is a wildlife photographer who discovered breaching in great whites and runs shark-watching tours. www.apexpredators.com October 2013

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Persistent music late at night

One of the most widespread complaints received by the Noise Abatement Society concerns loud music being played by neighbours at night. For the partygoers the music is pleasurable, while for the complainants it is unbearable. Context and control determine how people emotionally interpret the soundscape; a ‘noise’ can be thought of as a sound that is out of place. People can be sensitised to a persistent sound that is out of their control, even if the sound is quiet — this is why some people find a dripping tap so grating.

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Vicious dog barking

A dog’s bark has almost everything: it can be loud and surprising, it has associations with danger and threat. People’s mental connections to the sound of a dog barking make them feel bad, because vicious dogs conjure up unpleasant memories. The actual sound itself is also irritating because of its rough quality; for most sounds, roughness makes the sound more grating. Acousticians define roughness as rapid fluctuations in how powerful a sound is (20-200 cycles per second). The fluctuations have to be fast enough that they are heard as part of the sound’s texture, rather than as individual changes in the sound’s loudness.

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Thunder

The main reason thunder is so frightening to small children is because it suddenly becomes so loud. Similarly frightened responses can arise from fireworks or loud gun shots. Any sound can be aversive if it is loud enough. The cochlea, the sensory organ for sound in the inner ear, can be damaged by loud sounds. As the amplitude of sound waves in the cochlea approaches the threshold for this damage, the sounds cause pain.

acoustics

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Flatulence

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The sound of a woman screaming is even more upsetting than a baby crying. Evolutionarily, this alarm call would highlight danger to the tribe, in order to attract aid or instigate retreat. In one of my own experiments, participants occasionally smiled at a female scream because it reminded them of horror movies. This probably happens because cultural associations can reverse the alarming effects of a piercing scream.

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When you hear the high-pitched sounds of microphone feedback, does it make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, or do you just want to stick your fingers in your ears? Of all the sharp noises reproduced in the lab this is loudest and sharpest and, when tested, a University of Salford experiment rated it number two for horribleness.

Knife on a bottle

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Fingernails on a blackboard

In a study of piercing sounds by Dr Sukhbinder Kumar and his colleagues at Newcastle University’s Medical School, the noise of a knife scraping a bottle was rated as even more annoying than fingernails on a blackboard. Other sharp and rough sounds that have been rated as highly irritating include railroad brakes, grinding machinery and a metal rake against a slate stone.

1 Microphone feedback

Baby crying

Evolution has made us particularly sensitive to the sound of a baby crying. The sound spectrum of crying is composed mostly of frequencies from 2000 to 4000 cycles per second. These frequencies are perceived as ‘sharp’, an unpleasant acoustic property. The evolutionary reason for being more sensitive to sharp and rough sounds is probably so that we are roused to action by human shrieks and babies crying.

Volunteers in an experiment by Trevor Cox at the Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford ranked the noise made by a whoopee cushion as one of the most irritating. It’s not loud but its association with embarrassment is likely to be the root of its annoyance. Some sensitive souls find the sound of flatulence unpleasant to hear – although for many flatulence is a staple of comedy, from Dekh Bhai Dekh and Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai. In Japan, women in public toilets found the sound of urination so embarrassing that they would run the electric hand driers to mask the tinkling. The Japanese solution has been to pipe singer Barry Manilow’s records into public loos.

Woman screaming

SCIENCE

Vomiting

Does the sound of vomiting make you feel queasy? In a study of 385,000 internet responses to 34 unpleasant sounds, vomiting was rated as the worst. The sound of vomiting is so nauseating because of your mental associations to it. It brings up people’s most repulsive feelings of bodily discharge — in all its unhygienic glory. Interestingly, the acoustic properties of vomiting are not particularly noxious: it is neither rough nor sharp. Sensations associated with disgust are especially well learned by mammals because this skill is necessary to avoid poisonous foods.

This is a grinding sound in the frequency range associated with sharp noises. However, sharpness alone is not what makes this sound excruciating. It’s also very rough. The effect of nails on a blackboard is very difficult to reproduce with a recording, so although many lab studies using recorded sounds find this sound to be less annoying than others, it’s often reported to be individuals’ number one hated noise.

Dr Harry Witchel is the author of You Are What You Hear (Algora Publishing, £1349). He is Discipline Leader in Physiology at Brighton & Sussex Medical School, UK, where he researches the effects of music and noise.

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Science

underground cities

illustrations: the white balance

City planners and architects tight for space are increasingly looking beneath their feet for the solution. Are we destined to live subterranean lives?

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nwards the south of Nevs¸ehir province in central Turkey once lay the ancient city of Derinkuyu. At its peak, 20,000 people lived there. From its beginnings in the 8th century BC, it became a thriving community with wine and oil presses, stables and chapels as well as livestock. All of this would be unremarkable, except for one thing – the entire city was built underground. In places, it extends 60m below the surface. Even more surprisingly, Derinkuyu was not the only underground city in this part of Turkey. It is linked to another, Kaymakli, by a tunnel that’s 8km long. In fact, there were over 30 underground cities in what was once the Cappadocia region alone. These underground communities were occupied by several civilisations, and became a place of refuge for early Christians in the years before Christianity became an accepted religion. Back in the 21st century, a growing band of visionary engineers and architects are once more looking underground. But this time their motivation is not to escape religious persecution – their goal is to escape overcrowding.

Science

underground cities

In 2018, building work will start on a £7.4bn underground city beneath Amsterdam’s famous canals, complete with shopping, leisure and parking facilities. Singapore, Toronto and Frankfurt are also planning major underground developments. Subsurface living Rather than just shopping underground, Mexicans could soon be living there. A 65-storey ‘Earth-Scraper’ proposed for Mexico City would drop some 300m

(984ft) below the city’s main square. The upturned pyramid, created by Bunker Arquitectura, would have a 10-storey glass core, sending light into the 10 storeys of homes, 10 of shops and 35 of offices below. Even if you don’t have pillaging Romans to worry about, living beneath the Earth’s surface has distinct advantages.

Central Canada

At the Canadian Shield – North America’s ancient geological core – the solid, stable craton rock exposed at ground level also extends deep below the surface.

Prime sites for underground cities photo: science photo library, nasa, alamy, thinkstock, james ramsey/dan barasch, bnkr x3

Locations where rocks are suitable for subsurface development on a grand scale “If you look at phenomena such as natural disasters, where would you rather be: on the 50th floor of a highrise, or underground?” says Prof Samuel Ariaratnam, an engineer at Arizona State University who was one of the authors of a US National Academy of Sciences report on the future of underground urban development. And if conditions on the

Mexico’s proposed ‘Earth-Scraper’ is an inverted 65-storey pyramid that would reach a maximum depth of 300m, built below the city’s main Zócalo plaza (inset)

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“If people see a reason for it, or if there are physical advantages to being underground, then they can accept it”

Sweden and Norway

London

As the Tube shows, the clays beneath the capital have proved a good ally to underground projects. “The clay is stiff which means it is easy to excavate and then stands nicely for a while you create your structure in it,” says Prof Kenichi Soga, a civil engineer at the University of Cambridge working on the current Crossrail project.

The ultra-hard rocks that form the geological area known as the Scandinavian Shield would be an ideal place for a large underground lair. They are relatively impermeable, minimising problems of groundwater leaking into homes, and are strong and easy to mine.

China

Beijing has been built on top of the stable North China Craton. Investigations would be required to check that any proposed development was not near a fault line.

South Africa

The gold mines around Johannesburg – the deepest in the world – demonstrate how stable the rock is here. In fact, developers would have to watch they don’t dig too deep, as temperatures soar.

surface take a turn for the worse due to climate change, then a shield of metres of earth and rock could well become more desirable than a balcony with a city view. Ariaratnam admits that the immediate cost of building down is higher than building up: “I don’t think you’ll see reverse skyscrapers in my lifetime,” he says. But in the longer term, safe from the exposure to the elements, the advantages start to emerge and below ground is, he suggests, the way to go in many places. “Look at hot, humid climates, or very cold climates. Who wants to be outside?” Park life Even parks could one day be found deep down. Proposals in New York envisage a ‘Lowline’ park in a huge space left disused since the demise of a tram system in 1948. Its name is a nod to the city’s successful October 2013

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Deep dwellings

Some people have already adopted a subterranean lifestyle 1m below the surface

KANDOVAN, IRAN Caves dug into volcanic ash formations are said to have been inhabited for the past 6,000 years. In a typical four-storey Kandovan house, the ground or first floor is used as an animal shelter, the next two floors are living areas and the top floor is used for storage. The homes are known as karan, which roughly translates as ‘beehives’.

SUBTERRA CASTLE, KANSAS, USA This underground bunker was built by the US military in the 1960s to house its Atlas E nuclear missiles. Now part of the former silo has been transformed into a family home, complete with its own ‘spiritual’ room and an outdoor hot tub. Accessed by tunnel and housing a replica of the control room, the constant reminder of its former life might not be to everyone’s taste.

1.8m below the surface

COOBER PEDY, AUSTRALIA The cooler temperature of these ‘dugouts’ burrowed into the side of hills provides a welcome escape from the scorching heat above, where the temperature often tops 40°C. As a result, this opal mining town now hosts one of the biggest underground communities in the world, with 1500 residents living below the surface. There’s even an underground church.

2m below the surface

CAVE HOUSE, MISSOURI, USA Inside a 1400m2 (15,000ft2) cave in Missouri is this modern home, which has three bedrooms as well as three groundwater springs. Geothermal heating keeps the rooms comfortable. The home’s walls are simply the sandstone walls of the cave but they do shed sand, so there are artificial ceilings to stop debris falling down.

155m below the surface

SALA SILVERMINE HOTEL, SWEDEN Although it’s not actually a house, the £380-a-night hotel suite is the deepest inhabited place on Earth. Situated in a single chamber at the bottom of an old silver mine, the claustrophobic may want to give this one a miss. Guests access the room via a mine lift shaft and are left alone overnight with only an intercom connection with the ground above.

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1m below the surface

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“The vast majority of people have no problem taking the London Underground”

High Line park, which was built on an abandoned elevated railway in west Manhattan. Mirrors and fibre optics would bring natural daylight to this cavernous void. ‘Sunbeamers’ – reflective tubes – would play a key part in this, channelling huge shafts of natural sunlight from above. A full-scale prototype has trialled some of these lightcapturing innovations, which should allow grass, bushes and even trees to flourish far from the surface. Existing underground developments have shown how phenomena we associate with the surface can be brought below ground. At Sanford Underground Research Facility – a laboratory complex in South Dakota that has levels from 90m down to nearly 2,500m – architects worked with in-house psychologists to try and make the environment as pleasant as possible. Screens show blue skies and ventilation systems create noticeable air flows to mimic the breezes above ground. These designs are intended to prevent any psychological problems. But Dr Raymond Sterling, professor emeritus at Louisiana

Ventilation at Sanford Underground Research Facility mimics natural breezes

underground cities

SCIENCE

tunnel visions

Future space colonies could be housed inside natural caves

Tech and an expert on underground space, suggests that subterranean living need not be psychologically problematic at all. “The vast majority of people have no problem taking the London Underground or being in a windowless space for a concert,” he points out. “If people see a reason for it, or if there are physical advantages to being underground, then they can accept it.” Hot stuff Issues of psychology aside, the engineering challenges involved in building cities beneath the surface vary depending on the depth of the city. Dr Paul Younger, Professor of Energy Engineering at the University of Glasgow, points out that the first few tens of metres below the Earth’s surface tend to have the same average temperature as that found at the surface. So any deep-dwellers in the UK and other similarly chilly countries would need year-round heating to cope with an average 10°C temperature. Digging deeper,

Lava tubes below the Martian surface could one day be adapted for human habitation

things,” she says. As well as reducing requirements for building materials, underground living would also provide a ready-made shelter from the brutal surface radiation. “The Moon has no atmosphere to speak of, and Mars has a very thin atmosphere but no magnetic field, so it can’t protect itself like Earth does against solar flares and radiation,” explains Boston. “But the few metres of rock that you would have above you in a lava tube would provide free radiation shielding.”

Prof Boston’s team have also considered the possibility of going underground on asteroids. “Recent missions have shown that they’re a lot more geologically evolved bodies then we’d thought. So perhaps the possibility exists there for some sort of cave structure,” she says. All this means that the classic science fiction image of inhabited domes on a distant world is unlikely to come true. Instead, our space colonists are more likely to live tucked away inside holes in the ground.

temperatures increase and, depending on location, at a depth of around 500m a positively balmy 25°C may be found. But this comes at a price. “You’re bound to be below the water table then,” says Younger. In many locations the water table is just 10 or so metres deep. Keeping the water out, and clean air for breathing in, will require constant pumping. Applying brute force to dig out a space and continual power to keep it liveable is also expensive. “We can do it,” says Younger. “If you want an engineered underground space I’ll make you one. But it’s not going to come cheap.” Clearly the bigger the underground community, the bigger the headaches. Nuclear energy could provide the power. But there would still be big issues with waste treatment and disposal. “Large communities living underground, independent of the surface, would be very hard to realise,” says Sterling. “It’s easier to consider either certain functions located underground interacting

with other surface facilities, or certain communities moving underground and being able to exist independently of outside resources for limited periods.” Even if we’re not moving entirely underground, it seems an increasing proportion of urban life is set to be lived out beneath the surface. “With massive urbanisation you have two choices,” says Hashash. “You can go up, or you can go down. We’re seeing an enormous rise in use of underground space. I expect it will grow and grow.” Daniel Cressey is a reporter for the UK based blog Nature.

find out more  BNKR Arquitectura www.bunkerarquitectura.com  New York’s Lowline park http://thelowline.org October 2013

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nasa, matt kapust, roadsideamerica.com, alamy x2, sala silvermine

On earth, underground development is a smart solution to surface space limitations. In space it could be critical to survival. Prof Penelope Boston at New Mexico Tech, USA has spent much of her academic life studying how we could live in space. “The first paper I ever published, in 1981, was on inflatable surface greenhouses on Mars,” she says. “But I’ve got a lot smarter now. I’ve learnt how we should live on another planet – and underground is the way to go.” A key motivation is the high cost per kilogram of taking anything into space. “It’s important to become a little more creative,” says Boston. “Whatever you can use in the intrinsic environment is a boon.” Cave-like ‘lava tubes’ on the Moon and Mars are one geological structure being considered for human settlement. Lava tubes are long horizontal tunnels through which lava once flowed. Vertical tunnels known as skylights lead into the tubes, which Boston suggests could contain a lift and be accessed via an airlock. To adapt the tunnels for habitation, Boston says they could be lined with a foam which smooths out the interior contours. “This foam becomes rigid and then the tube can be lined with other

history

An artist’s view

of Delhi in 1857

discovering

Shahjahanabad Take a walk through the chowks, mohallas and streets of Shahjahanabad. Historian Swapna Liddle writes about the history that is still alive in this Mughal city of Delhi hahjahanabad, built in Delhi in the middle of the 17th century, was the grandest of the Mughal cities. It was founded by the emperor Shahjahan, who shifted the capital from Agra to this new city in 1648. Under this emperor, Mughal architecture had already reached its zenith, so the best master-builders, the most skilled artisans, and the best materials that were available in the wide realm of the Mughal empire, were sourced for this new project. It was to remain the capital of the Mughal empire and the seat of the Mughal emperors till 1857, when Bahadur Shah was exiled to Rangoon, and the Mughal dynasty came to an end.

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The team of imperial planners, closely guided by the emperor himself, carefully laid out the city. Shahjahanabad was situated on the western bank of the Yamuna River, and the palaces of the emperor (known now as Red Fort), overlooked it. Two broad streets ran east-west and north-south from the fort. These were lined with shops and shaded with trees. A channel of water flowed down the middle of both these streets, providing a cooling effect. An important landmark of the city was the Jama Masjid – the congregational mosque. This was built on the highest point in the city, and a broad street connected it to the southern gateway of the Red Fort. On important days the emperor would come in procession down this road, and enter the mosque through the imposing Eastern gate, to pray.

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Swapna Liddle, 123rf.com

Imperial planning and landmarks

history

Discovering Shahjahanabad

ajmeri gate

In the 1930s New Delhi became the new capital and Shahjahanabad lost its importance

turkman gate

delhi gate

yamuna river city’s defences The city was protected by a high wall, which encircled it. This wall had originally been made in 1650, of earth, but this collapsed in the rains.Following this a new wall was constructed with mortar and stones. About five miles long, the wall was completed in 1658. In the first half of the 19th century, when the British ruled the city, the wall was repaired and modified and additional defensive structures, called Martello towers, were added. The wall originally had 13 gates, which were guarded and kept locked at night. Some of these gates are still in existence, namely - Kashmiri Gate, Delhi Gate, Turkman Gate, Ajmeri Gate. Many of the gates were named after the important cities that lay on the roads that passed through these gates. When the British modified the

fortifications, they added a gate, which was called Calcutta gate.

recreational spaces Many places of commerce and recreation gradually came up in Shahjahanabad. Some of these were part of the original plan. Beautiful squares, or chowks, were located on the main streets. The most well-known of these were Kotwali Chowk and Chandni Chowk. The former was named after the main police station, which was located there. Today this square is called Bhai Mati Das Chowk. Chandni Chowk was an important commercial hub with many shops and coffee houses, a hammam (public bath house) and a sarai located on it. The latter was a resting place for travelers, built by the princess Jahanara, the eldest daughter of

Shahjahan. Many of these buildings were demolished after the Revolt of 1857, and later the Town Hall was built at the site of the old sarai. Other markets that came up in due course were Dariba Kalan – where the rich jewelers and bankers of the city were located, Katra Neel – famous for indigodyed fabric, and Khari Baoli which even today is the largest spice market in Asia. Apart from the bazaars, people often went for recreation to the area in front of the Jama Masjid where peddlers of exotic wares, entertainers, story-tellers and street-food sellers set up their wares and performances every evening. People enjoyed visiting the several gardens of the city, which included the large garden which ran north of and parallel to the main east-west street, and was laid out under the orders of Jahanara.

chandni chowk

kashmiri gate

jama masjid

Havelis and Mohallas

Once the palace complex had been built and the capital shifted here, many people made Shahjahanabad their home. Nobles and princes built grand mansions, or havelis, set in the middle of large estates. Shahjahan’s son Dara Shikoh, and the minister Ali Mardan Khan built mansions near the Red Fort, overlooking the river.

Ustad Ahmed, the master builder of the Red Fort, had his estate near the Jama Masjid. Around these large estates other people built smaller havelis and even huts. In this manner mohallas, or neighbourhoods, developed and the city grew organically, without much central planning apart from the main streets that had already been laid out. After a while – in the 18th and 19th centuries, the city also became more dense, as the larger estates were broken up into smaller housing plots. These newer mohallas, built on the old estates, often carried the name of the original mansion, such as Haveli Haider Quli – which is no longer a haveli but a mohalla. Shahjahanabad has seen many ups and downs in its history. It was sacked by the

Persian invader Nadir Shah in 1739, it was sacked again in 1857 when the British armies suppressed the revolt against British rule. Much of the city wall, many of its gates and other buildings were destroyed after this. Then in the 1930’s the new capital city of New Delhi was inaugurated, and Shahjahanabad lost its importance even among many of the city’s people and administrators. It began to be called – ‘Old Delhi’. But in many ways this historic city still contains the heart of Delhi – in its colourful bazaars, its beautiful havelis, its traditional customs, and street food. Swapna Liddle did a PhD on 19th century Delhi. She is co-Convenor Delhi Chapter, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), and author of Delhi: 14 Historic Walks. October 2013

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Swapna Liddle X3, Wikipedia

red fort

MEET THE L Our homes are our castles: places where we feel safe. But we are seldom at home alone… Thanks to the wonders of the scanning electron microscope, we have unprecedented views of the tiny creatures with which we coexist. We share our homes with a diverse array of organisms that take full advantage of the warm, safe, food-rich habitats we provide. As we move into the warmer summer months the numbers of these rent-free lodgers often increase dramatically. So, take this safari around your own home – you may be repulsed to find out who you’re sharing it with.

microscopic bugs

SCIENCE

LODGERS

October 2013

photo: science photo library

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CAT FLEA These highly specialised wingless insects are ectoparasites – parasites that live on the outside of their host. The mandibles – the saw-like structures protruding below the jaw – pierce the host’s skin allowing the flea to get a blood meal. The cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis) does not generally infest humans. However, they can bite us and cat owners will be only too aware of the problems fleas can cause their animals. Fleas develop from eggs that hatch to form larvae that resemble tiny maggots. Larvae feed on dried blood from adult flea faeces before pupating, eventually emerging as adults and jumping onto a host. Although fleas are the vectors of disease, they are beautifully adapted for their parasitic lifestyle.

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Science

microscopic bugs

corbis, science photo library

X9

BED BUG Cimex Lectularius, or the bed bug, belongs to the insect order Hemiptera. Many Hemipterans use their piercing mouthparts to feed on plant sap, but bed bugs have become ectoparasites. They use their stiletto-like mouthparts to pierce our skin to feed on blood. They have flattened bodies and have lost their wings. These adaptations enable them to live undetected in our mattresses and furniture, while also allowing them to expand their bodies after a large blood meal. In the animal kingdom, females can exercise considerable control over mating, blocking copulation, being picky during courtship and even ejecting semen from certain males. In bed bugs, this has resulted in the evolution of traumatic insemination. The male’s curved, dagger-like ‘stabbing penis’ [pictured right] pierces the female’s body, circumventing the reproductive tract and, therefore, any female control. This means that the male is able to deposit his sperm directly into the female’s body cavity, where they migrate towards the ovaries. 60

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EYELASH MITES To these microscopic mites (Demodex folliculorum), our eyelash follicles – the cavities in the skin containing the eyelash roots – are warm, food-filled caves. Eyelash mites are relatives of the spiders and can also be found in follicles in the nose and ear canal. They feed on oily secretions from sebaceous glands and dead skin cells and are not generally harmful. Technically, they are known as ‘commensals’ – organisms that gain benefit from another organism without causing harm. Sometimes, however, people can develop an allergy to Demodex and when this occurs, they can cause hair loss and other symptoms such as acne.

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microscopic bugs

DUST MITE Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus are, like eyelash mites, arachnids – relatives of the spiders and scorpions. However, at around 0.4mm long, dust mites are smaller than a full stop. They have unsegmented bodies and their mouthparts (seen in this photograph) are highly specialised for feeding on the skin scales that are found in household dust. As they feed they produce faecal pellets and partially digested particles containing proteins. Breathing these in causes our bodies to produce antibodies in response to them, releasing histamines. Inhalation of dust mite excreta can therefore give some people similar symptoms to hay fever or asthma. Washing bedding regularly and minimising the build-up of dust can help to control the problem.

SCIENCE

Kitchen critters X580 your washing-up sponge is an ideal habitat for bacteria and fungi [left, top]. Their spongy structure gives them a huge surface area and they are usually damp, warm and loaded with food particles. The green and blue rodlike structures in this photomicrograph are bacteria, the yellow-green spheres are yeast fungi and the purple and orange filaments are filamentous fungi. Their waste products give dirty sponges their unpleasant odour. Cracks and crevices in cutting boards [left, bottom] also provide excellent habitats for bacteria. Bacteria can form biofilms, where many cells stick together on a surface embedded in a matrix of substances that the bacteria produce. The formation of biofilms can make bacteria much more difficult to eradicate. Poor hand hygiene when preparing food can lead to harmful bacteria like Salmonella and Escherichia coli, causing food poisoning.

photo: science photo library x2, corbis x2

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CLOTHES MOTH These moth are unusual because the caterpillars mainly feed on lichens, fungi and dead plant material, rather than living plants, and they have become adapted to feeding on natural fabrics including wool, cotton, linen and silk. Part of the moth family Tineidae, adults lay tiny eggs on clothes and the caterpillars can develop into a pupa in as little as two months or as long as two years, depending on conditions. After a month or two as a pupa, the adults emerge to continue their life cycle within our wardrobes. October 2013

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science photo library x3

DENTAL PLAQUE A bacterial biofilm with which we are all familiar is the sticky coating of dental plaque that grows on our teeth, shown here on a toothbrush bristle. Plaque is a film of as many as 1000 species of bacteria lying within a matrix of glycoproteins (proteins with polymers of sugar molecules attached). As the bacteria feed on the sugars in our food they produce acidic waste products that corrode tooth enamel, leading to dental decay. Dental plaque build-up can also lead to gum disease and loss of teeth.

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microscopic bugs

SCIENCE

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CARPET BEETLE LARVAE Sometimes known as ‘woolly bears’, carpet beetle larvae [top] mature into fully-fledged adult beetles [bottom]. They belong to the family Dermestidae, which are scavengers, and their larvae are also opportunists, making them a pest. Larvae develop from eggs laid in dark, undisturbed areas and consume items like furs, feathers, furniture, clothing, blankets and carpets. As a result,

Dermestid beetle larvae can be a major problem for museums. As the larvae move they shed some of the hairs (or setae) that give them their nickname of woolly bears. These can cause irritation either through contact with the skin or by being inhaled. Skin contact can cause small itchy welts that are sometimes confused with bed bug bites.

Adam Hart is professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucestershire, UK.

find out more  bit.ly/18obBdw Information about controlling dust mites from AllergyUK.org October 2013

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Portfolio otters Otters have been an obsession since I was a kid. I took my first pictures of them in Shetland when I was 16, and I have returned to the islands every year since. I started photographing and filming otters on English rivers back in 2002, and in 2011 began taking subaquatic photos, inventing kit – including underwater camera-traps – to capture candid shots. My aim was to create novel, unique images, putting otters in context with their environment – and to depict their natural behaviour below the surface for the first time. Photographs by Charlie Hamilton James

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Nature

Rogue males Two young males tussle on a beach in Shetland where I spent a couple of months photographing them and their mum. A litter of just two male cubs is unusual; it suggests she may have had a third cub, a female, that died. Shetland has always been a stronghold for otters, but the population is now falling – though no one really knows why. It could be due to the collapse of inshore fish stocks, which declined sharply around 2004-2005; Shetland’s seabirds have also suffered large downturns over the past few years.

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Science NATURE

Portfolio

No flies on her  Stoneflies dance over the head of an adult female that I photographed over a period of several weeks in the middle of a Dorset town. I was amazed at how relaxed she was around humans; she would often swim close to me – within 1–2m – and ignored the numerous dog walkers who would stop to watch her. Increasingly, otters seem to be emerging during the day in England and Wales – as, historically, they have done in Scotland. I’m not sure why – perhaps, after years of protection, they are beginning to feel safer.

Fish, fingered  A few years ago, I started a project to study otters’ senses. I had a hunch that they could smell in water, so I set up an experiment in a murky river using an underwater camera and a dead trout; a wild otter found the bait straightaway. When I analysed the footage, I noticed that the otter emitted a bubble of air as it hit the fish, immediately sniffing it back in (presumably along with the trout’s scent) – behaviour that has been observed in other species. This shot was taken as a continuation of my study, using a camera trap system – so I could sleep while the otter took its own photo at night!

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Portfolio

Nature

Science NATURE

Portfolio

liquid grace  An otter breaks the surface while foraging for bullheads and other small fish under stones in a shallow river in Dorset. Otters are incredible to watch in this aquatic environment, melting into their watery world “as smooth as oil”, as Henry Williamson wrote in Tarka the Otter. I became fixated on capturing this fleeting moment in this particular way; I wanted the picture to look like a watercolour – no pun intended.

NIGHTSWIMMING  I got to know this otter quite well – for over two years she was the resident female on the river outside my house, raising the cub pictured above. She became very used to me wandering around at night; rather than swimming away when I approached, she often watched me from the safety of the water. This nocturnal shot was captured using a remote infra-red CCTV system that incorporated three cameras and several hundred metres of cabling wired to monitors in my kitchen, from where I fired the trigger remotely.

The photographer Charlie Hamilton James is a filmmaker, presenter and photographer who has been studying kingfishers and otters for decades.

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Portfolio

Nature

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy that contains our solar system

An excerpt from A book you should read

science

inside the pages

A brief History of time From the big bang to black holes By stephen hawking

e live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every several hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized, yellow star, near the inner edge of one of the spiral arms. We have certainly come a long way since Aristotle and Ptolemy, when we thought that the earth was the center of the universe! Stars are so far away that they appear to us to be just pin-points of light. We cannot see their size or shape. So how can we tell different types of stars apart? For the vast majority of stars, there is only one characteristic feature that we can observe – the color of their light. Newton discovered that if light from the sun passes through a triangular-shaped piece of glass, called a prism, it breaks up into its component colors (its spectrum) as in a rainbow. By focusing a telescope

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on an individual star or galaxy, one can similarly observe the spectrum of the light from that star or galaxy. Different stars have different spectra, but the relative brightness of the different colors is always exactly what one would expect to find in the light emitted by an object that is glowing red hot. (In fact, the light emitted by any opaque object that is glowing red hot has a characteristic spectrum that depends only on its temperature – a thermal spectrum. This means that we can tell a star’s temperature from the spectrum of its light.) Moreover, we find that certain very specific colors are missing from stars’ spectra, and these missing colors may vary from star to star. Since we know that each chemical element absorbs a characteristic set of very specific colors, by matching these to those that are missing from a star’s spectrum, we can determine exactly which E October 2013

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getty, science photo library

In this excerpt, Stephen Hawking expounds on the importance of the Doppler effect in discovering neighbouring galaxies in our solar system

The Big Bang led to the expansion of the universe and it continues to expand even today

elements are present in the star’s atmosphere. In the 1920s, when astronomers began to look at the spectra of stars in other galaxies, they found something most peculiar: there were the same characteristic sets of missing colors as for stars in our own galaxy, but they were all shifted by the same relative amount toward the red end of the spectrum. To understand the implications of this, we must first understand the Doppler effect. As we have seen, visible light consists of fluctuations, or waves, in the electro-magnetic field. The wavelength (or distance from one wave crest to the next) of light is extremely small, ranging from four to seven ten-millionths of a meter. The different wavelengths of light are what the human eye sees as different colors, with the longest wavelengths appearing at the red end of the spectrum and the shortest wavelengths at the blue end. Now imagine a source of light at a constant distance from us, such as a star, emitting waves of light at a constant wavelength. Obviously the wavelength of the waves we receive will be the same as the wavelength at which they are emitted (the gravitational field of the galaxy will not be large enough to have a significant effect). Suppose now that the source starts moving toward us. When the source emits the next wave crest it will be nearer to us, so the distance between wave crests will be smaller than when the star was stationary. This means that the wavelength of the waves we receive is shorter, than when the star was stationary. Correspondingly, if the source is moving away from us, the wavelength of the waves we receive

NASA/Casey Reed

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will be longer. In the case of light, therefore, this means that stars moving away from us will have their spectra shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (red-shifted) and those moving toward us will have their spectra blue-shifted. This relationship between wavelength and speed, which is called the Doppler effect, is an everyday experience. Listen to a car passing on the road: as the car is approaching, its engine sounds at a higher pitch (corresponding to a shorter wavelength and higher frequency of sound waves), and when it passes and goes away, it sounds at a lower pitch. The behavior of light or radio waves is similar. Indeed, the police make use of the Doppler effect to measure the speed of cars by measuring the wavelength of pulses of radio waves reflected off them. In the years following his proof of the existence of other galaxies, Hubble spent his time cataloging their distances and observing their spectra. At that time most people expected the galaxies to be moving around quite randomly, and so expected to find as many blue-shifted spectra as red-shifted ones. It

was quite a surprise, therefore, to find that most galaxies appeared red-shifted: nearly all were moving away from us! More surprising still was the finding that Hubble published in 1929: even the size of a galaxy’s red shift is not random, but is directly proportional to the galaxy’s distance from us. Or, in other words, the farther a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away! And that meant that the universe could not be static, as everyone previously had thought, but is in fact expanding; the distance between the different galaxies is growing all the time. The discovery that the universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century. With hindsight, it is easy to wonder why no one had thought of it before. Newton, and others, should have realized that a static universe would soon start to contract under the influence of gravity. But suppose instead that the universe is expanding. If it was expanding fairly slowly, the force of gravity would cause it eventually to stop expanding and then to start contracting. However, if it was

The discovery that the universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century

An excerpt from A book you should read

expanding at more than a certain critical rate, gravity would never be strong enough to stop it, and the universe would continue to expand forever. This is a bit like what happens when one fires a rocket upward from the surface of the earth. If it has a fairly low speed, gravity will eventually stop the rocket and it will start falling back. On the other hand, if the rocket has more than a certain critical speed (about seven miles per second) gravity will not be strong enough to pull it back, so it will keep going away from the earth forever. This behavior of the universe could have been predicted from Newton’s theory of gravity at any time in the nineteenth, the eighteenth, or even the late seventeenth centuries. Yet so strong was the belief in a static universe that it persisted into the early twentieth century. Even Einstein, when he formulated the general theory of relativity in 1915, was so sure that the universe had to be static that he modified his theory to make this possible, introducing a so-called cosmological constant into his equations. Einstein introduced a new ‘antigravity’ force, which, unlike other forces, did not come from any particular source but was built into the very fabric of space-time. He claimed that space-time had an inbuilt tendency to expand, and this could be made to balance exactly the attraction of all the matter in the universe, so that a static universe would result. Only one man, it seems, was willing to take general relativity at face value, and while Einstein and other physicists were looking for ways of avoiding general relativity’s prediction of a non-static universe, the Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann instead set about explaining it. Friedmann made two very simple assumptions about the universe: that the universe looks identical in whichever direction we look, and that this would also be true if we were observing the universe from anywhere else. From these two ideas alone, Friedmann showed that we should not expect the universe to be static. In fact, in 1922, several years before Edwin Hubble’s discovery, Friedmann predicted exactly what Hubble found! The assumption that the universe looks the same in every direction is clearly not true in reality. For example, as we have seen, the other stars in our galaxy form a distinct band of light across the night sky, called the Milky Way. But if we look at distant galaxies, there seems to be more or less the same number of them. So the universe does seem to be roughly the same in every direction, provided one views it on a large scale compared to the distance between galaxies, and ignores the differences on small scales. For a long time, this was sufficient justification

science

Friedmann made two very simple assumptions about the universe: that the universe looks identical in whichever direction we look, and that this would also be true if we were observing the universe from anywhere else for Friedmann’s assumption – as a rough approximation to the real universe. But more recently a lucky accident uncovered the fact that Friedmann’s assumption is in fact a remarkably accurate description of our universe. In 1965 two American physicists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were testing a very sensitive microwave detector. (Microwaves are just like light waves, but with a wavelength of around a centimetre.) Penzias and Wilson were worried when they found that their detector was picking up more noise than it ought to. The noise did not appear to be coming from any particular direction. First they discovered bird droppings in their detector and checked for other possible malfunctions, but soon ruled these out. They knew that any noise from within the atmosphere would be stronger when the detector was not pointing straight up than when it was, because light rays travel through much more atmosphere when received from near the horizon than when received from directly overhead. The extra noise was the same whichever direction the detector was pointed, so it must come from outside the atmosphere. It was also the same day and night and throughout the year, even though the earth was rotating on its axis and orbiting around the sun. This showed that the radiation must come from beyond the Solar System, and even from beyond the galaxy, as otherwise it would vary as the movement of earth pointed the detector in different directions. In fact, we know that the radiation must have traveled to us across most of the observable universe, and since it appears to be the same in different directions, the universe must also be the same in every direction, if only on a large scale. We now know that whichever direction we look, this noise never varies by more than a tiny fraction: so Penzias and Wilson had unwittingly stumbled across a remarkably

accurate confirmation of Friedmann’s first assumption. However, because the universe is not exactly the same in every direction, but only on average on a large scale, the microwaves cannot be exactly the same in every direction either. There have to be slight variations between different directions. These were first detected in 1992 by the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, or COBE, at a level of about one part in a hundred thousand. Small though these variations are, they are very important, as will be explained in Chapter 8. At roughly the same time as Penzias and Wilson were investigating noise in their detector, two American physicists at nearby Princeton University, Bob Dicke and Jim Peebles, were also taking an interest in microwaves. They were working on a suggestion, made by George Gamow (once a student of Alexander Friedmann), that the early universe should have been very hot and dense, glowing white hot. Dicke and Peebles argued that we should still be able to see the glow of the early universe, because light from very distant parts of it would only just be reaching us now. However, the expansion of the universe meant that this light should be so greatly red-shifted that it would appear to us now as microwave radiation. Dicke and Peebles were preparing to look for this radiation when Penzias and Wilson heard about their work and realized that they had already found it. For this, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel prize in 1978 (which seems a bit hard on Dicke and Peebles, not to mention Gamow!). This excerpt is published with permission from Random House India. No part of this excerpt may be quoted or reproduced without prior written consent from Random House India. A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawkings (Random House India `350). October 2013

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NATURE

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inside

the brain Moshita Prajapati finds out how the brain does what it does ur brain consists of two main parts; the cerebrum (the largest part of the brain, made up of the frontal, temporal, occipital and parietal lobe) and the cerebellum along with the brain stem. The cerebrum contains four lobes that work cohesively to simultaneously process information from our bodies, operate our internal organs, generate thoughts and emotions, store and recall memories and control our movement and actions.

O

Command Centre

Frontal Lobe

The reason why you can make that perfect sandwich without skipping a beat is thanks to the frontal lobe, which is in charge of organising the function of sequencing events and movements needed to perform a multi-step task. The frontal lobe is the boss of the brain and oversees the functions that control our movement, initiation, memory, sexual behaviour, emotional impulsivity judgment, flexible thinking, and understanding humor and irony.The frontal lobe also helps in expression through language.

illustration: hemant Gaonkar, 123rf.com xxx

The Storage

Temporal Lobe

Remember your first driving lesson? On how you concentrated on learning to get the gears correct for the right speed and how it came to you from memory after a few and well practiced attempts. That was the temporal lobe working its function for you. Located just above the ears on both sides of the brain, the temporal lobe is divided into two spheres and controls speech, memory, reading, emotional and auditory responses, visual processing and olfactory functions. The left side of the temporal lobe deals with language and verbal memory. The right side includes the ability to process non-verbal sounds and memory.

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SCIENCE NATURE

Somebody in the back of a crowded room mentions your name. Your attention immediately shifts there. Hmmm… looks like some people are talking about you! You stand at the same place, and swiftly start following their conversation without changing your position, ignoring all the other sounds that are much louder. The conversation now has your undivided attention, a task the parietal lobe performs with impunity.

The GPS

Parietal Lobe

Located in the middle of the brain and superior (above) to the occipital lobe, the parietal lobe is associated with movement, orientation, recognition, and perception of stimuli, all of which require our undivided attention.

The Seer

Occipital Lobe You are driving down the road reaching an intersection when out of the corner of your eye; you see a car approaching from the right side of the intersection. You recognise the possibility of an impending t-bone crash and apply the brakes immediately. The vision and visual recognition and processing the image of the car, a function that the occipital lobe performs sends signals to your brain and your reflex action engages you to apply the brakes.

Cerebellum

This monitors actions, such as motor movement, co-ordination, balance and equilibrium and muscle tone. So the next time you save yourself from falling over on a slippery floor, be sure to thank your cerebellum.

xxx

The Automation

The smallest of all lobes of the brain, the occipital lobe is placed right at the back of your head. It has no clear borders and the primary function of the occipital lobe is controlling vision and visual processing. Its function also includes the ability to understand and differentiate between different shapes allowing us to differentiate between letters, numbers and geometric shapes.

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inside the brain

Frontal Lobe According to Dr Aditya Murthy of the Centre for Neuroscience of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, research on the frontal lobe has shown evidence of a performance monitoring system, much like a supervisor, who is typically silent during the actual work, but steps in when things don’t go right as planned. For example, when the brain makes an error, this supervisory or performancemonitoring system detects the error and then slows down information processing on the next trial to minimise future errors. However, all this evidence comes from errors involving single movements. However, most of our actions consist of multiple movements

Command Centre

organised sequentially. Recent research shows how the basal ganglia (a part of brain involved in motor control and which dysfunction’s in diseases, such as Parkinsons) plays an important role in queuing parallel motor plans so that they can be executed sequentially. Such queuing mechanism allows a way for the brain to plan multiple moves ahead of time. Although these mechanisms allow sequential motor control essential for complex motor tasks, it is believed that they were integral to our ancestors’ ability to carry out complex planning, such as hunting for prey; and in more modern times may to be integral for cognitive functions, such as playing chess.

Parietal Lobe

Occipital Lobe

The GPS

While paying attention seems pretty simple, the circuits in the brain, which allow us to voluntarily shift our attention to a behaviourally interesting and relevant stimulus while filtering out all other irrelevant stimuli are exceedingly complex. Signals recorded from the brain show oscillations at various frequencies when such high-level cognitive tasks are accomplished. Dr Supratim Ray’s lab at the Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, studies brain rhythms during an attentional task to understand the underlying neural mechanisms that mediate such complex behaviour. “We have already begun our research and experiments would begin in about two three months time,” he adds.

Temporal Lobe

123rf.com x2

At Dr Upinder S Bhalla’s research lab at the National Centre for Biological Science, Bangalore, they are using optogenetics to study the learning process in the hippocampus “The hippocampus is well known to be crucial for memory. Patient studies have shown that with the loss of the hippocampus, people may develop anterograde amnesia: they can remember old events, preceding the loss of the hippocampus, but cannot form new memories. We and other researchers have found that

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The Storage

mice and rats form patterns of activity in the hippocampus in response to sensory stimuli. Crucially, these patterns change when the animal learns something new. These changes tell us how the memory of the sensory experience is transformed into activity changes in the brain. Many studies have used wire electrode recordings to do this, but the advantage of optical imaging is that we can monitor very many cells and see the location of the cells participating in forming memories,” says Bhalla.

The Seer

In the research lab of Dr S P Arun at the Centre for Neuroscience of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, research is aimed at understanding how objects are represented for successful recognition. “We use a variety of experimental techniques to understand this question. At one end, we study how human subjects perform common object recognition tasks. At the other end, we record the electrical activity of single neurons in the inferior temporal cortex of monkeys. This approach helps us elucidate object recognition at the level of single neurons,” he states. “In recent work from our lab, we have shown that a simple model that extracts coarse structure from an image can explain how we categorise objects into animals versus things. Another recent finding concerns how we find, say, a friends’ face in a complex street scene containing other people, vehicles, buildings etc. We have shown that this kind of search can be understood entirely in terms of processes that distinguish this object from each object types (i.e. the face among other faces, the face among cars, the face among buildings etc),” he concludes.

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The Big Idea exploring life’s great mysteries

Robert Matthews investigates

Gaia THEORY In the mid-’60s, British chemist James Lovelock began to formulate the idea that living organisms actively modify their environment to keep the Earth habitable. The idea attracted much criticism, with scientists claiming it contradicts Darwinian evolution. However, there is now growing evidence to support the basic idea behind Gaia, with major implications for life on our own planet – and others.

spl x2, dreamstime

hy does sea-water taste salty? It’s WI a question that countless people

have asked, and the textbook answer seems pretty convincing – rain washes a host of compounds from the Earth’s surface, the most water-soluble and abundant of which just happen to taste salty. All very simple. Or is it? After all, erosion has been taking place for aeons, dumping ever more of these salty compounds in the sea, yet the concentration is still far below the saturation level. So the real mystery is not why the sea tastes salty, but why it isn’t utterly packed with the stuff and as sterile as the Dead Sea. Here’s another curious thing about our planet. Its atmosphere has existed for billions of years and yet it still contains a mix of highly reactive gases like oxygen and methane. Why haven’t they settled down into a boring unreactive atmosphere like those of Mars or Venus? One September afternoon in 1965, a self-employed British scientist had an idea that turned these puzzles into revelations. Sitting in his office in California, James Lovelock had the realisation that they were the tell-tale signs that the Earth is in the grip of a natural force with the power to alter planets: life. It is an idea that provokes mixed reactions. Some see it as confirmation of their New Age belief in Mother Earth working in harmony with life. Others dismiss it as touchy-feely nonsense – an impression bolstered by the poetic name for Lovelock’s idea: the Gaia Hypothesis, after the Greek goddess of the Earth. Yet now there is a growing acceptance among scientists that Lovelock’s ideas have proved

useful in understanding the links between life and the environment – not only on Earth, but on worlds beyond our own. Space race Lovelock was in California at the invitation of NASA scientists who were seeking his help on one of the most exciting challenges facing science: the search for life on other worlds. As a chemist-turned-inventor, Lovelock’s expertise lay in devising instruments able to detect extremely low concentrations of chemicals. During the 1950s, he had developed a technique for detecting pollution at levels of less than one million-billionth of a gram (right). This was just what NASA scientists wanted for their planned probes to Mars – or so they thought. Lovelock believed they were making a critical mistake in trying to second guess what kind of life forms could exist on other planets. If they made the wrong assumptions about the kinds of chemicals to look for, all their efforts would be in vain. Instead, Lovelock said, they should devise some far more general test for life. Lovelock pointed out that, left to themselves, the mix of gases in the atmosphere of a planet will eventually settle down to a state where no more reactions take place. He also knew that the processes of life – taking in nutrients and producing waste – tend to prevent such chemical equilibrium from setting in. Lovelock argued that this could be the basis of a very general test for the presence of life on other planets.

James Lovelock shows off his electron capture detector

Is the Earth really one giant, self-regulating, organic entity?

For example, those with atmospheres composed almost entirely of a single gas like carbon dioxide would most likely be dead worlds, while those with complex mixes of highly reactive gases like oxygen may well harbour life. It was an elegant solution to a tough problem, but it soon became clear it was going to cause Lovelock much grief. In September 1965, astronomers in France

announced that the atmospheres of both Mars and Venus consisted almost entirely of carbon dioxide – implying they were dead worlds. This was hardly good news for NASA’s plans, but it prompted Lovelock to start thinking about how the Earth had managed to avoid such a fate. Suddenly, while sitting and thinking in his office one afternoon, a profound thought occurred to him. Perhaps living

organisms were able to control features of the Earth, such as the composition of its atmosphere, to keep the planet habitable via so-called feedback mechanisms p82 . Lovelock was not the first to envision the planet as ‘alive’. In 1785, the father of modern geology James Hutton envisaged the Earth as being a kind of metaphorical ‘super-organism’ with its own circulation and respiration cycles, in the form of the October 2013

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The Big Idea exploring life’s great mysteries

Pancreas cells which appear to act in a Gaia-like manner

The circle of life

spl, corbis x3, nasa

Feedback mechanisms At the heart of Gaia theory is the concept of ‘feedback mechanisms’, in which changes in external conditions trigger responses that counteract the changes. While Lovelock has focused on the role of living organisms in generating feedback that combats global environmental change, such ‘homeostatic’ behaviour is also at work within organisms themselves. This has prompted some researchers to apply Lovelock’s rationale to questions of human biochemistry, such as the impressive ability of the human body to match glucose production to demand. At Stellenbosch University, South Africa, researchers have identified two types of pancreatic cells, which work together in a Gaia-like relationship to tailor glucose levels to changes in demand triggered by exercise.

TIMELINE Bringing a living Earth to life

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E geological processes such as erosion. But such ideas came to be seen as violating the tenets of one of the cornerstones of science: Darwin’s theory of evolution. According to this, living organisms have to adapt to whatever conditions their host planet throws at them. Yet Lovelock was suggesting that organisms could adapt their planet to suit themselves. This was to become the source of bitter criticism, but initially Lovelock’s vision received a polite, if lukewarm, response. He published his idea about using atmospheric composition to look for extraterrestrial life in 1965, and began giving talks about the idea of the ‘living Earth’. In 1970 he began collaborating with Lynn Margulis, an American biologist then at Boston University thinking along similar lines. It was Margulis who made Lovelock aware of the potential role for microorganisms such as bacteria in forming links between life and the Earth.

Sulphur mystery This led Lovelock to make his first prediction – the hallmark of any scientific theory worthy of the name. It centred on sulphur, an essential element for living organisms. Washed off the land, most sulphate ends up in the oceans, and is recycled back to the land in the form of the notoriously smelly gas hydrogen sulphide. At least that was the conventional explanation, but Lovelock did not believe it – not least because the oceans do not reek of rotten eggs. He had heard that many marine organisms release another sulphurbearing gas, called dimethyl sulphide (DMS). Could

Does human behaviour cause global catastrophes or prevent them?

these ocean-going life forms be keeping land-based organisms supplied with vital sulphur? Lovelock arranged to travel with the British research ship RV Shackleton, and in 1971 confirmed the existence of trace gases produced by organisms predicted to exist by the need to maintain the sulphur cycle. This in turn led to a new view of the sulphur cycle. DMS produced by decaying marine algae seeds the formation of clouds, whose rain delivers sulphur ions back to the land-based organisms. But this also increases the erosion rate of the land, ensuring more nutrient runs into the sea for the marine algae, producing a cycle from which everyone benefits. Lovelock began pondering similarly elegant examples of

1785

1965

1982

1983

H Scottish geologist James Hutton presages Gaia theory by comparing the Earth to a living organism with its own circulation and respiration cycles, but the idea falls on deaf ears

English scientist and inventor James Lovelock shows how life on a distant planet could be detected by astronomers without the need to send space probes, by looking for the effects of life in the atmosphere

Evolutionary biologists including Richard Dawkins mount a barrage of attacks against Gaia, claiming it requires organisms to collaborate without necessarily benefiting themselves, which is hard to square with Darwinian evolution

E Lovelock and Andrew Watson of University of East Anglia, UK, publish the Daisyworld computer simulation to show how the rise and fall of different types of simple organisms can help maintain conditions on planets orbiting evolving stars

1972 G William Golding, author of the novel Lord of the Flies (1954) suggests to Lovelock the name ‘Gaia’ for his conception of a living planet, after the Greek goddess of the Earth

human impact

Are we having a Gaia-like effect on the Earth?

what by now he was calling the Gaia Hypothesis, following a suggestion by his friend, the author William Golding. The fact that the sea has avoided becoming too salty for life despite being constantly fed with salty compounds by erosion suggested that there might be organisms capable of keeping the saltiness in balance. Lovelock found a candidate in the primitive microbes that have created huge, shallow lagoons on many coasts, on which the Sun beats down, driving off the fresh water and leaving the salt behind. By the late 1970s, Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis had begun to enter the public consciousness – and chimed with the growing concern that humans were having G a negative effect on the Earth. But it also

1998

2002

David Robertson and Jennifer Robinson of the University of Western Australia use a computer model to claim that Gaia-like feedback is undermined by the ability of organisms to adapt to their environment

Mathematical biologist Takeshi Sugimoto of Kanagawa University, Japan, shows that adaptation boosts the ability of organisms to regulate conditions on a planet, thus showing Gaia does not contradict Darwinian evolution

When originally devising what became Gaia theory, the British scientist James Lovelock initially focused on the role of microbes in maintaining the habitability of the Earth. But most attention is now focused on the impact of a rather larger organism: Homo sapiens. And most scientists are convinced the effect of humans is anything but life-enhancing. Climatologists warn that man-made pollution could trigger a rise in global temperatures likely to prove catastrophic for life on Earth. But not everyone agrees that human activity has been entirely negative. In 2005, a team led by William Ruddiman of the University of Virginia put forward the controversial idea that human-made global warming may have prevented a

new ice age. They argued that ancient agricultural practices, deforestation and biomass-burning may have boosted levels of greenhouse gases sufficiently to combat an otherwise disastrous global chill. Studies have since shown that greenhouse gases did indeed rise around 5000 to 8000 years ago – a timescale that does tie in with the origins of largescale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe. However, last September an international team of researchers showed that the atmosphere of the time contained traces of carbon consistent with the hike in greenhouse gases being the result of natural rather than man-made processes. It seems that humans can’t claim credit for preventing a global ice age after all.

attracted increasingly hostile criticism from scientists. Some claimed it required organisms to ‘know’ what they were doing; others insisted it contravened Darwinian evolution; many simply loathed its associated New Age overtones. Lovelock fought back with Daisyworld, a computer simulation of a planet orbiting a sun-like star and inhabited by two types of ‘daisy’, one light and one dark. Despite its simplicity, the simulation showed how natural selection could trigger the spread of daisies whose colour absorbed or reflected sunlight, keeping the planet’s temperature constant despite changes in the star’s heat output. Daisyworld showed that Gaia, now elevated to theory status having passed

predictive tests, was not some whimsical idea lacking mathematical rigour, but it still left many questions unresolved. The most serious of these concerned its relationship with Darwinian evolution. In the early 1980s, the Oxford University evolutionist Richard Dawkins criticised Gaia theory on the grounds that it demanded global altruism among organisms – a feature that contravenes Darwinian natural selection. In 1998, researchers at the University of Western Australia made the arguments quantitative, with a Daisyworld model that they claimed proved that the Darwinian ability of organisms to adapt to their environment made Gaia-like processes unnecessary: life simply evolved to deal with changing conditions. By this time, Lovelock’s ideas had supporters from diverse fields – including evolutionists – who believed such attacks were often almost wilfully simplistic. They included Tim Lenton, a theoretician at the University of East Anglia, UK, who saw Gaia as complementing the understanding of evolution rather than contradicting it. Working with Lovelock, Lenton showed that claims that Gaia was redundant assumed life forms can always adapt to any conditions – despite the fact that the processes of life simply cease outside certain temperature ranges. In 2002, theorist Takeshi Sugimoto of Kanagawa University, Japan, went further, showing that Darwinian adaptation actually boosted E

2009 G Mass extinction expert Peter Ward of the University of Washington puts forward the Medea Hypothesis, which argues that – contrary to Gaia theory – life has self-destructive tendencies

2016 E Earliest launch date for the European Space Agency’s Darwin – a fleet of infrared telescopes able to look for life-bearing planets using the remote detection ideas proposed by Lovelock.

October 2013

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The Big Idea exploring life’s great mysteries

E the effectiveness of Gaia-like processes, helping organisms to keep the planet habitable for longer. Such developments convinced Lovelock that Gaia theory was being taken seriously even by its critics, and that he could leave its defence to a new generation of scientists. It had made some successful predictions, such as the role of DMS-producing algae in the sulphur cycle, and opened up a huge range of research fronts, from the role of organisms on global warming to the search for extra-terrestrial life.

The search for life on other planets could benefit from Lovelock’s ideas

reactive gases on other planets

nasa x2, photos.com

Gaia theory and the search for life James Lovelock originally came up with the notion of Gaia after investigating the significance of reactive gases in a planet’s atmosphere. He argued that such gases would quickly vanish unless topped up by living organisms – thus making them a tell-tale sign of alien life. So does this mean that the presence or absence of such gases proves the presence or absence of life? Unfortunately, Lovelock’s idea of using atmospheric gases to reveal the presence of life on other planets is far less effective than it seems. In January 2008, NASA scientists confirmed long-standing reports that methane exists on Mars, albeit in trace amounts. This could mean that small colonies of organisms exist in the Red Planet. But as the NASA scientists themselves admitted, the methane could also be the result of geological activity such as volcanic eruptions. 84

October 2013

Analyse this In 2007 a planet orbiting a star 63 lightyears away became the first planet beyond the Solar System to have its atmosphere analysed in any detail. Codenamed HD 189733 b and with a mass around 360 times that of the Earth, the planet is a little larger than Jupiter. Despite its distance, NASA’s orbiting Spitzer and Hubble telescopes have revealed that the planet has an atmosphere containing water vapour and carbon dioxide – plus methane, the kind of gas that Gaia suggests may be linked to the presence of life. It’s a discovery that harks back to Lovelock’s original motivation for his Gaia Hypothesis over 40 years ago, with his idea that life reveals its presence via its effect on a planet’s atmosphere. But it also highlights the difficulty of using Gaia to say anything definitive about life on other worlds. In the case of HD 189733 b, the planet’s atmosphere might be consistent with the existence of living organisms, but the planet itself orbits so close to its parent star that its surface is hotter than molten aluminium – not exactly conducive to life as we know it. There’s a similar problem with the absence of highly  reactive gases on other planets. Even so, the presence of highly reactive gases such as oxygen and methane could be useful in ‘screening’ planets for more detailed attention by astronomers. This is the aim of Darwin, a European Space Agency project designed to detect potentially inhabited planets around other stars. Scheduled for launch around 2016, Darwin will consist of a flotilla of probes into space, including three space telescopes each substantially larger than the Hubble Space Telescope. These will work together to create an effective telescope 100m (328ft) across, giving Darwin thousands of times more light-gathering power than Hubble. They will also be tuned to detect infra-red radiation – the wavelength at which the tell-tale gases reveal themselves most clearly. The telescopes will study the thousands of planetary systems expected to have been found by then, and earmark the most promising ones for further detailed study. While Gaia theory has come a long way since its conception over 40 years ago, many scientists remain uncomfortable with Lovelock’s use of metaphor, claiming that he goes too far in ascribing purpose to Gaia. Some have gone further, saying that the whole notion of life-enhancing Gaia

Could the planet known to astronomers as HD 189733 b sustain living organisms?

is simply wrong. In 2009, palaeontologist Peter Ward of the University of Washington in Seattle published a direct challenge to Gaia theory, arguing that organisms have themselves triggered repeated extinctions on Earth – among them the so-called Permian extinction, which led to the demise of over 90 per cent of all species around 250 million years ago. Recent research suggests this so-called Great Dying was caused by sulphur-generating marine bacteria, which poisoned both the sea and air – dramatic support for what Ward calls the Medea Hypothesis, after the mythic mother who consumed her own children. Not everyone sees Medea as a direct rival to Gaia, however. As Lee Kump of Penn State University, PA, points out, the Earth can recover from huge extinctions, and goes on to spawn even more complex organisms with even greater biodiversity. That said, the general consensus is now that humans are affecting the environment in ways that may well have a drastic effect on the habitability of the Earth. While Gaia theory prefers a living Earth, we should not expect preferential treatment from our planet. Robert Matthews is a science journalist and Visiting Reader in Science at Aston University, UK. www.robertmatthews.org

find out more E The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s climate crisis and the fate of humanity by James Lovelock (Basic Books, 2006) E www.pik-potsdam.de/~bloh/ Getting to grips with Daisyworld

Resource

A feast for the mind This photo of Nessie taken in 1934 proved to be a hoax, but people are still looking for this most famous of cryptids

Abominable Science! Origins Of The Yeti, Nessie, And Other Famous Cryptids

K Imagine if sasquatches really roamed the forests of the Pacific Northwest; if there really were yetis in Nepal; if Nessie swam into the light; if some fisherman netted the Great Sea Serpent. Wouldn’t it be great? Sadly, the myriad sightings of all these marvels have come to naught. The problem with cryptozoology - the study of unknown animals - is that no number of anecdotes will ever equal real data. And despite the

pretensions of its practitioners, the exercise is unscientific. In science, you set out to test a null hypothesis that your boojum doesn’t exist - not, as enthusiasts do, presume that it does and select the evidence that confirms your belief. The latter is how creationism and other pseudosciences operate. None of this says that remarkable unknown animals don’t exist, but those that do so emerge without fanfare. The coelacanth, the amazing Vu Quang ox of Vietnam, the okapi, the mountain gorilla – large animals that emerged blinking into the light in the

past century alone. Hence Gee’s Law of Cryptozoology: the credibility of a cryptid is inversely proportional to the effort expended trying to find it. If Bigfoot has been sighted in each and every state of the USA, it’s truly amazing that nobody’s come across a carcass, a bone, even some good DNA evidence. No amount of eyewitness testimony will satisfy. What Abominable Science! reveals is the fallibility of such testimony. However, with the authors taking turns to write chapters, its downside

is structure. A unified voice would have been more compelling and less jarring. Nevertheless, it successfully reveals the influence of popular culture on what we think we see. Nessie, for example, didn’t ‘exist’ until after King Kong was released in 1933, with its evocative portrayal of a monstrously large ape. Witnesses saw monsters, all right – monsters of the mind. Henry Gee is a biologist, senior editor of the journal Nature and Focus magazine columnist. October 2013

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dan dry

Daniel Loxton and Donald R Prothero Columbia University Press ` 912

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Our pick of internet highlights to explore

H Website

H Website

H WEBSITE

How many people are in space right now?

Glacierworks

Norm Chronicles

www.howmanypeople areinspacerightnow.com

http://explore.glacierworks.org

http://thenormchronicles.com

It’s easy to forget that several people at a time are orbiting above your head on the International Space Station. This simple website tells you exactly how many people are up there at any given moment, and, if you scroll down, you can find.

Starting in the small town of Lukla in Nepal, with Glacierworks you can follow the path that Everest trekkers take on their way to base camp. The website isn’t a substitute for making the journey yourself, but with contemporary and archive images, you’ll see how the mountain range is evolving over time.

Scroll through ‘distinctly average’ Norm’s life, and try not to be too disturbed when you learn the real risks associated with everyday activities (and some more extreme ones). It provides some fascinating insights. Who knew, for instance, that for every 25 people who reach the summit of Everest, one dies? Or that every two cigarettes lop half an hour off your life.

H WEBSITE

H WEBSITE

H WEBSITE

Distance to Mars

Timelapse

Lone Signal

distancetomars.com If you’re considering applying to be part of Dutch company Mars One’s one-way mission to Mars, check this site out before you commit yourself fully. Its sole aim is to show exactly how far away the Red Planet really is, by whizzing you on that journey through a Solar System that’s measured in pixels, not kilometres. You’re likely to be surprised just how long it takes.

world.time.com/timelapse Since the 1970s, NASA’s Landsat satellites have been watching Earth from the skies. In that time they have amassed a fascinating perspective on our changing planet. Now NASA has teamed up with Google to share those changes in seamless animations. Watch Dubai expanding into the sea, and glaciers retreating before your eyes.

http://lonesignal.com We’ve been using spacecraft to explore the cosmos for many years. Now Lone Signal is announcing our presence in an altogether more wordy way, and you can join in too. This website collects tweet-sized messages to beam from the Jamesburg Earth Station in California to the star Gliese 526, 17.6 light-years away. It’s the first continuous beam aimed at messaging extraterrestrial life.

If you have a favourite website, blog or podcast that you’d like to share with other readers, please email [email protected] 86

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Games

Reviews

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

Also out DuckTales: Remastered PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360; Capcom; `1,415 If you’re a child of the 80s then you may remember DuckTales, a rock-hard platform game based on the Disney cartoon of the same name. Capcom certainly hopes that you do, as it’s bankrolled this lavish remake from WayForward - maker of the excellent Double Dragon Neon. Hand-drawn graphics and official voice actors add a fresh lick of paint to this classic of the NES era, with Scrooge McDuck bouncing his way across Transylvania, the Amazon and even the Moon. Quacking good fun!

Splinter Cell Blacklist

PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360; Ubisoft; `2,830 (PC), `3,773 (console)

spilling the beans to Joe Public. Where Enemy Unknown filtered the original game’s turnbased structure into a similar but streamlined format, The Bureau’s takes the form of a third-person shooter with a heavy emphasis on strategy – you’ve got the ability to slow down time as you trigger special moves and issue commands to your buddies. In true X-COM tradition your squad can be renamed and customised as you see fit, but once they’re dead they’re gone forever - adding tangible consequences to your leadership slip-ups. Parallels aside, this is still a notable departure from the standard fare for the series and, after the largely reverential predecessor, purists may struggle to love the new approach. Even so, there’s much to admire in the detail of the 1960s setting, with classic ‘alien greys’ stalking the streets of America’s apple-pie suburbia.

There once was a time when Sam Fisher was a man of restraint. In the original Splinter Cell the aim was to creep through levels without leaving a trace of your presence – weapons were only to be used in the most extreme of circumstances. These days, old Sam fits somewhere between Jack Bauer with toothache and Arnie in Commando, a rampant slayer of men. Blacklist favours stark violence over subtle espionage – a decision that will be seen by many as cause for lament.

Pikmin 3 

Wii U; Nintendo; `3,301 As any Nintendo veteran will tell you, the Pikmin are a race of colourful sentient plants. With the right stewardship they’ll clear a path for you, carry heavy objects or battle any hostile creature that lumbers into your path. In Pikmin 3 you’ll lead up to 100 of the chaps at once, as you explore a verdant alien garden in search of food for your dying planet. This was originally slated to be a Wii U launch title, but hopefully the wait has been worthwhile.

October 2013

gamespress x4

Xcom: Enemy unknown was one of the surprise hits of last year, a tense strategy outing that assumed the mantle of the now ancient but still much-loved X-Com series. For long-term fans, the game’s success was all the sweeter for the fact that it displaced a previous project known simply as XCOM - a mysterious first-person shooter that appeared suddenly in 2010, received a backlash from loyal fans and then promptly vanished from sight. The Bureau is a carefully revamped iteration of that former pariah. It’s no longer a first-person shooter, but the broad concept remains the same: the Cold War is in full swing and the United States is about to swap the red menace for the menace of little green men. Alien invaders are launching incursions across the country, and as the head of the newly formed X-Com agency, it’s your job to fend off the threat - ideally without

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Principal Speak Avnita Bir, Principal of R N Podar School talks to editor Preeti Singh about the importance of merging technology with education

“Even CBSE is looking at digital content; it is going to make education more efficient and effective” What has been your experience with introducing technology in your classrooms? It’s been great. I have found that whenever we have introduced a new technology or a new learning format, teachers initially struggle with it and then a role reversal occurs, where students end up being the teacher and teach them. The students become aware of the fact that there is something the teacher does not know and that they can help him/her, thereby strengthening the bond between them. The students also realise that learning is a two way process. Why is technology important in today’s education? In a school, there are physical as well as time constraints. In order to overcome these hurdles, we looked towards certain technological innovations to solve our problems and we found certain software programmes and hardware tools that would meet our budgets; they were easy to use and would allow us to collaborate and communicate with not only the teachers and students, but also the parents. That was when we started using Google docs as a method to relay information within and outside the school. It also helps that the school’s management is very tech savvy, so pitching of e-learning ideas has never been a task. How is this inculcated in everyday life of the school? Everything from academic interactions to administrative functions is done online via Google docs. For our 12th std students’ programme Drishtkon, where students select a topic and present their perspective on it, we had a chief guest from Bangalore to chair the event. Using Google hangouts, we were able to broadcast the event and 88

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parents were able to watch an event they would not have been able to otherwise. Common school resources, such as libraries, laboratories, auditoriums etc. are in-demand spaces in school, so we introduced the Google calendar to inform students and teachers about the booking schedule on a daily basis, creating a master time-table for the whole school. Our entire school’s programme of work, which is a comprehensive excel sheet document is shared with the parents, where detailed information is available for their perusal. What is the flip model of education that you exercise in school and what is your vision in education in that direction? Lohit Sahu, an education entrepreneur from BITS-Pilani visited our school and pointed out that while the teacher was asking questions from a class of 50 students and getting the correct responses, there were still certain students who chose not to answer or maybe did not know the answer. Everyone’s grasp of understanding a lesson is different. What if the student is reviewing his lesson at home and needs a mentor to quell his doubts. This is when I decided to introduce the flip model of learning, a learning format I used to practice when I was a student. I would read the schoolbooks before the school began, and note down questions, which were later explained during lessons. Children today are able to make sense out of a lot of information and we as educators wanted to tap into that particular skill of theirs. Through my research, I found out about Khan Academy and how their model of learning is personalised to each student allowing teachers/mentors to keep a track on the progress of each student. I wrote to them asking for a pilot for our school on

the topics of Maths, Science and Economics and so now whenever the students are stuck on a topic in any of the subjects, they can look up for a reference video on the academy’s website. This has become a part of our academic curriculum. What is the next step for the Indian education system? I think technology is going to play a major role but it will not be a substitute for a teacher. Under the Right To Education Act, many more children have started going to school and we need more teachers, as they are the facilitators. But, where we don’t have teachers, we have information that is available for use. So if we could tap into people who may not have the qualifications required for teaching, but have the passion for it, for interacting with students, then we could put these two together. There is a concept of collaboration and sharing of resources online, which is a great leveller. I think technology will definitely help bridge the divide between the scarcity of teachers and the increase in the number of students. In India, we have this huge demographic advantage, and if we need to fill the education gap, and educate our children,then technology could play a tremendous role in it. What are the immediate challenges that need to be met in order to progress? It would be changing the mindset. It is happening gradually. Going by the no exam policy or the Continuous Comprehensive Examination (CCE) format, inherently boards are always resistant to change. Another would be an acceptance of technology in the classroom, because I think technology would be the key to reach the numbers we are looking at. All of these need to happen at the board level. At present, R N Podar School is the only CBSE board affiliated institution to follow the flip model approach. There is Amrita University which has created digital content to be used by schools in the country, which CBSE is offering to

other schools. So CBSE is looking at digital content of other courses as well, which is going to make education more efficient and effective. Should we be re-evaluating our multiple board systems? The centre wants to bring about change, but the states oppose it. Not every state, but Maharashtra specifically. They have a bias against the non-state boards, whether it’s ICSE or CBSE. This bias comes off in different forms whether it’s the junior college admission or at the degree level or the use of a percentile system. And then again with the new CBSE reform, with no board exams, the students have a disadvantage; those who go for the schoolbased exam have a disadvantage. We then lose out on talented students. Since they can’t secure admission here, they are applying abroad. The National Curriculum Forum (NCF) says categorically that every state should have 20% component of local, but let 80% be uniform. So why cannot we have a uniform board where we can have a curriculum for the country? I worked closely with Mr. Kapil Sibal and he was

There is a concept of collaboration and sharing of resources online, which is a great leveller. Technology will definitely help bridge the divide between scarcity of teachers and the increase in number of students

trying to bring in all these changes, and he would say, “You know I can do only so much, states have to come on board.” What are you looking forward to, in terms of certain developments, in the near future? We held a conference in Delhi in 2012 called LearnShift India, which we want to do again this time in Mumbai in November. Here we are plan to get policy makers, academics, practitioners, investors and private expertise together; people who are looking at funding education and those who are looking at higher education and what can we do to have vertical mobility. It’s a place where all this come together. The other thing I want to see being created is a kind of lobby…for education. It was Syed Sultan Ahmed from Edumedia who suggested this at the last LearnShift. For example,schools need a regular supply of teachers, and if the management wants to start a B.Ed college, but is not allowed to do so, by the government. Why is that? We need to have a voice. For example, new teachers who are being trained for B.Ed colleges are not being prepared for what the real scenario in schools is. They don’t know the technology, they are still being trained in using old methods like charts. These things don’t work today, but the college is stuck with that. So how do we bridge that skill gap? And lastly, I guess we are the first ones again to do this and that’s why we are a case study at IIM Ahmedabad; recently I have hired somebody from the IIM to look at all our processes and give a management perspective to it. We do lots of things so I want to see if there is a cost benefit to all that we do, and see if we can improve our efficiency and effectiveness. Avnita Bir is an economist and the curator of LearnShift India that focuses on co-constructing ideas for a new learning future. A former member of the board of Education Reforms Committee headed by Kapil Sibal, she has been awarded the Education Quality Foundation of India Education Awards for Excellence in Education and was honoured with the National Award for Teachers by the former President of India, Pratibha Patil. October 2013

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Gadgets

Have suggestions for any gadget/application? Share with other readers, email [email protected]

Necessarily Unnecessary Here are some gadgets that you don’t really need, but what the heck…

Absurd Box We would have crowned this gadget ‘the most useless’ device we have ever seen but the company who created it has already beaten us to it. The Frivolous Engineering Company Inc’s calls it ‘The Ultimate Most Useless Machine’. All you can do with this black box literally is just turn it ON and OFF! You flick the switch to turn the machine on, whereupon a robotic finger emerges from within the box and lo and behold, flicks the switch to off and disappears inside. You can repeat this process as many times as you want or until the sheer uselessness of the gadget wears off for you. Not useless enough? The company allows you to also buy a DIY Kit, so you can use your time better and build yourself one. Price: `3,345 • www.frivolousengineering.com

Remote Snooze This battery operated universal remote control by Brookstone comes with easy click fabric buttons and a smart shutdown feature; leave it inactive for more than 60 seconds and the ‘remote’ shuts down. So maybe you won’t lose the remote anymore, but do expect people to plonk themselves unexpectedly on the ‘pillow’. Price: `2,434 • www.brookestone.com

Sky’s The Limit Have you spent ages trying to launch a paper airplane and watched it flop down as soon as it left your hands? Despair not, for the battery powered Electric Plane Launcher, designed by Middlesex University, is going to ensure a better takeoff. This innovative make-your-own kit comes with spring motors and rubber discs that are guaranteed to send your plane soaring at an astounding speed of 50km/hr. All you have to do is, make your plane, set its path course and launch it. You could also just keep trying to toss the plane by hand till you get it right. Price: `972 • www.complex.com

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Reverse Time No, it doesn’t show a different time, it just shows time differently. The numbers on the watch are placed counter-clockwise and the hands move backwards too. Confusing and unusual as it is, you will spend a considerable amount of your time figuring out what exactly the time is. The next time you are looking for a timepiece that is different from the rest, you know what watch you need… if you are up for the challenge that is. Price: `1,817 • www.stupid.com

Enlightening Shower For most people, showering is ME time. Inject that with bright colour changing LED lights blinking over your head and wave a soapy goodbye to your regular bathing routine. US based company Magic showerhead introduces SH1022, a showerhead with 15 colour changing LED lights that promises to make your showering experiences more than just a routine.

www.etsy.com, www.images-amazon.com, www.i1.ytimg.com, www.morhipo.com

Price: `7,327 • www.magicshowerhead.com

For World Facility

Homemade Firewood Sure we don’t need for a fireplace in this country but for the rest of the regions and the colder areas of the world, feast your eyes on this epitome of uselessness. The Newspaper Log Roller helps you roll your newspaper into cylindrical shapes that can then be used to start a fire in your fireplace. Because rolling a newspaper by your hand is such a tedious and time-consuming task. Did we mention that you have to put this kit together by yourself? Have fun! Price: `2,070 • www.trendhunter.com

The Clock t-shirt in the era of smart phones is the best way to avoid being asked the ubiquitous question, ‘What’s the time?’ This one of a kind t-shirt displays time through LED lights on the front side, which is powered by four AAA batteries located in a pocket in the inside of the t-shirt. Time can be shared with the world in eight different kinds of flash patterns in a 24-hour format. Another important piece information, the t-shirt can and should be washed only by hand. Price: `2,429 • www.pointlessbutcool.com

October 2013

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The

last word

Dr Nandini C Singh writes about how sound is conveyed into meaning by the brain

“Act of listening and understanding sound may be thought of as recapitulating the past and predicting the future” n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” are the opening lines of the Bible. Similarly ‘OM’ is believed by some to be the first sound in the universe. The association of sound with meaning is as old as evolution itself. Our capacity for language has always been considered a unique gift – an ability that possibly makes human beings the most powerful beings on earth. Communication is the backbone of a societal structure and sounds form the primary means for communication. The auditory system, which is the sensory system for the sense of hearing in human beings, must perform the following tasks: (a) detect sound energy from the environment, (b) transform that energy into a pattern of nerve impulses (c) transport those impulses to specific locations in the brain and finally (d) process the pattern of impulses to identify the stimulus. This series of processes lead to auditory perception and is performed each time we encounter a sound, also called an auditory stimulus. The process of auditory perception begins in the air and ends in the brain. Sound waves which are pressure variations created by the vibration of the vocal cord or a musical instrument, enter the ear via the ear canal, a short crooked

123RF.com

“I

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tube that ends at the eardrum. Our understanding of how melodies or conversations are assembled back in the brain is still evolving. Scientists believe that human beings are wired to learn language – i.e., when a child or an adult is in a typical social environment, they will learn the language by ‘immersion’. The basis for this process is pattern recognition. The brain is built to recognise patterns, and in order to derive meaning from sound it starts to look for patterns. One way that babies use to solve the dilemma of language learning is by using the pattern of sounds within words to distinguish the ends of words. Babies ‘pay attention to sounds that stick together’ For instance, babies recognize the “aa” sound very early in life. That’s because people around them are using it – m”a”m”a”, p”a”p”a” in addition

to cooing noises is what the baby hears around itself and soon starts trying to find it in other words. And when that pattern breaks, the baby understands that a new word is about to start. Our understanding of music and its interpretation by the brain is, however, more recent. About 50 years ago, the famous neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, reported that when neurosurgical patients received electrical stimulation to the auditory cortex while they were awake, they would sometimes report hearing music. Dr Penfield’s observations, along with those of many others, suggest that musical information is also likely to be represented in the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex, which is part of the temporal lobe, is also active when we imagine a tune. This ability not only allows musicians and

composers to experience music even when it is not actually played, but also to invent new musical compositions and even remixes. The auditory cortex also responds when you hear someone play a wrong note — easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar piece of music. Thus, pattern recognition is one theory that is believed to explain sound recognition. Cortical circuits accumulate auditory information over time, and create templates or mental representations of various patterns. Not surprisingly, these are strongly influenced by culture, training and our surrounding environments. However, these representations are plastic – in that they rely on a phenomenon called neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the neural circuits to change due to learning. As a result these auditory circuits are constantly updated and refined. They also allow us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events. So each act of listening and understanding sound may be thought of as both recapitulating the past and predicting the future. Dr Nandini C Singh heads a research lab at the National Brain Research Centre (NBRC), Haryana, where she studies language, central auditory processes, and the structures and representation of sound.

SCIENCE • HISTORY • NATURE • FOR THE CURIOUS MIND