A Times of India publication
Volume 4 Issue 5 August 2014 `125
SCIENCE t HISTORY t NATURE t FOR THE CURIOUS MIND
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GIANT FOR MANKIND Greatest achievements that have defined our lives p30
R.N.I.MAHENG/2010/35422
HIROYA MINAKUCHI/MINDEN/FLPA, OLE JØRGEN LIODDEN, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, ILLUSTRATION BY JONTY CLARK, GETTY, SONY.CO.IN
CONTENTS
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COVER STORY 30 12 Giant Leaps For Mankind Humanity’s greatest achievements that defined the lives of generations
FEATURES 22 Portfolio: Sub-Antarctic Penguins Photographer Ole Jørgen Liodden’s series of the feathered residents of Southern Ocean's polar regions will melt your heart
39 Pre-Historic Safari Find out which dinosaur was the first of its kind, which was the most ferocious, and which was the last of its species as we travel back to the Mesozoic Era
47 When Lightning Strikes Did you know that lightning can be red, yellow, green, orange, and even purple in colour when it strikes? Find out more as we solve its mysteries
52 The Rise Of The Slime Unravelling the reasons behind the recent explosion of jellyfish populations in the world’s oceans
58 The Universe: The Story So Far The history of our cosmos is being rewritten in light of new discoveries and theories
August 2014
REGULARS 6 Q&A Our panel of experts answer the questions you’ve always wanted to ask
72 Ye Olde Travel Guide: Prague, 1600
12 Snapshot
We visit Prague at the turn of the 17th century to find a city that seethes with political turmoil
Outstanding photographs to inform and engage
74 Resource
18 Update The latest intelligence – an insect that can perceive the world in 3D and ten discoveries that will shape our future
66 How Do We Know: What Causes Earthquakes?
Our picks offer the best of science, history and nature on the web
77 Edu Talk Interview with Zarin Malva, Director of Training at the Ratan Tata Institute of Montessori, Mumbai
Understanding the science 78 Inside The Pages behind the occurrence of one of Read Russian literary icon nature’s most destructive and Anton Chekhov’s ironic take devastating forces on reputation and society and
72
222 52 58
82
their fragile relationship in the short story, Slander
80 Games Review We review Wolfenstein: The New Order and bring you the highlights of the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2014
82 Gadgets A pick of the best budget gadgets on the market that won’t cost you more than `10,000
84 Puzzle Pit A veritable buffet of brain teasers guaranteed to test your mind
88 In Focus Meet Dame Jane Goodall, the primatologist and conservationist responsible for shaping our understanding of wild chimpanzees
84 39 Corrigendum In the last issue of BBC Knowledge Volume 4 Issue 4 June 2014, the feature Portfolio: Food Maps was merely a sketch representation. Any offence caused is regretted.
FROM THE EDITOR The history of mankind technically dates back to roughly 2,00,000 years when the first modern day man appeared but it really started 3.7 billion years ago with the advent of a simple cell. Evolution is defined as a ‘process of formation or growth’; the journey from this simple cell organism to multicellular life and eventually primates and modern humans is one of the greatest and the most magical of phenomenon. Do we call the ultimate survival of the Homosapiens, our ancestors, over the others in the Homo genus a triumph? Did they do something to give themselves an edge over the others? Or was it a part of the evolutionary process anyway? You won’t find answers to this in this month’s cover story (page 30) but you will get a glimpse of what makes human beings spectacular, the infallible spirit that propels us forward. In the pages you will find our cumulative history changing directions because of decisions we made either independently, consciously, inadvertently or instinctively over thousands of years. And to truly comprehend the wonder of our progression as a human race, it is imperative we try and understand the infinitesimally ginormous context that surrounds us. Do read The Universe – The Story So Far (page 58).
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YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED Does ivy kill trees? p8 How long does it take food to pass through the body? p9 Can psychopaths be ‘cured’? p10 Do hiccups serve a purpose? p11
EXPERT PANEL
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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.
Why do things happen in slow-motion when you have an accident?
Robert Matthews Robert is a writer and researcher. He is a Visiting Reader in Science at Aston University, UK.
Gareth Mitchell
GETTY X2, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, NASA
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.
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This is because our estimates of time depend on how much we remember, and more memories are laid down in an emergency. Experiments have investigated this. In one case volunteers fell back into a net from 50m, experiencing terrifying freefall for three seconds. They said they seemed to be moving in slow-motion, and estimated the fall had taken between four and six seconds, rather than three. To find out whether they were really experiencing events more slowly they were given a wrist watch displaying random numbers flickering just too fast to see. During the fall they could not see the numbers any more clearly, so time doesn’t really slow down. They just remember it as though it did, probably because the amygdala, a part of the brain implicated in fear, is highly active and affects the way memories are made. SB
This chap’s first attempt at ‘free running’ went horribly wrong
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Why aren’t prehistoric humans depicted with facial hair? The vibrant colours of the Hawk moth’s larvae are a warning arning to birds
How do insects avoid void being eaten by birds?
Homo erectus georgicus is thought to be the first hominin to settle in Europe 1.8 million years ago
Lots of insects hide in burrows and only emerge at night, or use camouflage to avoid detection. But, more than any other group of animals, insects are also masters of the opposite strategy called aposematism. These insects use bright colouration to warn birds that they are poisonous. A 2013 study at Newcastle University found that birds still sometimes eat brightly coloured insects if they judge that the nutritional benefit outweighs the cost of dealing with the toxins. LV
Can a solar system exist outside a galaxy? It is possible, though none have yet been discovered. It is extremely unlikely single stars could form in intergalactic space where the density of material is so low. However, it is known that when galaxies collide or interact, the gravitational forces can easily rip stars out of their host galaxies. Such stars can become ‘orphaned’ in intergalactic space. If they started out with a planetary system, there is no reason that they’d lose it during their exile. AG Trails of dust are left behind the galaxy cluster Abell 3627
Q&
Never mind the gum disease – questionable goatee beards are a problem too
TOP TEN
What causes gum disease?
LARGEST BIRD WINGSPANS
1. Wandering Albatross
2. Great White Pelican Wingspan: 3.6m
Location: SE Europe, Asia, Africa
Your mouth contains millions of bacteria, comprising more than 500 different strains. These microbes live off the food particles in your mouth as well as the tissues of the mouth itself and they are constantly multiplying. In a normal healthy mouth, their numbers are held in check by the enzymes in your saliva and by the white blood cells of your immune system. But calcium phosphate deposits on your teeth (dental tartar) provide tiny crevices that make it easier for microbes to hide. Most oral bacteria won’t grow in a petri dish, which makes them very hard to study, but recent work at the Ohio State College of Dentistry has sequenced the DNA of one key bacterium involved in gum disease called Tannerella BU063. They found one gene complex that appears to significantly increase the virulence of certain strains of this bacterium and it may be this mutation that triggers outbreaks of gum disease. It may help us target the bacteria to better tackle the disease. LV
3. Andean Condor erica
Ivy isn’t the insipid parasite you think it is – it’s just hitching a lift on its tree host
4. Marabou Stork Wingspan: 3.2m
Location: Sub-Saharan Africa
5. Win
rasia
6. Whooper Swan Wingspan: 2.7m
Location: Northern Hemisphere
ill trees? isn’t a true parasite. The t of its length don’t nd are just used for grip. ts and water through its l like most other plants. ves the ivy from having to trunk to support its own vy infestations can reduce s a tree or make it more ut this is normally a dy ailing tree, rather than lth. LV
7. Kori Bustard Wingspan: 2.7m
Location: Africa
8. We Wingspa
traila
9. Goliath Heron THINKSTOCK X2, SLAC
Wi
, South Asia
10. Whooping Crane Wingspan: 2.3m
8
Location: North Africa
August 2014
What detail can the most powerful X-ray machines see? The most powerful X-ray machines are computed tomography (CT) scanners, which take multiple scans to create 3D images of structures deep in the body. They reveal fine bone fractures or tumours just a few millimetres wide. Away from the clinic, the world’s most powerful X-ray is the 3km-long accelerator tube at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. It takes stop-motion movies of atoms forming or breaking bonds. It can even image plant photosynthesis in action. GM
This 3km-long X-ray machine in California can take images of atoms
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How many man-made gases are destroying the ozone layer? The main ozone-depleting gases are chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). The Montreal Protocol, which came into force in 1989, lists 56 CFCs and 34 HCFCs and production of almost all of them is now completely banned. There are a few exceptions where there isn’t an alternative, such as the
fire suppression systems on submarines. However, a study at the University of East Anglia found three new CFCs and one HCFC that have recently been released into the atmosphere. The amounts aren’t large – less than one per cent of the total release of ozone-depleting compounds before the Montreal
Protocol was signed. But the source of these new compounds is currently unknown and the levels of two of them are rising rapidly. These chemicals will also take several decades to break down naturally, so they will continue to be a problem, even if their production is stopped immediately. LV
THINKSTOCK X2, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY THIN
Someone somewhere is pumping out CFCs and HCFCs again
How long does it take food to pass through the body?
Is it possible for goldilocks zones to exist in double star systems?
The variation from person to person is huge, even in healthy individuals eating exactly the same diet. Men empty their stomachs into the small intestine a little faster than women, but the overall end-to-end transit time is the same. Anything from 12 to 50 hours is normal. LV
The ‘goldilocks’ or ‘habitable’ zone is the region around a star (or stars) where planets can have liquid water at their surfaces. The location of the habitable zone is dependent primarily on the radius of the planet’s orbit, its mass, and the amount of energy given off by the host star. Things are a little more complicated in double star systems than for single stars. But, if the two stars are sufficiently close together (orbiting each other every 10 days or less), their combined energy resembles that from a single star. In this case, the habitable zone is actually larger than for a single star. However, if the two stars are much further apart, planets will have unstable orbits and will experience extreme variations in temperature. Although an atmosphere may mitigate some of these effects, in general the wider the binary system, the smaller the habitable zone becomes. AG
It should take you over a day to pass this
A twin sunrise on a planet orbiting a double star system would be a spectacular sight
& How can music change our mood?
Karaoke can have a decidedly negative effect on mood depending on the singer
By changing the way we perceive the world. For example, in experiments in which people looked at smiley or sad face icons, the music they were listening to affected what they saw. Even a neutral face could be judged as happy when listening to happy music. Music also stirs up old memories without us intending it to, often bringing back emotions experienced at the time. The rhythm or beat of music causes all sorts of bodily responses including tapping fingers and feet. A beat can even affect our heart rate and, when people sing together, their breathing may become synchronised and positive emotions increased. These effects are perhaps not so surprising when we know that musical patterns affect the auditory brainstem, as well as the auditory cortex, parts of the neural reward system and other areas involved in memory and emotion. SB
Can psychopaths be ‘cured’?
SUPERSTOCK, ALAMY, NASA
Psychopaths are impulsive, highly aggressive, and show no empathy for others. They can commit murder or horrific sexual crimes without feeling any remorse, and their behaviour is highly resistant to any kind of treatment including drugs, hypnosis, and electric shock. Hitler, and Jack the Ripper are often said to have been psychopaths. Brain imaging of psychopaths’ brains reveals abnormalities that can even show up in early childhood. When presented with images of others in pain their brains show far less activity than would be expected in emotional areas such as bitofrontal cortex. the amygdala, hypothalamus and orbitofrontal Until recently no cure was thought possible, but researchers in Italy now claim that psychopaths’ brains might be completely rewired using direct brain er with electrodes stimulation. This could be done either implanted under the skull or with a non-invasive netic method known as transcranial magnetic erve stimulation. We should perhaps reserve nce the lead judgement on this claim, though, since laiming that researcher made recent headlines claiming a human head transplant was not farr off. SB Liver-loving psychopath Hannibal nibal Lecter
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August 2014
This graphic shows the orbits of all the known potentially hazardous asteroids – over 1400 as of early 2013
How many potentially hazardous asteroids are there? A potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is an asteroid whose orbit comes nearer than 0.05AU (about 7.5 million km) of the Earth and whose brightness implies a size of the order of about 100m across or more. Such objects would have devastating consequences if they were to impact the Earth. At the time of writing, the International Astronomical Union lists a total of 1,466 potential hazardous asteroids. This does not mean all these objects will eventually hit the Earth, just that they have the potential to do so. Of course, this number represents only the PHAs we know about. A recent survey by NASA’s WISE satellite suggested there are at least 4700 such objects. Although we are in no immediate danger, asteroids like this that are big enough to cause major destruction, particularly in heavily populated areas, have hit Earth every 200 to 300 years on average. AG
KNOW SPOT 5IFNPTUIFBWJMZDSBUFSFENPPOJT $BMMJTUP JOPSCJUBSPVOE+VQJUFS*UT TVSGBDFJTQFSDFOUDPWFSFEJODSBUFST
Q&
QUICKFIRE
Why aren’t all TV programmes transmitted in HD?
8IZEPQIZTJDJTUTOFFE UIFHSBWJUPOUPFYQMBJO HSBWJUZ According to quantum theory, the fundamental forces of nature all have their own ‘exchange particles’, which transmit the forces between other particles. The exchange particle for electromagnetism, for example, is the photon; for gravity it’s the so-called graviton. Physicists expect these particles to have a starring role in the long-sought Theory of Everything, which will explain all of nature’s forces and particles. RM
$PVMEUSBGýDTPVOECF DPOWFSUFEUPVTFGVMFOFSHZ BBC News can be watched in HD, so now you can see what people are up to in the background even more clearly Production and post-production in high definition still need some hefty processing and storage, even by today’s standards. Even so, most programmes on the main broadcast channels are available in HD. BBC News has been in HD since it moved to the new studios in Broadcasting House last year. The other reason for programmes still being in standard definition is simply that they might have been made before HD cameras were widely in use. GM
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, BBC
Do hiccups serve a purpose? Hiccups only occur in mammals and are much more common with infants. One possible explanation is that they evolved as a way to burp excess air out of the stomach when suckling. This would allow babies to feed for longer before they were full, so there would be an evolutionary advantage. A hiccup is a reflex contraction of your diaphragm, followed by the vocal cords and epiglottis slamming shut – this causes the ‘hic’ sound. The sudden drop in pressure in the chest cavity forces air trapped in the stomach back up into the throat. LV
Hiccup
Normal breath
Epiglottis is open, leaving a clear airway
Epiglottis snaps shut, making a hiccup sound
Diaphragm contracts normally, air enters lungs
Diaphragm goes into spasm, chest cavity pressure drops abruptly
While it might sound deafening, traffic noise is actually a feeble source of energy. Even the 100dB roar of a lorry passing by generates barely a hundredth of a watt of power per square metre. By way of comparison, sunlight is tens of thousands of times more concentrated. RM
8IJDIQBSUTPGUIFCSBJO BSFBDUJWFEVSJOHBHFOFSBM BOBFTUIFUJD All parts of the brain are active but less so than during waking or sleep. General anaesthesia is essentially a ‘reversible coma’ in which consciousness is lost as brain patterns change. Some anaesthetics, such as ketamine, affect inhibitory cells first so that other cells become briefly excited. This explains the hallucinations experienced at low doses. With the commonly used anaesthetic, propofol, consciousness is lost when different brain areas that normally communicate with each other become activated or suppressed at different times. This disrupts the connectivity between them, leaving each brain region functionally isolated. So what matters for maintaining consciousness is not just which areas are active but how well they are synchronised. SB
NATURE | SNAPSHOT
SNAPSHOT
Living larder
FLPA
THE GENEROUS GLUTTONS
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Although they’re trying their best to look like a bunch of grapes, this is actually a group of honeypot ants hanging upside down. They have gorged on nectar during wet weather, storing it in their abdomens to provide food for the colony. “When other workers are hungry and they aren’t able to find food in the normal way, they will just come along and stroke the antennae of these hanging workers, who will then regurgitate the food,” says Dr George McGavin, author, BBC TV presenter and honorary research associate in the University of Oxford’s zoology department. There are several species of honeypot ant, but these belong to the species Camponotus inflatus and were photographed in central Australia. They often become so large that they are unable to move. They are precious when food is in short supply and can be stolen by other ant colonies. “I’ve eaten lots of insects, but this is one I haven’t tried,” says McGavin. “They are delicious apparently. In Australia they are a real treat for Aboriginals.”
August 2014
NATURE | SNAPSHOT
Escaping the grave
GETTY
RISING FROM THE DEPTHS This is what remains of what was once a lively town. Tourists visiting Villa Epecuén in Argentina would head for Lake Epecuén to bathe in the salty waters, hoping it would cure their ills. But the lake that enabled this resort to grow engulfed it in 1985 when it flooded. “The period since the 1970s was exceptionally wet, and so the resort, established in the 1920s, became flooded in spite of the building of a dam to try and protect it,” says Professor Andrew Goudie, Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. “Now the climate has reverted to what it was like in the earlier 20th century and so the lake has started to dry out.
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August 2014
STEVE BACK 16
August 2014
SNAPSHOT | NATURE
Red, red brine THE CRIMSON TIDE This salt lagoon, resembling a painting by Mark Rothko, is the biggest algae farm in the world. Located by the coast in Western Australia, it contains the single-celled Dunaliella salina. These usually appear green, but under the bright Australian sunlight they begin to produce beta-carotene – a pigment that gives pumpkins and carrots their orange colour. It’s farmed for use in both food colourings and medicines. “It is a photo-protectant”, says Alison Smith, Professor of Plant Biochemistry at Cambridge University. This means the algae form the pigment in direct response to the incident light, in order to protect themselves against damage from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. “The algae are grown up to high density in one place and then flooded into the shallow open ponds,” explains Prof Smith. “As the water evaporates, the salt concentration increases, and this exacerbates the response.” The farm is made up of a network of connecting lakes that are fed from the salty Indian Ocean, in order to encourage production of beta-carotene.
UPDATE
THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
1
A bug's life
MINUTE EXPERT
Dim matter What’s that: dark matter’s slow-witted cousin?
Scientists take a novel approach to understand 3D better
Afraid not. It’s actually the diffuse gas that constitutes the intergalactic medium (IGM).
Right. So what’s the intergalactic medium? Well, 96 per cent of the mass and energy in the Universe is dark matter and dark energy. Of the remaining four per cent, only around a quarter is made up of stars and galaxies. The remainder, around three per cent of everything in the Universe, is the IGM.
So how do they know it’s there?
Unlike most insects, mantises see in 3D. Next up: mantis-only screenings of Antz and The Fly
t’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to see at your local multiplex: a praying mantis wearing 3D glasses. Researchers at Newcastle University attached the tiny glasses to the front of the mantises’ heads to study their vision. The insects were then shown specially generated images on a computer monitor and their reactions observed. The specs fooled the mantises into misjudging depth, in the same way that human brains are fooled when we watch 3D movies. “This is a really exciting project to
DR JENNY READ/NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY
I
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August 2014
be working on. So much is still waiting to be discovered in this system,” said researcher Dr Vivek Nityananda. “If we find that the way mantises process 3D vision is very different from the way humans do it, that could open up all kinds of possibilities to create simpler algorithms for programming 3D vision into robots.” Although we humans tend to take depth perception for granted, it is by no means universal in the animal kingdom. In fact, mantises are the only invertebrates that are known to have it.
Recently, astronomers at the Palomar Observatory took the first three-dimensional images of the IGM using the Cosmic Web Imager and the Hale 200-inch telescope.
What’s next? Researchers plan to take observations of the IGM both from a telescope aboard a high-altitude balloon called FIREBALL (Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon), and from a satellite called ISTOS (Imaging Spectroscopic Telescope for Origins Surveys). By eliminating interference from the Earth’s atmosphere, both instruments will be able to get a clearer view. Astronomers hope the work will help to further our understanding of how galaxies are formed and interact.
UPDATE
THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
GRAPHIC SCIENCE Seeing research differently
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
EMOTIONS ARE WRITTEN ALL OVER OUR FACES
Happy
Happily disgusted
Disgusted
Disgustedly surprised
Surprised
Sadly surprised
Sad
Sadly angry
Angry
Fearfully angry
How are you feeling right now? Happily disgusted, perhaps? How about sadly angry? Researchers at Ohio State University have used computer modelling to identify 21 distinct human facial expressions, including those corresponding to the seemingly contradictory
feelings mentioned above. They hope the work will be useful in helping to map emotional responses in the brain and potentially aid the diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and autism.
UPDATE
THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
THAT Grow your own skin
A new paint by Nissan will keep a car looking pristine, assuming it’s sprayed on more than just one half
Testing cosmetics and drugs on animals may soon become a thing of the past thanks to the creation of lab-grown human skin. An international team led by King’s College London and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center has grown an epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, using pluripotent stem cells. The technique could also help develop new therapies for skin disorders.
Cleaner cars If you work at a carwash it might be time to start looking for another job. Nissan has begun trialling a super-hydrophobic paint called Ultra-Ever Dry that can keep a motor squeaky clean no matter how many
Waterproof wonder The next anorak you buy may be made from graphene. A team at the Swedish Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has produced a porous membrane using the ‘super material’ Graph that is 100,000 times of ca thinner than a human hair. Researchers claim the material is a thousand times more breathable than Gore-Tex and could be used to make ultra-lightweight waterproof clothing.
muddy puddles you might happen to drive through. The Japanese automotive giant says it has no plans to use the paint as standard on its cars, but could offer it as an option.
Flat antennae Pointy antennae may soon be a thing of the past thanks to the creation of a material that can manipulate and focus electromagnetic waves. By arranging tiny U-shaped, metallic structures on an insulating sheet, researchers at Southeast University in Nanjing were able to create a unique material that can focus electromagnetic waves like an optical lens focuses light. ght. The work could lead to thee development of new typess of antennae that can be made de to cover surfaces of any sizee and shape. The aerial of the future?
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Keratinocytes - the most common type of cell in the epidermis
Antibacterial film for meat Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have developed a film that could be used to keep meat and poultry products from spoiling. The film is made of pullulan – an edible, mostly tasteless, transparent polymer that is produced by the fungus Aureobasidium pulluns – and impregnated with nanoparticles and essential oils derived from rosemary and oregano. In tests it kept meat free from bacteria for up to three weeks. Sausages wrapped in the antibacterial pullulan sheets
WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE Auditory nerves regenerated after gene therapy (top) and before
Help with hearing Cochlear implants have been helping the hard of hearing for decades, but now they may also help to regenerate auditory nerves through the use of gene therapy. A team at the University of New South Wales has managed to regenerate surviving nerves in sufferers of age-related hearing loss by delivering therapeutic DNA to the inner ear via such implants. The technology could also be used in deep brain stimulation devices for the treatment of complex neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and depression.
Researchers at the University of East Anglia have discovered that Methylocella silvestris, a type of bacterium that is commonly found in peat, tundra and forest soils across northern Europe, can mop up methane and propane. The findings could help combat the effects of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere from natural gas leaks or from human activity such as oil spills.
Peat contains bacteria that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions
A pill to control your appetite Often feel hungry after a meal? It may be due to the food you are eating not releasing enough acetate. Large amounts of the molecule are produced when vegetables are digested by bacteria in the colon, but this is not the case with processed foods. When the researchers injected mice with acetate, they consumed less. The findings could result in the development of a pill to help control the appetites appet tes of o overeaters o e eate s
Eat your greens to get your dose of acetate
Flipping the switch Harvard scientists have created a switch so small it can be turned on and off using a single photon. The switches could be used to form a ‘quantum internet’ that allows for perfectly secure communications. The switch uses nanophotonic technology, ‘wiring’ that can control the pathway of light rather than electricity. The switches would form optical circuits that can be connected to fibre optic cables. The tiny new photon switch will form circuits made of light
MisTable is an interactive, fog-based display that enables multiple users to work collaboratively using hand gestures
Tabletop displays Forget touchscreens or high definition LED: today’s cutting-edge displays are made of mist. A team at the University of Bristol has created MisTable, an interactive tabletop display that projects 3D images onto a
curtain of fog. Sensors built into the system allow users to manipulate the images with hand gestures. The researchers say the table could help several users to work collaboratively on the same project.
NEWSPRESS, KINGS COLLEGE LONDON, UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA, THINKSTOCK, UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, PENNYSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY,
Bacteria that can fix gas leaks
NATURE | PORTFOLIO
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I fell in love with penguins on my first visit to Antarctica, in 2006. Since then I’ve returned several times to watch these charismatic birds – and I always discover something new at which to marvel. But while photos of the polar species abound, the penguins of New Zealand and its associated islands are less well-known. I’ve become increasingly curious about these hard-to-find sub-Antarctic species, so I set out to document the lives and behaviour of these often-rare birds on the beach and, particularly, under the waves. Photography by Ole Jørgen Liodden
A ROYAL RUCKUS The royal penguins endemic to Macquarie Island form dense colonies many thousands strong, so I was unsurprised to see regular outbursts of bickering. I never established the cause of this pair’s bill-to-bill spat – perhaps they were tussling for suitable stones or sites for nesting, vying for partners or simply because one trespassed on the other’s patch. But it was soon over, and the two birds melted into the bustling throng. There’s certainly never a quiet moment on the island. Some 8,50,000 breeding pairs of royal penguins spend seven months of the year here, sharing the rocky shores with king, gentoo, and rockhopper penguins and a host of other seabirds, as well as four species of seal.
PORTFOLIO | NATURE
THE ROYAL PROFILE S Royal penguins nest only on Macquarie Island and Bishop and Clerk Islets, lying in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica.
FOAM RUN W Fiordlan crested penguins approaching their ne ting sites on the shores of Westland can face a daunting barrage of surf. Waves break in tumultuous ranks that whip the surface nto a briny lather, reducing visibility to almo t zero. But though the conditions present stern test for both penguin and photogr pher (and equipment – my camera barely survived the experience), it was worth braving he spray to capture spume-capped birds in the shallows.
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ROCK OPERA S I was delighted to photograph a group of Snares penguins apparently in thrall to one of their number as it belted out an aria from atop their rocky home. The forests of the tiny Snares Islands, off New Zealand’s southern coast, host the only nesting colonies of these birds; landing on the islands is prohibited, but by chartering a Zodiac boat one summer’s day I managed to approach close enough to capture these revealing images.
FIT FOR PORPOISE X Snares penguins are underwater acrobats – sometimes erupting from the waves in porpoising leaps spanning 1–2m. In common with most of the other penguins I photographed around New Zealand, this species is classed as Vulnerable – its tiny home range hosts only 31,000 breeding pairs.
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CHICK LIT I photographed this juvenile white-flippered penguin – an Endangered subspecies of the little penguin, endemic to the Canterbury region of New Zealand’s South Island, where perhaps 4000 breeding pairs survive – on a rocky beach in the warm afternoon light. While the colony’s adults were out hunting for fish and squid to feed their fluffy offspring, I was able to locate and photograph a few young birds in relative peace, thanks to the help of an experienced researcher. The return of the adults that evening would be accompanied by a cacophonous din; the colonies are notoriously noisy, producing a discordant symphony of trills, yaps, wails and grunts.
PORTFOLIO | NATURE
DIVE TO SURVIVE T Royal penguins hunt for fish and krill in the waters off Macquarie Island; when a pair is incubating eggs, the foraging partner may spend many days out at sea in deep, nutrient-rich waters. I’m not a diver, so I used a home-made pole-cam system to capture the lithe grace of these penguins underwater. The birds seemed to be curious about my equipment, swimming close around my camera and creating this memorable image.
SUNSET TRYST W The Fiordland crested penguin is among the world’s rarest – only 2500–3000 breeding pairs nest among the rocks, caves, and coastal rainforest of Stewart Island and the westernmost shores of New Zealand’s South Island. I’d heard that these characterful birds, known to the Maori as tawaki, could be spotted emerging from the surf at a remote beach near Haast in spring (July–November), so on several evenings I hiked down to watch them surfing ashore, one by one or in small groups. As the sun set, I waited for this individual to pause, and used a long shutter speed to create a soft texture and emphasise the luminous beauty of the scene.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER Ole Jørgen Liodden is a wildlife photographer who specialises in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and leads photo expeditions and safaris around the world. www.naturfokus.com
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GIANT LEAPS FOR MANKIND
We ask 12 historians to nominate alternative moments in the past that they consider to be giant leaps for mankind. Interviews by Rob Attar
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Meat sets us apart 1 &DUQLYRULVP Probably Africa, c2.5 million years ago Chosen by Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto, University of Notre Dame don’t believe in human progress but if you held a pistol to my head and said I had to come up with something of evolutionary advantage to humans, I would say that among other primates the relatively early carnivorism of our hominid ancestors was of enormous importance. If you are carnivorous it gives you access to fats and proteins that are not available in such concentrated form in non-meat food sources. Not only that but although the first hominid carnivores were almost certainly scavengers, in the very long run meat-eating launched them on the trajectory
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A hominid skull from around two million years ago, when our ancestors were probably carnivoures
that led to hunting. Hunting stimulates the faculties of anticipation because you need to have the ability to see what isn’t there, to see what’s behind the next tree or over the next hill. I believe that an accidental by-product of this faculty of anticipation is humanity’s super endowment of the imagination. It is our imagination that has given humans the capacity to change with greater rapidity than other species and the ability to form a really astonishing range of cultures.The features of the human past which are different from those of the past of other animals are traceable to our imagination, which is traceable to anticipation and in an indirect way you can trace it all back to carnivorism. Nowadays there is a very broad consensus that carnivorism began about 2.5 million years ago.We don’t know why it happened but I’d postulate that it was an evolutionary consequence of our lack of other advantages compared with rival species. Actually we are pretty poorly designed animals because we’re slow, lack agility, have only one stomach, weak fangs and don’t have tails.We’re behind in almost everything and that’s why we need more plentiful abundance of anticipation than other creatures similar to ourselves. 'FMJQF'FSOÈOEF["SNFTUP is the author of The World: A History 1SFOUJDF)BMM
Getting involved: Greeks in conversation during the fifth century BC
The people take control 2 7KHDGYHQWRISROLWLFV Greece, seventh century BC Chosen by Professor Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge understand ‘politics’ in the very strict sense, that’s to say taking it from the Greek word polis meaning ‘city’,‘city-state’ or (best of all) ‘citizen-state’.The ancient Greeks invented the idea of the citizen and also the idea of citizens coming together on the basis of some sort of political equality to take decisions about matters of communal concern.We don’t know much about who the early politicians were, but we do know that for example in the little city of Dreros on Crete there was a public assembly passing communally binding decisions in 600 BC, so
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politics must have been flourishing already. Without the invention of this citizen state and the politics and procedure it entailed, democracy would be unthinkable.We do our politics very differently today, more in a Roman way, but nevertheless the very idea of the ‘political’ – people coming together and taking decisions, not by divine right but because they are citizens – goes back to the ancient Greeks. 1BVM$BSUMFEHF is the author of Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice $61
GIANT LEAPS | SCIENCE
The personification of democracy crowns the people of Athens
Every man has a voice 3 Democracy Greece, 507 BC Chosen by Dr Peter Jones, formerly of Newcastle University HPRFUDF\ZDVLQYHQWHGLQb%&E\DQ$WKHQLDQ called Cleisthenes. Over the course of the next 100 years in Athens and elsewhere in the Greek world it developed into a full-blown radical system where all male citizens over 18 took all decisions about the running of their own state. The consequence was that there was no such thing as politicians. Even a great $WKHQLDQSROLWLFDOŵJXUHOLNH3HULFOHVKDGQRDXWKRULW\ over the people’s assembly. All he could do was try to persuade them that his view of things was right but if they didn’t like it then they could reject it. Athenian democracy has been heavily debated but I think that it was remarkably successful. It ran for 180 years until it was destroyed by the Macedonians in 323
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BC and while the charge has been made that it was like mob rule, the Athenians strike me as having been admirably governed. I believe the people were perfectly capable of taking sensible decisions. To give one example they could, being the people who made all the decisions, have voted themselves bags of gold and pensions for life – but they never did. Modern ‘democracy’ can be traced back to Athens, yet what we live in today is actually an elective oligarchy where we choose 650 MPs to make decisions on our behalf. There is nothing wrong with elective oligarchy per se but I wish that it were not called democracy because it seems to me that the Athenian experiment was so remarkable, powerful, and appealing compared to the feeble version we have today. Peter Jones is the author of Vote for Caesar: How the Ancient Greeks and Romans Solved the Problems of Today 0SJPO
Seeing the world as it is Roman empire, c150 AD Chosen by Professor Jerry Brotton, Queen Mary, University of London
A 15th-century map of the world illustrating a Latin edition of Ptolemy’s the Geography
n around AD 150, Ptolemy was working in the library of Alexandria, then one of the greatest repositories of Greek learning. He wrote the Geography, which defined the discipline of geography and laid down the principles of global mapping.There were no maps in the book but what the Geography offered was a geographical description of the world and an explanation of how maps could be drawn. It allowed scholars to map the world for the first time in history. The text wasn’t taken up initially. This was in the late Hellenistic, early Christian moment and Christianity had no interest in the rather abstract geometrical mathematical notion of how you plot the world on a map. It was the Arabs who kept Ptolemy going in places like Baghdad until it reappeared in Italy in the 14th century. Renaissance geographers produced new editions of the
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Geography and employed Ptolemy’s principles to try to map the expanding world. It was also used by the likes of Christopher Columbus and some of the Portuguese explorers who were sailing east, such as Vasco da Gama. Ptolemy is known as the father of geography and for 1,500 years everything pivoted around him. Even the modern map is based on the kind of projections that Ptolemy offered. In a way Ptolemy was a kind of classical Google. Google gives you the tools to map as you want – whether to see your own home, or Washington DC, or Korea.Well in a sense that is what Ptolemy did. He didn’t proscribe what geography is but said here are the tools to understand your place in the world, and that for me is why he is so enduring.
JOHN READER–SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/HERITAGE IMAGES, AKG IMAGES
4 3WROHP\pVWKH*HRJUDSK\
+FSSZ#SPUUPOis the author of The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction 061
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Teaching the masses to read 5 $OH[DQGHURI9LOOHGLHXpV 'RFWULQDOH France, 1199 Chosen by Professor Robert D Black, University of Leeds hrough out the Middle Ages and well into the early modern period, literacy was inextricably associated with Latin. However, until the end of the 12th century, the methods of teaching Latin were extremely long and drawn out, based on a system whereby pupils read and memorised Latin texts for years. It was a scheme that was largely suitable to the clerical elite. Then along came Alexander of Villedieu, a French grammarian and teacher who was private tutor to the nephews of a bishop in northern France. He devised a fast-track method to teach
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Early learners: Italian students reading in the 14th or 15th century
Latin using simple rules and written in verse so that his pupils could memorise it more easily. When the bishop asked his nephews how they were doing in their learning of Latin, they quoted back a few verses given to them by their teacher. The bishop thought it was such a good idea that he encouraged Alexander to write a whole grammar. That book was Doctrinale, which became one RIWKHJUHDWPHGLHYDOEHVWVHOOHUV,WVLQŶXHQFH and use spread throughout Europe and, on the EDVLVRIVXFKVLPSOLŵHGPHWKRGVIRUWHDFKLQJ
The triumph of the law 6 0DJQD&DUWD England, 1215 Chosen by Professor David Carpenter, King’s College, London agna Carta was a turning point in British and world history because it was the first time a ruler was subject formally to the law. It became a great barrier against arbitrary rule and arbitrary kingship and it is that fundamental principle that resonates down the ages. Magna Carta seemed very important in the 17th-century struggle of the parliament against Charles; it seemed equally important to the founders of the American constitution, and of course it still reverberates today. The background to the charter was a society that was becoming more cohesive, with a greater sense of community.There were political ideas about rulers who should be subject to law and govern for the benefit of their society not just themselves.These came up against a very intrusive form of kingship,
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An early version of Magna Carta, issued in 1225
Latin, a great movement of mass literacy began. This new type of education was much more rapid and better suited to the aspirations, intentions and professional needs of the laity. Doctrinale WKHUHIRUHPDUNHGWKHŵUVWPDMRUVWHSLQWKH move towards a wide-ranging and extended secular lay education. 3PCFSU%#MBDL is the author of Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy $61
which extracted huge amounts of money from England on the one hand but gave little in the way of peace and justice on the other. King John was the final straw. He spent many years and large sums trying to regain Normandy after it was lost in 1204 – and once he failed to do so in 1214, with his treasure spent, he was a sitting duck. He was also a murderer and a lecherous womaniser who evoked fear and loathing on a very personal level.There was a huge degree of animosity against him, which doesn’t explain the broader grievances but helps to explain why it all came to a head with the rebellion in 1215. You can see how important Magna Carta was by the fact that when John tried to renege on the deal in the immediate aftermath there was a great civil war.The only way the minority government of John’s son felt they could win this war and secure the peace after he died in 1216 was by reissuing the charter.Throughout the 13th century the charter was constantly cited and referred to. It became then what it has always remained: a touchstone of just and lawful rule. %BWJE$BSQFOUFSis the author of The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 1FOHVJO
GIANT LEAPS | SCIENCE
Overturning the old astronomers
Explaining how the body works
*DOLOHRH[SORUHVWKHKHDYHQV 7 with his telescope
8 William Harvey reveals the FLUFXODWLRQRIWKHEORRG
Italy, 1609
England, 1628
Chosen by Professor Colin Russell, The Open University
Chosen by Dr Allan Chapman, University of Oxford
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Colin Russell is co-author of The Rise of Scientific Europe 1500–1800 )PEEFS"SOPME
Galileo’s scientific instruments, including his telescope
he circulation of the blood might sound like something we all accept but, in fact, it wasn’t discovered until 1628. Before that it was believed that blood came from food in your liver, then entered the heart where it was heated before it shot out into the veins, not the arteries.This is why Shakespeare and people like that talk about the blood “coursing through their veins” instead of their arteries. William Harvey was the physician to James I.Through a meticulous study of what you might call the plumbing of the chest he came to the conclusion that the heart didn’t heat the blood, it pumped it into the arteries. He knew from Fabricius that the veins had stepladder valves in them, which Harvey realised helped the blood get back to the heart, completing the circuit. Harvey was working before the microscope and didn’t know how the blood got from the arteries to the veins but he made a very bold guess that this was done by tiny vessels so small he couldn’t see them. He was perfectly right of course and we call them capillaries. It was a discovery of colossal importance. There have been numerous advances since but I’d suggest that circulation was so crucial because without it the others wouldn’t have emerged. You couldn’t undertake modern surgery or give an injection without circulation and can you imagine any modern medical
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An engraving from Harvey’s seminal work showing blood flowing through the veins of the lower arm
discovery without the knowledge of the blood pumping from the heart? Harvey’s theory was published in 1628 in a book called On the Motion of the Heart and Blood and you might think that he would have been inundated with patients afterwards. Yet it almost ruined his career as a doctor. In those days doctors were very conservative and wouldn’t make innovations – this was associated with quacks. Good doctors, it was thought, dispensed medicine and diagnosed purely in accordance with the way the ancients had taught. So curiously enough, the greatest medical discovery of all time caused a considerable amount of financial distress to its discoverer! "MMBO$IBQNBOis the author of England’s Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the SeventeenthCentury Scientific Revolution 5BZMPS 'SBODJT
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PHOTO SCALA, FLORENCE/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY, AKG IMAGES/TIME & LIFE PICTURES–GETTY IMAGES
hen Galileo became the first person to turn a telescope to the skies, it changed our view of the universe. He discovered new facts about the Sun, Moon and planets, which were totally incompatible with the old theory that the sky above Earth was unchanging and perfect. Instead they strongly supported the rival and newer heliocentric theory of Copernicus. Galileo’s telescope stimulated him to write his contentious book Two World Systems (1630), which more than anything else helped to establish Copernicanism. It also led to his trial and impeachment before the Roman Catholic church.The old system Galileo discredited had been almost unthinkingly adopted by the church and built into their picture of the universe. It fitted nicely with biblical data, so for hundreds of years it remained the accepted view. However scripture (unless interpreted woodenly) can also be compatible with Copernicanism. Galileo recognised this in a letter he wrote in 1615. But a scientific proof of Copernicanism had to wait till 1838! At the trial Galileo was found guilty and it wasn’t until the 20th century that the Vatican finally came to agree with him.
SCIENCE | GIANT LEAPS
Launching the scientific age 9 5IFGPVOEJOHPG UIF3PZBM4PDJFUZ England, 1660 Chosen by Dr Patricia Fara, University of Cambridge hen king Charles II was restored to power, a group of men who had been working in Oxford came back to London and decided to set up a society for carrying out experimental research. It was the first national scientific society to be created anywhere in Europe. Although it was rather like a gentlemen’s club, it did allow people to come together specifically to carry out experiments, do research, disseminate new theories and collect data. Within a few years there was a similar society in Paris, and soon they started proliferating all over Europe.
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The frontispiece of History of the Royal Society of London from 1667
A very small flea looks rather large in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia
Organisations dedicated to scientific research are very important and I think historians should write more about how science is enabled, not just the great achievements. Too much history of science has been about heroes such as Newton and Darwin, and not enough about institutions. For me, the big overriding question is how science has become so integral to today’s society: I believe the Royal Society was the institutional foundation that made modern science possible. Patricia Fara is the author of Science: A Four Thousand Year History 061
A micro-revolution in our understanding 10 5IFEJTDPWFSZPGUIFWFSZTNBMM Europe, 17th century Chosen by Dr Jim Bennett, director of the Museum of the History of Science t is such a fundamental, taken-for-granted notion of modern science that we explain the properties of things by going beneath the superficial appearance to the micro-world. But like anything we take for granted, it was made in history. The microscope was known from the earliest decades of the 17th century. At first it was just a toy that you could go and buy at a fair. It didn’t tell you anything about the natural world because although you could look at little things, nobody who was interested in explaining the world was yet saying that everything depended on them. Still, the microscope was the technology that made people believe there was a route to the very small. It was no longer just a matter of speculation.You could engage with it empirically.
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A new mode of explanation that assumed an underlying micro-reality began later in the century and one of its principal exponents was Robert Hooke, author of Micrographia (1665). He articulated very clearly that the micro-world is a bit like a clock with lots of springs and wheels. Just like we can open up a clock, Hooke said we could open up the actual world to see how it works, and the tool for doing so was going to be increasingly powerful microscopes. A lot more had to happen before we got to where we are now in our beliefs about explaining the macro with the micro but I think it all started in the 17th century. Jim Bennett is co-author of London’s Leonardo: The Life and Work of Robert Hooke 061
Stephenson’s famous ‘Rocket’ locomotive in an early photograph
Powering the modern world Britain, 18th century Chosen by Professor Jeremy Black, University of Exeter nlike the atom bomb, for example, there was no single invention with the steam engine. First you had the stationary steam engine where the most important person was Thomas Newcomen.Then James Watt improved its efficiency and its capacity to generate power. Later on, the
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stationary steam engine was transformed into the locomotive with George Stephenson. What the steam engine enabled people to do was transform themselves beyond the existing constraints of energy use, meaning that human society could develop in all sorts of ways. Now we know that the long-
Ending the empires 12 5IF.POUBHV$IFMNTGPSE3FQPSU British empire, 1918 Chosen by Professor Peter Robb, School of Oriental and African Studies fter the First World War there was a feeling in Britain that something should be done to recompense India for its war effort. At the same time there was growing political organisation and agitation in the country and the business of government had grown so much that the colonial authorities needed to involve more Indians in it. These were the origins of a report written by Lord Chelmsford, viceroy of India and Edwin Montagu, secretary of state for India. The report said the British should take definite steps towards giving Indians self-government.This was the
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first formal admission, at least by the British, that non-European people could rule themselves under a modern system of government. All subsequent discussions were not about whether India should
term environmental consequences of industrialisation were detrimental but on the other hand life would have been totally different if we had remained shackled by the manufacturing, energy, and communication systems before the steam engine. The long-term implications of steam power were everything we understand by modernity. It gave us the ability to speed up existence and overcome the constraints under which all other animal species operated. For much of human history we were not radically different in
have self-government but when India should have self-government. Most British thought it would be sometime in the next 100 years. They didn’t imagine it could happen in 1947 but once you had got on that particular bandwagon it was hard to get off. Indians did not think enough was being offered, or that the offer was sincere; and so they were organising, especially under Gandhi, setting an example for future political movements. Nothing like this had been done anywhere else in 1918 and no one had really conceded that it could be done.The whole trend of European countries then was to get more colonies.You certainly didn’t give them up.You might give them some rights but no one in authority was saying you should set them up as separate self-governing nations. But that is what the Montagu-
organisational terms from other animals, which have language, the capacity for acting as a group and systems of hierarchy. For much of human history that was how we were but we moved to a very different tune when we had everything that is understood by modernity. It was the steam engine that set that in motion. +FSFNZ#MBDL is the author of War: A Short History $POUJOVVN
Chelmsford report said they were going to do in India. It was a profound psychological shift. In a sense, all British decolonisation flowed from that moment and from its idea that a new nation-state could be made by non-Europeans, who some people had thought were incapable of self rule. (Indians had, however, shown themselves to be adept at law and politics.) India was the biggest country under European domination by far, so when it appeared that it was getting selfgovernment everybody else started talking about decolonisation.The report gave strength to the view that empire was illegitimate and that it was possible to transfer power into new nations.The example was eventually taken up by other countries and India itself was a major force on the United Nations decolonisation committee.
SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY/WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON, AKG IMAGES/HULTON ARCHIVE–GETTY IMAGES
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Peter Robb is the author of A History of India 1BMHSBWF.BDNJMMBO
Indians in Calcutta celebrate their independence in 1947 August 2014
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Knowledge Magazine India
Announcing the winners of The Curious Minds of the Week BBC Knowledge ran the Curious Minds of the Week contest from 10 May to 8 June on our Facebook page. Running over a four week period, each week was dedicated to a special theme- Science, Literature, History, and Art, Music & Culture. One winner was announced each week, based on the their correct responses and was given the title of the Curious Mind of the Week! The four winners received a gift from Tangerine.
Gifts from
Science Week Winner: Shivani Chunekar A Std X student, her favourite subjects are HIstory and English. She loves reading books that explore tragedy. Her favourite author is John Green and she would like to try her hand in writing, photogrpahy, and travelling in the future.
Art, Music & Culture Week Winner: Shashwat Gupta 14 year old Shashwat knows he wants to pursue a career in Maths or Science as those are his two favourite subjects in school. He won a subscription to BBC Knowledge magazine and is now in his words “a fan” of the magazine.
History Week Winner: Rashmi Singh Rashmi from Jamshedpur is pursuing her graduation in B.Com (H) and is looking forward to working in a reputable company. Her favourite memory is that of the family vacation spent p in Puri seven y years ago. g
Literature Week Winner: Harmeet Kumar Garg Harmeet counts Maths and Science as his IDYRXULWHVXEMHFWVDQGðQGV%LRORJ\ERULQJ+H sees himself as being a pilot, or an ethical hacker in future. At the moment, he enjoys playing the tunes on his guitar and keyboard.
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Moshita Prajapati Pr ati goes back in t e to the Mesozoic Era to time spot ot the fastest, the fiercest and the biggest dinosaurs that walked 65 million years ago
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he Mesozoic Era (251million years ago) saw the rise of the archetypal dinosaurs, reptiles and mammals. The era lasted for about 180 million years and is characterized into three shorter periods: Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.
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TRIASSIC PERIOD (245-208 MYA): The Dawn of the Dinosaurs When the Triassic period began, Earth had one consolidated landmass called Pangaea, the supercontinent. Research findings suggest that temperatures hovered around 10º to 15º C and towards the late Triassic period (continents Laurasia and Gondwana developed), the global temperatures became drier and hotter; evidence suggests that this resulted in wide open areas with water sources and low-growing vegetation covering land mass. This weather condition scientists believe led to the evolution of the two of the most important land animals of the Mesozoic, the dinosaurs and the mammals.
SHONISAURUS Largest marine predator Pronounced: show-nih-SORE-us Shonisaurus belonged to the Ichthyosaurus (fish lizards) genus and was the largest marine predator of the Triassic period; it measured 69ft and weighed 30 tonne. It had a round body, snout-like mouth filled with narrow teeth, front and rear flippers, and a double-pronged tail. Evidence suggests that Shonisaurus evolved from land-dwelling lizards that returned to an aquatic lifestyle, which makes it the ancestors of dolphins and whales.
COELOPHYSIS The speed racer Pronounced: SEE-low-FIE-sis The Coelophysis was one of the fastest of the earliest dinosaurs; it achieved speeds up to 50kmp/h. A muscle that extended from its thighbone to its tail powered its limbs while its anklebones were designed to keep its feet straight while walking or running and an elongated neck rose above its body allowing for greater visibility. It had unusually large eyes suggesting that it hunted during night as well. It could grow upto 9ft in length and weighed between 9-13kg. In 1947, thousands of preserved fossils were discovered in New Mexico, hinting that the creature may have moved in packs.
EORAPTOR The fierce omnivore Pronounced: EE-oh-RAP-tor Whilst tiny for an early dinosaur, the Eoraptor was extremely fierce and aggressive as a species and walked on two feet. Measuring at 3ft in length and weighing in at 24kg, its short fore limbs and long hind legs led scientists to conclude that it was an extremely swift and fast runner. Five claws with three of them being longer at the end of the forelimbs were used to catch and grab the prey and a jagged row of teeth allowed it chomp the flesh off its prey. New evidence suggests that the Eoraptor may have been an omnivore – eats both plants and animals.
EUDIMORPHODON The winged diver Pronounced: YOU-die-MORE-fo-don One of the earliest known pterosaurs (winged lizards), Eudimorphodon had a wingspan of about 3.3ft and was the ruler of the sky during the late Triassic period. At the end of its long bony tail it had a diamond-shaped flap, which may have had helped it steer midflight or to maintain its speed as it dove into the water like an arrow to pluck the fish, just like some modern day birds. This required strong eyesight and muscles to quickly propel itself out of the water and into the air. Fossil records suggest that it chewed its food; it had two rows of well-formed teeth.
PLATEOSAURUS The thumb user Pronounced: PLATT-ee-oh-SORE-us Plateosaurus was one of the tall, long-necked dinosaurs with a long tail that made up half its body. When its fossils were discovered in Europe by palaeontologist Hermann von Meyer, it was found that the shape of its jaw and teeth were similar to modern day herbivores suggesting it too was one. The presence of partially opposable thumbs on its front hands allowed it to grab leaves or branches of trees apart from vegetation on the ground for sustenance.
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HERRERASAURUS The agile predator Pronounced: : herr-RARE-oh-SORE-us Considered one of the first true dinosaurs, the Herrerasaurus, from the late Triassic period measured 10ft in length and weighed about 180kg. A carnivore, its sharp teeth, three fingered hands with sharp claws, and its ability to run on its two long legs made it an agile predator of its time. Don Victorino Herrera, a local rancher, after whom the dinosaur is named, found the first Herrerasaurus fossil in 1958 in Argentina. August 2014
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JURASSIC PERIOD (208-145 MYA): The Rise of the Giants During the late Triassic period, leading to the Jurassic period, Pangaea separated into smaller continents of Laurasia and Gondwanaland. A rise in the sea levels and increased rainfall gave rise to vegetation that resembled present day rainforest’s effusive growth, and covered much of the earth’s surface. This period saw an increase in the size of herbivores and carnivores; some of the largest dinosaurs appeared in this period along with bird-like dinosaurs.
ARCHAEOPTERYX The in-betweener Pronounced: AR-kee-OP-tar-iks A combination of avian and reptilian features led to the archaeopteryx being identified the transitional animal between dinosaurs and modern day birds. Despite having as th feathers, broad wings – used for limited flying or gliding, the archaeopteryx is more dinosaur than bird. It had jaws with sharp teeth, three fingers with claws, a long bony tail and hyper extensible second toes known as killing claws.
ALLOSAURUS STEGOSAURUS The weighty warrior Pronounced: STEG-oh-SORE-us Stegosaurus was the largest herbivore of the Stegosauridae family. Measuring the size of a bus (20ft) in length and weighing as much as a rhino (1600kg) made it a formidable herbivore. The double row of plates (3ft high) on its back, along with its tail bristling with four bony spikes, were possibly used in defense against the carnivorous Allosaurus.
The assassin Pronounced: al-oh-SORE-us Allosaurus reigned as the supreme predator during the Jurassic period. Measuring at an impressive 40ft in length and weighing 40 tonnes, this carnivorous beast had short arms and fingers tipped with sharp curved claws. Its jaw, with curved and serrated 4-inch teeth, was used to rip apart the flesh of its prey – presumably a Stegosaurus. Its fossil has been extremely rare to find; the first full fledged onee was only discovered in 1991 91 in Wyoming and wa was named med Big Al.
BRACHIOSAURUS The treetop grazer Pronounced: BRACK-ee-oh-SORE-us Brachiosaurus was an unusual dinosaur. Apart from its enormous size this herbivore was truly spectacular. The tallest of dinosaurs of its time (measuring 85ft from head to tail in length) and its forelimbs were longer than its hind legs. It had an unusually long neck (30ft); scientists believe it led a giraffe-like lifestyle, nibbling on vegetation from treetops.
PTERODACTYLUS The first flyer Pronounced: TERR-a-DAK-til-as Pterodactylus are amongst the first vertebrates to evolve the ability to fly. Evidence of this comes from fossils remains, which show presence of hollow bones, large brains, and an elongated fourth finger, which provided wing support. The wings were formed by a skin membrane, which stretched from its fourth finger all the way to its hind legs. The largest wingspan recorded for a Pterodactylus is 8ft.
DIPLODOCUS The whip lasher Pronounced: dip-LOW-doe-kuss The longest of all dinosaurs, Diplodocus measured 92ft long. To support its large length, it had a noteworthy skeleton body - two rows of bones on the underside of its tail existed to provide extra support and greater mobility. When attacked, Diplodocus may have used its long tail like a whip, thrashing it through the air to frighten the predator away.
LIOPLEURODON
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The filter feeder Pronounced: LIE-oh-PLOORoh-don Liopleurodon was the apex marine predator of this period. Characterised by its long head, massive teeth and four large flippers that helped it swim quickly and swiftly. Holding its mouth open, it ate any fish that swam in its path to feed its massive appetite appropriate for its 25-tonne weight.
AMENCHISAURUS The long-necked Pronounced: mah-MUN-chi-SAWR-us Characteristic of a sauropod dinosaur, the Mamenchisaurus had a very long tail and a remarkably long neck, which sometimes made up half the total body length and were held in position by a series of ligaments anchored at the hips. A complete fossil unearthed of the dinosaur in China consisted of 19 vertebras just for the neck! This would put the neck at 31ft – the longest of any dinosaur in this period.
CRETACEOUS PERIOD (145-66 MYA): The Golden Age As the Cretaceous period progressed, modern day continents began to appear. The lush forests of the Jurassic period started to thin out and the temperature cooled globally. The period saw the last remaining burst of evolution and new species of dinosaurs.
PACHYCEPHALOSAURUS The head banger Pronounced: PACK-ee-sef-ah-low-SORE-us A dome-headed dinosaur, its enormous head consisted of an incredibly thick skull, which was 10-inch thick and surrounded by bony knots. A herbivore, it travelled in herds and often used its head armour as a defense mechanism against predators by ramming it into their flanks. Evidence suggests that it was bipedal, but not a very fast runner. TRYANNOSAURUS-REX
TRICERATOPS The three-horned face Pronounced: try-SEH-rah-tops The most imposing feature about the Triceratops was its head. It measured 4-5ft across and included an impressive pair of horns (3ft in length) and a head plate. The horns, two on the head and short one on the snout were used to defend against its only known enemy, the T. Rex. It was one of the last of the dinosaurs to live in the late Cretaceous period before the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction.
Most deadliest Pronounced: tih-RAN-oh-SORE-us REX The T. Rex was a fierce predator who scientists believe could consume utpo 230kg of meat in one bite; it had an incredibly powerful bite – research puts the force of the bite to 5000 pounds, humans chomp their food with a force of just 175 pounds. A bipedal, its powerful limbs and strong tail helped move its 40ft long body quickly.
MICRORAPTOR
Pronounced: MY-crow-rap-tore
PTERANODON The toothless predator Pronounced: teh-RAN-oh-don A genus of the Pterosaurus (the family of winged reptiles), the Pteranodon did not have any teeth. It scooped up fish by swimming in water. The largest of the male pteranodon fossil has revealed that it had a wingspan of 18ft, while female fossils have revealed a wingspan of 12ft.
DROMAEOSAURS Built for kill Pronounced: tDRO-mee-o-SAWR-us Known as raptors, these bipedal carnivores’ including Microraptor, Utahraptor, Velociraptor, had three fingered hands, a big brain, and most recognisably a huge claw on each of their hind feet. They ranged in sizes from being child-sized to an astonishing 30ft in length and had a stiff tail at the end of the body that acted as a stabilizer. These killing machines were always primed for attack with their serrated teeth, talon .
ARGENTINOSAURUS The heavyweight champion Pronounced: AR-jen-TEE-noh-SAW- rus The Argentinosaurus huinculensis of the Argentinosaurus genus currently is recognised as the most heaviest and largest land animal to ever have walked the Earth in this period. Characteristic of a typical sauropod, it had a small head, elongated neck, a stocky build and a long tail. From head to tail, it measured between 98-115ft and weighed between 80-110 tonnes. Given its weight and the stress that would occur on its joints, the quickest walking speed it could garner was a mere 8kmp/h. Scientists believe it laid eggs, which weighed around 5kgs and were the size of a rugby ball.
UTAHRAPTOR
Pronounced: YOU-tah-RAP-tore
VELOCIRAPTOR
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Pronounced: vel-OSS-ih-rap-tore
ANKYLOSAURUS Battle ready Pronounced: ANK-ill-oh-SORE-us The Ankylosaurus magniventris of the Anklyosaurus genus had the distinct reputation of being the most armoured herbivore to protect itself against predators. Its head was adorned with small horns and hard bony plates covered the length of its back along with rows of spike to deflect attacks, which could also be used as a weapon. Its tail consisted of a series of bony plates fused together and ending in a club-like formation, which it would swing to detract its predators. Ankylosaurus had short, powerful legs that kept it low to the ground to protect its soft, unprotected under belly, the only chink in its armour.
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THINKSTOCK
WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES From brilliant balls of lightning to ghostly glowing haloes, surprisingly little is known about Nature’s electric light show. Katia Moskvitch unravels the biggest mysteries surrounding an awe-inspiring phenomenon
SCIENCE | LIGHTNING
hunderstorms rage worldwide every day, mostly in summer, sending some 100 electric bolts to the ground every second. And yet, we know surprisingly little about lightning.Yes, it’s a natural electrical discharge both inside the cloud and between a thundercloud and Earth, a spark of charged particles zipping through the air. But it’s hard to study, because it is impossible to predict where and when it’s going to strike. So what mysteries of this natural phenomenon are waiting to be unlocked?
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COSMIC ORIGINS? LIGHTNING COULD START IN SPACE
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X2, FORTEAN PICTURE LIBRARY
Researchers are still unsure about what exactly causes lightning, but there are two main theories. The most popular is that lightning is triggered by ice or water particles inside a storm. When a thunderstorm is brewing, hail and ice rush downwards, colliding with warmer water droplets on their way up. As the two fronts crash into each other, electrons are torn from the droplets and stick to the ice, making the water in the upper reaches of the storm positively charged and the ice lower down negative. Near the surface of the storm the electric fields build up, allowing small discharges to initiate there. “Somehow these small discharges join together to make bigger discharges and eventually form a ‘leader’ – a big spark,” says Joseph Dwyer, a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology.
“They can be red, orange, purple or green and eyewitness accounts report them passing through glass windows”
This ‘leader’ travels through the air at speeds of around 3,60,500km/h (2,24,000mph), and the temperature of the lightning strike can be as much as 30,000°C – five times that of the surface of the Sun, says Chris Stone of the Morgan-Botti Lightning Laboratory at Cardiff University. Another theory is called electron runaway breakdown – and it assumes a completely new physical phenomenon. This electrical discharge is caused by high-energy particles known as cosmic rays. These are mostly protons that are blasted out from energetic events like exploding stars. Cosmic rays travel across space and hit Earth’s upper atmosphere, producing highly energetic showers of ionised particles that are accelerated to close to the speed of light. These showers might be able to trigger lightning in a storm cloud, and the cloud’s initial electric field does not have to be very big for this to happen.
Cosmic rays from events like exploding stars could strike Earth’s upper atmosphere triggering lightning storms
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A possible sighting of ball lightning captured in 1978
BALL LIGHTNING: FLYING SPHERES These strange balls of electricity are seen during intense thunderstorms as glowing orbs. They can be yellow, white, red, orange, purple or green and eye-witness accounts report them passing through glass windows without leaving a hole. Reports of ball lightning go back for centuries, but the phenomenon has been difficult to study as the balls are elusive and their appearance unpredictable. In 2012, for the first time ever, ball lightning was properly captured on video. A team of Chinese researchers accidentally recorded it while observing a thunderstorm. A glowing sphere about 5m wide suddenly appeared when a bolt struck the ground. It vanished after 1.6 seconds – but the scientists were able to record a spectrum and high-speed video footage of the mysterious orb. The data showed that the ball lightning mainly consisted of silicon, iron and calcium, the same elements as those found in the soil. This supports an earlier theory that ball lightning is mostly the result of a lightning bolt striking the ground and vaporising mineral grains in the soil. But how the long-lasting sphere is constructed is not understood, says Martin Uman, a lightning researcher at the University of Florida.
DARK LIGHTNING: INVISIBLE AND POWERFUL Not all lightning is visible. Sometimes, lightning flashes can be just unexpected pulses of very powerful radiation. These extremely intense bursts of energy are called Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGFs). These types of outburst are usually found out in the cosmos, being spat out by collapsing stars. The blast created by a TGF is millions of times more energetic than the flash of light we see from lightning and scientists know they’re there from radiation readings taken during storms. Recently, researchers have suggested that these bursts of energy are brought about by so-called ‘dark lightning’ – an exotic, invisible form of lightning. It can be more energetic than normal lightning, but since it does not involve a hot incandescent channel, it emits very little light. It’s thought that normal lightning triggers the dark kind. “A fully charged thunderstorm is like a cocked pistol. Lightning is what pulls the trigger, causing dark lightning to go off,” says Dwyer, who came up with the term ‘dark lightning’. “Once triggered, dark lightning can take over and discharge the cloud faster than normal lightning. Perhaps one in every 1000 lightning flashes are dark lightning – but we don’t know the exact number.”
Blasts of gamma-ray radiation are thought to be a common occurrence during the collapse of stars
SCIENCE | LIGHTNING
BLUE JETS: EERIE, BRIEF DANCES OF LIGHT
SPRITES: GLOWING RED JELLYFISH
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, TÄHDET JA AVARUUS/TIMO KANTOLA/ISMO LUUKKONEN,JACCI INGHAM, JASON AHRNS/NSF
One form of lightning takes place in the upper atmosphere near the edge of space. They’re called transient luminous events (TLEs). Scientists are unsure what causes TLEs, but the widely accepted view is that they are electrically induced forms of luminous plasma, or ionised gas – and are usually generated when powerful positive cloudto-ground lightning strikes (see pxx). The most common type of TLEs are sprites – flashes of bright red light that happen above thunderstorms, at about 80km (50 miles) up in the atmosphere. They were first captured on camera in 1989, and later also seen by scientists studying video from the Space Shuttle. They can even be seen with the naked eye and appear for just a fraction of a second. Sprites usually resemble a glowing red jellyfish just above a thunderbolt, but they can also look like a carrot, an angel, or broccoli, with hanging tendrils underneath.
Blue jets lash upwards – they may be caused by hail with a thunderstorm
ELVES: MYSTERIOUS HALOES Emissions of Light and Very low frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic pulse Sources, or ELVES, are reddish, dim, flattened, expanding haloes. They are horizontal, ultra-fast flashes of electricity that happen in the atmosphere just below the boundary of space. ELVES are thought to result from an extremely powerful electromagnetic radiation pulse that stems from some lightning discharges. As the energy passes upwards through the base of
The bizarre form of red sprites appear high above a thunderstorm
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These blue blasts of energy emerge from the top of active thunderstorms at heights of 40 to 50km (30 miles up). They reach speeds of 100km/s but only last for about a quarter of a second. They can be seen with the naked eye – huge eerie cones spreading upward from clouds during raging thunderstorms. Blue jets are brighter than sprites, but occur much less frequently and don’t appear to be directly triggered by lightning. Researchers believe that their appearance may be caused by strong hail activity in thunderstorms. They were confirmed by studying video from a Space Shuttle mission in 1989, but are rarely seen. “All the upper atmospheric phenomena remain mysterious,” says Stone. “Lightning is unpredictable and this limits a complete explanation of how and why it occurs. After hundreds of years of scientific investigation it still remains one of nature’s most mysterious events.”
the ionosphere – a region of the upper atmosphere – it makes the gases there glow briefly. They are as bright as sprites, but only usually last for a millisecond. They can spread radially to more than 300km (185 miles), and occur some 100km (62 miles) above the ground. ELVES were first observed off the coast of French Guiana by a Space Shuttle mission in 1990. Researchers predicted ELVES before the first observation, theorising that lightning pulses heating the lower part of the atmosphere could trigger such an emission.
This rare image taken in 1989 shows the halo of ELVES together with red sprites
POSITIVE LIGHTNING: THE OTHER WAY AROUND Most lightning is negative – carrying a negative charge from the base of the cloud down to the ground immediately below. However, occasionally lightning can originate from the top of a cloud, where the air is positively charged, striking a patch of comparatively negatively charged land further away. Positive lightning occurs across very long distances, carries an electrical current of around 3,00,000A and can exceed a billion volts, says Stone. “This means that positive lightning is around 10 times more powerful than negative lightning. It usually consists of only one stroke whereas negative lightning will typically consist of two or more strokes.” It’s thought that positive lightning makes up only about five per cent of lightning strikes.
“Positive lightning can occur across very long distances, and may carry an electrical current of around 3,00,000A”
This positively charged lightning strike was captured over the Atlantic Ocean in 2008
,BUJB.PTLWJUDIJTBSFDJQJFOUPG UIFýSTU&VSPQFBO"TUSPOPNZ Journalism Prize.
As we overfish, pollute, and heat up the world’s seas, jellyfish are ta akin ng over. Lisa-ann Gershwin rreveals why these ancient surviv vors s arre now multiplying in vast numbers
HIROYA MINAKUCHI/MINDEN/FLPA
JELLYFISH BLOOMS | SCIENCE
Mass blooms of jellyfish – these are moon jellies, photographed at night in Prince William Bay, Alaska – can cause enormous problems, clogging intake pipes in power plants and warships, and invading salmon farms. Not to mention alarming swimmers…
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HISTORY | JELLYFISH BLOOMS
I’m not convinced about global warming” seems to be a common sentiment. And many of us also remain unconvinced about overfishing, or pollution, or ocean acidification. Being ‘not convinced’ may seem like a good thing: it keeps us from seeming too radical about something that others aren’t too radical about – except for the radicals. And it means we don’t have to do anything, we don’t have to give up anything. But why are we so detached from nature – and why don’t we connect with what it means to our future? Let’s consider the humble jellyfish – creatures that most of us barely think about. While we have distracted ourselves by being unconvinced, they have been having a field day. All across the globe, jellyfish have been making headlines, appearing in eye-popping numbers like never before and in places where we least want them. Lovely beaches in the Mediterranean, south-west England and Wales. Our favourite fishing regions. Important aquaculture areas. Intake pipes for cooling systems. So what is going on?
S STAMMERS/SPL, S GSCHMEISSNER/SPL, SUE DALY/NPL, MATT DOGGETT/EARTHINFOCUS.COM, JOHN FROST NEWSPAPERS, DOUG PERRINE/NPL
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The perfect ‘weeds’ Jellyfish are very simple animals that belong to the phylum Cnidaria (named after their stinging cells, or cnidae – a word itself derived from the Greek for nettles). This large group also contains the box jellies and water jellies, as well as their cousins the corals, sea anemones and sea fans. Jellyfish have been placidly drifting along for at least 565 million years (since the Precambrian era, and probably much earlier) while all
Various factors can lead to explosive blooms. In the 1960s, overfishing of mackerel, which prey on jellies, in the Black Sea led to a bloom of barrel jellyfish
Some jellyfish are important in keeping others in check. Thislion’s mane preys on moon jellies, which can otherwise be pestilential
Mauve stingers – seen here looming in close-up – bloom when seas heat up, as they did this summer in the UK
around them other species have come and gone, evolved bones and eyes and feathers, learned to breathe and walk. But jellyfish are perfect survivors just as they are – they haven’t needed to change. Their requirements are simple. Warm water speeds up their growth rate and reproductive output, but cold is okay, too. Fewer predators and competitors is a bonus, but most fish and invertebrate larvae also make tasty morsels. Low oxygen is good: most other species can’t survive, whereas jellyfish are relatively shallow breathers. Pollution is great: dissolved components put stress on other species, leaving more food for jellyfish, while chunky bits make good substrates on which polyps can settle and multiply – and floating plastic offers a free ride to just about anywhere. As we are coming to realise, with increasing alarm, these are the very conditions that we are creating in our oceans.
First, we have removed about 90 per cent of the large fish. Ninety per cent of the sharks, the tuna, the swordfish, the marlin, the halibut, the cod, the sturgeon and so many other species we used to enjoy on our plates. At the same time, we’ve fished out many billions of little species – anchovies, sardines and other oily fish – for everything from canning and seasoning to fish paste, omega-3 capsules, fish meal, and fertiliser. While big fish often keep ecosystems in balance, it’s the dwindling numbers of small pelagic fish that represents the biggest threat. These are the reciprocal predators and competitors of jellyfish. For every fish removed, many jellyfish can benefit from the extra food available, and each of those will eat as many fish eggs and larvae as it can. And so the balance shifts, like a ratchet, click by click. Our propensity to take fish from the ocean is a dream come true for jellyfish. As if overfishing were not bad enough, we have also contributed
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8 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT JELLYFISH
The typical jellyfish life-cycle has two alternating generations. Med M edusae, the floating form, rre eproduce sexually to spawn sea s seabed polyps that resemble sea a anem anemones, which clone lots of rep plicates. When conditions are plic rig t, these bud off to form ephyrae – bab by jellyfish (left).
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A sting from a box jellyfish, the most venomous animal on Earth, can kill a human in two minutes.
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Box jellyfish have well-developed eyes with lens, retina and cornea, and exhibit sophisticated behaviours including light attraction, colouredlight response, terrestrial navigation and courtship – yet have no brain.
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Of 2500 or so jellyfish species, some 90 per cent are smaller than a human thumbnail and rarely researched. The sole study of the bloom dynamics of these species found a five-fold increase in 20 years.
Blooms of sea nettles can wreak havoc at beaches. Millions of this basketballsized Pacific species clogged up California’s Monterey Bay in 2009
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Jellyfish fossils, though rare, do exist, some claimed to be over 600 million years old. Many closely resemble living species. This specimen (left) was found in Wales.
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One jellyfish species, Turritopsis dohrnii, is biologically immortal. After an individual medusa dies, its cells re-aggregate into the polyp form and the life-cycle begins again.
RICHARD HERRMANN/MINDEN/FLPA
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Jellyfish grow very rapidly – some can expand from a 2mm ephyra to the size of a dinner plate in a matter of weeks.
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The largest ‘new’ invertebrate discovered in the 20th century, found off Los Angeles in 1997, was the jellyfish Chrysaora achlyos. Its body is 1m across and its oral arms 8m long.
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to marine eutrophication (a fancy phrase for ‘too much fertiliser’). When sewage effluent or agricultural runoff is discharged into coastal waters, funny things can happen. At first, the plankton blooms and the ecosystem gets a nice boost. But then the weeds begin to take over. Jellyfish are the perfect weeds: they grow fast on little food, but grow even faster on more food; they get through lean times by slowly ‘degrowing’, then return to normal when food returns; they can clone in 13 different ways to survive or exploit just about any situation; and at least one species is biologically immortal (see box, left). Overstimulation by too much fertiliser triggers phytoplankton (plant plankton) blooms, which in turn prompts zooplankton (tiny animal plankton) to bloom. All this uneaten food sinks to the bottom, where the bacteria involved in the decay process consume all of the oxygen from the water. Without oxygen, any animals that can’t swim or scurry away fast enough die.
Except jellyfish. Jellies can store oxygen in their tissues like we store fat, and use it slowly when needed, so they carry on with life as normal, enjoying all the plankton for themselves. In addition to eutrophication, there are many other forms of pollution in the oceans: chemical pollution that kills through instant or gradual toxicity, or by stripping oxygen from the water; rubbish that is blown in or poured in from land, or is deposited in the sea as a means of sequestration; radioactive substances resulting from meltdowns, discharges, or intentional dumping; and even biopollution or introduced species that take up residence in a new home and flourish in unanticipated ways. These pollutants affect different species in different ways. In general, the more complex and long-lived organisms suffer more from pollution, whereas simple organisms such as jellyfish are unaffected – except that they benefit when their predators and competitors die off around them.
HOW A STINGING CELL WORKS A jellyfish stinging cell, called a nematocyst, is essentially a harpoon coiled inside a capsule and bathed in venom, with a hair trigger at one end. When mechanically stimulated or flushed with fresh water, it discharges at 40,000g – 40,000 times the force of gravity. This enables it to penetrate crab shells, fish scales and other types of armour. During discharge, the harpoon everts (that is, turns inside out) and uncoils, enabling it to drill into its target. Spines along the shaft help anchor it in its victim, and venom pours through the shaft as if through a hypodermic needle. Though nematocysts are very small, many of them discharging together can pack quite a wallop.
And then there is climate change. The oceans continue to warm, and jellyfish continue to love it. Water holds less oxygen as it warms, and a rise of even 1°C can make a big difference: where a fish is already struggling to find enough food to survive, the added burden of spending more energy to extract the same amount of oxygen can mean the inability to meet its new energetic demands. The ‘evil sister’ of climate change, ocean acidification, is making things even worse. The ocean absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide in a normal chemical process, but this makes sea water more acidic or corrosive, dissolving the skeletons of corals and the shells of pteropods, or sea butterflies. survival of the slimiest But jellyfish, in all their weedy glory, thrive – they are the ultimate survivors. Through a double whammy of predation and improved competitive advantage, jellies can –
Jellyfish, in ALL their weedy glory, thrive in polluted, warming, acidic waters – they are the ultimate survivors. and do – take over. Our traditional ecological understanding of the foodchain – big things eat little things, fast things eat slow things, smart things eat less intelligent things – is turned on its head by the slow, brainless jellyfish. In healthy ecosystems, jellies struggle because they are slower and less sophisticated than fish. But in disturbed ecosystems, they flourish. Once upon a time, we had to choose between paper or plastic: cut down the trees or strangle the turtles? Coal or nuclear: smoggy cities or pesky meltdowns? Our
desire for gourmet flavours pitted our conscience against our wallet: wild-caught or aquacultured, local or imported? But never for a moment did we ponder what effect our decisions and actions were having on the marine ecosystems on which we rely for solace, low-fat protein, weather buffering and oxygen production. For a long time we turned a blind eye because we didn’t like the answer. The oceans were dying to tell us something, but we waited to be convinced. Now it appears that we have passed a tipping point. Species are becoming extinct. Ecosystems are reshuffling. Already there are winners and losers, and if the current glimpses are anything to go by, in years to come we probably aren’t going to like it – possibly unlike jellyfish, which have proved, over 600 millions years, that they can survive. Lisa-ann GershwinJTBKFMMZýTI FYQFSUBU$4*30 "VTUSBMJBT OBUJPOBMTDJFODFBHFODZ
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ILLUSTRATOR: MAGICTORCH
How new discoveries are rewriting the history of our cosmos
THE STORY OF THE UNIVERSE | SCIENCE
he year 2013 could go down in the astronomical textbooks as the one when a revolution in our understanding of the Universe began. The iconoclast at the centre of this upheaval is not a person but a machine: a space probe called Planck. Named after the great German physicist Max Planck, the spacecraft was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2009, tasked with detecting the ‘blueprint’ of the Universe – a snapshot of the seeds of the stars and galaxies that surround us today. For almost a century, cosmologists have been busily constructing mathematical theories that describe the story of the Universe from the earliest moments to the present day. But now, analysis of Planck’s blueprint is revealing a number of plot holes, or ‘anomalies’ as the scientists call them, that don’t seem to fit the story. For one thing, data from Planck indicates that the Universe is older than expected by about 50 million years. It also contains more of the mysterious dark matter and fewer atoms than previously thought. And while these may sound serious, in reality they are the least of a cosmologist’s worries. Much more troubling is the so-called ‘cold spot’ in the radiation from the early Universe that Planck has recorded – a region that looks significantly colder than current theories allow. Indeed, the temperature pattern across the whole Universe looks strangely lopsided. New discoveries such as these are shedding new light on the history of our Universe: the story of how we arrived at the cosmos we see around us today.
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SCIENCE | THE STORY OF THE UNIVERSE
CHAPTER ONE:
THE BIG BANG The very moment of the Big Bang remains shrouded in as much mystery as ever. It’s the point at which the Universe began – space and time were formed and all the matter and energy that we see around us somehow came into existence. Data from the Planck telescope now indicates this happened 13.82 billion years ago. Initially, there were no stars or galaxies, just a hot, dense sea of particles and radiation. Straight after the Big Bang, space began to expand, spreading out the matter and energy. The trouble is the theory that we use to understand the expansion, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, will not work at the extreme densities of the Big Bang and so physicists are searching for a way to extend it. The best template is quantum theory, which deals with the physics of the very small and provides a basis for all the forces of nature, except gravity. To investigate such a theory, scientists must turn to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, which recreates the conditions thought to have been present in the Universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. “The LHC gives us a mini-Universe in the laboratory,” says Dr Anupam Mazumdar, a cosmologist at Lancaster University. While the experiment can show what particles were prevalent in the primordial Universe, theoreticians then have to form a theory to The CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider understand them. (top, below) is looking for particles that could String theory is a possible quantum theory make up dark matter of gravity, but it is unclear whether it bears any resemblance to reality, because the mathematics are currently unable to predict anything that can be tested in a laboratory or observed in the Universe. So for now, the moment of the Big Bang remains terra incognito.
CHAPTER TWO:
INFLATION
CERN X3, NASA
10-35 seconds after the Big Bang Until Planck, almost every observation of the Universe’s largest scales had suggested that it is remarkably uniform. Sure, there are clusters of galaxies and huge voids, but even these are pretty small when the Universe as a whole is considered. As a result, cosmologists had developed a mathematical framework called inflation to explain the uniformity. First proposed in 1980 by Alan Guth, a particle physicist from
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The Large Hadron Collider fires particles around a 27km (16-mile) ring before smashing them together to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it postulated that right after the Big Bang a period of extraordinary expansion took place. In the blink of an eye, the Universe grew bigger by a factor of at least 1060. This would smooth out any large-scale deviation across the Universe, making it appear uniform. Only the smallest fluctuations in the density of matter and energy would remain, the cosmologists theorised. Remarkably, these fluctuations were found in 1989 by NASA’s COBE satellite, and they amount to no more than one part in 100,000. They are the seeds from which the galaxies have grown. Planck has measured these fluctuations in much greater detail. The £500 million spacecraft split the sky into a billion pixels and observed each one a thousand times during its three-year mission. This produced a map of the sea of microwaves that bathe all of space – the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – unlike anything that had been seen before. It is these subtle fluctuations in this radiation left over from the Big Bang that provide astronomers with their blueprint of the early Universe – the distribution of matter and energy a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. When the data from Planck was released, it immediately became clear that there are problems that the cosmological community are still trying to come to terms with. There is a suspiciously large cold spot signalling that a vast clump of matter was present in the early Universe and it is much denser than inflation can explain. More troubling is that there is one side of the Universe where the fluctuations appear stronger than the other, indicating an uneven distribution of matter across the whole Universe. “This is very strange,” says Dr George Efstathiou, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and a member of the Planck science team. “And I think that if there really is anything to this, you have to question how that fits in with inflation. It’s really puzzling.” But it may not spell the end for the theory of inflation just yet. “Instead, my gut instinct is that these anomalies will point to a more specific model of inflation,” says Dr Rose Lerner, a cosmologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland who works independently of the Planck consortium. Another solution to the anomalies,
PLANCK’S POSTCARD FROM THE PAST How detecting radiation that’s travelled billions of years provides a window into the early Universe 1 Radiation and matter are produced by the Big Bang, but are locked together in a hot plasma.
Big Bi Bang
3 The microwave background was first released as visible light but the expansion of the Universe has stretched it and turned it into microwaves.
2 When the Universe cools sufficiently, the radiation and matter go their separate ways. It’s this radiation that forms the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
Dark D ages
FFirst i stars form
4 The microwave radiation travelled across space for billions of years before reaching the Planck spacecraft. The observatory built up a map of this CMB.
Galaxies and G planets form
TIME 13.82 billion years
FROM A POSTCARD TO PROFOUND CONCLUSIONS… lanck’s datta can tell cosmologis istss th thee ag agee off the Universe in a roundabout way. Unfortunately, the it is not as simple sim impl plee as jjust ustt measuring us meas me asur urin ingg it. it Instead, Ins nste tead ad, scientists try to reproduce the Planck map in a comp co mput uter er simulation. sim imulation. This involves programming pr rammi what cosmologists think the Universe contains into a supercomputer, such as the University of Durham’s aptly named Cosmology Machine, and then fiddling with the various proportions until they get something that looks like the actual map. In doing this, the Planck scientists announced in March that there appears to be 68.3 per cent dark energy instead of the expected 72.8 per cent, and
26.8 26 .88 per centt dark dark matter mat atte terr ra rath rather ther er tthan hann th ha thee 22 22.7 .77 per cent previously thought. The percentage of atoms atom at omss ch changes chan ange gess sl slig slightly ight htly ly ffrom rom ro m 4. 4.55 pe perr ce cent nt ttoo 4. 4.99 per cent. The earlier figures came from NASA s Wilkinson Microwave Wilk lkin inso sonn M icro ic rowave Anisotropy Probe. From the total matter content of the Universe, you can then work out the expansion rate, known as the Hubble Constant. And from this you can work out the age of the Universe. There is a caveat, however. If cosmologists are wrong in their assumptions that dark matter and dark energy exist, then these figures are all totally wrong.
Dark matter 26.8% Dark energy 68.3%
Ordinary matter 4.9%
The Universe after Planck
THE HISTORY OF OUR COSMIC BACK YARD A nnew e sspace ew pace pa ce mi mission ission i wil will illl re reveal eve veal al tthe he ddynamic ynam yn amic ic nnature atur at uree of oour ur oown wn G Galaxy alax al axyy
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The spacecraft continually revolves on its axis, once every six hours. The computer locates individual stars as they pass through the field of view, relaying their positions back to Earth.
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A history of the Universe wouldn’t be complete without a dig around our astronomical back garden. The Milky Way, our home Galaxy, is home to a few hundred billion stars, and we’d like to know how it was built. It might even be the best place to find clues to the nature of that most elusive substance, dark matter. Gaia – the European Space Agency’s latest telescope – was launched in December 2013 from French Guiana, after which it will be in orbit around the Sun, 1.5 million km (932,056 miles) from Earth. There it will build up an exquisitely detailed picture of the stars in our Galaxy.
Forget 3D: Gaia will compile a fully fledged map in no fewer than six dimensions, by tagging each star with three position co-ordinates and a further three detailing speed and direction. If current thinking is correct, the final 6D chart will be enough to prove that the Milky Way was assembled from dozens of smaller galaxies. That’s not an easy task: the Milky Way today looks smooth, with no clear sign of a mish-mash of different ingredients. Galactic mixing should go at a leisurely pace, so if Gaia compiles its data accurately enough, we can separate the stars into their original, long-lost mini-galaxies.
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Dr Fernando Gomez of Michigan State University has been making predictions for what Gaia will find in the spherical halo of ancient stars surrounding the main galaxy. “If we look at halo stars, most of them are supposed to come from smaller galaxies that fell in. It can be anything from a few tens to hundreds of galaxies contributing,” he says. If we can find partially mixed fragments of galaxies anywhere, it’ll be here. Gaia’s advanced design and isolated orbit will let it pinpoint the location of stars to an unprecedented accuracy of 20 micro-arcseconds. If your eyes were that powerful you’d be able
THE STORY OF THE UNIVERSE | SCIENCE
“At one minute old, the entire Universe resembled the interior of a star but on a vast scale” according to Matthew Kleban of New York University, is that during the sudden expansion that happened during inflation, our Universe slammed into a neighbouring one. This sent shockwaves rippling through our cosmos that imprinted the anomalies we see today. If so, we should think of them as a cosmic bruise. Testing such a controversial idea, however, is very tricky.
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Over the five years, each star will be seen about 70 times, allo allowing ng its ts movement to be calcculated. at . The he changing perspective from Gaia’s own annual orbit around the Sun allows distances to be deter determined. ned.
CHAPTER THREE:
PARTICLE CREATION 1 minute after the Big Bang At one minute old, the entire Universe resembled the interior of a star but on a vast scale. Particles that would become the nuclei of all the atoms in the Universe were built in this cauldron. Mostly these were single protons that would become hydrogen, but about a quarter of the particles turned into helium nuclei, containing two protons and two neutrons. There were also trace amounts of lithium and beryllium produced. The evidence for all of this furious activity is all around us today in the chemical make-up of the Universe. We know from measurements of the radiation given off by our Sun and other stars that 98 per cent of the Universe remains in the form of this primordial hydrogen and helium. Only 2 per cent of the original atoms have been processed into heavier chemical elements while inside stars.
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TTwo wo telescopes t escopes on boa oa oard Gaia, each around a m metre etre across, focus starlight oonto nto a 940-megapixel detec detector, ector, sending a stream of high-reso -ressolution u on images mages to thee on-board on oa com computer. mputer.
GAIA
CHAPTER FOUR: to locate features on the Moon to within four centimetres. Even so, Gomez warns: “If you only look at positions in the sky, all the torn up little galaxies overlap with each other. Only with speeds can we tell they were once separate.” Once we can accurately measure positions, the speeds of stars become measurable. Even then we’re only recording the apparent positions on the sky – working out the distance to a star is a more subtle business. Gaia does it by monitoring tiny parallax effects as it orbits the Sun. In other words, its changing vantage point is used in the same way that having two
eyes gives you depth perception. As well as confirming ideas of how galaxies form, Gaia will let us infer the distribution of dark matter. The motion of stars is dictated by gravity generated by matter. Stars speed up in dense regions, even if the mass is in the form of dark particles. So Gaia isn’t just about history; it will study the make-up of the Universe too. Dr Andrew Pontzen JTBDPTNPMPHJTU BU6OJWFSTJUZ$PMMFHF-POEPO
THE DECOUPLING OF MATTER AND ENERGY 3,80,000 years after the Big Bang This is the moment when the radiation detected by Planck was released into space. Until then, the Universe had been a searing mass of atomic nuclei, lighter particles and energy. It had been impossible for whole
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CHAPTER FIVE:
THE COSMIC DARK AGES
NASA X3, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X3
1 million years after the Big Bang
atoms to form because whenever a nucleus and an electron particle bonded together, the torrent of radiation smashed them apart again. Now, the continual expansion of space weakened the radiation so much that it could no longer break apart the atoms. This was a watershed moment because, with most of the previously free particles now confined into atoms, it was as though the fog cleared. In the same way that we can see to the horizon on Earth on a clear day, so we can now see this radiation that has spent almost 14 billion years travelling across space, preserving a record of the density of the various clumps of matter that became galaxies. It’s this record that’s providing troubling insights into the inflation that went before.
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Initially the decoupled radiation would have been visible to the human eye, not that there were any humans around to see it of course. But the continued expansion of space stretched the radiation into the infrared and then into the microwave. The Universe became dark. Even after a million years, there were no celestial objects, so no sources of light. These were the Cosmic Dark Ages. Slowly the sea of atoms across the Universe began to fragment into clumps, pulling themselves together to become the first celestial objects. This was driven by the gravity of ‘dark matter’ clouds composed of particles that formed shortly after inflation. The Cosmic Dark Ages ended with the first celestial objects. These could have been stars or black holes. In March 2013, the Hubble Space Telescope pinpointed one of the Universe’s oldest stars right on our
celestial doorstep. Known as the Methuselah star, it has an estimated age of 14.5 billion years – give or take 0.8 billion years. It’s only this margin of error that means it is potentially consistent with the supposed age of the Universe. This might sound like the star is older than the predicted age of the Universe, but is more of a quirk of how accurate we are able to measure the age of a star. It is speeding through space, just 190 light-years away, and astronomers think that it was once part of an ancient galaxy that embedded itself in our own, the Milky Way (see ‘The history of our cosmic back yard’, p62).
An artist’s impression of today’s Universe with its network of galaxy clusters
“The biggest mystery for cosmologists to solve manifested itself about ut five billion years ago” The first black holes were those now found at the centres of galaxies. Although gh a black hole emits no light, matter falling into nd its gravitational clutches does heat up and d thee emits radiation. They would have ended Cosmic Dark Ages as surely as the first stars stars. The first galaxies, known as quasars, were voracious monsters. Their feeding black holes gave out as much light as their collections of stars. Gradually, the black holes consumed all the matter in their vicinity, leaving only the stars to shine within the galaxy.
We consider ourselves ours rsel e v an intelligent species, speecies, but we don’t know w what whaaat wh 95 per cent of the Universe U is or its age; gee; here’s why we’re wee’rre still t in the dark THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSE
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The Universe is now thought too be 13.8 bbillion illion ill ion yyears ears old
Astronomers had felt pretty confident that they knew the age of the Universe. Derived from measuring exploding stars across the length and breadth of it, the figure they had settled on was 13.7 billion years. This work had been honed over decades, so it came as something of a shock when the Planck telescope showed that the Universe is more likely to be 13.8 billion years old. “It’s slightly surprising, but I think that every time you measure more precisely you should expect the central value to move a little,” says Dr Rose Lerner, of the University of Helsinki, Finland.
CHAPTER SIX:
PRESENT DAY
NATURE OF THE DARK ENERGY
13.8 billion years after the Big Bang
It is the biggest conundrum facing modern physics. Observations say y that that dark ke energy nergy makes k up about abo b utt ttwowo thirds of the contents of the Universe. Quantum theory says that it should be vastly more. To make matter worse, no-one has a clue what it is. Most observations suggest that it is some form of energy but some data is hinting that it could be an unanticipated force of nature. “That would be a gamechanger in terms of what comes next,” says Dr Tony Padilla at the University of Nottingham. “We may be able to construct experiments to investigate a new force.”
y. The Universe has been growing steadily. Occasionally, galaxies still collide and merge, but these incidents are a pale -ups fraction of the number of cosmic smash-ups that used to take place. Star formation iss also significantly reduced in the modern Universe. But don’t go thinking that the Universe became boring. The biggest mystery for cosmologists to solve manifested itself about five billion years ago. A strange energy began to e. accelerate the expansion of the Universe. n’t Astronomers call it dark energy but don’t rk ask them to explain it, yet (see ‘The dark energy mystery’, above). ESA is busy or developing the Euclid mission, slated for launch in 2020. It will investigate with extreme precision the way in which thee Universe is expanding as a means of determining the precise effect of dark energy and, in doing so, providing an important clue as to what it is. Clearly, the story of the Universe has not yet reached its conclusion. And with thee rate of new discoveries gathering pace, make sure you stay tuned. %S4UVBSU$MBSL is an astronomer, journalist and author of The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth trilogy.
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Dark energy is powering the expansion of the Universe erse,, driv driving ing clusters of galaxies apart
THE DRIVER OF INFLATION
3 What was it that sparked the Universe’s rapid period of inflation?
No one can find a solution to what sparked sp spa rked iinflation nflatio nfla tion n – the extremely rapid growth of the Universe that took place after the Big Bang. Scientists would like to find the answer in particle physics. However, this is difficult because the sudden expansion of the early Universe took place at vastly larger energy levels than can be achieved in a particle accelerator such as the LHC, the most powerful ever built. The hypothetical particle responsible is called the ‘inflation’. Some scientists believe that it is the Higgs boson, but this is far from proven.
SCIENCE | HOW DO WE KNOW
HOW DO WE KNOW?
WHAT
CAUSES EARTHQUAKES? BY ANDREW ROBINSON
They’ve devastated cities throughout human history, but have proved to be one of the most difficult of natural phenomena to understand
ot long after midnight on an ordinary evening in 2008, I had an uncanny seismic experience. I had just finished drafting a review of a book called Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, And The Wrath Of God when I felt the floor of my upstairs flat in London shift almost imperceptibly for a second or two. Perhaps the vibration had been caused by a London Underground train, so I forgot about it and went to bed. The following morning, however, the BBC radio news bulletin announced that there had been an earthquake, at 12.56am. The British Geological Survey had monitored the event as having occurred at a depth of 5km, with its epicentre in Lincolnshire, roughly north of London around 200km away, and with a potentially destructive magnitude of 5.2. One serious injury was reported and many houses close to the epicentre – where the intensity of an earthquake is greatest – suffered damage. This was the biggest earthquake in the UK
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since 1984. As a rule, 90 per cent of the tremors go undetected by the public. Those that are noticed – like the magnitude-5.2 earthquake on 27 February 2008 – are nevertheless rapidly forgotten. To most people, earthquakes and England would appear to have little connection with the almost apocalyptic earthquakes that have shaped society in countries like China, Japan, Iran and Pakistan, where violent shaking of the earth has killed millions of people in modern times. Yet, it was in Britain that seismology emerged as a science. The first attempts to account for earthquakes in other than divine terms come from ancient Greece and Rome. Rather than imagining the god Poseidon striking his trident on the ground in anger, some Greek philosophers proposed natural explanations. Aristotle, during the 4th century BC, believed in a ‘central fire’ inside caverns in the Earth. As the subterranean fires burned away the rocks, the underground caverns
collapsed, generating earthquakes. Aristotle even classified earthquakes into types according to whether they shook structures and people in mainly a vertical or a diagonal direction, and whether or not they were associated with escaping vapours. Much later, the Roman philosopher Seneca, inspired in part by an Italian earthquake in AD 62 or 63 that devastated Pompeii, proposed that the movement of air – rather than smoky vapours – trapped and compressed within the Earth, was responsible for both violent storms and destructive rock movements. Made in china The first measurement of an earthquake comes from ancient China, however. The earliest known seismometer was invented in AD 132 by Zhang Heng. It consisted of eight dragon-heads facing the eight principal directions of the compass. They were mounted on the outside of an ornamented vessel said to resemble a wine jar with an
> IN A NUTSHELL Once thought to be the work of callous gods, we’ve gradually come to understand the mechanics of earthquakes to the point where we can accurately measure them and even predict where the next devastating blow might strike.
A road is decimated by a magnitude-6.8 earthquake that struck Ojiya, Japan, in 2004, killing 68 people
SCIENCE | HOW DO WE KNOW
approximate diameter of 2m. Around the base, directly beneath the dragon-heads, were eight squatting toads with open mouths. In the event of an earthquake, a bronze ball would drop from a dragonhead into a toad’s mouth with a resonant clang. The direction of the earthquake was probably indicated by which dragon-head dropped its ball, unless more than one ball dropped, indicating a more complex shaking. The device must have comprised a pendulum as the primary sensing element, somehow connected to levers that caused the bronze balls to drop. According to Chinese history, in AD 138 the seismometer enabled Zhang
THE KEY DISCOVERY
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X3, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY, US LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake produced a surface rupture 435km (270 miles) in length, and wide enough to swallow a cow, according to a famous folk tale of the time. The rupture happened in an area named the San Andreas Fault. To explain it, geophysicist Harry Fielding Reid published his mechanism of ‘elastic rebound’. Reid had noticed that in the years before 1906, roads, fences and streams crossing the
Heng to announce the occurrence of a major earthquake at Rosei, 650km to the northwest of the Chinese capital Loyang – two or three days before news of the devastation arrived by messengers. This prediction restored the faith of court officials in the seismometer, and led the imperial government to appoint a secretary to monitor the instrument, which remained in existence for four centuries. But scientific understanding of how earthquakes form had to await the destruction of Lisbon in 1755 by an extremely powerful earthquake followed by a tsunami and fires. In Britain, data on the effects of the Portuguese earthquake
5)&.07&.&/50'30"%4 '&/$&4"/%453&".4$3044*/(5)&4"/ "/%3&"4'"6-5&/"#-&%)"33:'*&-%*/(3&*%50%&7&-01"5)&03: OF HOW EARTHQUAKES ARE TRIGGERED fault had been deformed by its movement, and how after the earthquake they were displaced or offset by up to 6.4m. He proposed that before the earthquake, friction between the two sides of the fault had locked part of it, deforming it as the sides moved past each other – until finally the fault snapped. The sides sprang away from each other and they elastically rebounded, creating the surface rupture.
Around 3000 people were killed and 80 per cent of the city destroyed as a result of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
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were collected from all over the country and abroad by the Royal Society, supplementing that collected after a series of British earthquakes in 1750. John Michell, an astronomer at Cambridge University, took up the challenge of analysing the eyewitness reports, and accounting for earthquake motions in terms of Newtonian mechanics. Michell eventually published an important, if flawed, geological paper, ‘Conjectures concerning the cause and observations upon the phaenomena of earthquakes’, in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions for 1760. He correctly concluded that earthquakes were ‘waves set up by shifting masses of rock
The lower the friction, the weaker the fault and the more easily it would slip, suggested Reid. In places where the friction was of medium size, the fault would slip frequently, producing many small earthquakes. But where friction was high and the fault strong, it would slip only occasionally: there would be few, but large, earthquakes. While Reid’s model suffers from serious difficulties, it’s still the best that seismologists have.
miles below the surface’. However, his explanation for this shifting relied wrongly on explosions of steam when underground water encountered underground fires. When the shifting occurred beneath the seabed, Michell also rightly concluded that it would produce a sea wave (a tsunami), as well as an earthquake. There were two types of earthquake wave, he said, once again coming close to the truth: the first was a ‘tremulous’ vibration within the Earth, followed shortly by an undulation of the Earth’s surface. From this he argued that the speed of an earthquake wave could be determined by its arrival times at different points on the surface. Such times were approximately known from eyewitness reports for far-flung places affected by the Lisbon earthquake, which enabled Michell to calculate a speed for its wave of 1930km/h. He was the first scientist to attempt such a calculation – unaware though he was that the speed of seismic waves varies with the types of rock through which they pass. He then went further, by theorising that the surface origin of an earthquake, what we now call the epicentre, could be located by combining the same data on arrival times. Although he curiously chose a different – and inaccurate – way to calculate the epicentre of the Lisbon earthquake (relying instead on reports of the direction of the tsunami), his theoretical principle is the basis of today’s method for locating an epicentre. Finding the epicentre The next major development came in the mid-19th century from a brilliant Irish civil engineer, Robert Mallet, who had spent two decades collecting data about historical quakes. His catalogue of world seismicity contained 6831 listings, giving the date, location, number of shocks, probable direction and duration of the seismic waves, along with notes on related effects. In 1858, he travelled to Naples to investigate the destruction wrought by a recent major earthquake. Assessing every crack with a trained eye, Mallet compiled isoseismal maps: that is, maps with contours of equal earthquake damage/ intensity. It’s a method employed today, albeit with refinements, to map seismic
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Robert Mallet (1810-81) was an Irish civil engineer and inventor who became interested in earthquakes during the 1830s. He created experimental earthquakes with dynamite, investigated the 1857 Neapolitan earthquake through detailed analysis of its damage to buildings, and compiled world maps that showed earthquakes clustering in mysterious belts.
Harry Fielding Reid (1859-1944) served on California’s state commission to investigate the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. An American geophysicist, he closely examined land movements due to earthquakes over the course of the previous half-century. He then proposed that earthquakes were the result of the ‘elastic rebound’ of geological faults such as the San Andreas Fault.
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Zhang Heng (AD 78-139) designed the earliest recorded seismometer. He was a Chinese astronomer and mathematician. In 138, the seismometer measured a major earthquake far from the Chinese capital, two or three days before news of the earthquake’s damage arrived by messenger.
John Milne (1850-1913), a British geologist and mining engineer, was a professor in Japan from 1876-95. His teaching, the seismographs he designed and his investigation of the 1891 Mino-Owari earthquake established Japanese seismology, while the international earthquake bulletin he issued after his return to Britain led to the International Seismological Summary started in 1918.
Charles Richter (1900-85), like Reid, was an American physicist-turnedseismologist. Working with Beno Gutenberg at the California Institute of Technology, Richter devised a magnitude scale for Californian earthquakes in 1935. Until the 1980s, ‘Richter magnitude’ was used internationally, but it has now been replaced by a more accurate ‘moment magnitude’ scale.
TIMELINE
THE KEY DISCOVERIES THAT HAVE ENABLED US TO UNDERSTAND THE MECHANISM OF EARTHQUAKES AND DETECT THEM The world’s first seismometer (pictured), invented by Zhang Heng, establishes the principle that an earthquake can be scientifically measured with an instrument located far from the epicentre.
1755
A catastrophic earthquake in Lisbon leads John Michell, a British clergyman and astronomer, to conclude, in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1760, that earthquakes are ‘waves set up by shifting masses of rock’.
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X2, GETTY X3, US LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRESS ASSOCIATION
Robert Mallet publishes his twovolume study, Great Neapolitan Earthquake, and maps of world seismic intensity demonstrating that earthquakes cluster in certain belts around the Earth.
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An earthquake in San Francisco and a subsequent fire destroy the city but establish the discipline of seismology in California. Harry Fielding Reid proposes the ‘elastic rebound’ theory of earthquakes, which is still influential, if flawed.
Charles Richter, following the 1933 Long Beach earthquake near Los Angeles, creates a magnitude scale, which enables seismologists to allot a size to each Californian earthquake, regardless of its varying intensities.
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The theory of plate tectonics explains why the vast majority of earthquakes cluster in belts, at plate boundaries such as the ‘Ring of Fire’ around the Pacific Ocean; but it fails to explain intra-plate earthquakes, for example in Missouri.
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hazard. Mallet placed too much reliance on the direction of fallen objects and the type of cracks in buildings as indicators of earthquake motion (cracking is in fact mainly a function of the type of building construction). But his maps did allow him to estimate the centre of the earthquake and its size relative to other earthquakes. Using the new technique of photography, he documented the damage. He then reported to the Royal Society in a two-volume study, Great Neapolitan Earthquake Of 1857: The First Principles Of Observational Seismology, published in 1862. Elsewhere, he published maps of world seismic intensity, providing the first indication that earthquakes cluster in certain belts around the Earth. An explanation of this fact would have to wait another century, but in the meantime Mallet’s map focused scientific attention on these patterns. Global network Over the next half-century seismology became a truly international science, as measuring instruments improved in sensitivity to the point where they were able to monitor, and record, earthquakes all over the planet from a single location. A British geologist and mining engineer, John Milne, having designed more than one such seismograph while living for two decades in Japan, returned to Britain in 1895 and established a central earthquake observatory at his house on the Isle of Wight. It had inputs from a worldwide network of seismographic stations. Although Milne’s theoretical contributions were small, he has a considerable claim to be considered the founder of seismology. With the vast increase in seismic data, theoretical understanding advanced in the first decade of the 20th century. The theory that volcanic action might be related to earthquakes – believed by Aristotle and lent credence by the contiguous volcanoes and earthquakes of southern Italy and Japan – was largely abandoned when it became clear that active volcanoes were often free from earthquakes. Instead, the tectonic movement of geological faults came to be seen as the chief origin of earthquakes. Known as the ‘elastic rebound’ model, abrupt
HOW DO WE KNOW | SCIENCE
NEED TO KNOW
KEY TERMS THAT WILL HELP YOU UNDERSTAND EARTHQUAKES
1 EPICENTRE
The area of origin of an earthquake underground is its hypocentre or focus. The point on the Earth’s surface immediately above the hypocentre is the epicentre, where there is often visible movement and cracking of the Earth, as surface waves radiate from the epicentre.
2 FAULT
At its simplest, a geological fault is a joint between two rock planes. The fault is usually not exactly vertical and so one plane of the fault overhangs the other. Fault movements and earthquakes are intimately connected, but their precise relationship is controversial.
3 INTENSITY
The intensity of an earthquake measures its effects on objects, humans and animals. Intensity generally increases the closer the observer is to the epicentre. It’s also higher for a poorly constructed building than for a well-built one, given the same shaking.
4 MAGNITUDE
Unlike intensity, magnitude is independent of the observer’s distance from the epicentre. It is, so to speak, the amount of explosive in a bomb, as opposed to the bomb’s effects. An earthquake can have only one magnitude, fundamentally; but it always has many intensities.
fault movement was first proposed by the American geophysicist Harry Fielding Reid in 1906 to account for the surface rupture of the San Andreas Fault in the San Francisco earthquake (see ‘The Key Discovery’, p68). But while the model was plausible enough, it offered no explanation as to why the sides of certain geological faults should be grinding past each other in a regular fashion, causing periodic earthquakes. What force was driving them? Not until the 1960s, with the advent of plate tectonic theory, did seismologists appreciate that the San Andreas Fault was the boundary between two tectonic plates, the Pacific plate and the North American plate,
Charles Richter studies earthquake tremors in his laboratory in Pasadena, California – he developed the Richter scale in 1935
which were moving in opposite directions. Some other plate boundaries, for example near Japan, were also seismically active. Hence the fact, first noted by Mallet, that earthquakes clustered in bands, which were now understood to coincide with plate boundaries. Yet, despite progress, seismologists remain far from fully understanding earthquakes. Plate tectonics do not really explain British earthquakes, far from the mid-Atlantic plate boundary. What’s more, geological faults such as the San Andreas have turned out to be very much weaker than would be expected from the elastic rebound model for large earthquakes. As for earthquake prediction, which was
touted by many seismologists as achievable during the last few decades of the 20th century, all seismologists now admit it’s currently impossible. The scale of the task was outlined by Charles Richter, who devised the ‘Richter’ magnitude scale for measuring earthquakes in the 1930s. The seismologist said: “One may compare it to the situation of a man who is bending a board across his knee and attempts to determine in advance just where and when the cracks will appear.” Andrew Robinson is the author of Earthquake: Nature And Culture and Earthshock.
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HISTORY | YE OLDE TRAVEL GUIDE
HISTORICAL HOLIDAYS: GUIDEBOOKS FROM THE PAST
Prague 1600
In the latest instalment of our historical holidays series, in which experts imagine they’re writing a travel guide in the past, Simon Winder invites visitors to Prague, a city striving to combat the impact of war
ll roads lead to Prague – mostly because its most famous resident, Rudolf II, is Holy Roman Emperor, king of Bohemia and Hungary, and ruler of countless other places in Europe. The city has much to dazzle, but unsuspecting tourists beware: danger lurks around every corner.
A
ILLUSTRATION BY JONTY CLARK , WWW.JONTYCLARK.COM, ALAMY
When to go While the city is in some ways more pleasant in the summer it is also then more prone to devastating outbreaks of fatal sickness, which can be an inconvenience for tourists. In the winter months it is bitterly cold and has been getting progressively colder as the Little Ice Age bites. The resulting poor harvests, combined with the devastation of agricultural land to the east by Tartar raiders, makes the winter supply of food expensive and scarce, so looking after frivolous foreign visitors is a low priority for the authorities. What to take with you Food can be scarce so bring your own supplies. Visitors to Prague are permitted to carry a sword and dagger and these will certainly come in handy. Actual fighting in the town is rare, but a tourist with a bag of coins on their belt, who is cluelessly gawping at the sites in the Old Town and who lacks this visible deterrent, will be a sitting duck for the innumerable petty thieves who infest the city. Costs and money As the royal and imperial capital under
the eccentric, neglectful rule of Rudolf II, Prague is ruinously expensive, with all available rooms crammed with ambassadors, noble entourages, contractors and mercenaries. The huge numbers of alchemists, painters, architects, decorators, jewellers and zoo-keepers employed by Rudolf also don’t help the overcrowding situation. Paying for even basic accommodation could see you run through your ducats at an alarming speed. Sights and activities Be sure to stop and admire the beautiful Prague Bridge, built more than two centuries ago. With its massive fortifications at either end, it controls all crossings of the Vltava river as well as movement between the castle and the Old Town. Some parts of Prague Castle, which is constantly being remodelled and extended, are open to the public, not least the extraordinary indoor shopping centre of Vladislav Hall. Built for the king of Bohemia a century ago, it is often used for banquets, although for much of the time it is filled with stalls selling religious items, books, prints, and jewellery.
“the emperor’s collections are among the most exotic and extensive in europe”
Prague is famous for its utraquist churches, home to a national Bohemian religion which stems from the Hussite Wars (1419–c34), a bitter religious struggle between followers of the Roman Catholic church and those of Bohemian reformer Jan Hus. These churches allow the laity to receive both bread and wine during the Eucharist, as well as the clergy. The front of the Týn Church in Old Town is decorated with a huge gold Hussite chalice symbol and a statue of George, the Hussite king of Bohemia. The Bethlehem Chapel, where Bohemian reformer Jan Hus once preached, keeps up the city’s great preaching tradition. With special permission it should be possible to see some of the emperor’s curio collections, which are among the most exotic and extensive in Europe. They include everything from precious stones and paintings by the artist Arcimboldo to some rhino bones sold
Prague today The geography of Prague is remarkably similar to that of 400 years ago. The Prague Bridge (now called the Charles Bridge) with its defensive towers is still one of the city’s biggest attractions. The castle, too, remains an important monument, although it has undergone many architectural and stylistic changes since it was founded in around AD 880. The Prague Castle Picture Gallery features works by Titian, Aachen and Rubens, and, happily, visitors can now wander the castle grounds without fear of tiger attacks. Even the Vladislav Hall is relatively unchanged, and still hosts banquets of a kind that would have been entirely recognisable to Rudolf II. Prague was invaded by imperial Catholic forces in 1620, and utraquism in the city was wiped out: the statue of King George on the Týn Church was destroyed, its gold chalice replaced by a Virgin Mary. The city’s most well-known landmark, the Gothic-style St Vitus Cathedral, is a must see for visitors and has hosted the coronation of many Czech kings and queens in its long history. Climb its 90-metre-high tower for stunning views over the city.
to Rudolf by King Philip II of Spain. Most striking are the emperor’s animals, which at different times have included a dodo, a cassowary, a pangolin and several cheetahs, with which he likes to hunt deer in the Bohemian forests. Dangers and annoyances War against the Ottoman empire and its allies has been grinding on for over six years now. New groups of troops from all over the Holy Roman Empire are on their way to fight, while wounded, penniless, disease-ridden and desperate soldiers returning from the front make the city of Prague an often dangerous and unstable place. Avoid wandering the dark, labyrinthine corridors of the castle: Rudolf allows a lion and a tiger to roam at will, and staff members are known to have been eaten. Eating and drinking The total destruction of Antwerp by
Spanish troops and continued fighting in the Low Countries has drastically damaged European trade, so the flow of delicious East Indian spices that had so improved Prague’s menus has been disturbed, bringing the choice back to the usual, near flavourless, beef and chicken. Supplies of mutton from Hungary have been disrupted by rebellion and by Ottoman armies – no great loss as the mutton tastes roughly the same as the beef and the chicken.
*GZPVMJLFUIJTy For the other great Hapsburg capitals go to Vienna and Budapest. Meanwhile, to visit the home of Rudolf II’s great rival and fellow Hapsburg, Philip II, try Madrid, Spain.
A wintery view of Prague Castle at dusk
Getting around Behind its defensive walls Prague is a crowded city and both pedestrians and horsemen struggle through its narrow streets. With rain reducing many thoroughfares to filthy morasses it is a good idea to wear high boots – with the added bonus that these are now intensely fashionable. Simon Winder is the author of Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (Picador, 2013).
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RESOURCE
THE LATEST SCIENCE BOOKS REVIEWED
How Not To Be Wrong The Hidden Maths Of Everyday Life
DAN DRY
+PSEBO&MMFOCFSH Allen Lane, ` 1,310
Just the appearance of an equation can induce fear and loathing in the most confident person, as memories of failing to fathom algebra come flooding back. But for many people, maths isn’t merely difficult; it also seems pretty pointless. Or at least most of the stuff we learn at school does. Jordan Ellenberg feels our pain – which is surprising given he’s a former maths prodigy who could do algebra when barely out of kindergarten and is now a maths professor. He believes that the problem with school maths is that there’s way too much boring stick, and not enough tempting carrot. And in this breezily written but deceptively deep
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book, Ellenberg provides enough carrots to enthuse even the most mathematically mulish. His strategy is to use examples drawn from the subtitle of his book: The Hidden Maths Of Everyday Life. His principal sources are arguably the two areas of maths richest in applications to real-life problems: probability and statistics. As the son of two professional statisticians, Ellenberg knows those two words conjure up images of boring problems about balls in urns and lists of coal production. Fortunately, he ditches such tedium and instead shows how they underpin everything from methods for spotting winning bets to extracting reliable insights from dodgy data. Along the way, he shows how some basic knowledge of the underlying maths can help spot howlers that even professional scientists make. Some of his most telling examples focus on the concept of statistical significance. Not a day goes by without some researchers claiming to have found a ‘statistically significant’ effect from some new therapy, health risk or whatever. Which sounds pretty compelling… until you find out what statistical significance really means. As Ellenberg points out, it’s far less impressive than even many researchers believe – especially if they’ve rummaged through their findings desperate to find something ‘significant’ to report. Ellenberg cites research suggesting that for every reliable claim of a link between genes and schizophrenia, there are 500 bogus ones. Inevitably the book contains a bit of maths, but nothing beyond simple school level. On the other hand, it comes jampacked with great examples, entertaining anecdotes and uncommon wisdom. Dr Anna Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Forensic Science at the University of Huddersfield.
Lucky Planet Why Earth Is Exceptional And What That Means For Life In The Universe David Waltham, Icon Books `1,246
Are we alone? Quite possibly, according to David Waltham. He argues that we live on a ‘lucky planet’ in a Universe where life-friendly environments are rare. Waltham begins by describing an imaginary dead world, Nemesis, which is almost identical to the Earth and once hosted life. Its slightly larger moon triggered drastic global warming and planet-wide extinction. Nemesis demonstrates that tiny changes can bring about huge temperature shifts. That being the case, how has our planet avoided the same fate? Isn’t it remarkable that Earth’s climate has remained clement throughout its two-billion-year life-bearing history? Waltham explains how finely tuned geological, biological and astronomical processes have regulated our climate, postponing mass extinction thus far. As a planet hunter myself, I am an alien optimist. However, if the goal of Lucky Planet is to make you marvel at the good fortune of your existence, then Waltham has been successful. I have been persuaded to look at my position in the Universe with fresh eyes. Perhaps we are alone, after all. 3VUI"OHVT is a PhD student researching exoplanets at Oxford University.
The Hunt For The Golden Mole All Creatures Great And Small And Why They Matter
Missing Microbes How Killing Bacteria Creates Modern Plagues
Richard Girling, Chatto & Windus, `1,347
Martin Blaser, Oneworld Publications, `1,061
Many books have been written about tigers, elephants and other charismatic animals, but this is the only one devoted to golden moles, a group of ultra-elusive African desert mammals. Girling explores the idea that every living thing – however insignificant it may appear – is important in its own right, and to prove it he embarks on an eccentric quest to locate the Somali golden mole. The creature has never been seen alive and the sole specimen is a 1cm-long fragment of jawbone found in a Barn Owl pellet in 1964. Girling muses why he cares about gazing upon this ‘tiny scrap of evidence’, which he tracks down to a collection in Florence; his motivation is simply: ‘Because it’s there.’ At the heart of this delightfully meandering book is a history of how we find and catalogue species, and a thought-provoking examination of our changing attitudes to wildlife. In particular, Girling paints a vivid picture of the Victorian age of discovery, when a colourful cast of swaggering explorers plundered the globe for animals for display in zoos, travelling shows and the newly opened zoological museums. As to whether Girling found the mole – that would be too much of a spoiler.
For the first time ever, overfed people in the world outnumber those who do not have enough to eat. Obesity, diabetes and allergy have replaced TB, polio and other infections as the major threats to human health. Martin Blaser explains that the rise of these ‘modern plagues’ can be attributed to the erosion of the microbiome, the hidden universe of microbes that we carry in, and on, our bodies, and which works – when in balance – to maintain our health. As Director of the Human Microbiome Project at New York University School of Medicine, Blaser is uniquely qualified to set out his theory, backed with an impressive array of evidence. He shows how medical trends, such as the overuse of antibiotics, especially in early life, and the choice of Caesarean section over natural birth, can disturb an individual’s inner microbial ecology. He paints a frightening, and very convincing, picture but does suggest a number of practical solutions, such as overcoming our fear of ‘germs’ and devising more precise diagnostics for infections. Written at a cracking pace, this is a good read for both the public and healthcare professionals.
Ben Hoare is features editor on BBC Wildlife Magazine.
Susan Aldridge is a science writer and former medical researcher.
The Psychopath Whisperer Inside The Minds Of Those Without A Conscience Kent Kiehl, Oneworld Publications `1,054
Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test was a bestseller. As a result, any new book on the same subject is inevitably going to be compared to it. The Psychopath Whisperer by Kent Kiehl is a case in point. Like Ronson, Kiehl has produced a fluid, engaging narrative from the perspective of an individual who wanted to know what goes on in the mind of a psychopath, filled with interesting and worrying characters. His journey lasts decades, and involves cutting-edge scientific research and methods. Strange, then, that it emerges as less scientific overall. Whereas Ronson gets across the murky nature of defining such complex mental issues, Kiehl implies that everything is established fact. For example, Ronson portrays the Hare Checklist (the psychopath test in question) as a useful but limited tool, whereas Kiehl seems to view it as some faultless gold-standard. It’s understandable; Kiehl has been a researcher in the field for decades so is clearly invested in his methods. Perhaps he cannot be as objective. But it’s a good read, as long as you remain sceptical of some of its grander claims. Much like you would with a psychopath, ironically. Dean Burnett is a doctor of neuroscience and stand-up comedian.
RESOURCE GET YOUR CLICKS
Our pick of internet highlights to explore
WEBSITE
WEBSITE
WEBSITE
Thingful
Lol my Thesis
Valentina Project
thingful.net/site/about
lolmythesis.com
valentinaproject.com
Thingful lets people all over the world share data from devices that track everything from the weather and traffic to seismic activity and sharks. The data is then displayed on a map, so you can compare what the air sensor outside your house says to others around the world.
After several years’ hard work on a single topic, you’d think a PhD student would struggle to sum up their thesis in a sentence. This delightful blog with submissions from hundreds of PhD-holders shows otherwise. Some take the challenge seriously, whereas others have a bit more fun (“I have killed so many fish.”)
In 1963 Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to go into space. The Valentina project has been named after her, and will be running profiles of female scientists throughout 2014 to try to raise the profile of women in science. You can also follow the team behind the website on Twitter at @TVPyear.
WEBSITE
WEBSITE
WEBSITE
Mosquito week
Egglab
Glimpse 360
gatesnotes.com/Health/MostLethal-Animal-Mosquito-Week
nightjar.exeter.ac.uk/egglab/
spitzer.caltech.edu/glimpse360
Nightjars are nocturnal birds with greybrown mottled feathers that camouflage them from predators. A group at the University of Exeter is studying the birds’ camouflage, and you can help them by playing this game that involves spotting eggs against the ground. The group is gathering information on which camouflage is the most effective.
See the cosmos in infrared with this 360-degree, zoomable panorama of the Milky Way. You can automatically navigate to objects of interest including nebulae, supernovae and background galaxies. If the panorama was printed out, it would require a piece of paper as big as the Rose Bowl stadium in California to fit it all on.
What’s the world’s most lethal animal? On the basis of how many people it kills, the answer is the tiny mosquito. That’s because mosquitoes carry diseases – malaria alone kills more than 6,00,000 people a year. Sharks, in comparison, kill only 10 people a year. This infographic on Bill Gates’s blog breaks down the numbers.
If you have a favourite website, blog or podcast that you’d like to share with other readers, email
[email protected] 76
August 2014
EDU TALK Zarin Malva, Director of Training at the Ratan Tata Institute of Montessori, Mumbai talks to Moshita Prajapati about the Montessori approach to education 8IBUJT.POUFTTPSJFEVDBUJPO Montessori education is an approach that was developed by educator Dr Maria Montessori to teach children between the ages of 1-18. She emphasised on observing the child and then providing him with a correct environment, especially prepared for the child, to develop. There are four stages of development that a child of 0-24 years undergoes. From 0-6 his sensitivities are strong for – Order, Refinement of Senses, Co-ordination of Movement, and Language. She compared these development stages to the four stages of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Just as a caterpillar is different from a butterfly, the same way the child is very different from an adult. He is not inferior, just different. So accordingly, the Montessori provides him with an education on what he needs and wants and not what we think he should have. From here, if you guide the child, follow the child, he will show you want he wants and needs. In a nutshell, Montessori education is different because it looks at education from a human development method in the prepared environment.
While exploring technology is good, it is not good for the structure of exploring that a child at his age needs to do. There is no harm in introducing a computer to a child, but he needs to understand what a computer is and what it does. Using it for the sake of using it is not correct. But in our elementary class, which is for students 6 years and above, we have introduced them to computers.
prepared environment is needed for all the subjects and practical work that a child does. For example in our course, we have the maps of the world blocks concretely made so he can recognise the shapes of the continents. Based
‘We must give the child what he needs and wants, and not what we think he should have’
What is it different from traditional FEVDBUJPO Montessori education is different because our children work individually – and that is the biggest difference. Between the ages of 3-6, the child learns with his senses and movements so we provide movements for his hands in the classroom and he doesn’t sit in one place like in a traditional classroom. He is allowed to work on his own, to use his senses to play with materials we provide, and move. 8IBUMFBSOJOHNBUFSJBMTBSFVTFE GPSUFBDIJOH When Dr Montessori was teaching her students, she followed the work of a psychologist who had made learning materials forchildren. She procured them for her students, when they informed her about what they needed. So this
on that, he is aware and knows of Asia and Africa. So he learns and works with the shapes. We use it because this is how the child takes in matter – through his senses and movements. %PFT.POUFTTPSJVTFBOZGPSNPGUFDIOPMPHZ UPBJEJOUIFMFBSOJOHPGJUTTUVEFOUT We are not against the aid of technology in our course, but when does a child between 3-6 years old have the time to understand technology and of course use it. There is so much going on in our classrooms and there is so much required by the child. Because of the kind of mind he has at this age, we know that he can take things concretely at first. And he will be using one sense at first, which as adults we do.
.POUFTTPSJMFBSOJOHGPDVTFTPOJOEJWJEVBM EJTDPWFSJFT)PXEPFTUIJTFOBCMFFBSMZTPDJBM JOUFSBDUJPOJOBDIJME Initially a child between 2-3 years is more interested in himself than others around him as he his exploring his own personality. If you try to encourage him to interact socially, when he is a year old, he wouldn’t like to share anything. That is why they say imagination is important. How do you ask a three-year-old to explain what his drawing is about because he doesn’t know reality? He needs to imagine, to know what is reality. That is why the home environment or any environment is essential in establishing the personality and imagination of the child, which makes him the social individual he is. How does Montessori education QSFQBSFJUTTUVEFOUTGPSIJHIFS FEVDBUJPO We offer Montessori learning to children till they are 18 years of age. Till the age of six years, we focus on individual learning and discovery of the child, but elementary group of 6-9 years is a different child. His emotions and issues have changed. Now he requires a reasoning mind, an imaginative mind and that environment is prepared for him. It is very different. Now he loves working in groups compared to earlier where he worked individually. Then when they reach the ages of 12-18 they want to establish themselves as complete human beings, complete individuals and then gradually shift from the environment of parents and form their own environment. And we aid them in this development process of their intellect.
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AN EXCERPT FROM A BOOK YOU SHOULD READ
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like an ungreased and made with his lips a noise ich nov pito Ka re for a moment, he Calligraphy master Sergei cart-wheel. After standing the g din wed er’s ght dau his ting t and smacked his Akhineyev was celebra snapped his fingers with deligh ich rov Pet n Iva ster ma phy to history and geogra lips again. ivities went ate kiss… W ho Loshadinikh. The wedding fest “Ha! The sound of a passion dancing and g yin pla g, gin voice from the a sin e s wa cam ” ere Marfa? smoothly. Th the other are you kissing, in fro and to eared the ng app stli y Bu rwa m. doo roo in the main next room, and in the stained and s tail teacher. ck nt bla ista in ass n the tme n, foo e nki rooms wer shaven head of Va ere Th . club the from d re, pleasu Sergei white ties who had been hire “W ho is it you’re… Ah… A ting Sit on. sati ver con old boy for you, to was a constant hubbub of Kapitonovich! There’s a fine one g ptin rru inte tily has and with the female sex!” side by side on a sette man put it mildly! Tete-atete nch Fre the v, tulo ran Akhineyev, Ta r che another, maths tea “I’m not kissing at all! ” said ntrol Co the of tor pec t idea, you fool? Ins tha ior you Jun Pasdequoi and rassed. “W ho gave bar em ing tell e wer da, rds… in Of fices, Egor Venedictych Mz s me… smacking my lips as rega wa It and e aliv ied bur t. At the sight of the fish…” the guests about cases of people . None of the token deligh lism itua spir on ws vie ir the ing express “Tell me another!” but they admitted , to ear and lism itua spir in d eve beli e thre Vankin’s face grinned from ear the t tha th ear this on gs eye hin v flushed. that there are many thin vanished through the door. Ak r the ano In d. hen pre the wretch’ll com er human mind will nev “Dammit!” he thought. “Now ing lain exp s wa sky my name all don n Do cke ster bla ng. He’ll room, literature ma try has go and start gossipi sen a ces stan um circ at wh er to the guests und over town, the slob…” e conversations main room the right to shoot passers-by. Th altogether hineyev went timidly into the Ak but nkin? He was were, as you can see, terrifying, glanced round. W here was Va and al soci ose wh d, yar bending over and pleasant. People outside in the standing near the piano and, , ide ins go to t righ the m pector’s laughing position did not allow the whispering something to the ins s. dow win were peering through the sister-in-law. v, the host, eyev. “It’s Exactly at midnight, Akhineye “It’s about me!” thought Akhin him. She dy rea s wa ing ryth eve if s see eve to beli hen she went into the kitc about me, blast him! And floor to from t olen red d! No, s Go wa My hen kitc ng! e for supper. Th believes him! She’s laughi much and k duc se, ke sure ma goo st of mu ke I ! smo No the t. ceiling with ’t leave it at tha can I set e wer ks drin and to all of them, else besides, the hors d’oeuvres they don’t believe him. I’ll talk the rfa Ma . rray disa other fool of a out on two tables in artistic and then he’ll look like just any s wa , ach stom e hug a h wit cook, a red-faced woman scandalmonger.” , still busy at the tables. Akhineyev scratched himself and n,” ma wo d goo my n, . uoi rgeo deq “Show me the stu ed, went up to Pas ds and licking his embarrass been giving instructions in the said Akhineyev, rubbing his han quet! I could just ve “I’ a bou nchman. “I lips. “W hat a fragrance, what about supper,” he told the Fre hen kitc the me w sho on, e a sturgeon, a real eat the whole kitchen! Come know you love fish, and I hav by the way… sturgeon.” opper! Hee, hee, hee! Yes, and wh and s che ben the kitchen just Marfa went up to one of I nearly forgot… I went into the . per spa new of et she sed k at the sturgeon carefully lifted up a grea now, to look over the food. I loo zed gla big a lay , dish t, I smack my us igh Under it, on an enormo and out of pleasure… out of del ots. carr and es oliv ers, n comes and cap h nki wit Va sturgeon garnished lips! And just then that fool . ped gas and n rgeo ’ Marfa the stu we? the at are e Akhineyev looked says, ‘Ah… kissing in her over t wen He ed. roll s eye his d, His face beame
clear… It’s my but even so I have to make it foolish the t, tha g kin ours going round thin cy rum Fan are ! re too cook, y… You see, the dut th. ear on g hin not like This cook of fellow! The woman looks hatt you are living with this … tha e Th ! her g sin kis n bee but… Live And he makes out I’ve yours. It’s none of my business, like, only crank!” with her, kiss her … just as you he as v ulo ant Tar ed ask Don’t ! k?” you “W ho’s a cran please, not so publicly! I beg r!” came up. forget that you’re a teache in– into the “Him over there, Vankin! I go Akhineyev froze, dumbfounded. ” a an… me I kitchen, He went home as if stung by n. nki Va ut abo ded all scal told and he s d An whole swarm of bee Truly, he “Isn’t it silly of him, the crank! by boiling water. On his way, rfa,” added s wa n tow ole wh the t I’d rather kiss the dog than Ma ed tha ginned imaagi da Mz saw and nd rou ked n Akhineyev. He loo ingg at him as if he had bee ookkin loo sh behind him. tarred and feathered… A frea he n,” nki Va ut abo ing e. talk hom “We were awaited him at es into the kitchen calamity explained to Mzda. “He com aren’t you eating hy “W has to go he so rfa, Ma ide bes me s see and he asked his wife at ‘W hat kissing, anything?” es. jok of ds g kin all up k thin and dinner. “W hat are you thinkin e been the drink hav st rtsick mu It hea s. ling say he Fee ?’ s? our you am are about? Your ner soo I’d say I So it. e you that made him imagin for Marfa? I know all about it, s, I have a ly opened ain cert e hav ple peo e kiss a turkey than Marfa. Beside him!” Som heathen! to said I , savage!” are less you me l sha wife. W hat a foo my eyes for me! Ugh! You ster ma y init div from the the up ed ask got He l?” ! foo a face “W ho’s And she slapped his feet, his er und und gro up. e the as he cam and, not feeling le tab you , hen kitc the nki way to Va n’s “Vankin. I’m standing in hatless andd coatltless, made his In on. so and ” n… see, looking at the sturgeo place. He found him at home. sts had heard the gue the hineyev to all r, hou an f hal ut abo “You’re a scoundrel!” said Ak n. rgeo stu the tha and all t mud at story about Vankin Vankin. “W hy did you sling t ugh tho ” m! the did you start tell hy “Now let him me in front of everybody? W ! him let st “Ju ds. han his g bin ?” Akhineyev, rub going about me y’ll say, ‘T hat’s the slander gs! ” He’ll start telling them, and the We know slander? You’re imagining thin hat “W l! foo sing kis you n se, bee sen I’d t non r tha ut you enough of “W ho spread it abo the whole story!’” sn’t it you? Wasn’t it you, t he drank four Marfa? Wa Akhineyev was so relieved tha dit? ” of sheer joy. After you ban his glasses of vodka too many out n blinked with all the fibres of nki Va r afte m roo bed ir the to ple icon cou escorting the young face, raised his eyes to the m and fell asleep battered supper, he went to his own roo and said: ; by the next my eyeballs like a per fectly innocent little boy “May God punish me. May iness bus the n otte forg ady r said a single eve alre I if had morning, he burst and may I conk out the face of from n. ish van rgeo I stu y with the rd about you! Ma wo An s. ose disp d Go But alas, man proposes, this earth! ” iness, and ject to doubt. l evi tongue had done its evil bus Exactly a Vankin’s sincerity was not sub il! ava no of s o had been Akhineyev’s guile wa He was clearly not the one wh the r afte y, sda dne We on week later, namely gossiping. was standing in Akhineyev third lesson, when Akhineyev “But who, then?” wondered ing talk and m roo n uaintances mo acq com his the all the middle of running over in his mind il named pup a of s itie cliv pro ous vici about the and beating his breast. up and called Vysekin, the headmaster came “W ho? ” him to one side. ch,” he said, “L ook here, Sergei kapitonovi The End. business, my of e non is “Excuse me… This
Ha! The sound of a passionate kiss… Who are you kissing, Marfa?
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August 2014
79
Wolfesntein: The New Order “Nazi scum.”” The first cutscene of Wolfenstein: The New Orderr ends with those words, instantly transporting old fans back to ssic, Wolfenstein 3D, D which changed the the 1992 classic, landscape off video gaming ami and defined the First Person S) genre. MachineGames and Bethesda Shooter (FPS) ook on the task of making the series relevant Softworks took neration of gamers, which led to 2014’s to a new generation Orderr Wolfenstein:: The New Order. chise’s gun-toting, knife-wielding, NaziThe franchise’s erican hero, B.J. Blazkowicz returns in a slaying, American at jumps narrative that umps forward to 1960, where the Third Reich won WWII and achieved world domination. The gamee blends stealth elements with the frenetic eered in Wolfenstein 3D. D In combat, players combat pioneered can use the cover system to duck behind cover for om enemy bullets, as well as access a wide protection from eapons from the inventory. Players have to variety of weapons llect ammunition, and there are plenty of manually collect waiting to be unlocked. hidden areass with bonus rewards waiti
story and setting are major The stor hhighlights hl hts of the game. ame. The tired trope of a German victory in WWII gets revitalised in The Orderr The developer’s New Order. vision of New Berlin, with massive gilded monuments to the Nazi victory creates an authentic victor weight atmosphere that lends we ht to the premise. The taciturn Blazkowicz opens up in The New r delivering one-liners and Order, internal monologues. The antagonist is General Wilhelm ‘Deathshead’ Strasse, the military scientist who returns to the series to fight ht our hero once again. Orderr is a solid offering Wolfenstein: The New Orde that should extend the longevity of one of gaming’s most long-running franchises. If you’re a fan of the FPS genre, or alternate universe storylines, or if you’re just an old fan of the series,, this one’s for you.
FINGER ON THE BUTTON Finish them! The upcoming Mortal Kombat game sees new additions to its roster of fighters. Scorpion, Sub-Zero and Co. are going to have a new male and female character to contend with in Mortal Kombat X, the latest title in the franchise.
The granddaddy of First Person Shooters (FPS) is back as B.J. Blazkowicz takes on Nazis in a fresh setting in Wolfenstein: The New Order
Exciting news from E3 2014, gaming’s biggest trade show.
Vive la assassination! Fans of the Assassins Creed series have cause for celebration as Ubisoft has announced an October 28 release date for Assassins Creed: Unity. The seventh title in the series is set in Paris on the eve of the historic French Revolution.
A Halo fan’s fantasy
Halo 5 is coming for Xbox One, but Phil Spencer (Head of Xbox) has announced that the console is going to benefit from the release of Halo: The Master Chief Collection. This collection is going to allow fans to enjoy Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 4 on the next-gen console. A must for die-hard fans!
Compiled by Dushyant Shekhawat
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Lava Iris X1 scores higher on aesthetics than other budget dgett phones, with its design inspired by Apple’s iPhone. It also o stands out from the crowd because of its high quality cameras eras s on both the front (8MP) and rear (2MP), backed by a dual LED D flash with the capacity to capture and store a lot ot off photographs. Price: ` tXXXMBWBNPCJMFTDPN DPN N
MICROMAX A77 CANVAS JUICE SONY EXPERIA E1 DUAL Sony Experia E1 Dual is a neat Android smartphone, but as a music player, it’s excellent. It is powered by Sony’s xLOUD sound enhancement engine with a loudspeaker that can play at a volume of upto 100 dB. The phone also boasts a dual sim and is powered by a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm MSM8210 dual-core processor, one of the most high-end in this price range. A phone and a quality music player for the price of one! Price: `7,900 t XXXTPOZNPCJMFDPN
Most smartphones are synonymous with poor battery, but Micromax Canvas Juice puts those woes to rest with a heavy duty battery that outlasts any equivalent smartphone. True to its name, the Canvas Juice packs a 3000mAh battery that offers upto 10 hours of talk time and 282 hours of standby time. If your lifestyle keeps you on the go, Canvas Juice is the phone with the stamina to keep up. Price: `7,999 t XXXNJDSPNBYJOGPDPN
Compiled by Dushyant Shekhawat
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PUZZLE PIT QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES GUARANTEED TO GIVE YOUR BRAIN A WORKOUT
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IN FOCUS “I don’t care two hoots about civilisation; I want to wander in the wild.” Dr Jane Goodall
- Jane Goodall is one of the world’s foremost primatologists and an active conservationist; her field work with chimpanzees in Tanzania led to new discoveries about the life and behaviour of the primates.
WIKIPEDIACOMMONS, GETTY
LEGACY Primatologist Dame Jane Morris Goodall (April 3, 1934) is considered as the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees. Goodall’s life’s work began when she approached the renowned paleoanthropologist, Louis Leakey. Using funds raised by him, she arrived at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in July 1960, at the age of 26, to study the Kasakela community of chimpanzees. Her lack of collegiate training prompted her unorthodox approach to documenting chimpanzee behaviour, such as christening her subjects with names, instead of arbitrarily assigning them numbers. Her first few weeks saw the chimpanzees harbour distrust of their human observers. It was when a male chimpanzee, christened David Greybeard by Goodall, approached the camp in search of food that she made her first breakthrough. Her studies challenged many existing notions of chimpanzee behaviour; dispelling the myth of the species as peaceful vegetarians, and also revealing their knack for tool making, previously thought to be a uniquely human trait. Goodall continues to work tirelessly for conservation and animal welfare.
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Goodall has been observing and researching chimpanzee behaviour since 1960
%*%:06,/08 t Goodall credits her love for animals to a stuffed chimpanzee toy named Jubilee given to her by her father when she was a child. She still owns Jubilee to this day. t Goodall was one of the only people to be allowed to study for a PhD at Cambridge University without first obtaining a BA or BSc. t A leading primatologist, Goodall has expressed belief in the existence of Bigfoot and the Yeti on several occasions. t Goodall nearly had her neck broken during an attack by a belligerent male chimpanzee named Frodo in 1989; her enthusiasm for conservation remained unaffected.
SCIENCE t HISTORY t NATURE t FOR THE CURIOUS MIND
