BBC Knowledge IN 2014-06 (Vol. 4 Issue 4)

A Times of India publication

Volume 4 Issue 4 June 2014 `125

SCIENCE • HISTORY • NATURE • FOR THE CURIOUS MIND

R.N.I.MAHENG/2010/35422

contents

A Times of India publication

Volume 4 Issue 4 June 2014 `125

SCIENCE • HISTORY • NATURE • FOR THE CURIOUS MIND

science photo library, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, epfl, Henry Hargreaves, nasa, getty, urb-e.com

Cover story

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24 Memory

Is the memory you cherish, real or fake? Find out how eerily close science is to manipulating your memories

features 32 Uninvited Guests

There are parasites living in your body that you are unaware of. Here are 10 of them

R.N.I.MAHENG/2010/35422

38 All Aboard The Future Express

Inventor Elon Musk’s proposed revolutionary mode of transport will help commuters travel faster than the speed of sound

44 Portfolio: Food Maps

A mouth-watering approach to cartography by photographer Henry Hargreaves and food stylist Caitlin Levin will have you reaching out for your forks rather than the atlas

52 Monument Mysteries

Using 3D laser technology, discover how history’s greatest monuments and buildings were constructed

54 Is This What A Genius Looks Like?

On the occasion of William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, we answer some pertinent questions on his life

60 Forecast From The Past?

Will the rising CO2 levels turn our weather into the inclement weather of the pre-historic era?

64 Noah’s Ark – The True Story

A scientific analysis of the biblical vessel reveals the authentic facts about its existence

June 2014

regulars 6 Q&A

Our panel of experts answer the questions you’ve always wanted to ask

12 Snapshot

Outstanding photographs to inform and engage

18 Update

The latest intelligence – scientists discover a new phase in stem cell research and how China’s pollution is causing a change in global weather patterns

68 How Do We Know: The Existence of Isotopes

We trace the isotopes from their discovery to their widespread application in the 21st Century

74 Ye Olde Travel Guide: Amsterdam,1648 We travel to the city of Amsterdam, the confluence of science, art, and commerce

32 38

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The big sources of CO 2 60 44

76 Resource

Our picks offer the best of science, history, and nature on the web

80 Inside The Pages

The master of short stories, author H. H. Munro, spins a spine-chilling tale set in the country side. Read the full story

82 Edu Talk

Interview with Dr Ayyappan, Director-Education of the Sree Gokulam Public Schools, Kerala

84 Gadgets

The next phase of lifestyle gadgets is here and it is in our homes and on ourselves

90 In Focus

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the 'anti-philosopher' who changed the landscape of analytical philosophy

84 54

from the editor Did you get a chance to see the movie Noah? Did you know the legend of Noah’s Ark predates the Bible, and even the Babylonians had a version of a flood story? That an ancient version of this story exists in the form of a tablet according to which the Ark was not long but round? Read the fascinating interview with researcher and author Irving Finkel about the real truth behind Noah’s Ark (on page 64). This month’s cover feature is on memory. If you, like me, have a let’s just say less than spectacular power of recollection and retention, and can get hazy about bits and pieces of your life, then this story will interest you. According to the latest strides in genetic research in this area, there is a good possibility that memory can not just be drastically improved but also permanently deleted or implanted. If you want to lay your bets on the natural way, then they say a Mediterranean diet is key to an active brain and longevity. And what is a Mediterranean diet? It is a magical combination of foods staple to that area ie, Greece, Palestine, Spain, Portugal, and Southern Italy. And consists of foods like olive oil, legumes, unrefined cereals, cheeses, fruit and vegies along with fish and other meats. In this issue, we bring a fascinating photo feature on countries beautifully illustrated by the foods they are famous for. It is a must see - on page 44. Read about philosopher Wittgenstein’s life and Elon Musk’s game changing Hyerloop (yeah it goes faster than the speed of light) that is set to change how we commute. Look over disgusting bugs that actually look quite pretty and who would love to live in our bodies. And learn about Shakespeare who turns 450 years old this year. Wasn’t he the one who has written ‘hell is empty and all the devils are here’? Another month, another exciting issue of BBC Knowledge. Mrigank sharma (India Sutra)

Enjoy.

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experts this issue Nicola Davies is a regular contributor to Nursing Standard, UK’s best-selling nursing journal and also works with Macmillan Cancer Support in designing and evaluating self-management programmes for cancer survivors. In this issue, she explores the science behind how our brains store memories. See page 24 Dickson Despommier is an ecologist, a microbiologist, and an author. He is also the Professor of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University. In this issue, he introduces us to the unwanted parasites living in our bodies. See page 32 Stuart Nathan is the Features Editor at The Engineer magazine, where he has been writing on technology and innovation since 1996. He has also worked at Chemistry & Industry magazine as Deputy New Editor. In this issue, he covers Elon Musk’s revolutionary transport mode, the HyperLoop, that could change commuting forever. See page 38 Paul Edmondson is Head of Education at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and an Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute and the director for the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival. In this issue, he answers some of the most contentious questions about The Bard. See page 54

 Send us your letters Has something you’ve read in BBC Knowledge Magazine intrigued or excited you? Write in and share it with us. We’d love to hear from you and we’ll publish a selection of your comments in the forthcoming issues.

Email us at: [email protected] We welcome your letters, while reserving the right to edit them for length and clarity. By sending us your letter you permit us to publish it in the magazine. We regret that we cannot always reply personally to letters.

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Your Questions Answered Do music or acting genes run in families? p8 Would birds be able to fly on other planets? p10 Why do some people sleep with eyes open? p11

Why are some people scared of holes?

Expert PANEL Susan Blackmore (SB)

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

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.

gary bell/oceanwideimages.com, thinkstock, getty, alamy

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.

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

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June 2014

A fear of holes could have evolved to help us avoid deadly species such as the blue-ringed octopus

It’s called trypophobia and it’s not a fear of open man-holes or caves. Rather, it is the revulsion some experience when they look at asymmetric clusters of small holes, or dark spots on anything from skin to wood or a plant. If that doesn’t sound horrifying, try Googling trypophobia. You’ll see real or Photoshopped images of people with clusters of pockmarks dotted on their face or hands. Some are simply dark holes, others might be eggs or larvae. Severe trypophobes are also revolted by much more innocuous things like the bubbles in a Nestlé Aero. The term trypophobia was only coined in 2005 and the reasons for it are still poorly understood. One theory is that it might be a behaviour that evolved to make us avoid people with skin parasites. Another study at the University of Essex published last year found that the clustered patterns that tend to trigger trypophobic reactions are also found on some very dangerous animals, such as the spots on a blue-ringed octopus. LV

What makes icebergs flip over? Icebergs are notorious for keeping around 90 per cent of their bulk hidden beneath the surface of the sea. While this makes them far more dangerous to shipping than they appear, it does mean they’re extremely stable, and unlikely to wobble about. Yet even mountain-sized icebergs weighing hundreds of millions of tonnes have been known to flip over, creating tsunamis capable of swamping nearby vessels. The risk is highest just after the birth of an iceberg from the edge of a glacier. As it breaks away, the iceberg tumbles off into the ocean, its irregular shape leading to the berg swaying or even flipping right over as gravity seeks to bring most of its weight beneath the sea surface. According to research published in 2011 by Prof Justin Burton and colleagues of the University of Chicago, the resulting motion can release as much energy as an atomic bomb. RM

How do bank card readers work? Bank card readers used to work similarly to the heads in a tape machine. Information was transferred as the card’s magnetic strip passed over the reader. In chip-and-pin devices, the readers make electrical contact with an embedded chip on the card. Like the magnetic strip, the user’s PIN is encrypted on the chip. When the correct number is entered, the card authorises the payment. GM

So much easier than writing a cheque

STATS VITAL

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carat ht of carats (1 ordinary weig ntly e a tr the ex e diamond rec lu a’s b ic fr re A ra th a Sou found in an mine Cullin

Is personality genetic? Yes, in the sense that many personality differences are highly heritable. Some of the best evidence comes from twin studies, especially those comparing pairs of identical twins who have been raised together to pairs who have been raised apart. These have the same genetic make-up but are brought up in different families. Among the most highly heritable traits are leadership, traditionalism and obedience to authority. It may seem odd that liking traditional values and wanting rules to be obeyed are inherited, yet this is what research reveals. The biological basis may involve different levels of neurotransmitters, including serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline. Other traits that are more than 50 per cent heritable include zest for life, sense of alienation, responsiveness to stress and risk-taking. This does not mean that these traits are rigidly fixed. A naturally fearful person can learn to overcome fear, an excessive risktaker can learn when it’s wise to hold back, and knowing how our body reacts to stress can help us understand ourselves. But we cannot change ourselves into someone we are not. SB

Q&A top ten

loudest animals 1. Sperm whale Intensity: 236 decibels (dB) Location: Worldwide Clicks generated by forcing air through a pair of phonic lips

2. Bottlenose dolphin Intensity: 220 dB Location: Worldwide Can emit thousands of clicks per second

3. Snapping shrimp Intensity: 200 dB

Location: Worldwide Acoustic pressures from a snapping claw can kill fish

4. Blue whale Intensity: 188 dB Location: Worldwide Songs of four notes can last two minutes each

5. Howler monkey Intensity: 140 dB

Location: South America Howls can travel 5km through dense forest

6. Lesser bulldog bat Intensity: 137 dB

science photo library x3, nasa, thinkstock x5, getty x3, alamy

Location: South America They squeeze ear muscles shut when squealing

7. Kekapo parrot Intensity: 132 dB Location: New Zealand Male inflates like a balloon and emits a series of booms

8. Moluccan cockatoo Intensity: 129 dB Location: Moluccas, Indonesia Screeching mainly happens at dawn and dusk

9. Northern elephant seal Intensity: 125 dB Location: Eastern Pacific Snouts act as echo chambers

10. Bladder cicada Intensity: 120 dB Location: Australia Deep, frog-like sound is made by males to attract females

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June 2014

Musical genetic genius: the Jackson 5

A nearby gamma-ray burst would wipe out all life on Earth

Do music or acting genes run in families? There are no such things as ‘music genes’ or ‘acting genes’, only genes and combinations of genes that, in certain circumstances, contribute to these abilities. However, the traits of musical or acting ability do tend to run in families. The heritability of musical ability is about 50 per cent, meaning that around half the variation in ability is attributable to genetic differences. There are several genes known to be involved. There are also stories of musicians who were adopted early in life that only discovered later that their biological parents were musicians. The opposite – ‘amusia’ or ‘tone deafness’ – affects about four per cent of the population, although watching Indian Idol you’d think it was more. This too can be inherited. SB

It didn’t help with her night terrors when her parents insisted on the only lighting in her room coming from a Victorian oil lamp

What’s the biggest gamma-ray burst recorded? Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are extremely energetic flashes of radiation caused by the collapse of massive stars to form neutron stars or black holes. They are the most energetic events in the Universe, but extremely rare. The record for the most energetic is named GRB 130427A, which occurred on 27 April 2013. It was detected by many telescopes, on Earth and in space, and occurred in a galaxy in the constellation of Leo, about 3.8 billion light-years away. This is relatively nearby for a GRB, which explains why it was so bright. In fact, GRB 130427A was more than five times brighter than the previous record. It’s the biggest explosion astronomers know about, after the Big Bang itself. If it had happened in our arm of the Milky Way, it would have destroyed all life on Earth. AG

Are there any treatments for night terrors? Not really. There is nothing pathological about night terrors, and the best response is sympathy and understanding. Many young children get them, especially boys aged five to seven, but most grow out of it by adolescence. Night terrors can be as frightening to those watching as to sufferers, who typically wake up screaming and confused, remembering nothing of what woke them. They may hit things, wet the bed, and appear terribly agitated, but in many cases they never fully wake up. They happen during non-REM deep sleep and usually occur after two or three hours of sleep. They are quite distinct from nightmares, which are horrible dreams that happen later in the night during REM sleep. Although they appear terribly distressed at the time, many children remember nothing about the event the following day. Adults occasionally have night terrors, but this is most often due to stress or alcohol. SB

QuicKFIRE How will aircraft be powered when there is no more oil? The historic flight of the Solar Impulse plane last year proved that power from the Sun might be able to drive aircraft in a post-oil world. The plane flew in several hops from San Francisco to New York. All the power came from an array of 12,000 solar cells and lithium ion batteries that charged during the day and allowed the plane to keep airborne at night. In the short term, biofuels – fuel derived from living organisms – are likely to be the answer. GM

Would a radioactive material at absolute zero emit radiation? Strictly speaking, it’s impossible to get to exactly absolute zero, or –273°C. Even so, the idea of chilling radioactive waste to incredibly low temperatures to make it safe is appealing. Sadly, however, it wouldn’t work. Radioactivity is a manifestation of fundamental nuclear forces and these are unaffected by low temperatures. RM

Will there ever be a male pill? Unlike women, men don’t have a natural monthly cycle of fertility, which means you can’t control it with a simple hormone pill. Until recently, research on the male pill has focused on ways of deactivating sperm, but new research in Australia has found a way to genetically modify mice so that sperm are not added to the semen during ejaculation. To turn this discovery into a pill, you would need drugs that can mimic the effects of the genetic modifications. This could take another decade to develop and license. LV

Q&A

Did you know?

Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest in the Solar System, but doesn’t have a moon itself

Can a moon have a moon? Astronomers are pretty certain there are no moons orbiting moons in our Solar System. Although possible, it is likely that the gravitational tug of the parent planet would quickly destabilise the orbit of the moon’s moon, eventually pulling it out of its orbit. However if the moon’s moon is small, the distance to the parent planet is large and there are negligible tidal forces, then such a system could exist. AG

Why doesn’t fog freeze in sub-zero temperatures?

science photo library x2, getty, thinkstock

It does, eventually. But if the temperature is only a few degrees below 0°C, the water droplets remain liquid. This is called supercooling and it occurs because ice crystals can’t form easily without a dust particle to act as a nucleus. Because fog doesn’t fall, it doesn’t pick up dust as it moves through the air so it doesn’t usually freeze. Supercooled fog is often called freezing fog, but only because it freezes when it touches the ground. For the droplets in the air to freeze, the temperature has to drop below –35ºC. This is called ice fog. LV

It’s nearly spring, hang in there!

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June 2014

What’s the oldest human DNA discovered? About 400,000 years old. This was DNA from a thigh-bone found in the ‘Pit Of Bones’ cave in the Atapuerca Mountains of northern Spain. The leg bone either belonged to an early Neanderthal or possibly a member of the human species Homo heidelbergensis. These are both sister species to our own Homo sapiens but H. heidelbergensis is the older species and is probably the direct ancestor of both the Neanderthals and ourselves. These other species of the genus Homo are not the same as a modern human though. Homo sapiens didn’t appear for another 200,000 years, and didn’t migrate from Africa to Europe until at least another 75,000 years after that. LV

A skull of H. heidelbergensis found in the Pit Of Bones in Spain

Would birds be able to fly on other planets? While the birds on other planets may not look much like those on Earth, if they exist at all, the laws of physics remain the same. They show there’s no reason why birds should not be able to fly – given the right combination of not too much weight and not too thin an atmosphere. RM

Unfortunately there’s no reason why you wouldn’t get bird droppings on you on another planet

Q&A Is it possible to harness the power of falling rain? A 2008 French study estimated that you could use piezoelectric devices, which generate power when they move, to extract 12 milliwatts from a raindrop. Over a year, this would amount to less than 0.001kWh per square metre – enough to power a remote sensor. A better idea would be to collect the water and use it to drive a turbine. The UK receives just

It doesn’t rain hard enough for useful power, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise

Is light pollution causing insect species to decline? The moth: a lover of the light

getty, thinkstock x2

Almost certainly. Nocturnal insects, particularly flying ones, are attracted by artificial lights. Some species circle around a streetlight, others settle on it or stop moving when they wander too close. This makes them more vulnerable to predators and interferes with their normal foraging and mating behaviours. This is definitely causing the balance of insect species to change. However, it’s too early to say whether the overall number is dropping or if some species actually benefit from artificial light. LV

KNOW SPOT The most densely populated city in the world is Bangladesh’s Dhaka. There are 44,500 people in every square kilometre.

under a tonne of water per square metre per year. For a house with a 185m2 roof, this would amount to 3kWh of energy per year. With a 60 per cent conversion efficiency, it’s enough to run a 15W light bulb for 133 hours. That’s still a lot less than solar energy; we receive 60,000 times more energy per square metre from the Sun than from rain. LV

Strange but true Why do some people sleep with their eyes open? Children sleep with their eyes open far more often than adults and it seems to do them little harm. ‘Nocturnal lagophthalmos’ is the technical term for this and in adults it can be more serious. If the eyes do not close properly then tears cannot wash across the whole of the cornea, keeping it wet and clean to prevent damage. The underlying reason may be a problem with the facial nerves that close the eyes or with the shape of the eyelid. Some skin diseases and infections can also cause lagophthalmos and it can even arise from botched plastic surgery. For example, some older people have their upper eyelids operated on to remove some of the excess skin that increases with age. This may make them look younger, but if too much skin is removed their eyelids cannot close properly and they have to sleep with their eyes open. SB

Sleeping with at least one eye open makes it difficult for anyone to steal your copy of BBC Knowledge

nature | Snapshot

CATERS

snapshot

Horsing around eyes wide open Like puppets from a children’s TV show, these bizarre-looking creatures seem to be posing for the camera. Though often referred to as False Stick insects, they are actually Horsehead grasshoppers. Their appearance as bulbouseyed twigs is an adaptation to help them blend in with trees in the Peruvian rainforest. “Some grasshoppers in other parts of the world have an elongated shape and a slanted face, but not as extreme as this,” says Dr George McGavin, entomologist and BBC presenter. “The females reach about 16cm in length and they can jump a fair way.” In fact, neurobiologists from the University of Leicester have discovered that Horsehead grasshoppers jump without using muscles thanks to the unusual properties in their limbs and joints. It is hoped this could help in the development of robotic and prosthetic limbs.

June 2014

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cern CERN

Science | Snapshot

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June 2014

Cloud control make it rain One hundred metres below the ground, the CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets) experiment unfolds. This is the top of the cloud chamber where beams of ionising particles, tuned to mimic the cosmic radiation that rains relentlessly down on Earth, are fired through plumes of atmospheric gases. The experiment is investigating the effect of cosmic radiation on cloud formation, an important factor in understanding the Sun’s role in climate change.To mimic atmospheric conditions, the chamber must be kept as free from impurities as possible. “We’re the only cloud chamber in the world that can do these experiments at the required level of cleanliness,” said CLOUD spokesperson Jasper Kirkby. “It’s a big subject but we’ll answer the question definitively in about 10 years.” So far, CLOUD has blasted high energy particles at amines, derivatives of ammonia. Next up will be sweetsmelling monoterpenes. “When you go into the forest that lovely smell is the monoterpenes. They’re organic compounds with a lot of carbon in them and we will try to understand how they interact with cosmic radiation.” The experiment is at CERN, the European nuclear research facility located in France and Switzerland.

Science | Snapshot

Rocky start, flying finish upwards and onwards

nasa

After spectacularly crashing in 2012, the team working on NASA’s ‘Morpheus’ most likely wished they could have taken a blue pill and forgotten about the whole ordeal. But now the prototype lander has found its second wind after successfully completing two flights in one week. During the latest test flight the lander stayed in the air for 64 seconds and reached a height of 91m. On the way back down it avoided rocks, craters and other obstacles to land within 30cm of its target pad. Morpheus is a re-usable vehicle propelled by a liquid oxygen-methane engine. It’s capable of vertical take-off and landing and can scan surfaces for potential hazards before touching down. The hope is that it will eventually be able to land unaided on craggy surfaces like the Moon or asteroids. “Morpheus itself was never intended for human spaceflight, but these technologies have potential for future human missions,” says Morpheus project manager Jon Olansen.

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June 2014

update

the latest intelligence

Game-changing stem cell discovery Personalised medicine is a step closer, thanks to the development of a new technique

haruko obokata , nasa, thinkstock, jennifer wenger/penn museum

Having been made fluorescent, stem cells produced using the new method completely populate a mouse foetus, confirming their existence

A

revolutionary method for creating cells that can grow into any type of tissue has been developed by scientists in Japan, potentially ushering in a new era of personalised medicine. Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology have found that almost any mature adult cell taken from mice can be transformed into a pluripotent stem cell. These are of potentially great use in medicine since they can transform into any kind of cell in the body. The process, dubbed stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP), involves shocking cells with a suitable dose of stress. Though the exact mechanism is not yet understood, the stress causes the cells to lose their specific characteristics and enter a state of pluripotency. The scientists tried squeezing the cells, heating them and starving them, but had the best results when soaking them in a mildly acidic solution. “It’s exciting to think about the new

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June 2014

possibilities these findings open up, not only in areas like regenerative medicine, but perhaps in the study of cellular ageing and cancer as well,” explained lead researcher Haruko Obokata. Pluripotent stem cells have already been created using several different methods. One type, called Embryonic stem cells (ESCs), can be harvested from embryos that have been fertilised in vitro in a lab. However, this has proved controversial as it involves the destruction of human embryos. Another type, induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS), were produced in 2006 by a team from Japan led by Shinya Yamanaka. They were produced from adult cells by manipulating genetic material. The team was later awarded the Nobel Prize. However, the new technique has the

advantage of being much simpler, taking only half an hour to produce the cells. To confirm that the cells created through the stressing process were pluripotent, and so able to transform into other cells in the body, the researchers tagged some of them with a fluorescent dye and injected them into a mouse embryo. These glowing cells spread through the animal as it grew, proving that they were pluripotent. The mice were then bred and produced healthy offspring. The next step is to attempt the process in other mammals and ultimately humans. If successful, doctors will be able to create stem cells specific to each patient from a simple skin biopsy or blood sample. Eventually, stem cells could be used for even growing entire replacement organs.

Environment

China’s pollution goes global Biochemistry

Not just tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping: the news about cod is good for blood banks

In cod blood As well as tasting delicious when deep-fried in batter, cod has another impressive talent: they are able to survive in the Arctic’s icy waters without freezing solid. Now, scientists have used this ability as a starting point to create a new way to freeze the packs of human blood used in medical emergencies. Researchers at the University of Warwick found that adding tiny amounts of polyvinyl alcohol, a derivative of wood glue, to stored human blood mimics antifreeze properties

A satellite image shows huge clouds of pollution flowing east away from China

CHINA 8.2 billion

USA 5.4 billion

from Asia can have important consequences on the weather pattern over North America.” The boom in China’s economy during the last 30 years has led to the building of countless factories and power plants that pump out huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere. Levels of air pollution in some cities, such as Beijing, are often more than 100 times higher than acceptable limits set by the World Health Organization’s standards.

UK 0.4 billion

A commonly quoted idea of chaos theory is that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can trigger a hurricane in the US. Now, it seems it is not colourful insects but pollution in China that is affecting global weather patterns. Using climate models and data collected over 30 years about aerosols, fine particles of liquid suspended in a gas, researchers at Texas A&M University found air pollution over Asia is impacting global air circulations. Much of it is coming from China. “The models clearly show that pollution originating from Asia has an impact on the upper atmosphere and it appears to make storms or cyclones even stronger,” Professor Renyi Zhang explains. “This pollution affects cloud formation, precipitation, storm intensity and other factors, and eventually impacts climate. Most likely, pollution

Total CO2 emissions in metric tonnes

Data for 2010 from the World Bank Organization standards.

found in the blood of coldacclimatised fish. It works by inhibiting the growth of ice crystals during thawing that would otherwise damage the blood cells. “Although we need to run further tests, this new method looks very promising in terms of vastly extending the shelf life of blood stored for medical procedures and therefore preventing dangerous dips in blood availability at certain times of the year,” said Dr Matthew Gibson.

Egyptology

Pharaoh’s tomb discovered Archaeologists have unearthed the 3600-year-old tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh and the first material proof of a forgotten dynasty. The tomb was discovered in January 2013 near a 60-tonne royal chamber found in South Abydos, 482km (300 miles) south of Cairo, by a team led by the University of Pennsylvania’s Dr Josef Wegner. It had been plundered by ancient looters, who had torn apart the mummified remains and stripped many of the gilded surfaces. Nevertheless, archaeologists were able to recover the bones and

determine they belonged to Woseribre Senebkay, a pharaoh who ruled in the 17th Century BC. Further analysis indicates he was around 5ft 10 inches (1m 77cm), and died in his mid-to-late 40s. “It’s exciting to find not just the tomb of one previously unknown pharaoh, but the necropolis of an entire forgotten dynasty,” said Dr Wegner. “Work in the royal tombs of the Abydos Dynasty promises to shed new light on the political history and society of an important but poorly understood era.”

The remains of Woseribre Senebkay, whose tomb was discovered last January

round up

Keeping abreast of the top science, history and nature research from around the world

Wildlife conservation

Was a Danish zoo right to kill a male giraffe? Copenhagen Zoo has sparked an international controversy after killing Marius, an otherwise perfectly healthy 18-month-old giraffe, because its genes were deemed too close to those of seven other animals kept in the same enclosure.Vets shot the giraffe before dissecting the carcass in front of a crowd of onlookers and feeding it to the zoo’s lions. “Copenhagen Zoo’s giraffes are part of an international breeding programme, which aims to ensure a healthy giraffe population in European zoos,” said scientific director Bengt Holst, defending the zoo’s actions. “This is done by constantly ensuring that only unrelated giraffes breed, so that inbreeding is avoided. If an animal’s genes are well represented in a population, then

any further breeding with that particular animal is unwanted.” Holst added that giving the animal contraceptives and allowing it to live on, as some critics suggested, would have caused a number of unwanted side effects in its internal organs and reduced its quality of life. However,Yorkshire Wildlife Park had offered to home the giraffe, but the offer was refused. Copenhagen Zoo said it could not be passed on to another institution due to rules set down by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) that prohibit the selling of animals. EAZA itself backed the zoo. In a statement it said: “EAZA fully supports the decision to humanely put the animal down. Our aim is to safeguard for future generations

a genetically diverse, healthy population of animals against their extinction.” The animal rights charity PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) condemned the decision and questioned the need for breeding in zoos. “Breeding programmes serve no true conservation purpose because giraffes and other animals born in zoos are rarely, if ever, returned to their natural habitats. They give the public a false sense that something meaningful has happened,” said PETA’s Dan Howe. “The death of Marius should be a wake-up call for anyone who still harbours the illusion that zoos serve any purpose beyond incarcerating intelligent animals for profit,” he added.

the ohio state university, getty, british antarctic survey

News in brief Tattoos reveal personality Though traditionally the preserve of sailors and tough guys, tattoos are now sported by everyone from binmen to bank managers. But a study has found they may still be a useful way to spot mavericks and risk takers. Researchers questioned students at Midwestern University and discovered that students with tattoos were significantly more likely to use alcohol and marijuana and engage in risky sexual behaviour.

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Whales from space

Whales can be tracked using satellites, a new study carried out in Argentina has shown

The beauty of maths A new way to count whales from space could revolutionise the way populations of these mammals are monitored and tracked. Using high-resolution imagery from the WorldView-2 satellite, a trial study detected southern right whales off the coast of Argentina with 90 per cent accuracy. It’s hoped that the technique will provide a safer, more flexible and cheaper alternative to counting whales from ships and planes.

It’s official: maths is beautiful. UK researchers asked 15 mathematicians to rate equations on a scale from -5 (ugly) to +5 (beautiful) and then have their brains scanned as they viewed the formulae. The more beautiful the equation (as rated by the mathematicians), the greater the activity in their medial orbitofrontal cortex. This is the region of the brain that ‘lights up’ when we listen to a symphony or ponder an artistic masterpiece.

INSPIRING YOUNG MINDS THROUGH KNOWLEDGE OLYMPIADS

Last year millions of students from 27,000 schools in 1,350+ cities and 16 countries competed in the SOF Olympiads!

14TH SOF NATIONAL CYBER OLYMPIAD SEP. 18 & OCT. 14

17TH SOF NATIONAL SCIENCE OLYMPIAD NOV. 12 & NOV. 25

8TH SOF INTERNATIONAL MATHEMATICS OLYMPIAD DEC. 4 & DEC. 18

Important: Applications must reach us by August 31st, 2014.

5TH SOF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH OLYMPIAD JAN. 20 & JAN. 29

Promotional Feature

AWARDS, SCHOLARSHIPS, & RECOGNITIONS

SCHEDULE OF EXAMS:

Each of the four Olympiads will be conducted on two dates with a separate question paper for each date. Schools may choose a date convenient to them from either of the two dates. The entire school must conduct the Olympiad only on the given dates.

Students attaining top ranks at school level, state level, and at international level will be recognised.

 14th National Cyber Olympiad (NCO)  18 September 2014 & 14 October 2014



 17th National Science Olympiad (NSO)  12 & 25 November 2014  8th International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO)  4 & 18 December 2014

INTERNATIONAL AWARDS - Class 1 - 12 RANK AWARD NO. OF AWARDS





(New) Academic Excellence Scholarship (AES): `5,000 scholarship and trophies to 160 students from class three to ten. The winner will be a student who gets the highest aggregate score in any three Olympiad exams in the 2nd level (1st level for IEO). 4th Teachers’ Training Camp (TTC): 100 teachers are invited to attend a three day residential education camp conducted by trainers of British Council. The boarding, lodging, and training costs are borne by SOF.

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`25,000 each + Silver Medal* 47 + Gifts Worth `1,000 + Merit Certificate

3

`10,000 each + Bronze Medal* + Gifts Worth `1,000 + Merit Certificate

47

RANK AWARD NO. OF AWARDS

* A minimum of ten students must register for an Olympiad from a school

Scholarship for Excellence in English (SEE): `5,000 each scholarship to 120 students will be provided. Schools may nominate one student excelling in English language.

47

STATE AWARDS - Class 1-12



Girl Child Scholarship Scheme (GCSS): `5,000 each scholarship to 300 girls will be provided. Schools may nominate one girl who is academically inclined and is from an economically weak family.

`50,000 each + Gold Medal* + Gifts Worth `1,000 + Merit Certificate



 5th International English Olympiad (IEO)  20 & 29 January 2015

SCHOLARSHIPS

1



1

`5000 each + Gold Medal* + Gifts Worth `1,000 + Merit Certificate

840

2

`2,500 each + Silver Medal* + Gifts Worth `1,000 + Merit Certificate

840

3

`1,000/ each + Bronze Medal* + Gifts Worth `1,000 + Merit Certificate

840

25 Gifts Worth `1,000 + Merit Certificate

20,680

4-25

(new) STATE AWARDS – FOR LEVEL ONE WINNERS Class wise  Top ten rank holders from each of 20 states / zones, who qualify for the 2nd level exam will be awarded a Certificate of Merit and a gold medal each. This will be applicable for NCO, NSO, and IMO.

SCHOOL TOPPER AWARDS Medals will be awarded to toppers from each class as under:  If 10 or more students from one class write an exam - gold, silver, and bronze medals will be awarded to top three rank holders.  If between five to nine students from a class write an exam - a gold medal will be awarded to the topper.  Participation Certificates will be awarded to every student and Merit Certificates to all 2nd level qualifiers.  Performance Analysis Report for each participating student will be provided.

neuroscience | Science

What if you could wipe out a hurtful moment from your past, implant a completely new experience, or remember everything for an exam with ease? Dr Nicola Davis looks at how science will soon be able to shape your memories

E

ver wished you had a better memory so you were able to recall names, dates and faces more easily, or even get better grades in exams? How about removing all recollection of a failed relationship like the characters in Michel Gondry’s Academy award-winning movie Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind? Or virtually travelling the Solar System via false memories implanted directly in your mind like ArnoldSchwarzenegger’s Douglas Quaid in the sci-fi classic Total Recall? Well, therapies like these may be coming sooner than you think as scientists have been making great strides in how to delete, improve, and even create memories.

“Memory is a very important aspect of cognition,” says Dr David Vauzour, a senior research fellow at the University of East Anglia. “It refers to what you can remember along with the capacity for remembering. Some memories are retained for a short period of time and then discarded, but the most important ones are stored in the brain and can be retrieved at will. This process of learning new information, storage and recall involves a complex interplay of brain functions.” It is this incredibly complex network of nerves and chemical processes that must first be unravelled to help shed light on how the human brain stores and recalls memories, before we are eventually able to figure out how to manipulate them.

June 2014

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DELETING MEMORY

the kobal collection x2, science photo library, scripps research institute, getty, xu liu/steve ramirez/susumu tonegawa/MIT illustration: chrisstockerdesign.co.uk

For many people, deleting memories poses an ethical conundrum. Memories can of course be a source of great pleasure. They can, however, also be a source of great pain, as is the case for sufferers of conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or drug addiction. In this case, memory deletion may be the answer. People with PTSD constantly relive traumatic memories. Similarly, drug addicts connect certain habits with a previous sensation of being high, which stimulates their craving. By removing or subduing specific memories, traumatic emotions and harmful behaviours can be prevented. Zapping memory So, how exactly can memories be deleted? “Researchers have used a three-stage model to describe how the brain learns and remembers, with impairment in any of these processes resulting in memory failure: acquisition, consolidation and retrieval,” says Vauzour. One study taking advantage of the consolidation process is a ‘withinsubjects manipulation’ study conducted by Marijn Kroes and colleagues at Raboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Memories are periodically rewritten in the mind, or reconsolidated, somewhat like defragmenting a hard drive. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), however, appears to prevent memories from being rewritten or alters them during the reconsolidation process. In the team’s 2013 study, published in Nature Neuroscience, participants undergoing ECT for depression were shown a troubling story in words and pictures. A week later they were reminded about it and given ECT. This completely wiped out their recall of the distressing narrative. Similar breakthroughs have also been found taking the chemical approach, as demonstrated in a 2013 study led by Dr Courtney Miller of the Scripps Research Institute in San

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Diego, California. Miller sought to help methamphetamine addicts by targeting the removal of memories linked with drug use. “Neurones connect to each other through small structures known as dendritic spines; this is where memories are thought to be physically stored,” explains Dr Miller. “The structure of spines is maintained by a scaffolding made up of individual units of actin – a protein that facilitates memory formation by supporting the connections the neurones make when a memory is created. These

Memories are thought to be stored in dendritic spines - seen here as fine, hair-like structures bristling off dendrites, which in turn branch off the main cell body of a neurone

Dendrite

Neurone

Dendritic spine

Dr Courtney Miller is using the science of memory to help drug addicts

units of actin combine to form long chains that can enlarge spines and store memories by stabilising specific connections between neurones. “With your run-of-the-mill memory,” she adds, “the individual units of actin cycle very slowly – one comes off the top, another is added to the bottom. But with memories formed when taking methamphetamine, these units move very fast. So we took advantage of this and gave animals drugs (Latrunculin A) that gather up those actin units so they aren’t available to go back on the long actin chains. With actin units still coming off the top, but no longer being added to the bottom, it seems the actin chains fall apart and we lose the structures storing the methamphetamine memory. “What makes this finding so

exciting is that the inhibitors seem to be incredibly selective as to the memory type. We think we’re able to selectively target drug-associated memories, and hopefully traumatic memories in the future, because the brain is using a different mechanism to store these memories.” More recent research, published in Cell in January 2014, reveals that drugs known as histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACIs) can enhance the brain’s ability to permanently replace old traumatic memories with new memories. In the first phase of the preclinical study, led by Dr Li-Huei Tsai of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), mice were exposed to a tone followed by an electrical shock. Once the mice learned to associate these two events, they

neuroscience | Science

IMPLANTING MEMORY began to freeze in fear upon hearing the tone, even when they did not receive a shock. The researchers then repeatedly presented the tone without the shock to test whether the mice could unlearn the association and stop freezing in response to the tone. This was successful for mice exposed to the toneshock pairing one day earlier, but not for mice that formed the traumatic memory one month earlier. These mice were then given HDACIs before undergoing the ‘unlearning’ exercise. The mice then stopped freezing in response to the tone.

In the Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster Inception, professional criminals use an experimental military technology to implant ideas and memories into a victim’s mind while they sleep. The concept may seem about as far-fetched as a movie premise can be, but in reality, false memory implantations happen all the time – including when people are awake. What’s more they can have drastic consequences, especially in the case of court trials where juries place a disproportionate amount of credibility on eyewitness testimony. Every one of us is susceptible to false

highly superior autobiographical memory – in other words the ability to remember personal experiences as well as more general facts and knowledge – with 38 ‘control’ individuals. Despite it being likely that the former group might be immune to memory distortions, the opposite was found. Over a two-week period, a series of exercises designed to test participants’ susceptibility to forming false memories were administered. In each case, false memories were apparent just as often in those with superior memory as in controls. For example, when

“We think we’re able to target drug-associated memories, and hopefully traumatic memories in the future” Dr Courtney Miller of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California

Dr Li-Huei Tsai of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that memory can be inhibited in mice with the help of a drug

Genetic memory Delving deeper, researchers from MIT have discovered a gene essential for ‘memory extinction’, called TET1. Published in Neuron in 2013, findings show how boosting the activity of TET1 might benefit people with post-traumatic stress disorder by making it easier to replace fearful memories with positive ones. The researchers had two sets of mice develop a fear of a cage by electrocuting them in the cage. The mice were then put into a cage without being electrocuted. Those with an inhibited TET1 gene no longer feared the cage because the fear memory was replaced with the new memory of not being electrocuted.

memories, even those with otherwise exceptional powers of recall. This was shown in a 2013 study led by Lawrence Patihis of the University of California in Irvine. Patihis compared 20 individuals with

A region of a mouse hippocampus is lit up with the protein ChR2; the technique was used to implant a memory of fear

presented with a word list that included ‘thread,’ ‘pin’, and ‘knitting’, both groups were likely to later ‘remember’ also having seen the word ‘needle’ – which was never actually shown.

HOW TO CREATE FEAR Scientists induced false memories in mice

1. A mouse is first put in an environment (blue box) and the neurones responsible for memorizing the environment are labelled. These cells were made responsive to light.

2. The mouse is put in a different environment (red box) and light is delivered to the brain to activate the previously labelled cells, so it recalls the first box. Electric shocks are given.

3. When the mouse is returned to the first environment, it shows signs of fear, showing it had formed a false fear of the first June 2014box, where it was 27 never shocked.

Science | neuroscience

IMPROVING MEMORY “Physical health, emotional state, stress level and diet exert a big influence on how well you learn and remember” Dr David Vauzour, a senior research fellow at the University of East Anglia

rex, university of alberta, thinkstock, getty, ted orlando/flickr

Dr Wendy Suzuki believes memory implanting is still in its early stages

Fear factor Recently, Nobel Prize winner Susumu Tonegawa was able to successfully implant fear memories in mice. Tonegawa and his team genetically engineered mice to express the protein Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) in neurones associated with memory formation and storage in the hippocampus. An interesting characteristic of this protein is that it reacts to, and becomes activated by, light. In the experiment, the mice were placed in a safe container and the group of memory neurones, called an engram, created a memory of this container (see ‘How to create fear’, p27). The mice were then placed in a different

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container while light was shone on the memory neurones – thereby activating the memory of the first container. As this occurred, the mice were given a shock. When the mice were being placed into the original container, they froze in fear – they associated the shock with the first container, even though it was administered in the second container. The researchers had managed to implant a fear memory. “They basically tricked the system into making these memories,” says Dr Wendy Suzuki of The Suzuki Laboratory for the Study of Learning, Memory and Cognition in New York. So, can we create any type of false memory? “At this point we only have access to specific kinds of memories to create, depending on the patterns of activation that we can mimic,” says Suzuki. “But in theory if we understand the patterns of activation associated with various kinds of memory formation, we can create any kind of memory. We are certainly in the early days with these experiments, but the potential is there.”

Kim Peek, the ‘megasavant’ who was the inspiration for the fourtime Oscar winning film Rain Man, could remember almost everything he had ever read. He could also read both pages of a book simultaneously and retain the information. Given advances in memory research, could we all one day be like Kim Peek? That’s likely to be a long way off, but fortunately there are several

The ‘megasavant’ Kim Peek was able to memorise everything he ever read

effective ways of improving your memory. “Physical health, emotional state, stress level and diet exert a big influence on how well you learn and remember,” explains Dr Vauzour. One study carried out by researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, published in the Journal Of Neurology in 2013, suggests that following a Mediterranean diet based on fish, salads, and chicken, and rich in the fatty acid Omega-3 can improve cognition. Four years of data collected from 17,478 participants revealed that those who more strictly adhered to the Mediterranean diet performed better in memory tests. In another study, led by Yves Sauvé of the University of Alberta, it was shown that high levels of Omega-3 in

Give your neurones a boost by eating high levels of Omega-3 – muscles are a good source

D OL PH I N in t e llige nc e

Yves Sauvé has shown that the fatty acid Omega-3 improves the communication of neurones used for memory

a person’s diet can help to improve the communication of the neurones used for memory. Evidence suggests that

exercise is also key to a healthy memory. Research led by Dr Sandra Chapman of the University of Texas at Dallas

Want to improve your memory? Exercise is better than black market pills

in 2013, showed that aerobic exercise improves memory by helping maintain consistent and healthy blood flow to the hippocampus. There are some people, however, who baulk at the thought of putting on their running shoes and pounding the pavement, and would instead prefer to simply swallow a memory-improving tablet. This attitude has led some students wishing to stay alert and retain memory during exams to turn to so-called smart drugs. But since these are prescription medications for conditions that most students do not suffer from, such as narcolepsy and ADHD, the

long-term effects are unknown and potentially dangerous. Moreover, they may not even have the expected effect of improving memory. Although they can give the user the impression of a temporary memory boost, a placebocontrolled trial led by Irena Ilieva of the University of Pennsylvania showed no improvement in the performance of young adults taking Adderrall compared to those taking a placebo. So it would appear that there are no quick-and-easy shortcuts to improving memory. Nicola Davies is a health psychologist and writer.

WHAT IS MEMORY? Your recollection of life’s events is stored in networks of billions of neurones in different areas of the brain

Entorhinal cortex

illustration: chrisstockerdesign.co.uk

This is involved in consolidating memories, in particular spatial memory. It acts as a gateway between the memory-forming hippocampus and neocortex, which deals with sensory perception. In 1953, Henry Gustav Molaison lost his ability to store new memories after surgeon William Scoville removed a large part of the hippocampus in an effort to treat his epilepsy. Recently a micrometre-scale examination of the part of his brain that was surgically removed has confirmed that those parts are involved in memory. Findings published in Nature Communications in January 2014 by Jacopo Annese and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, found residue of the posterior hippocampus that had survived the operation. However, because it was disconnected from the entorhinal cortex, both learning and memory had been affected.

Synapses Synapses send signals to dendritic spines, small membranous branches that protrude from the dendrites at a neurone’s end. It is in these spines that memories are thought to be stored. Simon Rumpel and Kaja Moczulska from the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna used a technique called ‘in vivo two-photon imaging’ to look at the architecture of synapses structures that allow neurones to communicate and send electrical signals to one another. They looked at how these synapses work during learning and memorising in mice and found that the learning process created new synaptic connections.

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neuroscience | Science

Cerebral cortex Memories are stored in complex networks, primarily in the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of neurones in the brain. Long-term memory can be divided into two major categories: declarative and implicit memory. Declarative memory requires a conscious effort to recall, while implicit memory such as procedural memory refers to skills and routines.

Hippocampus Amygdala We have two walnut-shaped amygdalae - clusters of neurones that deal with emotion and fear. In a 2013 study led by Haohong Li and Mario Penzo and published in Nature Neuroscience, the specific part of the central amygdalae that encodes fear memory has been pinpointed – it’s called the lateral subdivision.

This seahorse-shaped part of the brain is crucial to both spatial awareness and memory. We have one on each side of the brain. “Long-term memories are likely formed by a variety of different mechanisms depending on the type of memory,” says Dr Michael Yassa of the University of California. “There is evidence supporting the notion that long-term memories for facts and events are stored initially using the hippocampus, but eventually most memories become stored as a distributed representation throughout the brain. The process is likely some form of strengthening of communication among neurones.”

Science | Parasites

UNinvited GUESTS Microbiologist Dickson Despommier counts down the top 10 most horrifying parasites that would love to take up residence in your body

Say hello to a botfly larva – it can’t wait to get under your skin

B science photo library

eing the highly successful animal that we are, we humans have attracted an exotic range of ‘hangers-on’. We harbour hundreds of species of viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoans, and arthropods. Viruses were the first parasites, infecting bacteria, and once multicellular life evolved, more complex creatures followed in their wake. Of the 100 million or so species on Earth, half of them might be parasitic. In an attempt to become better acquainted with these unwelcome guests, here are 10 horrifying critters that you certainly wouldn’t want setting up home inside you.

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10

BOTFLY

Dermatobia hominis

found along the resort beaches of Central America, botflies are large and cumbersome. People usually brush them off before they can lay eggs on their skin, the fly’s ultimate modus operandi. So botflies use a second, more inconspicuous host, laying their eggs on the abdomen of female mosquitoes before releasing them. When egg-carrying mosquitoes

suck blood from unsuspecting people, the botfly larvae detect heat from the victim’s flesh and hatch, falling on to their skin. Larvae penetrate into the tissue beneath the skin, growing two inches in length over several weeks before crawling out. Nice! They then fall onto the ground and pupate. Days later botflies emerge from the pupae to start the cycle anew.

JA N UA RY 2013 / FOCUS / X X

Science | Parasites

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Giant roundworm Ascaris lumbricoides

This pencil-sized roundworm takes up residence in your small intestine. Here it secretes a chemical known as antitrypsin, which interrupts your gut’s digestive process so it can have first ‘dibs’ on our meals. Females produce 200,000 eggs a day for three to five years that pass out in the faeces and develop in soil. Eggs live there for years waiting to be accidentally eaten. The giant roundworm infects two

science photo library x4, getty

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billion people worldwide, mostly children. In small children a heavy infection can cause stunting and loss of intellect. Unfortunately, the parasites only leave in cases of extreme fever – eg malaria – upon which they migrate, sometimes out of the anus or the mouth. If the liver, pancreas or gall bladder is invaded, a roundworm infection can be fatal. Otherwise they are fairly straightforward to treat with a drug known as mebendazole.

Whipworm Trichuris trichiura

This roundworm infects the large intestine and it’s normally found in the tropics. Like other roundworms, its eggs lie dormant in the soil until some unsuspecting child picks them up. Usually it just causes diarrhoea, but the strain can result in the rectum losing muscular integrity, exposing the raw surface covered

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Seen magnified 120 times in this picture, the giant roundworm can grow up to 50cm in length

June 2014

X X / FOCUS / JA N UA RY 2013

with adult worms, a truly disgusting and psychologically upsetting event. It’s a terrible experience for the child, but spare a thought for the new pediatric doctor when the distraught mother brings her screaming child into the emergency clinic at 3am. If spotted early though, treatment is simple enough.

This unpleasant animal can reach 50mm in length

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Chagas disease is caused by the single-celled organism Trypanosoma cruzi

CHAGAS DISEASE Trypanosoma cruzi

This single-celled attacker is transmitted by the blood-sucking ‘kissing bug’ found in South and Central America. The insect has the nasty habit of defecating while it eats, which gives Trypanosoma cruzi the opportunity it needs to enter its victim’s bloodstream and cause ‘Chagas disease’. The organism travels into the body and invades nearby cells, causing a

6 Guinea worm larvae – the longest adult recorded was 78cm in length

Human immune cells (yellow) attack a W. bancrofti roundworm

Guinea worm Dracunculus medinensis

Another roundworm rears its ugly head. The guinea worm’s larvae infect aquatic crustaceans such as water fleas, usually found in stagnant water. When an unsuspecting human drinks this water, the body digests the fleas that have been sheltering the worm larvae. Once free, males and females mate a few months after infection. The males die and are absorbed by the human body while

5

local swelling to develop at the site of infection known as ‘Romana’s Sign’. In chronic cases, it travels to the heart and nervous system or the small and large intestine. Destruction of nervous tissue causes organs to fail, and they enlarge. So-called megacolon, megaesophagus and an enlarged heart are the result of a long-term infection, which is often fatal.

the females make their way towards the legs and feet. Once there a worm creates a blister into which it lays eggs. The blister causes a painful burning sensation that often drives its host to water for relief. The submerged blister bursts, starting the cycle again. Treatment is often done by wrapping the head of the worm around a narrow stick and turning it until the worm is removed.

ROUNDWORM Wuchereria bancrofti

This roundworm takes up residence in vessels that carry lymph – a clear fluid that helps rid the body of waste products. Adults live for 10 years, producing ‘microfilariae’ that migrate to the bloodstream, become ingested by mosquitoes and transform to infectious larvae. When an infected mosquito feeds again, larvae are deposited onto the victim, crawl into

the bite wound, migrate to lymphatic vessels and grow to adulthood. When adult worms die, inflammation slows the flow of lymph, and when they all die, the lymph vessel becomes completely blocked. Swelling ensues, legs enlarge, skin dries out and becomes folded. The disease is called ‘elephantiasis’ for an obvious reason.

F LY I NG S OL O

4

ESPUNDIA

Leishmania braziliensis

This single-celled parasite enters your bloodstream through the bite of sandflies. After infection, it starts by colonising immune cells that travel through the body. These infected cells travel to the mouth, rectum, and urinary tract - where the parasite replicates in new cells, causing ulcers. Untreated, L. braziliensis can be fatal. In unusual cases the mouth

can become so heavily infected that the roof can erode away. This condition is known as ‘Espundia’ and is found only in remote rural areas where medical personnel are rarely available. Once diagnosed it can be successfully treated and plastic surgery can repair the oral cavity back to near normal.

The grey form of the single-celled organism Leishmania braziliensis is seen alongside red haemoglobin

science photo library x2, bbc, getty

3

Pork Tapeworm Taenia solium

Although it can reach 4m long, the adult pork tapeworm is relatively harmless, taking up residence in the small intestine. It’s typically acquired by eating infected raw or undercooked pork. A juvenile is released from its cyst in the tissue and attaches to the wall of the small intestine, where it grows into an adult within three months. It’s the eggs that can be a little more dangerous. If the eggs are consumed they can release tiny larvae that migrate into the bloodstream and lodge themselves in

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X X / FOCUS / JA N UA RY 2013

various tissues – such as the heart, brain and even eyes – developing into juveniles. Unfortunately for us, the only way to be rid of the beast is to pass it in faeces, having taken medication.

The fearsome-looking head of the pork tapeworm

2

Dog tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus

This is a small tapeworm that infects dogs, but can find its way into humans too. Sheep are the usual source of infection, harbouring the juvenile stage. When infected sheep are slaughtered, cysts in liver, containing juveniles, are often fed to dogs. Once inside the canine host, the juveniles are released from the cysts and attach to the dog’s small intestine, becoming adults. Infected dogs can harbour thousands of adult tapeworms. When adult worms pass eggs,

they exit with faeces. Sheep ingest the eggs, acquiring cysts that may grow to the size of grapefruit. Sheep farmers can also acquire the cyst by coming into contact with them. If a cyst ruptures, the infection spreads to other organs like the brain and lungs, often resulting in death.

F LY I NG S OL O parasites | Science

1

Eye worm Loa loa

Although this isn’t the most dangerous parasite the human body can harbour, this West African parasite earns the top spot simply because it has the spine-tingling habit of crawling into its host’s eyes. Most of the time roundworm lives beneath the skin, wandering throughout the body causing little harm. Females produce larvae that enter the bloodstream and are ingested by deer flies feeding on blood. The larvae develop to the infectious stage in the wing muscles of the fly, before migrating to the

Behind the scenes with

mouth parts. When infected deer flies bite, larvae crawl out onto the skin and into the bite wound. Sometimes, adult Loa loa crawl over the sclera of the eye, making it clearly visible to infected individuals who might be looking in the mirror at that moment. “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid” takes on a whole new meaning! The worms have to be surgically removed. Dickson Despommier is a microbiologist, ecologist, author, and professor of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University.

You wouldn’t want to see Loa loa staring back at you when you look in the mirror

Michael Mosley

Michael Mosley and a tapeworm (but not his own – that’s still MIA)

The BBC TV presenter for his show Infested, tells us what it was like to have a tapeworm inside him Did you feel your beef tapeworm (taenia saginata) moving at all? No, that was what was so odd. It wasn’t until I saw it for the first time – I swallowed a camera in a pill – that I had any awareness that this was inside me. Doctors told me I might experience something, but what was surprising about the whole experience was how little you notice it. It was sat there really quite innocently, while I got on with my life. Did you give it a name? A personal name? No. We toyed with Terry the Tapeworm but it seemed a little bit coy. Do you still have it? The honest truth is that I just don’t know. I took a pill that kills

it in 98 per cent of cases. But the producer was keen to take it out and wave it around after it came out the other end, so I sifted through – well, at least had a look at – my faeces, but nothing was ever seen. All I can do is wait and see if segments start to crawl out. The doctor seems convinced that it’s probably gone, but there’s still a lingering fear that at some point I may detect segments. It’ll be several weeks till I’m fully convinced that I’m clear. Did you lose any weight? They say that if you’re well nourished, as I am, it’s not really going to have any real side effects. It’s only dangerous if you’re living in sub-Saharan Africa on a marginal diet.

How large did it grow? I think it got to about 10 feet long. So why did you do it? I was just curious. Parasites are the most extraordinary, adaptive creatures. I hadn’t really understood just how interesting they are until I made this series. And when I made a show called Medical Mavericks we looked into all these fascinating doctors who had infected themselves with different diseases. So both

things together formed a long road towards this point. Any regrets? No, I was delighted when I saw it on the camera for the first time. It would have been a real pain to have gone through all that and not seen anything. My wife, on the other hand, wasn’t terribly keen on the whole idea. She made me promise to get rid of it before segments started coming out.

JA N UA RY 2013 / FOCUS / X X

illustrator: magictorch

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the future of trains | Science

m

Meet the machine that could carry commuters faster than the speed of sound. Stuart Nathan explores Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, and the trains that will change transport forever

illions of people commute to work by Tube, whether they call it the Underground, the Subway or the Metro. But if US technology entrepreneur Elon Musk has his way, tube travel will take on a whole new meaning. Frustrated with the shortcomings and cost of the planned Los Angeles to San Francisco high-speed rail line, Musk has come up with a combination of two high-tech sciencefiction staples of train travel: the vacuum train and the magnetic levitation (maglev) train. Called the Hyperloop, the system would run pods through an elevated tube, shooting passengers along the coast of California like bullets in a gun barrel. These vactrains work by propelling carriages along an evacuated tube. The lack of air resistance means that they can reach terrific speed, theoretically exceeding the speed of sound – no air means no sound barrier. But vactrains have always been a

NOV EMBER 2013 / FOCUS / 39

History| theAsoka Science future of trains

Inside the hyperloop

San Francisco San Jose

Fresno

Proposed route Bakersfield

How do you travel nearly 600km in under 40 minutes? Elon Musk’s ‘fifth mode of transport’ could be the answer

160km

Forget boats, planes, trains and cars, Elon Musk – the pioneer behind Tesla and SpaceX – wants to create a fifth mode of transport: a vacuum tube. His vision would get commuters from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and vice versa, in 35 minutes, at a fraction of the cost of a high-speed railway. While Musk won’t be building the Hyperloop himself he’s offered up these blueprints – along with full specifications – to anyone bold enough to make it a reality.

Los Angeles

The proposed route of the Hyperloop tube would carry it along the Interstate 5 Highway that connects San Francisco and Los Angeles. Raised on 6m-high pylons, the tube would limit environmental damage and reduce costs.

Any air left inside the vacuum tube is sucked into the nose at the front of the carriage and pumped out through ‘skis’ to create an air cushion between the train and the tube.

spacex

While the train cars would be sculpted out of dense aluminium, the ‘skis’ upon which the carriages float would be made of an alloy called Inconel, which can handle the high pressure and heat.

conceptual technology, thought too difficult to actually turn into reality. Musk has adapted the ideas to remove some of the potential drawbacks while still keeping many of the advantages. It’s difficult to create a perfect vacuum, so Hyperloop instead runs at a reduced pressure, about a thousandth of an atmosphere. The transport pods are equipped with compressors in their noses to suck the air out of the way and divert it to

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skis underneath, creating a hovercraft-like air cushion to lift the pod clear of the floor of the tube. Power for forward motion comes from linear electric motors. Because of the lack of friction or air resistance in the tube, these wouldn’t have to be continuous – one linear strip every 100km or so would be sufficient to accelerate the pods up to 1,220km/h (696mph) – only a little short of the current world land-speed record. The pods would

slide on skis made from Inconel, a nickelchromium alloy with extraordinary temperature resistance. Even so, each pod would have to carry 800kg of water for cooling. Such speeds could see a Hyperloop pod complete the 563km (350-mile) journey between LA and San Francisco in about 35 minutes – about half the time it currently takes to fly. All of this will require energy, of course, but sunny California will provide all the

Asoka

Hyperloop pods will be equipped with emergency brakes. Other safety precautions include making sure carriages travel 8km (5 miles) apart and a seating design which prevents passengers hitting their heads against the seat in front in an emergency stop.

electricity the system needs – and more, according to Musk – through highefficiency photovoltaic panels built into the top of the tube. Musk claims that the panels would generate 57MW of power, which is three times as much as he claims the system would consume. The tube itself – or rather pair of tubes, as they could only operate in one direction – would ride above the landscape on 6m-tall pylons placed every 30m or so along the

History

Passengers inside a Hyperloop carriage would experience 0.5g (G-force); you’d experience 1.5g going from 0-100km/h in a Bugatti Veryon supercar.

route. In all, there would be at least 25,000 of them. Because of the somewhat unstable nature of California, each pylon would be equipped with an earthquake damper, and the route would follow the existing I-5 interstate road, which would keep the cost down. Musk claims that the whole system would cost about $7 billion (£4.4bn), set against the projected $68 billion (£43bn) for the California High Speed Rail project. Elon

Musk certainly has form and finances – he co-founded PayPal. But despite launching Tesla Cars, commercial space enterprise SpaceX, and the photovoltaics company Solar City, he wants somebody else to develop it, although he might work on a demonstration model himself. If it works, it could change the face of medium-range travel completely. If it doesn’t, it’ll be the latest in a long line of vactrain concepts consigned to the realms of science fiction.

Science | the future of trains

off the rails The Hyperloop isn’t the only radical locomotive wdesign we can expect to see in future

Clip-Air

EPFL has a prior track record for delivering on outlandish ideas. It’s a major technology These designers took the term ‘blue-sky centre in Switzerland, whose facilities include thinking’ a little too literally. The École a nuclear reactor, Tokamak nuclear fusion Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has reactor, and research projects including designed a form of transport which, it says, the autonomous solar-powered aircraft combines the flexibility of train travel with the Solar Impluse. reach of planes. Clip-Air is a train carriage, The Clip-Air train carriage is an aircraft which is designed to attach to a pair of wings fuselage, designed to travel by rail to an with engines.

airport. Once there, it attaches to a ‘flyingwing’ aircraft, similar to the experimental Boeing X-48B. The aircraft can carry three ‘carriages’ side by side, carrying passengers, cargo or a combination. According to research leader Claudio Leonardi, it would be faster to board than a conventional aircraft and simpler to maintain. His team hopes to undertake aerodynamics research with a 6m-long flying model soon. Taking a journey by CLIP-AIR means you’d board your flight at the railway platform

PHOTO: epfl, getty, labis trains, bombardier

The ECO4 pulls together a range of technologies to make it ultra-efficient

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Eco4 Trains have always been seen as an environmentally friendly mode of transport, but this design takes it a step further. Train manufacturer Bombardier’s ECO4 is a family of technologies. It uses an ultra-efficient magnetic engine system that draws energy from solar cells mounted to the roof. These rotate to track the Sun and if it’s built will make it the world’s first solar-powered train. The carriages will be made of carbon fibre composites, making it strong but lightweight. Since it’ll be a commuter train system, the ECO4 will use a hybrid engine to keep it running through our dark winter months. As well as being energy efficient, the ECO4 train is designed to insulate passengers from engine noise.

Asoka

Chuo Shinkansen The land of the Bullet Train is now aiming to go one step further with a fully-fledged maglev high-speed train. The Chuo Shinkansen is planned to connect

Labis The Lashley Advanced Bi-Rail System (LABIS) is designed to be the trans-American high-speed train that doesn’t stop. Travelling on elevated tracks, the trains are

the cities of Nagoya, Tokyo and Osaka, and is based on technology currently being developed on a 42.8km (26.5-mile) test track in Yamanashi prefecture. Existing maglev trains use magnetic rails to lift trains off the ground, where they’re

wide-bodied (six passengers abreast plus tables and aisles), which makes them stable, with powered carriages. This, the designers say, avoids the need to over-engineer carriages to cope with the stresses of being pulled You won’t be waiting for the LABIS train to arrive – it never stops

held and pushed towards their destinations. Since maglev trains simply levitate, they don’t lose any speed to ground friction, allowing the carriages to accelerate to speeds of up to 321km/h (200mph). The Chuo Shinkansen trains use a similar premise but with much more efficient ‘superconducting’ rails, as well as a radically streamlined design. They’re lighter than the predecessors too, using lightweight aircraft-grade aluminium alloys and composites, with minimal glass to shed further kilos. Test trains running on this line have achieved speeds of 500km/h (310mph), and the service is due to open to the public later this year. The entire line will be an extension of this test track, and is scheduled to cost a total of ¥9 trillion (£44bn). The line is due to be completed in 2045, although Shinkansen services between Tokyo and Nagoya will begin in 2027.

along by one end. The train itself keeps moving at a speed of some 320km/h (200mph) and doesn’t stop. Passengers embark and disembark via shuttle vehicles, which stop at a station located on a parallel track. These pick up passengers, rejoin the mainline, catch up with the main train and dock onto the back. This allows passengers to board the main train and let disembarking passengers get on. When everyone who wants to leave is on board, it undocks, goes onto another parallel line and stops at the next station. The entire transcontinental journey would take about 14 hours. Stuart Nathan is features editor of The Engineer Magazine. xxx

The Chuo Shinkansen wows the press with its lightning pace and 15m-long aerodynamic nose

History

April 2013

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Nature | Portfolio: Food Maps

portfolio These food maps created by food stylist Caitlin Levin and photographer Henry Hargreaves are inspired by a passion for travel. The series has been imagined and created around the iconic foods of countries and continents and turned them into physical maps. The maps are a playful representation of their interpretation of food from around the world. Created by Caitlin Levin and Henry Hargreaves Typography by Sarit Melmed Text by Moshita Prajapati

50 states of corn  Native Americans had been growing corn in America 5000 years before Columbus discovered the country. Ranked first in the world in corn production, the United States of America have 80,000,000 acres of land reserved just for corn fields. The average American spends $267 on corn products alone in a year and consumes one-third of all corn products in the world.

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Lined with Lime Citrus fruits are produced all over the world, and Brazil is one of the largest producers of these – particularly oranges. Oranges are grown in the coastal plains and in the highlands but most extensively in the states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; their contribution accounts for almost 80 per cent of the total national production.

Nature | Portfolio: Food Maps

It’s shrimp season!  Who doesn’t know the saying “throw another shrimp on the barbie” and not immediately think of Australia? Australians consumed half a billion shrimps during the Christmas Day in December of last year.

Would you care for some noodles?  In China, noodles go back 4000 years. The earliest records of noodles being eaten were during the Eastern Han Dynasty and during the Song Dynasty, they became the staple diet. Noodles made from wheat are popular in Northern China while those made from rice are eaten in Southern China. The country tops the global demand for consuming the most quantity of instant noodles – 44 million packets of instant noodles according to the World Instant Noodles Association.

Tuh-may-toh, Tuh-mah-toh The tomato is native to South and Central America and not Italy, as some mistakenly believe. Called pomodoro (golden apple) in Italian, the tomato was initially considered poisonous and used only as an ornamental decoration in gardens of Italy. It was the Spaniards who taught Italians peasants to fry tomatoes with other vegetablest. In Italy today, approximately 80,000 hectares are given over to tomato cultivation, to annually produce 6 million metric tons, thereby making it the third largest producer of tomatoes in the world.

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Nature | Portfolio: Food Maps

Spice Routes India is home to a variety of spices, many of which are native to the country while others were imported and cultivated over generations. Different climates and soil compositions in different states have led India to become the largest producer (2.48 million tonnes) and exporter of spices (0.20 million tonnes). The spices from India make their way into the kitchens of over 134 countries.

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Pain et fromage (Bread and Cheese)  Who goes to France and not have bread and cheese? There are about 350 to 400 distinct types of cheeses unique to France. Made from both cow and goat’s milk, each French region has its own cheeses. And what goes best with cheese? There are nine different kinds of French breads, including the iconic baguette.

It's Bananas!  Bananas and plantains are the staple food of nearly 70 million people in Africa. In the East African highlands, a person may consume upto a kilogram of bananas in a day! Of the numerous edible varieties, the East African Highland Banana (EAHB) accounts for 17 per cent of the types of Musa grown worldwide and plantain accounts for another 19 per cent. 120 EAHB varieties are endemic just to the country of Uganda.

The photographer Henry Hargreaves is a Brooklyn-based still-life photographer. He uses food as a medium in his photo series, including: Burning Calories, Food of the Rainbow, Mark Rice-Ko, Jello-O Presidents and more.

find out more Ewww.henryhargreaves.com

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History | archaeology

MONUMENT MYSTERIES h

ow can we learn more about history’s greatest buildings and the methods used to construct them? That’s where 3D laser scanning comes in, capturing the ruins and recreating virtual replicas. Structural engineer Steve Burrows, who worked on Beijing’s ‘Bird’s Nest’ Olympic stadium, and presenter Dallas Campbell visited ancient sites for the National Geographic documentary Time Scanners. From Egypt’s pyramids to Rome’s Colosseum, Steve Burrows gives us the latest insights.

Riddles of the ancient world’s most iconic buildings are now being solved using 3D laser scanning technology, as engineer Steve Burrows told Helen Cahill

Dallas Campbell (left) and Steve Burrows examine a computer recreation of the Colosseum

The Great Pyramid is scanned with the laser technology

Machu Picchu reveals its secrets

Steve Burrows at the magnificent Petra

The Pyramids, Egypt Before the Great Pyramid, the Egyptians hadn’t cut the stones accurately enough to make the joints really tight. They had problems with ‘freeze thaw’. This is when moisture gets into the joints, and if the weather is cold enough, the water freezes, solidifies and expands – pushing the joint apart. That cycle of joints being opened and closed effectively makes buildings fall apart. The Egyptians knew that if they could construct joints so tight that water couldn’t get in, the building would last a long time. They did this in the Great Pyramid. In addition, they used stone like granite; a material so hard it wouldn’t act like a sponge. So, the stone would shed the water and the building would last longer.

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Petra, Jordan

The Colosseum, Italy When we put the Colosseum back to its original grandeur using laser-scanning technology, the thing that stood out was that the staircases were narrower at the top and bigger at the bottom. It was wider at the exit,

so that 60,000 people could get out without there being a stampede. They wanted people to be able to enter and leave safely. People could also enter at different levels. Once inside the Colosseum, you were separated by your ticket

price - by your position in society. Some people had to get to the very top, some to the bottom. You went up different staircases and entered through different routes – exactly how we do in modern stadiums.

Machu Picchu, Peru The scale of Petra is immense – 10,000 people lived there, in the desert. It only rains for a short period of time, and they had to hold the water from these brief interludes of rainfall for the rest of the year. So they had to have pools – huge bodies of water in the desert. These incredible buildings, carved out of sandstone, have lasted 2000 years. We figured out how they built it through the laser scanning. They put giant steps into the mountain, so they could see the quality of the rock, and so that there was no need for people to be hanging by ropes and dangling dangerously off the mountain. They wanted to make sure the masons were safe, because these people were highly skilled, and there weren’t many of them.

It’s hard to breathe at Machu Picchu because the air is so thin. Imagine moving huge pieces of stone. They cut rock off the top of the mountain and moved it the shortest possible distance because it was an incredibly difficult place to work. They also captured a stream and ran it down a series of fountains so that 1000 people could live there. We knew that toilets must be lower down the mountain than the water supply. They captured their waste in what were effectively bedpans, took them to a building and then somebody walked down a spiral staircase and put them in a cave. When they’d finished with water for washing, they allowed it to run down through the caves to wash away the waste.

history | The life of William Shakespeare

Is this what

genius

looks like? Did Shakespeare grow tired of his wife? Why was he so wealthy? And which portraits of him can we trust? On the 450th anniversary of the writer’s birth, Paul Edmondson asks some of the most pressing questions about his life

hdwallpapers.in getty images/alamy

It makes up the vast majority of the matter in the Universe, but we have no idea what it is. Now, as Marcus Chown reveals, a hidden realm of dark matter could exist right under our noses The Cobbe portrait, which dates from c 1610. This image’s “provenance and claim to be painted from life make a compelling case” for it being an accurate likeness of William Shakespeare, says Paul Edmondson

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How do we know when he was born?

It seems that England’s greatest poet first appeared on the world’s stage on the feast day of England’s patron saint: St George’s Day, Sunday 23 April 1564. The parish register of Holy Trinity Church, Stratfordupon-Avon records Shakespeare’s baptism on 26 April. According to the Book of Common Prayer, babies had to be baptised either on the next saint’s day after their birth or on the following Sunday. In baby Shakespeare’s case, the next saint’s day was St Mark’s Day, the stolen patron saint of Venice, just two days after his birth. However, Elizabethan folk superstition considered this day to be unlucky, so Shakespeare was baptised after morning or evening prayer on the following day. For corroborative evidence that Shakespeare was born on 23 April we can look to his monument on the north chancel wall of Holy Trinity Church. This tells us that he died on 23 April 1616, aged 53 – that is at the beginning of his 53rd year. Hence the assumption that he was born and died on the same date. Shakespeare’s baptismal entry tells us that he is “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakespeare”: William, the son of John Shakespeare. Only one person of that name lived in the town. The master bedroom of the house now presented as Shakespeare’s Birthplace was upstairs, overlooking the street – the same room that people have been visiting in homage to Shakespeare since the 18th century. On John’s death in 1601, William inherited the whole of his estate (John had left no will). William allowed his sister, Joan Hart, and her family to live in part of the building (as her descendants did until 1806) and leased another part to become a pub, the Swan and Maidenhead. The house today is a Victorian renovation of the site and buildings purchased by public subscription in 1847. The Birthplace and four other houses associated with Shakespeare’s life are cared for and conserved by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. William Shakespeare was born on the site of this Stratford-upon-Avon building on St George’s Day, 1564

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Shakespeare the schoolboy would have done his studies using a hornbook like this

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“There was little respite, even in the playground, where the boys were expected to talk to each other in Latin”

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demanding. The pupils studied Terence, Virgil, Tully, Sallust, Palingenius, Mantuanus, Cicero, Susenbrotus, Erasmus, Quintilian, Horace, Juvenal and Ovid in their original Latin. The latter’s Metamorphoses seems to have been Shakespeare’s favourite book from his school days, and he alluded to it many times in his work. The only writing in Greek to feature on the syllabus was the New Testament. Shakespeare’s grammarschool education is writ large across the whole body of his work. Above all, it taught him eloquence. As an education it was rigorous but limited and it did not, for example, include numeracy.

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From the ages of 8 to 15, William Shakespeare would have found himself at Stratford-uponAvon’s grammar school, which had been established under Edward VI to offer a free education to all of the town’s boys. Founded in 1553 and based on Humanist ideals, Tudor grammar schools were a key element of the government’s stated aim of ensuring that “good literature and discipline might be diffused and propagated throughout all parts of our kingdom, as wherein the best government and administration of affairs consists”. These were establishments that took education very seriously indeed. Shakespeare would have gone to school six days a week throughout the year, starting at 6am in the summer and 7am in winter, and staying until dusk (though there were half days on Thursdays and Saturdays). The major Christian festivals provided the few annual holidays. There was little respite, even in the playground, where the boys were expected to talk to each other in Latin. The emphasis of the whole educational enterprise, in light of the teachings of the 16th-Century Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536), was on the development of eloquence in speech and writing. A key textbook was William Lily’s Short Introduction of Grammar (1540), through which Shakespeare became familiar with a vast range of rhetorical devices. The curriculum was highly

We don’t know what Anne Shakespeare looked like, but here is an 18th-century artist’s impression

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topfoto, the shakespeare birthplace trust/national portrait gallery/ALAMY

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history | The life of William Shakespeare

Was he trapped in a loveless marriage?

Questions about Shakespeare’s marriage and sexuality have divided generations of scholars and critics, and continue to do so. When he was just 18, William married Anne or Agnes Hathaway (those first names were interchangeable). She was 26 and already pregnant. It has been estimated that around a quarter of late 16th-century women were pregnant before marriage. Another illuminating statistic has been deduced by local historian Jeanne Jones from records curated by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Between 1570 and 1630 the average age for men to marry in Stratfordupon-Avon was 24. In that 60-year period, and out of 106 cases, there were only three men who married under the age of 20. Of those three, Shakespeare was the youngest and the only one whose wife was already pregnant. They had three children: Susanna (born 1582) and then boy-and-girl twins Hamnet and Judith (born 1585; Hamnet died in 1596). But were William and Anne happily married? Katherine Duncan-Jones thinks not. In her Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (2001), she presents a Shakespeare who is trapped in his marriage. In Shakespeare’s Wife (2007), Germaine Greer describes the Shakespeares’ relationship as “a demanding and difficult way of life”. Certainly Shakespeare spent long periods of time in London, but that does not mean that he never saw his wife and children. Townsmen frequently travelled between Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The commute took three days by horseback. Some commentators have pounced upon Shakespeare’s decision to leave Anne his “second best bed with the furniture” to question the state of his marriage. True, this bequest could have been a put-down. But it could also have been a romantic souvenir, or even, perhaps, a codified permit for Anne to remain resident in the family home, New Place. Most of the speculation on Shakespeare’s sexuality has been based on his works – for example, the same-sex relationships in his plays. Evidence from his life reveals little. In fact, the only surviving contemporary anecdote of Shakespeare’s personal life is to be found in the diary of John Manningham, a trainee lawyer at Middle Temple. The diary relates how Shakespeare arranged to meet a woman with his fellow actor Richard Burbage, yet got there early to have sex with her before Burbage arrived: “Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.”

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Of the numerous portraits of Shakespeare, which is the most accurate?

Two images are widely accepted as being accurate depictions of Shakespeare, both of them posthumous: the engraving (below, right) by the artist Martin Droeshout on the title-page of Master William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies of 1623, and the memorial bust (below, left) in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. This was installed some time between 1616, when Shakespeare died, and 1623, when it is first mentioned in Leonard Digges’s commendatory verse in a collected edition of Shakespeare’s work. It is possible that both the engraving and the bust were approved by Shakespeare’s widow, family, and friends. The playwright Ben Jonson, in his verse printed opposite the engraving, describes it as a good likeness. The bust was made by Gerard Janssen who, in 1614, had also carved the Stratford-upon-Avon tomb effigy for Shakespeare’s friend John Coombe. Janssen’s workshop was in Southwark, near the Globe, so he too probably knew what Shakespeare looked like. Two portraits of Shakespeare have good provenance and may have been painted from life. One is the Chandos portrait

(below, centre); the other is the Cobbe portrait (p54), which won the support of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholar, Stanley Wells, in 2009. It has been suggested that the Chandos portrait was painted by John Taylor (an actor from Shakespeare’s period), and was bequeathed to William Davenant, who liked to say he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son. From here it eventually came into the possession of the Duke of Chandos. The Cobbe portrait passed through the descendants of Shakespeare’s only known literary patron, Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. It spawned a succession of near-contemporary copies, the majority of which independently identify the sitter as Shakespeare. The Cobbe portrait has compositional similarities to the Droeshout engraving and may have been its source, possibly through one of the early copies. X-ray analysis has shown that the earliest of these copies is the one now in the possession of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC has another early copy but does not accept that the sitter is Shake-

speare. Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones is among those who have suggested that the portrait represents Sir Thomas Overbury, based on a perceived visual resemblance. Yet none of the many versions and copies of the Cobbe portrait has ever carried an Overbury identification. What’s more, research at Cambridge University has established that the Cobbe portrait and the undoubted Overbury portrait are unrelated and unlikely to depict the same sitter. Of all the portraits that might represent Shakespeare, the Cobbe portrait is the most intimate and its provenance and claim to be painted from life make a compelling case. Left to right: Shakespeare’s memorial bust in Stratford-upon-Avon’s Holy Trinity Church; the Chandos portrait may have been painted from life, perhaps by the actor John Taylor; Martin Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare, which Ben Jonson described as a good likeness

“It has been suggested that the Chandos portrait was painted by John Taylor, and was bequeathed to William Davenant, who liked to say he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son”

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How did a humble writer grow so rich?

Shakespeare’s will includes numerous bequests that show that he died a wealthy man. But he cannot have owed his riches simply to his plays. A theatre company would pay a freelance writer a few pounds for a new play, but that wasn’t enough to support and sustain a wife and family. A writer could boost his income by acting as well – and Shakespeare, Ben Jonson (early in his career) and a handful of others appear to have done just that. Yet, all the same, none of the other playwrights of the period were able to invest in the way Shakespeare did. Shakespeare was wealthy because he was, from 1594, a shareholder in the theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in which he was also the leading dramatist. Their patron was the lord chamberlain and they performed at court as well as at the Inns of Court, for which they were paid handsomely. Shakespeare was rich enough to buy a house in 1597, which it has been estimated probably cost him around £120. In 1599, he invested in a tripartite lease on the new Globe Theatre. This meant he would receive a share of the box-office takings which, partly because of the popularity of his plays, were high. He carried on investing heavily in Stratford-uponAvon. He bought a massive 107 acres of land for £320 in 1602. Only three years later, he spent £440 on a 50 per cent share in the annual tithes payable to the church. This brought him back around £60 a year. In 1613 he bought a gatehouse at Blackfriars for £140. A story from William Davenant first published in Nicholas Rowe’s biographical account of 1709 suggests that Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, gave Shakespeare £1,000 “to enable him to go through with a purchase, which he heard he had a mind to”. We’ll probably never know whether he did or not, but it would explain how Shakespeare could afford the shares in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and how he was able to buy his grand residence, New Place. And all this at a time when a local schoolmaster’s salary was £20 a year.

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A c1600 portrait of Shakespeare’s benefactor Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton

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“Shakespeare’s will includes numerous bequests that show that he died a wealthy man. But he cannot have owed his riches simply to his plays”

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history | The life of William Shakespeare

Did he agonise over his plays or dash them off?

Defining the way in which Shakespeare went about his work is no easy task because canons of literary work develop over time, as do an author’s mode of writing. What complicates matters is the fact that much of Shakespeare’s writings were published after his death. The Sonnets, a few occasional poems and about half of his plays first appeared during his lifetime. The rest (with the exception of Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen) appeared for the first time in a collected edition of his work in 1623. In 1986, The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works attempted to cast some light on the issue by putting forward two

An artist’s impression of Shakespeare’s family home, which was the largest house in the centre of Stratford-upon-Avon

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The site that was occupied by Shakespeare’s New Place until 1759

Where did Shakespeare call home?

When he was first married, Shakespeare would have had little choice but to live in the family home on Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon. He saved money by lodging in London at various places including (in order of residence): the parishes of St Giles Cripplegate; St Helen’s Bishopgate (where he was fined for defaulting on his taxes in 1597 and 1598); St Saviour’s near the Clink, Southwark; and with the Mountjoy family on the corner of Monkswell and Silver Streets, again in the Cripplegate ward. Shakespeare’s family home from 1597 was New Place, the largest house in the centre of

Stratford-upon-Avon. The theatres were closed during Lent and Advent, which would have given him plenty of time to spend at home with his family and to get some writing done in relative peace and quiet. Between 2010 and 2013, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust commissioned an archaeological dig of the site (New Place was demolished in 1759), which confirmed it to be a grand manor house, designed for someone of considerable means and social status. Shakespeare was a commuter who lodged in London and whose grandest living space was in Stratford-upon-Avon.

“A dig confirmed New Place to have been a grand manor house designed for someone of no little means and social status” of the most radical theories to emerge in the past 30 years. The first was that Shakespeare regularly revised what he wrote because of practical theatrical considerations. The second suggested that he collaborated on several plays, most significantly at the beginning and end of his career. Collaboration was absolutely a standard practice among playwrights of Shakespeare’s time. In 2013 Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen published William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays, a collection of little-known works in which Shakespeare may or may not have had a hand. There are also some apparently lost plays including Love’s Labour’s Won and Cardenio. Collaboration alone should be enough to put paid to any theory that suggests the plays were the handiwork of a lone aristocrat or an alternative single author operating undercover. The way in which the plays are written shows that Shakespeare had a profound knowledge of theatrical practice and knew the actors for whom he was writing. He didn’t dash off his plays, as the film Shakespeare in Love might like us to believe. Paul Edmondson is head of research and knowledge, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. shakespeare.org.uk

A catalogue page from a 1623 listing of all the plays of William Shakespeare

illustrator: andy potts

Science | climate change

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FORECAST FROM THE PAST Could rising C02 levels see Earth returned to the kind of climate not seen since the prehistoric era? Katharine Sanderson heads back in time

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unday 13 May 2013 was just an ordinary working day for the airsampling instruments of the Mauna Loa observatory, sitting on the slopes of a volcano in Hawaii. Those instruments have been keeping an eye on the air for decades, and nothing was different on that Sunday. But it was a significant day for humankind. For the first time, the instruments recorded carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere of 400 parts per million. Humans are responsible. We got to this point after a few short centuries of burning fossil fuels, and in doing so could be plunging our climate back into prehistory, returning the Earth to conditions it was last familiar with millions of years ago. The figure of 400ppm isn’t particularly significant in itself, but the number is symbolic,

highlighting just how far levels of the greenhouse gas have risen since humans got busy with fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide levels in the pre-industrial era (that is, up to the late 18th Century) stayed steady at around 280ppm. Up until then, for the past million years levels had gently oscillated between 180 and 280 as the Earth steadily cooled and warmed in cycles. By 1953, when a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech called Charles Keeling started making measurements of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide across the US, that number had reached 310ppm. Now, 60 years on, the numbers are going up and up. “It is obvious levels will keep on climbing rapidly until, or if, serious action is taken,” says Paul Pearson, a climate scientist at Cardiff University. “We could be

approaching 1000ppm by the end of the century.” In an attempt to figure out how the planet will react to 400ppm carbon dioxide, climate scientists need to explore the distant past. There isn’t yet agreement on exactly when levels of CO2 were last this high, but one contender is the Pliocene: between 2.5 and 5.5 million years ago. Bang in the middle of the Pliocene, around 3.5 million years ago, CO2 levels could have reached 400ppm. By unpicking what the Pliocene Earth was like, we might get a glimpse of what the future holds for humankind if we keep on belching out carbon dioxide. Warmer wilds Back then our world was very different. It was much warmer; temperatures were on

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550-1,000

is the estimated CO2 levels in ppm by 2100. Levels of 1000ppm have not been seen since the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago. SOURCE: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

170,000

years: the length of time that the Earth experienced global warming during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum after this huge outpouring of carbon dioxide. SOURCE: Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science

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per cent is the immediate cuts in carbon dioxide emissions needed to keep the amount of the gas in our atmosphere stable at current levels. SOURCE: realclimate.org

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metres is the sea-level rise per degree rise in temperature that is now inevitable over the next 2000 years. The prediction for 2100, if emissions remain the same as today, is a temperature rise of 4° or 5°. SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA

average 3° higher. In places, especially the Arctic regions, the temperature could have been almost 10° higher. Sea levels were at least 15m higher. Dappled sunlight was peaking through the treetops of forests that thrived on what is now the frozen Arctic tundra. Richard Norris, a geoscientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California says that this warmer world would see more rainfall at mid-latitudes, more monsoons and fewer deserts in Africa. “The world was somewhat familiar, but the way rainfall and climate worked was not the same as now,” Norris says. But how do we know that carbon dioxide is implicated in this different climate and weather? We have a pretty detailed knowledge of carbon dioxide levels going back almost 1 million years, thanks to tiny bubbles of air trapped in ice-cores drilled from Antarctic ice, some 3.6km (2.2 miles) deep. But to find out how much carbon dioxide was around during the Pliocene and beyond takes a different approach – second-hand information known as proxy data. Fossilised leaves give us some clues. Leaves have tiny holes called stomata that let carbon dioxide in (so they can photosynthesise) and let water out. Being adaptable as plants are, the leaves can alter the number and size of stomata to cope with different atmospheric conditions. By measuring the size and density of stomata in fossilised leaves, scientists can work out how much carbon dioxide that tree was dealing with when it was alive, helped by comparing with leaves grown in controlled conditions in greenhouses. The oceans provide other clues. Chemical processes in the ocean are recorded in tiny fossils and shells that sit in the sediment on the sea floor. Like an ice core, a sediment sample can tell us what pollens were around when the sediment was laid down – which in turn offers clues to the temperature at that time. Put all this proxy data together, and the warm, wet Pliocene atmosphere is revealed to have been one with lots of carbon dioxide – at least in the high 300ppm region, and possibly over 400ppm at times. One reason for this high number could be that there was more volcanic activity, so more carbon dioxide being emitted. Concurrently, there was possibly less weathering – the natural processes that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Another theory is that changes in ocean circulation were responsible for releasing more CO2. Even if we did know, working out what it

Geoscientist Richard Norris holds the cast of a skull of a walrus from the Pliocene epoch, which was host to a menagerie of exotic animals now extinct

was like in the Pliocene won’t help predict what humans are facing in the next 100 years. If Earth suddenly became Pliocene-like, the sea-level rise alone would wipe out many major cities, all perched precariously on the continents’ coastlines. But that kind of sudden change isn’t likely – Earth’s processes move on a slower timescale. Back to the future Some climate researchers think other epochs might better mimic a time when the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels reached 400ppm. Pearson thinks that the last time the Earth experienced 400ppm carbon dioxide was the Oligocene, around 25 million years ago. But all this could be immaterial. Soon we will surpass 400ppm. As levels rise, we need to look yet further back in time to see what we’re in for. There are hints in the carbon dioxide record that some 56 million years ago, a time called the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, large and sudden spikes in carbon dioxide were seen, accodring to Norris. “Although ‘sudden’ means thousands or tens of thousands of years, this period might have a closer relationship to the likely future than the Pliocene or Oligocene,” Norris says. The worry isn’t that humanity can’t survive in Pliocene-like conditions. The problem is surviving the violent changes that our planet is being forced to make before it can settle into a new regime. Pearson thinks we’ve already gone much too far. “We must get CO2 down below 350ppm as soon as we can,” he says, “and that means leaving most of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground.” Katharine Sanderson is a science journalist and former features editor for Chemistry World magazine.

WASTE WATER Commercial and residential buildings

3%

8%

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26%

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13%

AGRICULTURE

14%

INDUSTRY

19%

LAND USE AND FORESTRY

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Energy supply - The burning of coal, natural gas, and oil for electricity and heat is the largest single source of global greenhouse gas emissions. Industry - Emissions from industry primarily involve fossil fuels burned on-site at facilities for energy. This sector also includes emissions from chemical, metallurgical, and mineral transformation processes not

Commercial and residential buildings - Greenhouse gas emissions Agriculture Emissions - from agriculture from this sector arise from on-site mostly come from the management energy generation and burning fuels for heat in buildings or cooking in of agricultural soils, livestock, rice homes. production, and biomass burning.

associated with energy consumption.

released by deforestation.

Land use and forestry - Greenhouse gas emissions from this sector primarily include carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation, land clearing for agriculture, and fires or decay of peat soils. However, estimates indicate that on a global scale, ecosystems on land remove about twice as much CO2 as is

Transport - Almost all (95%) of the world’s transportation energy comes from petroleum-based fossil fuels, largely gasoline and diesel.

Waste and wastewater - Landfill methane forms the largest source of emissions in this sector, followed by wastewater methane and nitrous oxide.

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The big sources of CO 2

History | Archaeology

NOAH’S ARK

Hodder & Stoughton x2

The Bible’s ark has fascinated archaeologists for centuries and now a new discovery purports to explain the story. Jason Goodyer spoke to the British Museum’s Irving Finkel about his remarkable find

Irving Finkel inspects the ancient descriptions of an ark

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ven those who didn’t make it to Sunday school know what Noah’s Ark looked like. And now a new Hollywood take, Noah, is compounding the myth. It was a long, pointy wooden ship with a large house built on the top, right? Well, no. At least if the British Museum’s Middle East expert Irving Finkel is correct in his new book The Ark Before Noah. After painstakingly translating an ancient version of the great flood story found on a clay cuneiform tablet, Finkel discovered a set of instructions on how to build the ark. This was a spectacular find in itself, but the story gets even more intriguing: the craft described is round.

People know the flood story of Noah and the animals, but this tablet predates the Bible, doesn’t it? We’ve known that the Babylonians also had a version of the flood story since a curator here at the British Museum found it inscribed on another clay tablet in 1872. At the time it caused a great furore among theologians, Christians and Jews who knew their Bible. One of the most disturbing things for them was that the parallels between this 1872 discovery and the Hebrew text of the Bible were so close that it was difficult not to believe that the two narratives were connected in a literary sense. In the time since 1872, a sprinkling of other clay tablets of different periods have come to light, some big pieces, some only fragments. It culminated in this new one, which was written in about 1750 BC, making it one of the oldest known.

Other than its age, what’s so special about this particular tablet? The central point of this tablet is the realisation that the boat the Babylonians conceived of was a round coracle. I don’t think anybody would have expected

The 1750 BC Babylonian tablet with a cuneiform description of an ark

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“What is peculiar is that the tablet gives the quantities of rope, the amount of bitumen, and how it was built”

needed to be buoyant, but didn’t have to go anywhere – as opposed to a boat with a bow and a stern, which could go on a specific voyage. All it had to do was bob around like a cork on the surface, until eventually the water went down. But what is peculiar and even more unexpected is that the tablet gives all the measurements, the quantities of the rope, the amount of bitumen, and how it was built. Also, the measurements that are quoted – which are very large indeed – are accurate.

that because if you read your Bible you will see that Noah’s Ark was a sort of oblong wooden thing. So you have this very different, deeply established conception floating about in people’s minds and so this boat comes across as a shock. It was a bewildering thing for a decipherer because, if you read the words on the tablet, you think: ‘what the hell is this?’

Were coracles common during the time the tablet was written? In ancient times, and in fact right up to the middle of the 19th Century AD, coracles were used in Iraq in huge numbers, and there are photographs from the 1920s where you can see a whole cluster of them by the side of the river. They functioned a bit like taxis. So if you wanted to cross the river, with a couple of sheep and your two daughters, you’d hire a coracle and the guy would get you across to the other side. And the thing about the coracle is that it is light, buoyant, and thoroughly waterproof – to all intents and purposes it is unsinkable. Those are the qualities that Noah’s Ark required. It A coracle being built in Iraq in the 1920s; they were used to taxi people and goods across rivers

A tablet inscribed with the story of the flood and ark from the 7th Century BC

So is this tablet instructions for a reader, or is it a description of something that actually happened? Well, that is an extremely pertinent question. It is not obvious. As I see it, the flood story has its inception in reality in as much as the landscape of Iraq is fed by the great rivers and has always been vulnerable to flooding. There’s lots of historical evidence for floods. I think the basic position is that the landscape of Iraq, or Mesopotamia, was subjected to a kind of tsunami a very long time ago in its remote past. Perhaps the bulk of the villages were swept away, down to the gulf, and knowledge of this was a deepseated factor in their psychology. The story itself went through mythological development. I think that the presence of what you might call the technical information, which looks as if it was a prescription for someone to go home and build one, was not that at all. As

far as I understand it, the narrative of the floods – the anger of the gods, that lastminute rescue, the flood itself and the final revivification of the world – must have been in the purview of itinerant storytellers for a very long time. It’s a classic, major strain of their mythology. We can tell from cuneiform literature that these stories circulated in that way before writing.

So why is the information so detailed? My idea is that you have this narrative, with the divine intervention and the boat, being a central part of a very gripping story which is told to audiences who were primarily boatmen, fisherman and coracle builders. You might have a marvellous storyteller who could hypnotise a village with all of this ‘Bruce Willis’ drama, and then acts the part of the god with a thunderous voice and says: ‘You will build this boat’. If he just said to these people ‘build the biggest boat you ever saw’, his listeners are going to say ‘Well, what does it look like?’ Once you had this question of ‘what does it look like?’ and ‘how big was it?’, it became a kind of itch for the storyteller and the audience. I have the feeling there was a curiosity engendered about this. And it was probably solved in the following way: there could have been a schoolmaster who had half a dozen boys who were literate in the kind of calculations that professional scribes had to do, like how many bricks in a wall and so forth. At one point the schoolmaster said ‘Everybody knows the ark is a round coracle, and let’s say its surface area is 3,600m2 and its walls are 6m high. How much rope do you need, if the rope is an inch thick?’ This is exactly the sort of thing that we find on mathematical tablets; the sort of thing that scribes had to work out. The exact amount of rope needed was specified. In profile, a coracle is a bit like a doughnut, and if you have a plan of a doughnut with the height of the walls and the rope’s thickness, you can work out how much rope you need. What is interesting is that in the version on the tablet found in 1872, which is much longer, the actual details about the components needed to build the ark are boiled down to a minimum. But I can’t help but think that there was also a time during a build-up to the flood and the construction of an ark, when the design

came to the conclusion that if you made the boat to full size as described on the tablet, which is about half the size of a football pitch, it wouldn’t work. It would simply be so huge that the structure wouldn’t function. They reduced this size to the maximum scale that would work by using the tablet inscription and traditional building methods. I think it’s somewhere between a third and half of the size.

Irving Finkel believes the ark was a round coracle

was actually full of specs that would have been very interesting to a coracle-builder. But as the story moved into perhaps more urban circumstances, and certainly into the capital of the Assyrian empire, nobody wanted to hear about all that stuff so it was squashed out of the story.

Could this super-large coracle have held several people and several animals? A coracle that I’ve found in photographs has about 30 people on it, so you can build quite a big one. There’s a documentary film being made in which specialists on ancient boats are trying to build this thing on the basis of the ancient inscription. They have the materials and craftsmen to work with them, and they used computer modelling to consider size, strain and weight bearing. They rapidly

So it’s unlikely that any of the Babylonians actually tried to build this boat? I don’t think anybody tried to build this thing to scale in antiquity. I think you have a mythological theme of the ark that people normally accept without a lot of analysis. However, in the world of those living alongside boats, people might be a little bit more interested in the details than elsewhere. This led to the formalisation of it, but I don’t think the audiences would ever to say to themselves, ‘let’s have a go at it’. They wanted something satisfactory conceptually.

Is it possible that anyone like Noah, or at least a Noah-like character ever existed? In the Bible, it’s clear that there was nothing but wickedness in the world and a single person, Noah, stood out as being the saviour. In the Babylonian world, the flood came because the human race was noisy, rather than sinful, and the gods were

Hollywood is set to explore the Noah myth with a blockbuster starring Russell Crowe (foreground) out this month

discomforted and irritated by the racket. That’s a whole different framework, psychologically and poetically. It’s a matter of taste whether you feel you need to retain a conception of Noah as a guy with sandals and a beard and a good sailor’s gait, or whether you take the story to be a symbolic representation of the frailty of the human race in the face of God. It’s about how the forces of nature and God’s will can obliterate everything, and how sometimes a single man suffices to avert the wrath of God. That is a very powerful religious and philosophic precept, the potency of which has nothing to do with whether Noah was once in the world. When you know there was an equivalent to Noah a thousand years earlier, then it becomes even less important to establish. To me, the crucial thing is the potency of the story, and its unforgettable influence on the reader, which existed in Babylonia and was adopted into the Bible with a different message. Irving Finkel is an expert of the ancient Middle East at the British Museum and the author of The Ark Before Noah.

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Science | How do we know

How Do We Know?

the existence of

isotopes By Cherry Lewis

They are used in everything from cancer treatments to smoke detectors and atom bombs, but it wasn’t until the 20th Century that we unravelled the mystery of chemically identical elements

science and society

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xactly 100 years ago on 4 December 1913, a paper was published in the journal Nature that documented one of the most important discoveries ever made. It was the culmination of many years of experiments and was to revolutionise the way we understand our world. It was the Greek philosopher Democritus who first put forward an atomic theory of the Universe. According to this, objects differed only in the shape, position, and arrangement of their atoms. So, for example, atoms of a liquid were smooth and round while atoms of a solid were jagged so that they could catch on to each other and hold fast. Democritus coined the word ‘atom’ which in Greek (atomos) means ‘undivided’ because, according to his theory, atoms could not be destroyed. Two thousand years elapsed before the theory developed much further. In 1789 a French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, listed the existence of 92 different types of matter. These were the elements, the building blocks of which everything in the Universe is made, but the dilemma was how to classify them; what characteristics did

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they have in common that would allow them to be ordered? Had Lavoisier lived, he may have solved this problem, but he was beheaded in 1794 during the French Revolution. An Italian mathematician lamented at the time, “It took them only an instant to cut off his head, but France may not produce another such head in a century”. As it was, the challenge of ordering the elements was taken up by an Englishman, John Dalton. Up in the air Dalton was concerned with the nature of gases. Around 1803, having shown that evaporated water exists in air as an independent gas, Dalton wondered how water and air could occupy the same space at the same time. He reasoned that if each were composed of discrete particles (what we now think of as atoms), evaporation might be viewed as a mixing of water particles with air particles. It was while performing a series of experiments on mixtures of gases to prove this idea that he was led to determine ‘the number and weight of all chemical elementary particles’. Exactly how he arrived at this idea

remains unexplained, since much of his work was lost in a bombing raid during the Second World War. However, a paragraph added to a paper published in 1805, after it had been read to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1803, said the following: “An enquiry into the relative weights of the ultimate particles of bodies is a subject, as far as I know, entirely new: I have lately been prosecuting this enquiry with remarkable success.” This was followed by the first rudimentary table of atomic weights. Dalton’s atomic theory not only identified that each element is distinguished by the characteristic weight of the atoms of which it is composed, but he also showed that all matter is composed of atoms, that all atoms of the same element are identical, and that different elements have different types of atoms. However, he also thought that atoms cannot be made or destroyed, an idea that was not challenged for almost another hundred years. In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a German physicist, observed a mysterious source of energy being

> IN a nutshell They are chemically identical to other elements, but discovering isotopes led to a revolution in science and technology, opening up applications in archaeology for carbon dating, cancer therapies and nuclear weapons.

The physicist Francis Aston used this mass spectrograph, to reveal two isotopes of neon in 1919

Science | How do we know

emitted as invisible rays from a Crookes tube. When he placed his wife’s hand over a photographic plate and in the path of these rays, Röntgen was able to develop a remarkable photograph that showed the bones in her hand, surrounded by the shadow of her flesh. This extraordinary image was the first X-ray ever seen. The following year Henri Becquerel, a French physicist, wondered whether there was any connection between the newly discovered X-rays and the reason why uranium glowed in the dark. He placed some uranium in a drawer with a photographic plate covered with black paper. On removing it the plate was seen to be fogged, proving that uranium also emitted invisible rays. Initially Becquerel’s discovery did

not arouse much attention, overshadowed as it was by Röntgen’s X-rays because of the medical possibilities. But working in Paris at that time was a newly married couple, Pierre and Marie Curie, both of whom were physicists. Following the birth of their first child in 1897, Marie decided to make a systematic investigation of Becquerel’s ‘uranium rays’. Progress was quick. Within a few days she had discovered that another element, thorium, gave out the same rays as uranium. Marie concluded that the rays being emitted from uranium and thorium were not the result of a chemical reaction, but came directly from the element itself. She called the phenomenon ‘radioactivity’. Later that year the atom finally lost its status as a fundamental particle

the Key EXPERIMENT

photo: science and society x4, science photo library, corbis

In 1910, unable to chemically separate several decay products of uranium and thorium from their parent elements, Frederick Soddy suspected that he had discovered a new chemical phenomenon. The next year, a young chemist, Alexander Fleck, joined Soddy’s laboratory and was set the task of systematically studying the chemical and electrochemical nature of all the known decay products – then some 40 elements. By the end of

that could not be subdivided when James Joseph Thomson detected the electron at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Working under him was a young New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford, who the following year (1898), at the age of only 27, was appointed Professor of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. There, Rutherford pursued his work on radioactive materials. He established that there were several kinds of radiation, each of which emitted different particles – alpha particles, beta particles and gamma rays. As part of this work, the chemical nature of the emitters themselves came under scrutiny, so Rutherford looked for a skilled chemist to work with. He found Frederick Soddy, a

By studying the decay products of uranium and thorium, Frederick Soddy and his assistant Alexander Fleck were able to identify the existence of isotopes

1912, Fleck had shown conclusively that ‘All are chemically indistinguishable from one or other of the elements occupying the last 12 places of the periodic table’. Furthermore, he demonstrated that whenever two or more elements came to occupy the same place in the periodic table – as a result of the expulsion of alpha or beta rays – then they were inseparable from one another and identical in chemical character. This was regardless of all

other factors such as the element’s atomic weight, its radioactive character and the nature of the radioactive changes in which it was produced. These remarkably consistent results led Soddy to propose the concept of isotopes in December 1913. Isotopes were positively identified after the First World War when Francis Aston recognised two isotopes of neon with his new mass spectrograph.

Frederick Soddy’s apparatus which was used to detect the production of helium from uranium and thorium

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The pioneer: Frederick Soddy

young assistant in the chemistry labs at McGill. Pioneering partnership The pair worked well together, and in 1902 astounded the scientific community with the announcement that one element could change into another. Incredibly, it appeared that in the process of emitting ‘mysterious rays’, completely new types of matter were created, the chemical and physical properties of which were quite distinct from the parent atom: radium became radon – a solid became a gas. Suddenly radioactivity was all the rage and Rutherford and Soddy’s ‘decay’ theory of the break-up of atoms was a topic of supreme interest not just to scientists, but to the world at large. Journalists besieged Rutherford’s laboratory and doctors wrote to him about ‘a trial of the inhalation of radium gas as a cure for tuberculosis’, and ‘the interesting effects produced when radium is brought near the eye’. Soddy later recalled what it had been like to work with Rutherford at that time: “I abandoned all to follow him, and for more than two years scientific life became hectic to a degree rare in the lifetime of an individual.” Following their success, in March 1903, Soddy elected to join Sir William Ramsay at University College in London to examine more fully the gaseous products of decay. When Rutherford visited England later that summer they together established that in the ‘decay chain’ that started with an unstable ‘parent’ atom of uranium, a ‘daughter’ atom of radium was produced and helium liberated. In turn the unstable radium atom decayed to its ‘daughter’ product radon, also releasing helium in the process. And so on until eventually eight atoms of helium had been discharged and a completely new stable element emerged. We now know this element to have been lead. After a year in London, Soddy took up the post of Lecturer in Physical Chemistry and Radioactivity at the University of Glasgow where, over the following 10 years, he helped to

cast of characters

The great minds that unravelled the true nature of the elements Democritus (ca. 460–370 BC) lived in Ancient Greece and was known as the ‘laughing philosopher’ because of his emphasis on ‘cheerfulness’. He was a founder of the atomist theory, which held that there are small indivisible bodies from which everything else is composed, and that these move about in an infinite void.

John Dalton (1766–1844) is one of the most important figures in chemistry. In 1805 the English physicist published the first table of atomic weights, recognising that each element is distinguished by the characteristic weight of its atoms, that all matter is composed of atoms, and that all atoms of the same element are identical.

Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) was a New Zealand physicist who investigated the phenomenon of radioactivity. Working in Canada with his assistant Frederick Soddy, they proposed that radioactivity results from the disintegration of atoms, for which Rutherford won the Nobel Prize in 1908. He is credited with splitting the atom in 1917, when he also discovered the proton.

Marie Curie (1867-1934) was a Polish chemist inspired by Henri Becquerel’s discovery of ‘uranium rays’, which she termed radioactivity. She separated radium in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterisation and the study of its properties. In 1903, Becquerel and the Curies received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity.

Frederick Soddy (1877-1956) worked in his early years on the disintegration products of radioactivity. In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of isotopes, but after this became disillusioned with science, believing his work on radioactivity had made him sterile. His later writings were on political economy and monetary theory.

Science | How do we know

timeline

The idea of atoms stretches back 2000 years, but the nature of isotopes wasn’t realised until the 20th Century Democritus puts forward an atomic theory of the Universe and coins the word ‘atom’. According to this theory, atoms cannot be destroyed and exist in a void.

1789

400 BC

French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, lists the existence of 92 different types of matter. These were the elements.

1805

science photo library x2, Science & Society, alamy, thinkstock, corbis

John Dalton determines the atomic weight of atoms, demonstrating that all matter is composed of atoms and that different elements have different types of atoms. He still thinks atoms cannot be subdivided.

1896

Henri Becquerel (left) discovers mysterious rays being omitted from uranium, which in 1898 Marie Curie calls radioactivity. During this work Curie went on to discover other radioactive elements, radium and polonium.

Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy announce their discovery of radioactive decay in which one element spontaneously changes into a completely different one through the emission of various particles. Helium is liberated in the process.

1913 72

1902

After two years of experiments, Alexander Fleck confirms that many radioactive decay products are chemically inseparable from each other, but have different weights. This leads Frederick Soddy to publish his discovery of isotopes.

June 2014

clarify the relationship between the ever-growing number of radioactive elements and the periodic table. But during this period a number of chemists in different laboratories around Europe were reporting that several elements appeared to be indistinguishable as far as their chemical reactions were concerned, even though they could be separated physically. Radiothorium, for example, a decay product of thorium, was chemically inseparable from thorium, although it could be distinguished physically. What was going on? Soddy examined the problem and he too found that it was impossible to separate thorium X from mesothorium and radium, concluding that the three elements were chemically identical. As he reported later: “From this date [1910] I was convinced that this nonseparability of the radioelements was a totally new phenomenon, quite distinct from that of the most closely related pairs… and that the relationship was not, as usually supposed, one of close similarity, but of complete chemical identity.” Identical elements? The following year, 1911, Soddy resolved the situation when he advanced his ‘general displacement’ law. In this he stated that when an alpha particle was expelled during radioactive decay, the element shifted two places along the periodic table in the direction of lower mass; the subsequent loss of two beta particles from the new element would then return it to its original position. When the element was back in its place on the periodic table, it would become the same element it had been originally, but its weight would be different. This explained why the daughter element could not be chemically separated from its parent, but could be distinguished by its different weight. Studies over the next year or so by Soddy’s assistant, Alexander Fleck, confirmed that the same effects were found in many other decay products. It was while discussing this new

Francis Aston at Cambridge University; he devised a mass spectrograph that was able to identify isotopes of neon and other elements

need to know

Five key terms that will help you understand isotopes

1 Alpha, beta and gamma decay

Alpha decay occurs when the nucleus ejects a helium nucleus. Beta decay happens when the nucleus emits an electron or positron and a type of neutrino. In gamma decay, energy of an excited nucleus is emitted as a gamma ray.

2 Isotope number

The number of neutrons and protons in the nucleus added together. An atom of lead derived from the decay of uranium 238 is ‘lead-206’ because it contains 82 protons and 124 neutrons (82+124 = 206), thus ‘206’ is the isotope number.

3 Mass spectrograph

An instrument used to determine the masses of atoms. A beam of charged particles is passed through an electromagnetic field, separating particles of different mass. The resulting spectrum is recorded on a photographic plate.

4 Radiothorium

Radiothorium and thorium X are both defunct terms – today they’re known as thorium-228 and radium-224. Mesothorium came in two states, I and II, now called radium-228 and actinium-228.

concept at a dinner party given by Soddy’s father-in-law, himself an industrial chemist, that a family friend, Dr Margaret Todd, suggested the name ‘isotope’ (from the Greek, isos topos, meaning ‘same place’) for atoms that were chemically identical but had different weights. Soddy used the term ‘isotopes or isotopic elements’ for the first time in his article Intra-atomic Charge, which was published in the journal Nature on 4 December 1913. On reading this article, the physicist Francis Aston began to suspect that isotopes of other elements might exist, but the First World War prevented him from testing this hypothesis. On returning to Cambridge in 1919, he developed the instrument that became known as the mass spectrograph, a device that showed the chemical

constituents of a sample as distinct lines. He showed that neon produced two spectral lines at mass 20 and 22, proving that neon had two isotopes. At the time of Soddy’s discovery, the nucleus of an element had only just been discovered (by Rutherford in 1911), and it was still unknown that the nucleus itself was comprised of two kinds of particle – protons and neutrons. We now know an element’s position in the periodic table is dictated not by atomic weight but atomic number (the number of protons). The discovery of isotopes revolutionised science. In medicine, isotopes are used in bone imaging and as tracers to detect tumours and blood clots. Gamma rays of cobalt-60 are used in radiotherapy to kill cancer cells; it also kills bacteria in food. In

archaeology, carbon-14 determines the age of an object, and geologists use isotopes of uranium and lead, amongst others, to determine the age of rocks. Isotopes are also used in the sensors of smoke detectors and, most famously, it’s the isotope uranium-235 that is found in nuclear weapons. In 1921, Frederick Soddy was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A year later, the Prize was awarded to Francis Aston for his discovery ‘of isotopes in a large number of nonradioactive elements’. They were fitting awards for one of science’s greatest discoveries. Cherry Lewis is a geologist and the author of The Dating Game: One Man’s Search For The Age Of The Earth.

History | ye olde travel guide

Historical Holidays: guidebooks from the past

Amsterdam 1648

In the latest instalment of our historical holidays series, in which experts imagine they’re writing a travel guide in the past, Russell Shorto recommends a city that, with the threat of invasion lifted, has become the emporium of the world

A

fter centuries as a pokey little place famous only as a centre of pilgrimage, Amsterdam has morphed into the global hub of art, commerce and science. And what better way of navigating the city than on its staggeringly efficient waterways

When to go Any time is good, though high summer is the malaria season along the canals.The tulips for which the city is famous – even after the tulip mania of a decade ago, when the price of bulbs soared and then collapsed – still pop up in the spring. In winter you can skate on the canals.

bridgeman art library / illustrated map: www.jontyclark.com

What to take with you Layers! The northern winds blow strong here. Look at the locals: they aren’t all fat, just protecting themselves from the elements. If you want to fit in, bring a crisp, white lace collar. Costs This is the world’s greatest city right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most expensive.The Dutch are great ones for bargains. Haggle with merchants, and you’ll be respected. Amsterdam is the emporium of the world. Along its canals you can buy live elephants, stuffed monkeys, Delft tiles, and spices from the East Indies. Everything is cheaper here than elsewhere in Europe, because most goods arrive here first before being shipped elsewhere.

Sights and activities Leaders from other European cities come to marvel at the new canal zone, which is about three-quarters finished now. Nearly four decades ago the city fathers laid out a massive urban expansion programme, which involved wrapping a horseshoe ring of canals around the medieval city centre, increasing the size of the city fivefold. Thousands of gable-topped brick houses, miles of road and canal, and dozens of humpbacked bridges later, the result is a place unlike any other. For the first time, a city has been crafted around the needs and comforts of individual residents. The homes themselves are a reflection of this.Think of homes in other European cities.Who lives in them? An extended family, its servants, renters, assorted others. An Amsterdam canal house is smaller, and it is meant to house a man, his wife, and their children.What a concept! The city has brought about a new emphasis on this family unit, and so has redefined the meaning of ‘home’. With that comes a new approach to comfort.The Dutch have a word – gezellig

“Along its canals you can buy live elephants, stuffed monkeys and east Indian Spices”

– that doesn’t have an English translation. It means something like cosy, comfortable, warm. Go inside a canal house and you’ll find lots of gezelligheid.There are cosy beds tucked into closets, to keep out drafts.The family gathers around the fireplace.You’ll see that everyone hangs paintings on their walls. And the paintings will amaze you – for they are not religious subjects. Instead – you won’t believe this – they depict ordinary people. A woman pouring milk into a bowl. An old man selling fish on the street. Imagine making art out of such commonplace material! Yet this is the key to Amsterdam: it’s geared to the individual. One stop you must make, therefore, is at one of the city’s art dealers.Why not see the great man himself: Rembrandt van Rijn? He’s not only one of Europe’s most celebrated artists (his Night Watch painting of the civic guard company on patrol hangs in their headquarters a few steps from his house), but a dealer in his own right. Dangers and annoyances As of the Treaty of Munster, which was signed this year, the threat of a Spanish invasion, which has loomed over the city for 80 years, is over.The Dutch have won their long war of independence. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to watch yourself along the canals. But the threat will be from pickpockets, who prey on the thousands of newcomers hoping

Amsterdam today Canals, characterful small houses and art like Rembrandt’s Night Watch remain a powerful draw to the Dutch capital – just as they were in 1648. Though today two-wheeled transport has replaced boats as the most popular way of getting around, the water remains the best way to appreciate the canal ring, now an ancient treasure admired the world over. You can enjoy art all over the city, including the Van Gogh Museum and, most stunning of all, Rijksmuseum, newly opened after a decade-long restoration. Anne Frank’s House does more than nod at the recent history of the city. Most of all, Amsterdam is a thoroughly modern European metropolis which preserves its past while advancing confidently into the future. For all that, brown cafes offering gezelligheid by the glass still abound. As an added bonus, Amsterdam is brilliantly connected with airports to all major cities. There’s little excuse not to go and see it for yourself.

If you like this… If you like your canals Dutch, try Leiden, a short train ride from Amsterdam. Another cyclefriendly European capital with a fascinating history is Copenhagen Denmark. Tom Hall, travel editor, lonelyplanet.com. You can read more of his articles at the website

to make a go of it in the city where, 40-odd years ago, the stock market and the concept of ‘shares of stock’ were born.

winter, pea soup is the thing. For quick bites as you stroll, you can find street stalls hawking cinnamon cakes.

Sleeping/accommodation Most inns are clustered near the harbour. You get off your ship and cross into the city via the New Bridge. In front of you is a canal called the Damrak. It’s lined with cheap places to stay. For something finer, go straight ahead until you come to the Stock Exchange Building. Around it are accommodations for the merchants and traders who flock to Amsterdam.

Getting around If you’re coming to Amsterdam from another Dutch city you’ll be astounded by the public transport boats.They are clean.They ride the waterways that connect cities.They usually depart hourly, and are efficient. You can walk anywhere in the city in 15 minutes. If you’re rich and want to flaunt it, you can hire a coach, and laugh as commoners dash to the sides of the narrow roads to avoid being run down.

Eating and drinking In two words: herring and beer.You can’t go wrong with either. Beyond that, the national dish is hutspot, a stew of vegetables, meat, ginger, and lemon juice. And in

Art house: Amsterdam’s “stunning” Rijksmuseum

Russell Shorto is an American author and historian, as well as a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and director of The John Adams Institute in Amsterdam.

June 2014

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the latest science books reviewed

Written In Blood The Remarkable Casebook Of One Of Britain’s Top Forensic Scientists

dan dry

Mike Silverman Bantam Press, ` 664

K This book is not for the faint-hearted. Don’t expect to tiptoe into the shallow end and ease yourself into the gory details. From the first page, Silverman gives you a sharp shove between the shoulder blades and sends you face-first into the pool. With the metallic scent of blood rising from the pages, Silverman recounts a personal journey through 35 years of game-changing advances in serology (the study of blood serum), fingerprinting and DNA analysis. Giddy with the implications of catching criminals using ever-tinier samples, the police initially thought their problems were solved. Almost overnight, cold cases were cracked and swathes of suspects eliminated from enquiries. But it wasn’t all plain sailing.

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Rapists changed their pleas from ‘never met the woman’ to ‘she consented’, and courts expected TV fictioninspired results. Silverman describes his work with the scientific detachment of many a forensic scientist. There’s a faint amusement at the fright and disgust of ‘lay people’ – his girlfriend for example, when he brings home a jar of decomposing flesh and maggots from a crime scene – and much of the book’s appeal lies in its shock factor. Each case is almost joyously described, sparing no intimate or gratuitous detail. However, more alarming than the bloodshed, is the story of the inevitable commercialisation of forensic science and the resulting monetisation of justice. As fast as labs could perfect DNA amplification techniques, they became commodities, subject to patents, copyright infringement, and market competition. Suddenly, the Forensic Science Service was under pressure like never before to produce accurate and speedy results every time, and turn a profit to boot. The impact of having to pay for every single test meant police sent fewer samples to the labs and relied more heavily on evidence they thought would be a ‘sure thing’, undoubtedly compromising investigations. In turn, labs often threw unnecessarily advanced techniques at samples in order to secure competitive results and generate income, or risk being undercut or outbid. And eventually, that’s exactly what happened. Silverman makes a convincing case that prioritising profit over ‘locking up bad guys’ was doomed from the start. His prognosis for forensic science in the UK is bleak, and ultimately he asks what price we have to pay for justice. But whatever you do, please don’t have nightmares. Dr Anna Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Forensic Science at the University of Huddersfield.

Neanderthal Man In Search Of Lost Genomes Svante Pääbo Basic Books, `945

This is the fascinating account of Svante Pääbo’s efforts to sequence Neanderthal nuclear DNA. Although the details of the technical problems faced are not an easy read, his personal story, from graduate to world-renowned scientist, makes this a very enjoyable book. As a young Swedish medical student, Pääbo’s fascination with ancient things led him to secretly extract DNA from dead tissues in his professor’s laboratory. His ultimate ambition was to sequence the DNA of the Neanderthals, our closest relatives. The study of the Neanderthals has kept palaeontologists occupied for more than a century, but Pääbo convinces us that decoding their DNA will provide insights into how different we are from them and what makes us so unique. You accompany him on a journey that culminates in the publication of the Neanderthal nuclear genome in 2010, 30 years after his illicit trials in the lab in Sweden. Helped by advances in genetics and the support of his collaborators, he achieved what no one thought possible. Isabelle De Groote is an evolutionary anthropologist at LJM University, Liverpool.

How Dogs Love Us

The Gap

The Galapagos

A Neuroscientist And His Dog Decode The Canine Brain

The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals

A Natural History

Gregory Berns Scribe Publications `1,544

Thomas Suddendorf Basic Books, `1,852

If you’ve ever wanted to know how to get a dog into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, this is the book for you. Neuroscientist and dog lover Gregory Berns had long wanted to know what dogs are really thinking. He’s used MRI to study blood flow in live human brains – a proxy for thought – and decided to try the same trick with dogs. Coaxing a dog into a MRI scanner, though, was not easy. A laboratory is a deeply unnatural, frightening place for a dog, never mind the claustrophobic tube of a MRI scanner. Worse, the machine makes a noise like a jackhammer, and the subject has to lie still for lengthy periods, not moving a millimetre, in a machine designed for a completely different species, while wearing specially designed doggy ear defenders. It’s a tribute then to Berns and his team – notably his dog Callie – that they succeeded, and in so doing asked probing questions about the rights in our society of sensitive, intelligent and possibly sentient creatures. But did Berns find out what dogs really think about? The answer is ambiguous as well as poignant and meaningful: dogs think about what we’re thinking.

What separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom? It’s tempting to point to tool use, speech, morality and co-operation. And yet, as this book shows, such superficial lists are easily contradicted by a wealth of research on animal behaviour. To scratch the surface - parrots can speak, chimps form war parties, dogs understand fairness, and crows use tools. In fact, New Caledonian crows use one tool to obtain a second tool to get to the food they’re after. So what is unique about the human mind? Thomas Suddendorf believes only we are capable of what he calls nested scenario building – we think about thoughts and imagine possible worlds. He also argues that we have an unrivalled urge to connect with each others’ minds, aided by the ability to imagine other times and perspectives. Suddendorf is a skillful guide through ‘the gap’ between animal and human minds. He describes clever animal experiments and observational work with lucidity. He ends with a plea. Our ape cousins are dying out. It’s vital that we use our unique powers of foresight to prevent the gap from widening.

Henry Gee is an evolutionary biologist, and a senior editor of the journal Nature.

Christian Jarrett is a neuroscientist and the author of The Rough Guide To Psychology.

Henry Nicholls Profile Books, `1,728

Darwin sailed to the windswept Galapagos Islands in 1835 to study their geology, but came away beguiled by the varied life forms he found. It was this experience that shaped his ideas about evolution and natural selection. Countless coffee-table picture books have been made about the Galapagos, but Nicholls’s volume takes a refreshingly different course: it is the only popular account I am aware of that ventures off the well-beaten track of famous tortoises or the photogenic Darwin’s finches, to document the rich diversity of species that made these islands a World Heritage site. Nicholls describes the ocean life, birds, plants, invertebrates and reptiles, augmenting these accounts with personal and historical anecdotes. He writes in an informal style that takes for granted that saving the Galapagos as a living museum is a good thing – you won’t find the economic and social pros and cons of conservation debated here. But then he is in good company. Having left the Galapagos, Darwin noted ‘the natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention’. Prof Mark Pagel is an evolutionary biologist and author of Wired For Culture.

resource get your clicks

Our pick of internet highlights to explore

H WEBSITE

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Disk detective

World of statistics

Weather spark

www.diskdetective.org

www.worldofstatistics.org/

www.weatherspark.com

Astronomers are searching high and low in our Galaxy for stars that could be hosting planet-forming discs, like the one our own Solar System formed from over four billion years ago. But they need your help. So watch these short clips taken from NASA’s WISE mission and get classifying.

Ever wondered how your life would really be affected if statistics weren’t around? Well, for starters, we wouldn’t be able to tell who had won an election, and you couldn’t take the lift instead of the stairs to the office in the morning. To find out why, read this blog that uses cartoons to explain why statistics matter.

Weather nerds, this site is for you. The amount of detail might seem overwhelming at first, but dig in and there’s a wealth of data to be had. Not only can you get an hour by hour account of conditions at any of 4,000 weather stations, but you can search through the whole history of each one – showing average temperatures and more right back to 1973.

H WEBSITE

H WEBSITE

H WEBSITE

Vaccine-preventable outbreaks

The Interstellar Mission

The Brain Scoop

www.cfr.org/interactives/GH_ Vaccine_Map/#/intro

www.voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

www.thebrainscoop.tumblr.com

Since 1977, NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft have been exploring the frontiers of space. This NASA website allows you to track them in real time, and is a great resource to learn more about the Voyager Mission. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have gone places in our galaxy that no other spacecraft has, and you can join them on their journey into the great unknown!

Based out of the Field Museum in Chicago and run by Emily Graslie, who has the rather splendid job title of Chief Curiosity Correspondent, The Brain Scoop gives you the inside track on the inner workings of a natural history museum. With only 1 per cent of the museum’s collection able to be displayed at any one time, there’s a lot from behind the scenes to show off.

It’s clear that not vaccinating against preventable diseases is a bad idea. But this site really proves the point. The interactive map shows disease outbreaks across the world that should be preventable by vaccination, as told by news reports (so take it as a rough guide only). This is grim, but necessary, stuff.

Sent in by BBC Knowledge reader Mehul Pandita

If you have a favourite website, blog or podcast that you’d like to share with other readers, email [email protected] 78

June 2014

buzz

30 things i never knew contest

All through March, BBC Knowledge ran the contest, 30 Things I Never Knew that became popular on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. United by the hashtag #30ThingsINeverKnew, the contest went viral as entries poured in from participants across the country. Out of over 9000 entries, 10 were chosen to create the #30ThingsINeverKnew photo album. The contest was trending across India, and in the end, everyone taking part came away as a winner with a new nugget of knowledge!

inside the pages An excerpt from a book you should read

ThHeH MOunproe(Snaki)Window by

123rf.com x4

lady of fifteen, said a very self possessed young ," ttel Nu . Mr tly, sen pre n "My aunt will be dow and put up with me." flatter the niece of "In the meantime you must try something, which should duly ect corr the say to ed our eav doubted more Framton Nuttel end that was to come. Privately, he t aun the ting oun disc uly und much towards the moment without ion of total strangers would do cess suc a on ts visi al form se than ever whether the . was supposed to be undergoing helping the nerve cure, which be paring to migrate to this rural pre s wa he en wh said had er sist his be," l your nerves will "I know how it wil not speak to a living soul, and and re the n dow f rsel you y the people I retreat; "You will bur you letters of introduction to all give just ll sha I g. pin mo be worse than ever from te nice." fas as I can remember were qui ting one of the know there. Some of them, as the lady to whom he was presen on, plet Sap s. Mr er eth wh ed Framton wonder the nice division. that they letters of introduction, came into asked the niece, when she judged e?" her nd rou ple peo the of ny "Do you know ma nication. had had suf ficient silent commu at the rectory, you know, n. "My sister was staying here, mto Fra said "Hardly a soul,” e of the people here." e me letters of introduction to som some four years ago, and she gav a tone of distinct regret. He made the last statement in d the self-possessed young hing about my aunt?," pursue "T hen you know practically not lady. dering whether Mrs. admitted the caller. He was won "Only her name and address," able something about the room or widowed state. An undefin Sappleton was in the married itation. ld be since your seemed to sug gest masculine hab ago," said the child, "T hat wou rs yea e thre just ed pen hap "Her great tragedy on," said the sister’s times." wide open on an October afterno dow win t tha p kee we y wh "You may wonder n. window that opened on to a law niece, indicating a large French t has that window got "bu n, mto Fra said r," of the yea "It is quite warm for the time ?" anything to do with the tragedy band and her two young Summar three years ago to a day, her hus , dow win t moor to their y: The Op through tha ut "O of the an never came back. In crossing the ey Th g. otin sho ’s day ir the thology B en Window (part e of bog. It had brothers went off for easts and Beasts, 1 e engulfed in a treacherous piec thre all e wer y the und gro 9 S ing 1 uper4) is a gre other years gave way favourite snipe-shoot Saki's su at ex w, and places that were safe in ailing ma ccinct writing sty ample of t dreadful wet summer, you kno tha n the dreadful part of s bee wa at er recovered. Th n travels le. In it, a nev e wer ies bod eir Th g. nin to a rural n his health suddenly without war ha . residents After meeting wit mlet for "Poor aunt it." , he enco h several e and became falteringly human. not sed sses -po self its u lost ce n voi ters a niel that was who tells Here the child’s , they and the little brown spa day e him a ho young girl som k bac e com l wil y the rrible sec y the window always thinks that ret. as they used to do. That is wh just dow win t tha at in k wal told me how they lost with them, and Poor dear aunt, she has often k. dus te qui is it till g nin eve e, her youngest is kept open every f coat over his arm, and Ronni roo erp wat ite wh his h wit d ause she said went out, her husban he always did to tease her, bec ”as nd? bou you do y wh e, erti , I almost get a brother, singing, “B on still, quiet evenings like this es etim som w, kno you Do . it got on her nerves 80

April 2014

History

walk in through that window." creepy feeling that they will all en the aunt bustled into the r. It was a relief to Framton wh dde shu e littl a h wit off ke bro She earance. for being late in making her app n. room with a whirl of apologies n very interesting," said Framto bee has he “S g you?”she said. usin am n and bee d has ban a hus Ver y e "M hop , "I on briskly n window," said Mrs. Sapplet for "I hope you don’t mind the ope e in his way. The’ve been out com ays alw y shooting, and the from ctly ndire e me hom you be l like wil So rs brothe poor carpets. they’ll make a fine mess over my snipe in the marshes today, so folk, isn’t it?" birds, and the prospects for the shooting and the scarcity of ut abo lly erfu che on led ratt She de a desperate, but only it was all purely horrible. He ma n, mto Fra To ter. win the in duck he was conscious talk on to a less ghastly topic; the turn to rt effo ful cess suc ly partial and her eyes were y a fragment of her attention, onl him ing giv s wa tess hos his that ond. It was open window and the lawn bey the to him t pas g yin stra tly constan visit on this tragic nce that he should have paid his cide coin e nat ortu unf an ly ain cert anniversary. mental me complete rest, an absence of "T he doctors agree in ordering sical phy t len vio of thing in the nature excitement, and avoidance of any e-spread wid ly rab tole the who laboured under exercise," announced Framton, the least for gry hun are s chance acquaintance and rs nge stra l tota t tha sion delu n the matter of rmities, their cause and cure. "O infi and s ent ailm ’s one of ail det eement," he continued. diet they are not so much in agr yawn at the a voice, which only replaced a "No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in n-but not to what ly brightened into alert attentio den sud she en Th nt. me mo last Framton was saying. ’t they look as if d." Just in time for tea, and don "Here they are at last!," she crie s!" they were muddy up to me eye a look intended to convey turned towards the niece with and Framton shivered slightly the open window with dazed e child was staring out thorough Th . sion hen pre and looked in com ic het pat sym mton swung round in his seat Fra fear s eles nam of ck sho l horror in her eyes. In a chil dow; they the same direction. g across the lawn towards the win kin wal e wer res figu e thre t t In the deepening twiligh nally burdened with a white coa s, and one of them was additio arm ir red the er nea y und s the y, gun essl ied isel carr all ir heels. No d brown spaniel kept close at the hung over his shoulders. A tire k: "I said, Bertie, why do you dus the of out ng voice chanted you rse hoa a n the and se, hou the front gate bound? " l-door, the gravel-drive, and the hal the ; hat and k stic his at into the Framton grabbed wildly coming along the road had to run ist cycl A eat. retr ng dlo hea his were dimly noted stages in n. hedge to avoid imminent collisio tosh, coming in through the the bearer of the white mackin said r," "Here we are, my dea o bolted out as we came up? " st of its dry. "W ho was that wh mo but , ddy mu ly fair ; dow win on, "Could only talk about his Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sapplet e would thing "A most extraordinary man, a apology when you arrived. On or ye d-b goo of d wor a t hou illness, and dashed off wit he had seen a ghost." he had a horror of dogs. He the niece calmly, "He told me pariah dogs, "I expect it was the spaniel," said ks of the Ganges by a pack of bac the on ere ewh som y eter was once hunted into a cem tures snarling and grinning and a newly dug grave with the crea in ht nig the nd spe to had and ve." h to make any one lose their ner foaming just above him. Enoug speciality. Romance at short notice was her The End

Hector Hugh Munro (18701960), known by his pen name, Saki, was a popular short-story writer. His stories are widely known for their dark humour, idyllic settings, and their clever endings.

123rf.com X3, wiki

The child was staring out thorough the open window with dazed horror in her eyes

edu talk Dr Ayyappan, Director-Education of Sree Gokulam Public Schools in Kerala, talks to Moshita Prajapati about how education today needs to prepare students for a better tomorrow How is the spirit of the school’s motto implemented in everyday schooling at Sree Gokulam Public Schools (SGPS)? The motto of Sree Gokulam Public School is Vidya Gurunam Guruh, which means vidya is the master of all gurus.’ Keeping this in mind, we help each student to become self-reliant by exploring their innate abilities and inculcating good habits in them. We also integrate activities into classroom learning as this allows them an opportunity to develop their reasoning and thinking skills. The students are also exposed to different avenues of knowledge eradicating even the small grains of ignorance. Thus, we give prime importance to vidya in all aspects. What according to you is good education? Good education is training and developing the knowledge, mind, character, skills, and habits of children especially by formal schooling. SGPS assures its students of quality education by helping students carve a niche for themselves. We also encourage the passions of students and believe in the co-curricular activities that enhance their academic capability.

‘The present education system lacks the ability to eradicate social disparity from India’

What sets SGPS apart from other schools? It has left its door open without any bias of gender, caste or creed for people to attain the biggest asset, which is knowledge. We inculcate a single-minded devotion to learning and fostering an all-round development of students. Teaching is done in a manner, which fires the students with enthusiasm for their subjects. Last but not the least, discipline is very important aspect of our school. As the Education Director of SGPS, what changes have you bought about? I understood that academic achievements are predominantly related to demographics and socio-economic class of surrounding community, so I tried to develop a cordial relation with local

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education. What would you attribute this to? First and foremost I would attribute this to the hard working nature of people. Keralites always aim to be the best in all fields. Hence, they are determined to succeed.

people. I encouraged teachers to use motivative and remedial strategies to enhance the IQ of each pupil. I gave due importance in investing in-service teacher preparation. I have also taken the initiative to introduce modern courses like Geospatial Technology and Mass Media courses at the +1 and +2 level for better career options in various fields. How is technology inculcated for everyday learning? Modern technology is very useful because it relies on one of the most powerful bias we have i.e. preference for visually presented information. Hence, we have interactive white boards and smart class facility in schools to attract and maintain the attention of young students. Kerala is considered to be a state with highest literacy rate and is known for its good

What according to you are the most pressing problems the Indian education system faces today? Though due importance is given to national integration I feel the present education system lacks the ability to eradicate social disparity from India. Moreover, the education imparted at school and college level is not as per the job market. Fresh graduates lack the skills required in a job market. Personality is equally important as academic qualification, but the present education system does not cater to the development of the child’s overall personality. Also, I feel the present generation is not able to critically analyze and think about important issues, for example our history, culture, and religion. How are the students of SGPS equipped to tackle these problems? The students of SGPS take an active involvement in organising religious and national festivals in the school campus. They forget all religious and social bias and are indirectly involved in eradicating social disparity. The introduction of new courses at higher secondary level (Geospatial Technology and Mass Media) is a giant leap to enable the students to be skilled as per the job market requirements. In order to inculcate a respect for our rich Indian heritage, each programme is framed to pave the way for the students to understand its glory. Due attention is also given to improve the personality of the child. What is your vision for students who graduate from SGPS? We envision a global village where the students of GPS are the torchbearers of educational, physical, and cultural excellence.

games review Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

Diablio III : Reaper of Souls features plenty of the hack and slash dungeon crawling that made franchise popular two decades ago

also out Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Square Enix, `3,599 The long-running franchise featuring the archaeologist Lara Croft received an overdue reboot in 2013. Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, released in January this year, takes last year’s edition to the next level. The game features improved graphics, improved physics and all of the downloadable content. A highly engaging storyline, beautifully rendered settings, and a faithful but fresh take on an iconic protagonist.

Titanfall PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Respawn Entertainment, `3,499

PC, Blizzard Entertainment, `2,399

In 1996, Blizzard Entertainment released the genre-defining Role Playing Game (RPG), Diablo. The game’s runaway success spawned a successful franchise. The latest expansion pack, Reaper of Souls, comes on the heels of Diablo III, the third title in the series. Released this March, Reaper takes players back to realm of Sanctuary. This time, the game’s antagonist is not the familiar Diablo but Malthael, a fallen angel whose agenda is to wipe out humanity as a means to end the eternal conflict between the angels of the High Heavens and the demons of the Burning Hells. Reaper of Souls released post the Loot 2.0 patch for Diablo III, an update, which replaced the Auction House with a more rewarding loot system. Adventure Mode features numerous side quests, which can be completed to earn legendary item drops. This change brings the game closer to its roots as a dungeon-crawling RPG. The

game’s opponents are drawn from a new bestiary, with barely any of the old monsters and demons from Diablo III making a return. The game’s colour palette is also darker, adding an ominous tone to the landscapes you pass through. The Crusader class makes an entry in this expansion. The Crusaders comes into their own during multiplayer sessions, where their defensive and supporting skills can be used to full effect. The five other classes from Diablo III have been given new passive abilities to add to their skill-set. The level cap has also been raised from 60 to 70, giving players incentive to revisit their characters from the preceding game. The tightly woven storyline keeps players riveted, managing to stay interesting in spite of the absence of the primary antagonist, Diablo. However, the climactic sequence reveals that the player’s actions during the game have freed Diablo’s essence from the Soulstone in which it was trapped, foretelling the return of The Lord of Terror. Blizzard Entertainment has a history of taking their time with their releases, with twelve years passing between the releases of Diablo II and Diablo III. Until then, Reaper of Souls is a great way for fans to satiate their addictions. Let the reaping begin!

Titanfall released amid fervent hype with fans of the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre looking forward to a new take on a largely formulaic genre. The game allows players to play as both human “Pilots” and mechanical “Titans”. Titanfall broke new territory by giving players liberty to adopt contrasting playstyles within the same game. However, paying full price for a game that offers no campaign mode but expects you to pay for fresh downloadable content feels like a cash-grab.

Smash Hit Android, iOS, Mediocre, `119 Wanton destruction in a harmless virtual setting is the premise for Smash Hit. Smash Hit’s developers, Mediocre, realised the entertainment value of mindless acts of destruction when they came up with the game. A simplified on-rails shooter, the player’s objective is to travel down an unalterable path, destroying glass obstacles along the way by tossing steel spheres at them. Touch the glass and its game over. Smash Hit is a great option for casual gamers looking for a brief distraction. Compiled by Dushyant Shekhawat

Gadgets

for a Better Tomorrow

LUMO LIFT Lumo Lift, the fitness device, doesn’t just count the amount of steps you’ve taken and the calories you’ve burned, it also corrects your posture. The clip-on device sends gentle vibrations to remind you to sit up straight and stand without slouching anytime it detects your posture slipping. Mothers of children hunched over a computer screen worldwide can rejoice. Price: `4,732 • www.lumobodytech.com

URB-E URB-E is a compact, collapsible bike made of lightweight aircraft aluminium, making it easy to carry it onto buses and trains. The versatile design offers riders a choice between a three-wheel and a two-wheel system. It is also connected to an app, which tracks the vehicles battery life and aids navigation. Price: `1,07,760 • www.urb-e.com

NEST THERMOSTAT Nest’s most successful product is a smart thermostat that learns your home’s heating patterns, adjusts to your lifestyle, and saves energy. As with all other smart devices, it boasts the ubiquitous link with the users smart phone and can be controlled even when you’re away from home. Price: `14,915 • www.store.nest.com

POPPY

LUMOS SOLAR BACKPACK Bangalore-based start-up Lumos’ Solar Backpack cleverly harnesses the potential of India's sunny weather. The panel of solar fabric on the backpack provides energy to charge your laptop, phone or camera whilst on the go. As they say, make hay while the sun shines! Price: `4,999 • www.lumos.co.in

GLOFASTER JACKET The Glofaster 'Smart' Jacket uses a system of lights to communicate with the wearer. Glofaster Jacket’s system serves as a herald of things to come. Currently, the product’s operating principle is if you’re meeting your target heart rate and running speed, the lights stay on. Intermittent flashes are the smart jacket’s way of telling you to put your legs into it! Price: `5,930 • www.glowfaster.com

The Poppy 3D Camera & Viewer quite literally adds a whole new dimension to iPhone photography. Using a system of mirrors, lenses and old-fashioned optics, the Poppy converts a single photo taken from the iPhone into two separate stereographic images, which are then placed one above the other to produce a 3D photo. Price: `3,590 • www.poppy3d.comcom

GOJI SMART LOCK Knock knock. Who’s there? The Goji Smart Lock finally puts this tired question to rest. The lock connects to your smart phone, and is operated through this paired device. Amongst its many features, it also sends a photo of anyone who tries (with or without your permission) to enter your home directly to your phone. The companion app for Goji Smart Lock also allows you to grant access remotely via text or email to acquaintances, and keeps a record of all comings and goings through your home’s door. Price: `16,652 • www.gojiaccess.com

RING

iVEE The iVee brings us one step closer to the future envisioned in the Jetsons. This home automation hub can control the lighting in your house, give you weather updates from anywhere in the world, play the music of your choice as well as a host of other activities. Users interact with iVee through its smooth voice-recognition system that makes relaying commands as simple as thinking aloud. Price: `11,979 • www.helloivee.com

If 'One Ring to Rule Them All' existed in our world, this would be it. This gesture-controlled device, Ring is compatible with Google Glass. With a flick of your fingers, the ring plays music, captures images, makes mobile payments and sends texts. It connects to your home appliances directly or through a home automation hub such as iVee. Price: TBA • www.logbar.jp/ring/

KOLIBREE SMART TOOTHBRUSH Kolibree’s Smart Toothbrush does away with pointless visits to the dentist. The toothbrush connects to Smartphones via Bluetooth, and the companion app then tracks your brushing habits and dental hygiene. The app supports upto five brushes, effectively freeing parents from the task of checking on your child’s (not so) pearly whites. Price: `5,930 to `11,920 •www.kolibree.com

SONY HMZ-T3 This futuristic headset isn’t going to get you into music duo Daft Punk, but it will offer you a unique viewing experience. Once you strap on this head-mounted personal 3D viewer, be prepared to be completely enthralled by the images floating on the twin OLED screens on your visor. Sony HMZ-T3 can be used for viewing movies, playing video games, or anything that would normally require a TV screen. This lightweight gadget even comes with detachable light screens to ensure your escape from reality! Price: `1,30,045 • www.sony.co.uk Compiled by Dushyant Shekhawat

in exciting Solve & W hampers chocolate550 from worth `

puzzle pit Questions and challenges guaranteed to give your brain a workout

Crossword NO.21 Across

9 Florida city (5) 10 Mathematician and astronomer of ancient India after whom our first satellite was named (9) 11 Inhabitants of a country? (7) 12 Compensation, remuneration, or stipend (7) 13 Set of beliefs or principles (5) 15 Blind as a ____? (3) 16 Symbolically 'Sn' for the chemist (3) 17 Son of Lord Rama and Sita (3) 19 Stress; suspense (7) 20 Careless or negligent (3) 23 I do not ___ that : I do not believe your story, in a way? (3) 24 Robert E ___ : US Confederate general in the American Civil War? (3) 25 A Hindu religious instructor (5) 27 Chattered, gossiped or confessed (7) 29 Improves or amends (7) 32 In a restricted area (9) 33 Our national animal? (5) Down

1 Arabian sultanate (4) 2 Cows, bulls, oxen etc. (6) 3 Capital of Ukraine (4) 4 Eccentric shafts (4) 5 Comfort; console (10) 6 Act in accordance with the order of others (4) 7 Of or from father's side of the family (8) 8 Signal structure (6) 13 Calorie in short (3) 14 A little song (5) 15 Country, which hosted the 2014 World T20 tournament (10) 16 Nurses or looks after, minds (5) 18 Resonance (8) 21 16 in Roman numerals (3) 22 ___ over : become lively, in a way? (6) 26 Exact reparation for a wrong (6) 28 Hinder, thwart or foil (4) 29 ____ adieu : says farewell? (4) 30 Adds up? (4) 31 Active and alert (4)

How to enter for the crossword: Post your entries to BBC Knowledge Editorial, Crossword No.21 Worldwide Media, The Times of India Bldg, 4th floor, Dr Dadabhai Navroji Road, Mumbai 400001 or email bbcknowledge@ wwm.co.in by 10 June 2014. 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

Your Details Name: Age: Address:

PinCode: Tel:

School/Institution/Occupation:

Email:

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. 20

Aswath Magesh, Chennai • Shivika Marwaha, Gurgaon • Riju Khatri, Pune • D. Rohit, Coimbatore

Solution of crossword NO. 20

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June 2014

87

Puzzle Pit

t Find your way ou of the maze.

Q7 Hidato

Q8 PICTURE SEARCH 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.

Q9 Enigma Code 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. The Clue: Fasten

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Q12 Today's Teaser 1) Once upon a time, there were 4 men of different height. If the difference in height among the first 3 men was 2 inches and the difference between the third and four th man was 6 inches, and the average height was 74 inches, how tall was each?

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2) I run, yet I have no legs. What am I? 3) What occurs once in a minute, twic e in a moment, but never in an hour?

Q7 Hidato:

Q3 Deduction: Outlive, Movie, Tan. Q10 Go Figure: Easy: 7 x 4 + 7 + 9 = 44 Q4 Chain Words: Hello, Loot, Other, Hermit, Mitten, Medium: 7 x 8 - 2 + 2 = 56 Tender, Dermal, Mallet, Letter, Terse, Second, Hard: 9 + 2 - 4 x 5 = 35 Condone, Onerous, Rouser, Errand, Random, Omit, Itch, Chart, Artist, Istle, Legend, Gender, Ergo. Q11 Pick and Choose: Overthrow, Fright, Reign, Juvenile, Rome, Personal. Q5 Head & Tail: Running-Back-Dive-In-General-Electric-Power-Grid. Q12 Today's Teaser: 1) The first man was 70 inches tall, the second 72, the third 74 and the fourth was 80 inches tall. 2) A nose. 3) The letter M 4) A coffin 5) 59th day. It doubles every day, and if the pond is half full on the 59th day, then it is filled on the 60th day. Q6 Scramble: Words: Brood, Bliss, Future, Unlock. Answer: I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. - Albert Einstein Q2 Mensa Puzzle: 37 & 45. In each square the central value equals the sum of the product of the top two numbers and the product of the bottom two. Q1 Double Barrelled: Leg. Solutions:

Q9 Enigma Code: Clamped, Limping, Angelic, Dealing, Decimal, Leading, Medical. Q8 Picture Search: Candle, Cellphone, China, Clip, Crow, Dollar, Flute, Gloves, Lion, Lobster, Palette, Potato, Pyramid, Ring, Stumps, Syringe.

5) A lily pad doubles in size every day . If on the 60th day the pond is filled with the lily pad, on what day is the pond only half covered?

Q13 One Letter Crossword: 1. C, 2. T, 3. R, 4. J.

4) The maker doesn't want it; the buye r doesn't use it; and the user doesn't see it. What is it?

in focus “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

- Wittgenstein said that language existed to communicate real, clear, and present facts. Therefore, concepts which cannot be communicated in a simple manner hold no real truth-value themselves. Taken from Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein (published in 1921)

Legacy

www.lucadelbaldo.com, nybooksDOTcom

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) is considered one of the 20th Centuries greatest philosophers. He was an engineering student, before he moved to Cambridge to study philosophy under mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell. This combination of mathematics and logic defined his approach, which also espoused a rejection of the metaphysical and abstract thinking that dominated the field. He postulated a reality made up of tangible facts, and stated that the ethereal approach of his predecessors was largely nonsense. His adherence to facts made the metaphysical realm alien to him, and he believed that the world existed only as a collection of material truths of which we can speak of. The Austrian-British thinker published only two major works; Tractatus Logico Philosophicus in 1921, and Philosophical Investigations, which was published posthumously in 1953. These works represent the two stages of Wittgenstein’s philosophy; Tractatus exploring the limitations of language in expressing abstract thought, and Investigations assigning arbitrary truth-value to statements in context of the language games they were used in. 90

June 2014

Trinity College, Cambridge, England, where Wittgenstein studied and later taught philosophy

The Wittgenstein siblings with Ludwig second from right

Did you know • Wittgenstein was a student at the same school as Adolf Hitler during the academic year 1904-1905 • The Wittgenstein family had a storied history of depression; three of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide • Wittgenstein’s mentor, Bertrand Russell, described him as the most perfect example of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating • Wittgenstein received numerous distinctions for bravery for his service in the Austro-Hungarian Army during WWI • Wittgenstein took a sabbatical from the field of philosophy and served as a teacher in rural Austrian villages after publishing Tractatus

SCIENCE • HISTORY • NATURE • FOR THE CURIOUS MIND