Cosmos Magazine 2015-12 2016-01

Issue 66

THE SCIENCE OF EVERYTHING

Dec—Jan 2016

WHAT SMART DOGS CAN TEACH US

522008 9 771832

AU $12.95 inc GST NZ $13.90 inc GST

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50

Celebrating the Father of Light 60

Solving the asthma riddle 70

Lessons from robot champs 78

Rock star. Leading a NASA mission to Mars makes QUT alumnus Dr Abigail Allwood a very big name on the world scientific stage. Her journey began with studying Earth Sciences, which led to a PhD and the discovery of some of the oldest evidence of life on earth in Western Australia. Now based in California, Abigail’s in charge of the ‘Planetary Instrument X-ray Lithochemistry’, or PIXL, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This instrument will use X-rays to study the chemistry of rock samples collected on the Mars 2020 mission. When you study science, technology, engineering or maths at QUT, the sky’s not the limit, it’s just the beginning. bcm:qust0108 CRICOS No. 00213J

CONTENTS — 3

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COSMOS 66 COVER STORY & FEATURES

CONTENTS PAGE 50

Geneticist’s friend Efforts to breed a smarter dog could help researchers understand which genes influence human behaviour. HAZEL FLYNN reports. CREDIT: MELANIE FAITH DOVE / PAUL MACPHAIL OF BELOKA KELPIES

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CELEBRATING THE FATHER OF LIGHT

SOLVING THE ASTHMA RIDDLE

WHAT THE ROBOTS TAUGHT US

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF WALLACE

James Clerk Maxwell is revered among physicists but otherwise little known, writes ROBYN ARIANRHOD.

Could farm animals protect us from asthma? ELIZABETH FINKEL explains the latest research.

A competition to make a more versatile robot has yielded striking results. ERICO GUIZZO and EVAN ACKERMAN report.

Vojtech Novotny studies New Guinea’s insects, but is now more interested in its people. He talks to JO CHANDLER.

4 — CONTENTS

Issue 66

COSMOS 66 DISPATCHES, ESSAYS & REVIEWS

UPFRONT EDITOR’S NOTE — Giving science a second chance 7 FEEDBACK — Cosmos readers share their views 8 LEADERS — The year of light; Asthma riddles 10

DIGEST NEWS — A closer look at the big stories in science 12 NOBEL PRIZES FOR SCIENCE — The winners 24 LAB TALK — Researchers’ latest discoveries 27 PAGE 38

TECHNOPHILE — A very fast tube 28 CLIMATE WATCH — Making sense of the latest data 30

Holodeck A global voyage to map plankton reveals a marine wonderland. By VIVIANE RICHTER.

VIEWPOINT BODY TALK — Preventing, not operating 34 ASTRO KATIE — Understanding symmetry 35 PHILOSOPHER’S CORNER — Replicating data 36 INCURABLE ENGINEER — Against a robot war 37

SPECTRUM ZEITGEIST — Aldrin’s Mars mission 97 SNAPSHOT — Fire and ice 100 WHY IS IT SO? — 124

SCIENCE FICTION — North 103 GADGETS AND GIZMOS — 3D printing at home 112 REVIEWS — Books, television 114 ABACUS — A natural mathematician? 120 SMOKE & MIRRORS — How to be a number wizard 122 WHY IS IT SO? — Why do we sneeze in the Sun? 124 MIND GAMES — Puzzles and prizes 128

SCIENCE FICTION — 103

PORTRAIT — Phong Nguyen, biologist 130

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6 — UPFRONT

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CONTRIBUTORS HAZEL FLYNN Hazel is a features writer, editor, non-fiction author, former publisher and radio producer and presenter. Her seventh book, Working Dog Heroes co-written with animal trainer Steve Austin, will be published by ABC Books in March. Previous titles include 2014’s History’s Most Daring Moments, published in the US and UK as Missions Impossible.

ROBYN ARIANRHOD Robyn is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University. Her research fields are general relativity and history of mathematical science, for which she is also a technical reviewer for the American Mathematical Society. Her books include Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the World through the Language of Mathematics and Young Einstein and the story of E=mc2.

JO CHANDLER Jo is an award-winning freelance Australian journalist and author. She has reported from sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea, remote Australia, Antarctica and Afghanistan. She has earned distinctions as an essayist, profile writer and narrative journalist, and is recognised for work across a range of areas including science, environment, health, human rights, women’s and children’s issues, aid and development.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Each member of the Cosmos Editorial Advisory Board has nominated a school to receive a year’s Cosmos for Schools subscription. ALAN FINKEL, Chairman Chancellor, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Sponsored school — Birdwood High School, Birdwood, SA, Australia

BUZZ ALDRIN Apollo 11 astronaut and entrepreneur, Los Angeles, USA Sponsored school — Mount Hebron Middle School, New Jersey, USA

MIKE ARCHER Professor of Biological Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Sponsored school — Sydney Girls High School, Sydney, NSW, Australia

PAUL DAVIES Director, BEYOND: Centre for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA Sponsored school — West Arnhem College, Jabiru, NT, Australia

BRYAN GAENSLER Director, Dunlap Institute

LOUISE LEAKEY Director of Public Education

JOANNE MANASTER Lectures in molecular

ROBYN WILLIAMS Host, The Science Show,

for Astronomy and Astrophysics, The University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Sponsored school — Gilroy Catholic College, Castle Hill, NSW, Australia

and Outreach, Turkana Basin Institute, Kenya. Research Professor of Anthropology, University of Stony Brook, New York, USA Sponsored school — St Andrew’s Senior School, Turi, Kenya

and bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, USA Sponsored school — Campus Middle School for Girls, Illinois, USA

ABC Radio National, Sydney, Australia Sponsored school — Byron Bay State School, Byron Bay, NSW, Australia

EDITORIAL Editor-in-chief ELIZABETH FINKEL Online editor JAMES MITCHELL CROW Deputy editor BELINDA SMITH Spectrum editor BILL CONDIE Production editor KATHERINE KIZILOS Art director ROBYN ADDERLY Designer ANTON BANULSKI Reporter VIVIANE RICHTER Fiction editor CAT SPARKS Editor-at-large WILSON DA SILVA ADVERTISING Advertising manager KAREN TAYLOR +61 414 218 575 [email protected] MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS Digital marketing coordinator TESS WARDLE Communications advisor ANDREW BRADLEY +61 403 777 137 [email protected] Media relations BRIAN JOHNSON +61 2 6582 3311 DISTRIBUTION GORDON & GOTCH Australia — 1300 650 666 New Zealand — +61 9 979 3018 SUBSCRIPTION & SALES Subscriptions manager CHANTELLE VIANI Publisher’s assistant JACQUIE SMITH +61 3 9829 0407 [email protected] cosmosmagazine.com/shop OFFICE CONTACT Website cosmosmagazine.com Editorial inquires [email protected] +61 3 9829 0408 PO BOX 254, Toorak Victoria 3142 Australia

Published by Cosmos Media Pty Ltd ACN 137 559 187 ABN 65 137 559 187 Chairman & executive publisher ALAN FINKEL Director DAVED LAMBERT Associate publisher WAYNE GIBBINGS Cosmos – The Science of Everything™ is published six times a year (February, April, June, August, October and December) by Cosmos Media Pty Ltd. Copyright © 2015-2016 Cosmos Media Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner or form without written permission. Printed in Australia by Webstar. Cosmos does not accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, original artwork or any other material. The views expressed in Cosmos are not necessarily those of the editors or publishers. Cosmos is protected by trademarks in Australia and the USA. Cosmos Media offices operate on 100% GreenPower, and our printers conform to the ISO-14001 environmental management standard. Circulations Audit Board September 2014 — Average Net Distribution 18226 66MAG1115

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EDITOR’S NOTE Redemption of science EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK , science seems to be losing its good name. Cases of fraud regularly sizzle across the pages of Nature and Science. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Even where there’s no outright misbehaving, a disturbing number of published papers are probably wrong. Over the last decade, psychology has taken the rap as dozens of high-profile studies could not be validated by independent researchers. You might put that down to a problem of the “soft sciences”. Not so. Consider the gravitational waves that catapulted Harvard astronomer John Kovac into the limelight in March 2014, only to disappear into the dust of the Milky Way a year later. Most of us can take or leave the fortunes of theoretical physics. But when it comes to the billions of dollars being spent researching cancer cures – that’s another matter. In 2012 cancer drug developers at the company Amgen, found that only 11% of the published research they combed through was worth the paper it was written on. So what’s the problem with science? Are people just breaking the rules or is there something wrong with the rule book? Probably both. Scientists live by a crushing dictum: publish or perish. That’s a powerful reason to pump out papers, ready or not. On the other hand, some say the rulebook needs updating. These days scientists are spoiled by an avalanche of data like never before. But big data needs

ELIZABETH FINKEL Editor-in-chief

different statistics – the time honoured cut off for statistical significance, a p-value of less than 0.05 just doesn’t cut it. Comparing gigabytes of DNA data, for instance, requires a p-value of less than one in 10 million. Even so statistical methods are easy to manipulate. There are even new names for this practice – p-hacking or data dredging. Philosopher Karl Popper says science should be self-correcting. If a theory is wrong, then experiments will falsify it. This sounds simple, but the problem is there’s little incentive for researchers to spend their time testing the experiments of others. That’s not how you get a paper in Science. Until now, that is. Last August Science magazine published a paper that re-tested 100 experiments. All had been published in the top psychology journals over the past few years. A team led by Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, and 270 volunteer experts, attempted to replicate the findings. Only 40% of the experiments could be replicated. The fact that most psychology studies were wrong attracted a huge media storm. But some psychologists hail this as a great step forward. “This is how science works,” Joshua Correll, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, whose work could not be replicated, told Science magazine. “How else will we converge on the truth?” This important initiative, known as “The Reproducibility Project”, was generously funded by philanthropy. Another reproducibility project is now examining cancer research papers. Nosek has shown how, with the good will of working scientists and philanthropic support, we may yet redeem the good name of science.

ISSUE 66 Issue 66

66

THE SCIENCE OF EVERYTHING

Dec—Jan 2016

THE SCIENCE OF EVERYTHING 66 522008

AU $12.95 inc GST NZ $13.90 inc GST

9 771832

December—January 2016

50

c66_001_COVER.indd 1

Solving the asthma riddle 70

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WHAT SMART DOGS CAN TEACH US Celebrating the Father of Light 60

COVER The cover shows a kelpie called Zoe. Kelpies are highly prized for their intelligence and work ethic. A greater understanding of canine genetics might help unlock understanding of the human

Lessons from robot champs 78

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8 — UPFRONT

Issue 66

FEEDBACK WRITE TO US Letters to the editor must include the writer’s full name, address and daytime telephone number. They may be edited for clarity and length. Please do not send attachments. SEND TO [email protected] Cosmos Magazine, PO Box 254, Toorak Victoria 3142 Australia facebook.com/CosmosMagazine @CosmosMagazine

EINSTEIN IS STILL INSPIRING One hundred years on, how many are there among us who: (a) have grown to be conceptually comfortable with general relativity’s implications and (b) have come to learn anywhere near fully about its widespread, multi-topical insights? Keep going on it. There can almost never be enough attention paid to this astonishing intellectual tour de force. — JOHN WEXLER Via email

KNOWLEDGE PROTECTS OUR FUTURE I enjoy Cosmos as much as Scientific American and look forward to their arrival. Fifty years ago I was lucky to have an engineer father, who encouraged my interest in how the world worked. My parents took me to see early efforts at fusion, steel plants, breweries, electricity generators and aircraft. The world became more interesting than sport and passing tests. The seed planted at so young an age continues my love of science at 70. We are mostly familiar with the results of CO2 pollution, but how familiar are we with nitrogen oxide emissions, sulfur dioxide emissions, carbon monoxide emissions, small particle health effects and toxic effects of some chemicals and foodstuffs? Knowledge protects our future. — VIC CRITOPH Via email

A READER’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE BIG BANG In the last issue Vance Grey asked what preceded the Big Bang. Deputy editor James Mitchell Crow explained our incomplete understanding of the origin of the Universe stating “all the matter in the Universe was squeezed into a ‘singularity’ of infinite density”. But why did it have to be matter, which we instinctively equate with volume? We, again instinctively, find it very difficult to reconcile all matter being squeezed into a point taking up no volume. But matter and energy are equivalent. And energy takes up no space. I am no physicist. I find it more satisfying to imagine the singularity being a point of vast energy which, come the Big Bang, “exploded” out and was converted into matter which now fills the Universe. — ALAN MOSKWA Joslin, South Australia

ANOTHER LOOK AT CARBS AND MICE In the article “Carbs earn their place at the table” (Cosmos 64, page 36) Norman Swan describes a mice-based study and says: “The best diet balance of them all turned out to be what the mice selected for themselves – namely around 55% of calories as carbohydrates, around 23% as protein and 22% as fat. That happens to be pretty close to what we call the Mediterranean diet.” The Mediterranean diet is arguably

more than a range of macronutrient distributions and is one whose dietary benefit is based on food quality rather than mere metrics. It is high in monounsaturated fats and omega-3 polyunsaturated fats provided through sources including nuts, olive oil and fatty fish. But the mice referred to by Dr Swan relied on a single source of fat – soybean oil. This is low in monounsaturated fats and high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fats – the antithesis of the Mediterranean diet. Also, the source of carbohydrate the mice were fed was a mix of cornstarch and sucrose. This is a mix of highly processed carbohydrates and sugar. It is precisely what the author said the animals were not eating! Finally, the small animal experience is so removed from that of free-living humans that their use in translation of nutrition evidence to practical advice should only be performed with extreme caution.

— KIERON ROONEY Senior lecturer, exercise and sport science, University of Sydney

REPLY FROM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ELIZABETH FINKEL: Rooney’s criticism is well-taken. Nevertheless the focus of the study was a comparison between high-protein and high-carb diets. The conclusion that the high-protein diets were the least healthy remains valid for these mice – and is also supported by other studies.

UPFRONT— 9

COSMOS

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10 — UPFRONT

Issue 66

LEADERS ISSUE 66 FAREWELL TO THE YEAR OF LIGHT UNESCO picked 2015 to celebrate something we mostly take for granted: light. It has been a worthwhile exercise. With a bit of reflection you realise that, thanks to light, we know our Universe from its furthest reaches to the microcosmos under the lens. Harnessing light has transformed medicine from the first use of X-rays and lasers to the dazzling techniques we now have for scanning the body. And of course it has hooked up the planet with fibre optic cables that transmit tsunamis of digital data as light pulses. But what is light? The question has been pondered for millennia. In 1862 a poetic, amiable Scotsman by the name of James Clerk Maxwell gave us the answer. It was a tumultuous period in physics.

Newton’s legacy was overwhelming. His laws governing gravity had demystified the motions of heavenly bodies and predicted the comings and goings of comets. Gravity, it seemed, required no intermediary: it acted instantaneously at a distance. But a century later there was a new puzzle. Electricity and magnetism were not the separate entities that they at first appeared. Rather they were two sides of the same coin – a new force known as electromagnetism. The established physicists of the day, dubbing themselves Newtonians, considered electromagnetism needed no new mathematical explanation: it too could be described by the sort of maths that had served for gravity. But Michael Faraday, the man who showed that a moving magnet induced an electric current, could not accept that electromagnetism acted without

an intermediary; rather he proposed that the force must be carried by a field. The self-educated Faraday barely knew algebra; he could not give his flimsy idea the mathematical backbone it required. Maxwell took up the cause. Not only was he a gifted mathematician, he had a conviction, shared by all good writers, that to capture reality one must dig deep to find the right language. In the end it came down to four equations. And a revelation. Maxwell’s equations described a wave. Not any old wave: a light wave. In the time-honoured tradition of physics, complexity had resolved into a beautiful simplicity. Our Universe was awash with electromagnetic waves of varied frequencies. Light was a part of that spectrum.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR Walk into any classroom, and chances are one in 10 of the students will have a puffer in their pocket. From childhood on, asthma is the scourge of modern societies and Australia is one of the most affected countries of the world. Yet despite decades of research our understanding of the disease is surprisingly foggy. Even something that should be as straightforward as defining the long-term trend is fraught. Most developed countries reported a sharply rising incidence between the 1960s and 1990s, in some cases more than doubling. Some of that spectacular rise could have been a medical fad that slapped a diagnosis of asthma on to what had once been wheezy bronchitis. Even so, researchers are convinced that part of the rise was real. Since the 1990s asthma rates started slowly declining – though they are still high. But they are now on the rise in developing countries. Researchers have struggled to explain why asthma rates rise in modernising

countries. They have also tried to find ways to stop that rise. In the 2000s, some doctors tried to forestall childhood asthma by reducing babies’ exposure to house dust. It didn’t work and in some cases, it made things worse. Meanwhile, other doctors were persuaded by an opposite logic, the “hygiene hypothesis”. In this view, cleanliness was the problem. In cleaner environments, the immune systems of children had nothing to do, and were reacting against innocent items such as dust mites or cat fur. While the logic was compelling, for 20 years the hygiene hypothesis didn’t deliver much beyond a vague understanding that being too clean was bad. Now the hygiene hypothesis seems to be coming into its own. It is being backed up by a new understanding of the importance of the microbes we carry around with us – our microbiome. One line of evidence comes from farm studies: children growing up with animals have low rates of asthma.

Asthma inhalers are common today. CREDIT: BALLYSCANLON / GETTY IMAGES

Even scrapings of dust from animal barns – laden with bacteria – will protect mice from asthma. Another line of evidence comes from comparing the microbes in the bowels of babies who do get asthma to those that don’t. They differ! Could we stop the epidemic of asthma that accompanies modernisation? It looks like the answer lies within our microbiome.

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“WE LOOK AT SCIENCE AS SOMETHING VERY ELITE, WHICH ONLY A FEW PEOPLE CAN LEARN. THAT’S JUST NOT TRUE. YOU JUST HAVE TO START EARLY AND GIVE KIDS A FOUNDATION. KIDS LIVE UP, OR DOWN, TO EXPECTATIONS.” — MAE JEMISON CREDIT: NASA / ROGER RESSMEYER / CORBIS

Issue 66

DIGEST — 13

COSMOS

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE BIG STORIES

DIGEST

PHYSICS

Can buckyballs make any metal magnetic? A layer of carbon can bestow the powers of magnetism. VIVIANE RICHTER explains. In a feat of modern day alchemy, scientists have turned non-magnetic metals into magnets. Oscar Cespedes at the University of Leeds and his team published their magnet recipe in Nature in August. The key ingredient? A dusting of carbon.

SPACE – The Universe is slowly fading away 15 LIFE SCIENCES – Can fish oil prevent schizophrenia? 16 SPACE – Could salty Martian streams harbour life? 17 LIFE SCIENCES – Recipe for a bee vaccine 18 EARTH SCIENCES – Probing the secrets of middle Earth 2O

A model of a buckyball, a sphere of carbon atoms. Buckyballs can suck electrons away from metals, turning the metal magnetic. CREDIT: SCIENCE PICTURE CO / GETTY IMAGES

LIFE SCIENCES – Why cats have slit-shaped pupils 22 NOBELS – The science prizes explained 24 TECHNOPHILE – A very fast tube 28

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“This is a new way of making magnets – it opens up a new field!” says Naresh Dalal from Florida State University, who also researches magnetic materials. Magnets are crucial in the age of big data. We’ve generated almost as much data in the past two years as during all of human history. To generate and store it, devices such as smartphones and computer hard drives use tiny, powerful magnets that store data as magnetic alignments – or “bits”. The magnets gain their strength from rare Earth elements such as neodymium. But mining these elements is an intensive process, requiring vats of industrial solvents. To reduce that environmental price tag, scientists have been looking for alternative ways to create powerful magnets. And that involves going to the source of magnetism – electrons. You can think of the electrons in an atom as behaving like planets orbiting a Sun. They make their way around the atom’s nucleus while also spinning on their own axis. The spin can be clockwise or anti-clockwise, or “up” or “down”. As they spin, each electron generates its own tiny magnetic field. A block of metal becomes a magnet when most of its electrons spin in the same direction, combining their tiny magnetic fields. You can induce this alignment by holding another magnet close to the metal. But at room temperature only iron,

We need an alternative to magnetic rare Earth elements. CREDIT: KIYOSHI OTA / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

Issue 66

Magnetism results when electrons spin in the same direction. ILLUSTRATION: JEFFREY PHILLIPS cobalt and nickel retain the alignment after the magnet is removed. Electrons in other metals quickly fall back into their dishevelled spinning state – the interaction between their spins is not strong enough to keep the alignment intact. Cespedes and his team wondered if they could coax those obstinate electrons into aligning their spin – and staying there. For assistance they turned to buckminsterfullerene, or “buckyballs”, molecules of 60 carbon atoms shaped like a soccer ball. Buckyballs are extremely stable – so stable some astronomers think they may have delivered carbon to Earth from space. Their electrons are trapped between the atoms of the “ball” leaving few on the surface. This electron-poor surface sucks up electrons from other sources like a sponge. Though not magnetic themselves, could these sponges also coax electrons to align their spins in one direction? To test this idea, the team took a non-magnetic wafer of copper, merely 20-atoms thick, and pelted it with buckyballs until they’d built up a coating six layers thick. Then they popped this material in an ultra-sensitive magnetometer to see if the copper-carbon combination was magnetised.

They measured a slight, but definite, magnetism from the metal. “OK, nobody is going to believe this,” thought Cespedes. “We’ll have to measure another 100 samples.” So they did, and the results were consistent. “This is the first universal method that you can apply to any metal to try and make it magnetic,” he says.

SCIENTISTS HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR ALTERNATIVE WAYS TO CREATE POWERFUL MAGNETS THAT HAVE THE CAPACITY TO STORE DATA. Their copper magnet was 30 times weaker than iron, so it wouldn’t stick to your fridge. And the magnetism only lasted for a couple of weeks. While the team is still trying to work out exactly how the buckyballs exert their effects, it is confident it can make stronger magnets by tweaking the metal or changing the buckyball layer to other stable carbon-based molecules. Dalal says the discovery will put buckyballs on the data storage map, but other applications for these magnets are hard to predict. “A new method can lead to something we really can’t even imagine.”

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SPACE

The Universe is slowly fading away Researchers have predicted how long we have until the last star in the Universe finally flickers out. By BELINDA SMITH . Astronomers peering out into the deepest corners of the Universe have found its expiration date, stamped into the light from distant galaxies. By analysing the brightness of that light, the astronomers discovered the Universe today is only half as energetic as it was two billion years ago. But we don’t need to worry just yet; our 13.8-billionyear-old Universe is still in its first flush of youth. It will take another 100 billion years for the Universe to become cold, dark and then “nod off for an eternal doze”, says University of Western Australia astronomer Simon Driver and his colleagues. They presented their finding at the general assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Hawaii in August. We have known that the Universe is running out of energy since the 1990s. Nobel prize winning astrophysicists Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess showed that after the Big Bang, the expansion of the Universe was not slowing down – it was accelerating. The energy ledger of our Universe shows a gain when gas clouds collapse into stars and galaxies merge, or a loss when stars explode into supernovae. But as the Universe expands, the debits outweigh the gains. And the faster the expansion, the faster the energy balance runs down. When gas clouds and galaxies become too dispersed, stars will eventually stop forming. A further threat comes from supermassive black holes sucking in matter and energy, taking it out of the equation. To calculate the Universe’s likely expiration date, Driver and his team used

10 telescopes to measure 200,000 galaxies at 21 light wavelengths – making this survey the most thorough examination of light reaching the Earth ever conducted. Comparing the light reaching us from nearby and distant galaxies (which we see as they were millions or billions of years ago, because of the time their light takes to reach us), the team found that light at all wavelengths had faded over the past couple of billion years. Wherever they looked, the Universe was losing energy. “It’s moving inexorably towards a heat death,” says University of Melbourne theoretical astrophysicist Katie Mack. Aside from the Universe’s end date, the new measurement will allow “us to measure the evolution of galactic components”, ranging from stars to dust clouds, says Swinburne University astrophysicist Alister Graham. So is the Universe safe for the next 100 billion years? Not necessarily. “There’s also another scenario – the Big Rip,” Mack says, which could bring about the death of the Universe.

IT’S HARD TO SAY WHETHER WE ARE DOOMED TO RIP APART OR MERELY DRIFT INTO THE COLD ETERNAL NIGHT. In contrast to normal matter, the density of dark energy – the mysterious energy source that is causing the Universe to expand ever faster – does not appear to be lessening as the Universe expands. If it increases – even by a little – galaxies would be torn asunder, then stars, planets, molecules, atoms and subatomic particles – until every subatomic particle was infinitely far from every other. Because we know so little about dark energy, it’s hard to say whether we are doomed to rip apart or merely drift into that dark cold eternal night. In our immediate neighbourhood there’s likely to be at least one major spectacle before then. Roughly seven billion years from now, our ageing Sun will expand into a red giant, engulfing and vaporising the inner Solar System. So even if humans still inhabit the Earth, they won’t see the end of the Universe anyway. Probably for the best, really.

BY THE NUMBERS

BIG TREE COUNT

3 TRILLION

The number of trees according to a paper published in Nature in September. The study measured tree density from the ground, whereas previous estimates were based on satellite images.

7 TIMES

The new survey method shows the Earth has many more trees than previous estimates predicted.

15 BILLION

Approximately the number of trees cut down each year.

422:1 The approximate ratio of trees to humans today.

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Issue 66

IN BRIEF

ANTIMATTER PUZZLE

LIFE SCIENCES

Can fish oil prevent schizophrenia? Omega-3 fatty acids could stop the onset of full-blown psychosis, according to an Australian trial. VIVIANE RICHTER reports.

Anti-protons are glued together as strongly as ordinary protons, an experiment showed. The Big Bang produced matter and antimatter in equal amounts. Yet matter vastly outnumbers anti-matter. Why? One theory was that while protons are glued together into stable nuclei by the strong force, perhaps anti-protons were less well-glued? Single anti-matter particles may be more vulnerable to annihilation – the result when matter meets anti-matter. To test this, Aihong Tang, a Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist and collaborators smashed atoms together in Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, creating a shower of particles including some anti-protons. As reported in Nature in November, when they measured the force between the anti-protons, the attraction between anti-protons was the same as between ordinary protons. “We’re still in the dark”, says Swinburne’s Alan Duffy. — COSMOS MAGAZINE EDITORS

Could schizophrenia be nipped in the bud? Yes, according to a seven-year study by Paul Amminger and colleagues at the University of Melbourne. And the wonder drug to halt this terrifying disease? Fish oil. That remarkable conclusion was published in Nature Communications in August. Psychiatrist Vaughan Carr, chief of Sydney’s Schizophrenia Research Institute, calls the work “extraordinary”. But adds, “I’d like to see someone independently replicate it”. Schizophrenics may hear voices, fear their thoughts aren’t private and lose their drive and ability to experience joy. “It’s like a person loses their life,” says Amminger. Around one in 100 people develop the disease, most often between the ages of 15 and 30. Antipsychotic medications can stop the hallucinations, but also have side-effects such as weight gain and drowsiness. But omega-3 fatty acids found at high concentrations in fish oil don’t have these disadvantages. They have been earmarked as a possible treatment since the 1990s when researchers suggested schizophrenia might be triggered by a deficit of phospholipids in nerve membranes – omega 3 fatty acids are precursors for these molecules. Since then, research has found schizophrenia patients have about half as much omega-3 in their red blood cell membranes as healthy individuals. Since schizophrenia often begins in the teen years with early warning symptoms such as paranoia, Amminger wondered if a course of fish oil could stop the disease from progressing. Between 2004 and

2007, his team put their theory to the test. They administered a 12-week course of 1.2 grams of omega-3 daily to 41 young people aged between 13 and 25 who had a family history of schizophrenia and had begun to experience mild symptoms. At the same time another group of 40, with the same family history and early symptoms, took a placebo. A year after treatment, only two of the omega-3 supplemented group had developed full-blown psychosis, compared to 11 in the placebo group. According to the latest follow-up study, after seven years the psychotic symptoms were still significantly reduced in the supplemented group. While 16 individuals (40%) in the placebo group had developed psychosis, only four (9.8%) of the omega-3 takers had succumbed. Reducing the risk of full-blown schizophrenia by four-fold is impressive. But Carr points out the study was small, and similar studies have not found this magnitude of effect. “It’s either an extraordinarily effective treatment that needs to be looked at seriously, or it’s a false positive finding,” he says. Amminger says his group and others are already repeating the trials. He agrees it’s too early to brand omega-3 as a miracle cure, but given it has no side-effects, he says patients with early psychosis symptoms may as well try a month or two of daily omega-3 supplements to see if there are any benefits. He is also investigating whether omega-3 can help relieve depression. How might omega-3 forestall schizophrenia? Amminger thinks the supplement works in two ways. It may provide crucial building blocks for the still developing neurons of adolescents. It also appears to reduce inflammation that can damage neurons. The study might also improve the quality control of commercial fish oil supplements: Amminger says the amounts of omega-3 in these capsules has been found to be much lower than the levels claimed. So while trials continue, Amminger recommends taking the supplement directly from the source. “If you can eat fish three to four times a week, you’re in the right ballpark.”

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SPACE

Could salty Martian streams harbour life? Microbes in Chile’s Atacama Desert might hold clues about life on Mars. VIVIANE RICHTER reports. In 1895 Percival Lowell pointed his telescope at Mars and saw canals. Ever since, Earthlings have debated whether the Red Planet has running water. With great fanfare, this September NASA concluded it does. And where there’s water, there may be life. But what form might it take and where should we look? Astrobiologists are using clues from Earth’s cold deserts to find out. The smoking gun for water on Mars was dark streaks, hundreds of metres long, that decorated the walls of canyons and crater walls, growing and shrinking with the seasons. Researchers first noticed these streaks in 2010, in images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But what was their composition? To find out Matt Chojnacki, a planetary geologist from the University of Arizona, and colleagues, had to analyse data from another type of onboard camera – a spectrometer that detects chemical signatures in the rocks. Their stunning conclusion was published in Nature Geoscience in September. The streaks were a brine, flowing downhill in the warmer months. They were composed of hydrated salts, a mix of chlorates and perchlorates. The spectrometer detected the salts in dark streaks in walls of the Hale, Palikir and Horowitz craters, and a large canyon called Coprates Chasma, but did not detect them in the surrounding terrain. While scientists didn’t doubt that water flowed on Mars in the distant past, finding fresh flows is startling. The planet has lost most of its atmosphere – it’s a mere 1% that of Earth. That means any water reaching the surface should rapidly

Dark narrow streaks on the walls of Garni crater on Mars are believed to be formed by flows of briny liquid water. CREDIT: NASA / JPL / UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA evaporate. But because it’s mixed with salt, it evaporates more slowly. Salt also lowers the water’s freezing point – the streaks are found in a region that reaches minus 23°C even in the warmer months. If liquid water still exists, might life have defied the odds too? Four billion years ago Mars, like Earth, had lakes, oceans, a warmer atmosphere and a protective magnetic field. All have since been lost. But if life took hold in these hospitable conditions, it may not have disappeared; it most likely retreated underground, says Malcolm Walter, an astrobiologist at the University of New South Wales. “It’s impossible to sterilise a planet.”

IF WE FIND SOMETHING ALIVE ON MARS, HOW DO WE KNOW IT’S NOT A CONTAMINANT FROM EARTH? But could life exist in such cold, dry, salty conditions? Yes. In 2012 researchers from Spain’s Centre of Astrobiology discovered a “microbial oasis” two metres beneath the surface of Chile’s cold dry Atacama desert. These microbes – several species of bacteria and archaea – can cling to life thanks to salty crystals in the sand. The crystals suck moisture out of the air percolating through the sand. This condenses on their surface as a thin liquid film that is enough to sustain the microbes.

If that works for Atacama microbes, perhaps it could work for Martians. The possibility that Earthly and Martian microbes might not be dissimilar raises a problem. If we find something, how do we know it’s not a contaminant from Earth? A spacecraft’s surfaces have so far proved impossible to sterilise. Meanwhile, there’s still a lot left to discover about Mars’ briny flows. One theory is the streaks are subterranean water seeping up to the surface. But another possibility, that Chojnacki is investigating, is that the dried up salts on Martian slopes absorb water from the thin atmosphere to form the salty streams – as happens in the Atacama desert. The team doesn’t yet know the full extent of the briny flows. The orbiter only observes the region at 4 pm local solar time – by which time the streaks have been warmed by the Sun all day and much of the water would have evaporated, Chojnacki says. “There’s probably a lot more there than what we’ve been able to document.” The next Mars orbiter mission, scheduled to launch in 2022, should provide more information. Before then, in 2020, NASA will launch its next Mars rover. Walter, for one, is betting we will find life on the Red Planet. “Mars and Earth were very similar more than three billion years ago; if life is here, why not on Mars?”

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LIFE SCIENCES

Saving the world’s crops with a vaccine for bees Researchers have learned how queen bees immunise their young. Beekeepers might be able to exploit the same trick to protect their hives. VIVIANE RICHTER reports. Could vaccinating baby bees reverse the global decline in bee numbers? Dalial Freitak at the University of Helsinki and her colleagues think so. They found a common yolk protein that nourishes the developing bee larvae also kickstarts their immune system. Their discovery was published in PLOS Pathogens in July. “Finding a link between this molecule and what’s happening in the field – that is extremely exciting,” says Boris Baer,

Bee eggs, like the one above, contain a protein that boosts larvae immunity. CREDIT: STEPHEN DALTON / GETTY IMAGES

Issue 66

director of the University of Western Australia’s Centre for Integrative Bee Research. Reports of rapid declines in bee populations date back as far as the Roman Empire. But this time it’s different, says Baer. “We don’t see bee populations recovering,” he says. In the US, for instance, the number of managed honeybee colonies has declined from six million in 1947 to 2.5 million today. The global phenomenon dubbed “colony collapse disorder” threatens our food supply. Bees are our main crop pollinators – if they go, so might we. The general view is that colony collapse disorder is a perfect storm of pesticides, particularly neonicotinoids, and pests, particularly Varroa mites. These mites suck the blood-like hemolymph of bees. In response, the European Union restricted neonicotinoids in 2013 while beekeepers try to control Varroa mites with beefirendly chemicals. Freitak and her colleagues have taken a different tack and explored the natural immunity of bees. Scientists have known since the mid2000s that from the moment they hatch baby bees can resist pathogens such as E. coli and fungi such as yeast. Baby mammals acquire immunity from antibodies transferred in the mother’s milk. It turns out bee mothers pass on some type of immunity to the egg. While the details are still poorly understood, this resembles the “innate immunity” that humans also carry, but is more primitive. In humans, certain cells recognise fragments of bacteria, and that elicits a rapid defence response. In bees, the first step to triggering the immune response also requires a fragment of the pathogen to be transferred into the egg. Freitak had a hunch that vitellogenin, the major protein found in bee eggs (and in the egg yolk of fish and birds), might play a role. To test that idea, they removed six egg-laden queen bee ovaries and placed them in a dish containing bacterial particles tagged with fluorescent molecules. The bacterial particles stayed put outside the eggs. But when vitellogenin was added to the mix, those particles were shuttled into the eggs. Freitak thinks the bee’s natural

immunisation cycle starts with forager bees, which pick up pathogens as they collect pollen and nectar for the queen’s royal jelly. Her gut enzymes break down the pathogens and the fragments move into energy stores known as “fat bodies” in her abdomen and head. This is also where vitellogenin is made. As the vitellogenin moves from the fat bodies to the ovaries, it transfers the pathogen fragments too. The whole mix is deposited into unlaid eggs. After the queen lays her eggs, the developing larvae feast on the mix. The fragments trigger the bee’s immune system to make antimicrobial peptides such as apidaecin that target those particular pathogens, so that when the larvae emerge from the egg, they’re already armed.

REPORTS OF RAPID DECLINES OF BEE POPULATIONS DATE BACK AS FAR AS THE ROMAN EMPIRE. BUT THIS TIME IT’S DIFFERENT. “WE DON’T SEE BEE POPULATIONS RECOVERING,” SAYS RESEARCHER BORIS BAER. Could Freitak’s discovery offer a way for us to protect bees? Her team has already filed a patent, and begun field trials, for a bee vaccine against American foulbrood. It is the most destructive bacterial infection of honeybee larvae, turning them into an infectious goo. When the worker bees clean up, they spread the parasite to the entire hive. The infection can take out a queen and her hive before she can digest the bacterium and immunise the next generation. The bacteria also produce tough spores so the only solution for beekeepers is to burn the hive before the disease spreads. Freitak’s vaccine contains predigested fragments of the bacterium that commercial beekeepers can add to bee food. The bacterium will end up in the queen’s dinner, and then, thanks to vitellogenin, inside all her eggs. Freitak hopes the vaccine could be given as a treatment on demand. “It would work like a yearly flu shot,” she says.

COSMOS

A new bee vaccine aims to protect honeybee larvae as they develop into adults. CREDIT: ANAND VARMA / NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

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Issue 66

The Borexino detector in Italy detects geoneutrinos from the interior of the Earth. CREDIT: VOLKER STEGER / GETTY IMAGES

EARTH SCIENCES

Probing the secrets of middle Earth Physicists are probing the planet’s inner workings by trapping antimatter particles from deep within the Earth’s mantle. BELINDA SMITH explains. The middle layer of our planet makes up 84% of the Earth’s volume, but we’ve little idea what’s in there, how much heat it produces, or how it affects the plate tectonics our planet depends on. That’s about to change thanks to a technique that measures ghostly anti-particles slipping out of their radioactive graves in the mantle. An international team at Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory published the calculations in Physical Review D in August. Their sums suggest that more than half our planet’s internal heat comes from radioactive decay within the mantle. The findings have been welcomed by researchers eager to discover more about

the mantle. “We know more about the heavens than what’s happening below,” says Zheng-Xiang Li, geoscientist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. We do know that the mantle is 2,900 kilometres thick. But efforts to drill through the crust – which is 40 kilometres thick, on average – to reach the mantle have failed. One attempt was made by Russian engineers drilling the Kola Superdeep Borehole, on Russia’s Kola peninsula. They drilled for 20 years but as the drills neared the mantle, the intense heat wrecked the machinery. Funding ran out in 2005 and the site has been abandoned since 2008. So geologists use indirect techniques to make their investigations. The mantle (and crust) contains radioactive uranium and thorium. As they decay into lighter elements, they emit ghostly geoneutrinos that pass through rock as if it wasn’t there. You might already be familiar with a closely related particle – the neutrino. These uncharged, inert, ghostly particles are produced by fusion reactions in the Sun, distant supernovae and other cosmic events. Because they rarely interact with other particles, they are exceptionally hard to detect. Geoneutrinos, their antimatter equivalent, are equally elusive. (Antimatter is composed of antiparticles. They have the same mass as particles of

ordinary matter but an opposite charge.) When a neutron inside a thorium or uranium atom decays, a proton, an electron and a geoneutrino are emitted. While protons and electrons are everywhere, the comparitively rare geoneutrino is the perfect marker for measuring remote radioactivity.

EFFORTS TO DRILL THROUGH THE EARTH’S CRUST – WHICH IS 40 KILOMETRES THICK, ON AVERAGE – HAVE FAILED. To pick up geoneutrinos’ infrequent interactions, detectors must be big and well shielded from more interactive stray particles. Cue the Borexino instrument at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. “It’s the best performing tool we have to study the interior of the Earth,” says Aldo Ianni, a physicist at Canfranc Laboratory in Spain as well as a member of the Borexino team. It consists of an 18-metre steel box buried 800 metres underground. When a geoneutrino slips past the layers of steel and pure water designed to keep other particles out, it eventually reaches a central tank filled with a hydrogen-rich fluid. In this environment, if a geoneutrino crashes into a proton, they produce

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a positron (an electron with a positive charge) and a neutron. The positron immediately annihilates and as it does, it puffs out a burst of light picked up by super-sensitive photodetectors placed around the tank. The neutron, on the other hand, is captured by a hydrogen atom, which becomes the slightly heavier deuterium. As it slots the extra neutron in its nucleus it shoots out a gamma ray – which is also spotted by photodetectors. The time delay between the annihilating positron’s flash and the gamma ray is a reliable 250 microseconds, “a very strong signature” that a geoneutrino has been captured, Ianni says. Ianni’s team picked up 77 flashes with the geoneutrino signature from December 2007 to March 2015. Some 53 were traced to nearby nuclear reactors (a known geoneutrino source). That left 24. Crust radioactivity accounted for 12 flashes leaving 12 unaccounted for. The researchers believe there’s a 98% chance at least some of these came from the mantle. Based on the energies of the mantle geoneutrinos they spotted, the team could calculate that 50-70% of the heat the Earth emits into space is generated by

radioactivity in the mantle – up to twice as much as previous estimates. Knowing how much heat the mantle produces may allow geophysicists to one day map how heat is transferred from the Earth’s hot liquid core via the mantle to the crust. Because motion in the mantle tugs on the overlying crust, mapping this flow could give new insights into the processes driving plate tectonics and earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and lava flows, says Li.

The Borexino researchers plan to run the detector for another three to five years, until the light-sensitive photodetectors age. There’s more data to come though, both from Borexino and the KamLAND antineutrino detector, buried in an old mine shaft under the Japanese Alps. And a new detector – the SNO+ underground experiment in Ontario, Canada – is under construction. The more the better, Ianni says, to “combine data and disentangle the models, and build a bridge between particle physics and geophysics”.

Hydrogen nucleus Neutron decays in Earth’s mantle

p

Positron

+

H

n n g

p+ Gamma ray

Geoneutrino travels through the Earth’s crust into the Borexino tank

p+ e KEY

250 microseconds

_

p+

Proton

DEPRIVED CHICKS EAT MORE

50-70% OF THE HEAT THE EARTH EMITS INTO SPACE IS GENERATED BY RADIOACTIVITY IN THE MANTLE.

A geoneutrino sets off a chain reaction culminating in two flashes of light 250 microseconds apart.

GEONEUTRINO SIGNATURE

IN BRIEF

e-

Electron

n

Neutron

How well a starling feeds a chick determines the chick’s weight for life. CREDIT: HYDROMET / GETTY IMAGES

Baby starlings that grow up with food shortages become fatter in later life than starlings that were well-fed when they were chicks, researchers have discovered. “What we have shown is that birds that struggled against larger brothers or sisters for food early on were keener on finding food and tended to overeat when they became adults,” says Clare Andrews of the Newcastle University Centre for Behaviour and Evolution and one of the leaders of the study. She said the research may hold some lessons for humans who are overweight. “There’s evidence that obesity is common in people lacking a reliable supply of food,” she said. “Perhaps people too have evolved to eat more and take more interest in food if they are worried where their next meal will come from.” — COSMOS MAGAZINE EDITORS

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LIFE SCIENCES

The reason cats have slit-shaped pupils New research suggests pupil shape relates to whether an animal is a predator or prey. BELINDA SMITH reports. Ever wondered why cats have vertical slitshaped pupils, while sheep have horizontal bars? A recent study suggests it has to do with their place in the food chain. Martin Banks from the University of California in Berkeley and colleagues examined the eyes of more than 200 land animals and found their status as predator or prey correlated to the shape of their pupils. Their findings were published in Science Advances in August. Depending on the light, the shape of a domestic cat’s pupil changes from vertical slit to alluring almond to almost fully round. Like opening or closing theatre curtains, muscles on either side of the cat’s pupil open the slit wide or cause it to narrow. Overall a cat’s pupils can expand 135-fold to perform like built-in night vision goggles. By contrast human pupils expand by a factor of 15.

Vertical slit-shaped pupils can be found in predators that hunt by day or night. CREDIT: A DAVID WANG WORK / GETTY IMAGES

The slit-shaped pupil, with its remarkable light control, is most often found in animals that hunt by day and night, from domestic cats to snakes, says Ron Douglas, an animal vision biologist at City University London. These pupils are also more common in predators that

ambush their prey, again, like cats and snakes. Those that chase their prey, such as cheetahs and wolves, tend to have circular pupils. Why might being an ambush predator dictate the shape of your pupil? Because to pounce on a mouse, a cat must be superb at judging distance – and that’s where a slitshaped pupil can help, says Banks.

BESIDES HUNTING AND GATHERING, HUMANS USE THEIR EYES TO DETECT INTRICATE DETAILS SUCH AS FACIAL EXPRESSIONS.

Bar-shaped pupils allow sheep (above left) to scan for predators. Cuttle fish (above right) can look forwards and backwards at the same time. CREDITS: DOUGLAS JNR / PAUL KAY / GETTY IMAGES

A cat’s eyes face forward, as is the case in most predators. The brain compares the slightly different images relayed from the left and right eye to help estimate distance – a process called stereopsis. We do this too – try walking down stairs with one eye shut. Tiny pupils deliver the sharpest image and perform best for stereopsis. Paradoxically, an alternative way to judge distance is to blur parts of the

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image. And for that, a big pupil is best – as any photographer could tell you. Set a wide aperture on your camera and while your subject will remain in focus, the foreground and background will blur. This so-called blurring of the depth of field can abe used to estimate distance. But to use both measuring tricks at once, a cat would need a small and a large pupil at the same time. Impossible, right? Not if it is slit-shaped, Banks says: “We think the vertical slit is a really clever adaptation ... It makes the pupil small horizontally and tall vertically. It’s really pretty cool.”

CAPTURED

WHY DO THESE CORALS GLOW?

A CAT’S PUPIL CAN EXPAND 135-FOLD TO PERFORM LIKE BUILT-IN NIGHT VISION GOGGLES. HUMAN PUPILS EXPAND BY A FACTOR OF 15. The effect works best in daylight, when the cat can contract its pupil to its narrowest. With its horizontal bar-shape, a sheep’s pupil could not be more different from a cat’s. Banks found that most land animals with bar-shaped pupils were herbivores that had to keep a constant eye out for predators. Their horizontal pupils, in eyes placed on either side of their head, allow them to scan the horizon all around for possible attackers. Sheep spend much of the day with their head tilted downward as they graze. As their head pitches towards the ground their eyeballs roll like spirit levels keeping their pupils parallel to the horizon. “That their eyeballs swivel like this means it must matter what their orientation is,” Douglas says. Banks suspects another benefit of horizontal pupils is to reduce glare from the overhead sun. The self-levelling horizontal eye would also give sweeping views of the ground ahead – part of the reason, perhaps, why goats, sheep and horses are so surefooted across uneven terrain. Round pupils like our own are less well understood. Humans are consummate generalists. Besides hunting and gathering, we require our eyes to detect intricate details such as facial expressions.

When biological oceanographer Jörg Wiedenmann from the University of Southampton shone a torch light on corals living 50 metres under the Red Sea he was amazed to see them glow intensely in a range of colours. Given the light barely reaches these corals why do they respond to it? The question has researchers scratching their heads. Wiedemann published his deep-sea discovery in the journal PLOS ONE in June. CREDIT: PROFESSOR J WIEDENMANN

“There’s more demand on our eyes,” Banks says. Perhaps there’s a trade-off – we forgo some of the light-controlling mechanisms of the cat, say, for eyes better suited to picking up colour and other details. The winner of the most bizarre pupils, though, must be cuttlefish. Their bulbous

eyes and distinct W-shaped pupils let them look forwards and backwards at the same time. The pupils can also dilate to an almost-perfect circle. Douglas suspects this geometry may explain why cuttlefish have one of the fastest pupil reflexes of any animal – about twice as fast as humans.

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SPECIAL FEATURE

NOBEL PRIZES FOR SCIENCE THE NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE

Using nature’s genius to fight malaria and river blindness Drugs that can outwit tropical parasites earned their discoverers the Nobel prize for medicine. BELINDA SMITH reports.

What do a Japanese golf course and an ancient Chinese remedy have in common? Each was the source of parasite-killing drugs that have saved countless lives. They also delivered the Nobel prize in medicine or physiology to their discoverers: Satoshi Ōmura, William Campbell and Youyou Tu. Thanks to this year’s winners, river blindness and lymphatic filariasis are all but wiped out. And millions have been spared from malaria. These medicines were inspired by the natural world. In the 1970s, Japanese microbiologist Ōmura, while searching for new antibiotics, took a close look at the soildwelling bacteria Streptomyces. From dirt dug up near a golf course in Ito, he isolated thousands of bacteria and grew them in broths, before whittling them down to the 50 or so he deemed promising. At the US Merck laboratories Irishborn biologist Campbell fed the broths to mice infected with roundworms. One of the broths cleared the parasite. Campbell isolated the roundworm-killing

compound, then tweaked its chemical structure to make it extra lethal. He dubbed this new drug ivermectin. Human trials showed ivermectin successfully treats diseases caused by roundworm, killing the young parasites that cause the symptoms. Unable to reproduce, the adult roundworm dies after about two years. As of 2012, ivermectin treated more than 200 million people. It also delivered Ōmura and Campbell one half of the $960,000 prize. Meanwhile in 1960s China, Tu, at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing, was given a mission by Chairman Mao: find a cure for malaria. So Tu pored over traditional recipes to treat fever. She noticed that Artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood, appeared repeatedly. She boiled up an extract from the plant, and gave it to malaria-infected rats. But the results were inconsistent. Had she gotten the recipe wrong? So she looked back at the literature. A recipe more than 1,600 years old said the healing juice was

squeezed from fresh, not boiled, leaves. Cold extraction cured 100% of malariainfected mice and monkeys. Clinical tests in the 1980s showed the extract not only reduced fever in infected humans, but also reduced parasite levels in their blood. Tu refined the active component, artemisinin. Combined with other drugs, bed nets and insecticides, it has been the first line of treatment against malaria ever since.

William Campbell. CREDIT: SUZANNE KREITER / GETTY

Satoshi Omura. CREDIT: ASAHI SIMBUN / GETTY

Youyou Tu. CREDIT: CHINAFOTO PRESS / GETTY

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THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS

Shape-shifting neutrinos that stream from the Sun Two scientists delving into the habits of neutrinos have upset the standard model of physics. CATHAL O’CONNELL explains.

Every second, billions of neutrinos fly through your body at close to the speed of light. Fortunately, they’re harmless – although distinctly strange. The 2015 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to two scientists who discovered neutrinos shapeshift as they move through space. Even in the weird world of quantum physics, neutrinos stand out as eccentrics. Each time physicists solve one riddle of neutrino behaviour, they unveil another. Take the discovery for which Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo and Arthur McDonald of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, shared this year’s physics prize. In experiments performed in 1998 and 2001, their teams showed why neutrino detectors often pick up fewer neutrinos than expected. They demonstrated that this is because neutrinos flip between three forms, essentially disguising their identities as they go. The discovery also indicates that the standard model of physics, our best theory of particle physics, is incomplete – something uncharted must lie beyond. By the mid-1970s, physicists had catalogued all known subatomic particles into a table called the standard model. The table included slots for three types of neutrinos – electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. Neutrinos don’t ordinarily interact with other matter, but occasionally a neutrino will smash into an atom, sparking a photon shower. The Sun only produces electron neutrinos – so early detectors were designed to look for them. But these

Arthur McDonald. CREDIT: LARS HAGBERG / REUTERS

Takaaki Kajita. CREDIT: DAVID MAREUIL / GETTY detectors only picked up a third as many neutrinos as expected. Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo suggested this was because the electron neutrinos created in the Sun switched between their three identities as they travelled to the Earth. This is possible because quantum particles such as neutrinos can also behave like waves. Neutrinos are effectively three waves superimposed on each other. Their identity depends on how the waves are mixed, a bit like mixing colours by combining red, green and blue. Pontecorvo speculated that if these subunits were to differ slightly in mass, their waves would oscillate at different rates as they travel and manifest as a neutrino with a switching identity. The idea could be tested by making more accurate neutrino counts. The SuperKamiokande Neutrino Detector was filled with 50,000 tonnes of ultra-pure water 1,000 metres beneath Mount Kamioka. Thousands of electronic eyes were placed around the tub, to detect direct strikes

between a neutrino and a water molecule. The team, led by Kajita, looked at the muon neutrinos created in the Earth’s atmosphere when cosmic rays crash into air molecules. Do they change identity as they travel from the upper atmosphere to the Earth? They compared the number of muon neutrinos arriving from overhead with muon neutrinos formed on the other side of Earth (and entering the detector after travelling through the planet). They reasoned the neutrinos created above should be more plentiful because they had the least amount of time to flip identity. They found that indeed the further the muon neutrinos travelled, the fewer there were. Since neutrinos were not being absorbed by their journey through the Earth, the best explanation was that they were changing identity. Meanwhile in Canada, McDonald’s team was gearing up for another crucial experiment, finally attempting to reconcile the longstanding mystery of the missing solar neutrinos. They used two different experiments to detect incoming solar neutrinos. One (based on deuterium) would detect all types of neutrinos coming from the Sun. The other would detect only electron neutrinos. That allowed McDonald to calculate what proportion of neutrinos coming from the Sun were electron neutrinos. The experiment did show that electron neutrinos counted for just a third. This was the clincher: electron neutrinos emitted by the Sun must be changing identity. The discovery raises many more questions. The combined mass of all the neutrinos in the Universe is estimated to be roughly equal to the mass of all visible stars. We need to know the mass of this particle to describe the evolution of the Universe. The biggest mystery is why neutrinos are so much lighter than other particles – this suggests there must be a new layer of particle physics to uncover. Paul Langacker, particle physicist from Princeton University, New Jersey says the answer to that, “would point to all the physics beyond the standard model”.

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THE NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY

Identifying DNA’s repair kit Biologists investigating how damaged DNA is fixed have won the chemistry Nobel. By VIVIANE RICHTER.

Your DNA is under constant attack. Ultraviolet light, tobacco smoke – even cell replication – can dent our genetic code. Fortunately, our cells have a molecular repair kit on hand. Discovering how the kit works has netted Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar a share in this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry. Early researchers assumed the DNA molecule was stable. After all, life would not have prospered if the repository of the genetic code was easily damaged. But Lindahl had his doubts. As a postdoc at Princeton University, New Jersey, he discovered that DNA’s close cousin, RNA, degraded quickly. So in 1972 he tested DNA by placing some strands in a test tube filled with a solution that recreated conditions inside a cell. Sure enough, the DNA began to disintegrate. Lindahl guessed something must repair the disintegrating DNA in our cells. Initially working with simple bacteria, over the next few decades he identified a crew of enzymes dedicated to this task. He discovered that some enzymes cut out damaged sections of DNA, while others fill the gaps with the correct genetic code. By the 1990s, he had identified the equivalent crew of enzymes inside human cells. Meanwhile Modrich, then working at the Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina, investigated how errors in the genetic code are corrected whenever a cell divides and replicates. Before the cell divides, it copies its DNA. The two strands of the double helix unzip, each half acting as a template for enzymes to create a complementary new

Tomas Lindahl. CREDIT: JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP / GETTY

Paul Modrich. CREDIT: MEGAN MENDENHALL / AP strand, so that one double helix becomes two. But the process is imperfect. It is estimated for every 100,000 letters of DNA code copied by our cells, one mistake is made. The genome in each human cell contains three billion DNA letters, which means 30,000 mistakes are made each time a cell divides – and nearly two trillion cells divide in the body each day. Modrich found the fixer enzymes responsible for correcting the errors – they trundle along the double DNA strand looking for mismatches, flag any problems they find and call in other enzymes to fix the damage. Your DNA also takes a lot of knocks from the environment – from exposure to tobacco smoke, to the ultraviolet rays that pelt your skin on a sunny day. When UV radiation strikes your DNA, this jolt of energy can cause neighbouring letters to chemically fuse, locking up this section of genetic code so it can no longer be read. While working as a physician in Turkey in the early 1970s, Sancar wondered why

Aziz Sancar. CREDIT: SARA D. DAVIS / GETTY

bacteria exposed to potentially lethal doses of UV radiation can recover if they are bathed in blue light. As a researcher at the University of Dallas, he isolated the gene for the enzyme responsible. Called “photolyase”, when activated by blue light it finds and repairs DNA letters that have fused. Sancar has since teased out three enzymes that repair DNA damage caused by UV radiation. This year’s chemistry Nobel laureates have helped make it possible for doctors to diagnose genetic risk factors for cancers that can result from uncorrected DNA mutations. The enzymes BRCA1 and BRCA2, for instance, are expressed in breast and ovarian tissue and are key to repairing DNA in those tissues. If the genes responsible for producing BRCA1 and BRCA2 are mutated, the enzymes don’t work and mistakes go unchecked. A woman with one of these faulty DNA repair enzymes is up to five times as likely to develop breast cancer, compared with a woman with no mutations in these genes. Over the past decade, half of the chemistry Nobels have been awarded for discoveries in biological systems. So why the shift? Do we know all the “pure” chemistry there is to know? “No,” says James Whisstock, biochemist and director of Melbourne’s Centre for Advanced Molecular Imaging. “The nature of science has changed – hugely,” he says. “We live in a world where collaborations [underpinned by chemistry] are the norm rather than the exception.”

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COSMOS

We ask researchers to tell us about their discoveries and to explain why they matter.

LAB TALK SHESHANATH BHOSALE is a chemist at RMIT in Melbourne.

STEPHANIE GODFREY is an ecologist at Perth’s Murdoch University.

Say it with microflowers

When avoiding family is best

Useful flowers aren’t only grown in greenhouses – some are grown in labs like mine. My flowers look a bit like carnations, but with one important difference: each bloom is around the size of a single pollen grain. We don’t make microflowers for their looks. By growing a carpet of microflowers across a material, we dramatically boost its surface area. And that could be useful in countless applications, from more efficient solar cells, to air purification systems that can filter out toxins, to super-sensitive detectors for sniffing out explosives. Incorporating these abilities into our microflowers will be the next step in our research. Right now we’re focused on finding the perfect growing conditions. To cultivate our microflowers, my team and I looked to nature for inspiration – and what better than our own DNA? This molecule forms its strong double helix shape thanks to powerful hydrogen bonds between neighbouring coils in the structure. The key interaction is between nitrogen-rich groups that form the “rungs” of the DNA double helix, and phosphate groups in the DNA backbone. We mimic this interaction by making a watery solution of phosphonic acid and a nitrogen-rich molecule called melamine, then spraying this cocktail on a surface. Even while wet, the two chemicals start to react and form sheets only a few molecules thick, bound by strong hydrogen bonds. As the water evaporates, the growing sheets crinkle, rising up off the surface to form “petals”. The dry flowers are only 10 microns in diameter – about half the width of the finest human hair. Their tiny petals stop water from reaching the surface, a little like the scales on butterfly wings. Droplets simply roll or bounce off. The microflowers are non-toxic and stable if handled carefully. Next, we plan to find ways to engineer the size and shape of the microflowers, and “dope” the petals with glowing or colour-changing molecules to fine-tune them to different applications. Who knows where they’ll spring up next?

As Christmas often reminds us, family relationships form a fundamental part of our social network. For many animal societies, family comes first too. By helping their family, animals can increase the chances that some of their genes will survive to the next generation. But does family still matter to less social species? The sleepy lizard (Tiliqua rugosa) is commonly found across the southern half of Australia. These slow-moving, stumpy-tailed, blue-tongued specimens are remarkably monogamous – for eight weeks each spring they pair up with their partner, with some pairs reuniting for more than 20 consecutive years. But outside of these eight weeks, the lizards are loners. To see what they get up to – and who they meet – either side of the breeding season, we fitted them out with “lizard loggers”. These micro-GPS units, attached to their tail, record the number of steps taken and the lizards’ locations for around 12 days at a time. We’ve spied on their movements and found they come in contact with each other less often than if they wandered randomly. This suggests deliberate avoidance – and it appears that they avoid their relatives most of all. Perhaps not surprisingly, males and females that are related spend the least time together. Since most interactions between males and females are of a “romantic” nature, this is important to avoid inbreeding. Lizards have a well-developed sense of smell, and research in related species has shown that they can recognise familiar and related individuals. It’s possible that these lizards “sniff out” suitable (and unsuitable) mates. But sleepy lizards seem to sniff out and avoid related males, too. When two males meet, they will usually fight over territory, grappling and trying to flip each other over with their powerful jaws – which can lead to debilitating injuries. By keeping away from each other and avoiding this fighting, related male sleepy lizards may be showing an unusual form of “brotherly love”. So it seems that family does matter for less social species – just not in the way we are used to thinking about it.

PAPER: Flower-like supramolecular self-assembly of phosphonic acid appended

PAPER: A contact-based social network of lizards is defined by low genetic relatedness

naphthalene diimide and melamine, Scientific Reports, 2015, vol 5, no 14609.

among strongly connected individuals, Animal Behaviour, 2014, vol 97, p35-43.

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Issue 66

TECHNOPHILE Super fast land travel? No pressure. A cheaper, swifter alternative to the high-speed train is on the horizon. By CATHAL O’CONNELL . You step inside the sleek silvery pod, settle back in your seat. There’s a slight shudder as the pod is loaded into the vactube – and you’re off. The pod catapults forward, then banks south to join the Hume Highway. You are skimming along at 1,220 kilometres per hour. Sydney to Melbourne in 48 minutes? Just take the tube. Hyperloop was conceived by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. The idea is for passengers to travel at near supersonic speeds in minivan-sized pods that are fired through a tube. It sounds wild, but Musk (co-founder of Paypal, and CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX) has a track record of turning the seemingly impossible into reality. Musk says Hyperloop would provide a faster, cheaper and more energy efficient means of high-speed travel. How would it do this? In any vehicle, power is required to overcome air resistance – and the faster you go, the more power you need. For this reason aeroplanes climb to altitudes of around 10 kilometres, so they can travel through thinner air. In a Hyperloop tube air would be pumped out to reduce the air resistance faced by the speeding pod. (Musk proposes that the density of air remaining in the tube would be the equivalent to the air density at 50 kilometres above the Earth.) The pods would not use wheels but would float on little jets of compressed air, further reducing friction. Electric motors, similar to those used on maglev trains, would be situated every 50 kilometres along the tube. Their super strong magnets would give each passing pod a kick along. Speed would be limited to 1,220

PARTIAL VACUUM Air pressure in the tube is lowered to about 1/1000th the pressure at sea level, or the equivalent to an altitude of 50 kms. This reduces drag, allowing the pod to travel at very high speeds while propelled by a relatively low amount of energy.

PROPULSION Linear induction motor magnets, similar to those already used on maglev trains, are placed at regular intervals along the tube and accelerate the pod by giving it an electromagnetic push. They also recover the pod’s kinetic energy using regenerative braking, much like a modern electric car.

kilometres per hour – just below the speed of sound to avoid a sonic boom, which might knock the pod against the tube wall. High-speed transport in a tube is not a new idea. Robert Goddard, the early 20th century pioneer rocket scientist, also came up with designs for what he called the “vactrain”. And in the past 20 years, an American company called ET3 (Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies) proposed a modern vactrain design, although they have not built a working model. Musk is not developing the Hyperloop himself, but is promoting his proposal

as “an open source transportation concept”. Several companies have taken up the challenge, including Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a California-based start-up. In August they announced a partnership with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum, a European specialist engineering firm that supplied some of the high-vacuum systems used at the Large Hadron Collider. Hyperloop Australia Design is working to adapt the idea to the Australian market. “It’s a concept whose time has come,” says Dennis Levy, head of the Australian engineering consortium.

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COMPRESSOR The nose of the pod contains a compressor similar to the turbine on a jet aircraft. Its job is to pump the small amount of air remaining in the tube from the front of the pod to the rear. Otherwise, the speeding pod would quickly collect a pocket of air at its nose, and lose its low air pressure advantage.

AIR BEARINGS The pod rides on a cushion of air pumped from 28 jets. The air cushion is only one millimetre thick yet creates an almost frictionless suspension.

Levy acknowledges that “some extremely difficult challenges still need to be solved” before a commuter pod could be launched. For example, Musk’s concept describes how the pod would ride on “air bearings” – a cushion of air one millimetre thick – created by jets. “Air bearings” have been used in other applications, such as shuttling crates around warehouse floors, but have never been tested at high speed. Another question is whether the heat built up by compressed air at the front of the pods could be kept in check. And the concept’s economic viability is unknown.

Musk’s initial vision was to service the San Francisco-Los Angeles route. Sydney to Melbourne, one of the world’s busiest air routes, would also be a good candidate, Levy says. Musk’s company SpaceX is constructing a 1.6-kilometre test track at their California headquarters. In September, they launched a global competition for pod designs to encourage interest from universities and engineers. It will begin testing in June 2016. ILLUSTRATION: ANTHONY CALVERT

HYPERLOOP SPECIFICATIONS CRUISING SPEED: 1,220 km/h PASSENGERS PER POD: 28 ESTIMATED COST TO CONSTRUCT: San Francisco to Los Angeles route $6 billion (less than 1/10th the $68 billion proposed for the California high-speed rail project) TRIP TIME: 35 minutes (SF to LA) ESTIMATED COST PER PASSENGER: per trip (SF to LA) $20 plus operating costs per oneway ticket FREQUENCY OF POD DEPARTURES: Every 30 seconds during rush hour. ESTIMATED TRIP TIMES FOR AUSTRALIAN ROUTES: Sydney to Melbourne: 48 minutes Sydney to Brisbane: 52 minutes Sydney to Canberra: 19 minutes

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Issue 66

CLIMATE WATCH EARTH SCIENCES

Looming threat from the far north If the permafrost thaws, the result could be catastrophic. BELINDA SMITH reports. Carbon levels are rising, so negotiators at the Paris climate conference already have their work cut out for them. But things are starting to look a lot worse. Climate scientists such as Columbia University’s James Hansen have long warned about “runaway” climate change – feedback loops where climate levers get pushed to the point where out planet enters a phase of unstoppable warming. One of the most worrisome runaway warming scenarios involves the thawing Arctic permafrost. This causes microbes entombed in the frozen soil for millennia to begin releasing methane, a greenhouse gas with 20 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. The thaw triggers a vicious cycle. The vented methane amps up the rate of warming. That, in turn, thaws more permafrost, triggering the release of more methane. Before we know it, the planet has left two degrees of warming in the dust. Where the tipping point lies for runaway permafrost thaw is so uncertain that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change doesn’t factor it into its reports. But new research shows we might reach it sooner than we think. An American study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October showed that, once reawakened, the hungry microbes in permafrost can pump out greenhouse gases remarkably quickly. After only 200 hours of thawing almost half the carbon in a sample

of 35,000-year-old Alaskan permafrost was released into the atmosphere. And there’s a lot of patches to worry about. Permafrost accounts for 23 million square kilometres of the land surface inside and around the Arctic Circle. That’s around a quarter of the northern hemisphere’s landmass that is not under ice, including 85% of Alaska and around half of Canada and Russia. Permafrost formed during the ice ages, when glaciers and ice sheets expanded and shrank, grinding the rock below into fine dust called glacial flour. Over tens of thousands of years plants and animals became part of the mix. Some permafrost patches are 1,500 metres thick. These vast tracts of frozen soil are thought to contain almost 1.7 trillion tonnes of carbon trapped within them – double the amount of carbon now in the atmosphere. An April Nature review led by Northern Arizona University soil ecologist Ted Schuur calculated that almost a tenth of that carbon, 160 billion tonnes, might be released into the atmosphere from thawing

permafrost between now and 2100. That first tranche of carbon could contribute up to a quarter of a degree of global warming on its own and “could have catastrophic global consequences”, says Max Holmes, a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre in Massachusetts – especially when humanity is already perilously close to pushing the planet beyond two degrees of warming. It’s hard for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to factor permafrost into its climate models because the microbes that produce the greenhouse gas emissions are unpredictable.

SOME PERMAFROST REGIONS ARE ALREADY EMITTING MORE CARBON THAN THEY ARE ABSORBING. The top, or active, permafrost layer thaws and re-freezes seasonally. The real trouble starts when heat seeps into the rock-hard layers below, which have been frozen for millennia. Like peas in your

Permafrost, exposed and thawing near Longyearbyen, Norway. CREDIT: JOHN SHAW PHOTOGRAPHY

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freezer the ensconced organic matter largely stays intact while it remains frozen. Ancient animals occasionally found in the permafrost are beautifully preserved, such as the 39,000-year-old Yuka woolly mammoth unearthed in Siberia in 2010 – complete with brain. As these soils thaw and the cryogenically preserved microbes start to devour the plant and animal remnants around them, they release greenhouse gases including methane. But exactly what gases will be released and how much they will contribute to global warming is diabolically hard to predict. For example, the type of gassy waste the microbes burp out depends on whether they are sitting in water. If they are dry the microbes have access to oxygen and emit carbon-dioxide. But if the microbes are smothered by water and oxygen-starved, methane-emitters or “methanogens” come to the fore. Around 10% of the microbial population are methanogens, says Ben Woodcroft, a microbiologist at the University of Queensland who last year with colleagues identified a new species of methanogen in a patch of Swedish permafrost called the Stordalen Mire. The amount of liquid water in the active layer also controls the microbes’ menu. In a 2014 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, Florida State University geochemist Suzanne Hodgkins reported that when the active layer of Stordalen Mire is merely damp, that favours the growth of peat moss which is tough for microbes to break down. But when the active layer is very wet, it provides perfect conditions for grass-like sedges – the methanogens’ favourite food. The permafrost also supports vast evergreen forests more than twice the size of the Amazon rainforest. They have made the Arctic a carbon sink, sucking in more carbon from the atmosphere than is released by the reawakened microbes. Global warming changes that equation. Schuur says some permafrost regions are already emitting more carbon than they’re absorbing – probably for the first time since the permafrost was formed. “We are near that tipping point – and maybe over it already,” he says. “Arctic sea

Hidden carbon sink in the Antarctic Tiny moss animals are doing what they can to combat climate change. Cosmos Magazine editors explain. In a rare piece of good news on climate change, a paper in the September issue of Current Biology suggests the loss of sea ice in the Antarctic has led to the increased growth of creatures living on the seafloor that act as a carbon sink. It is known that Arctic forests and new algal blooms where ice shelves have disintegrated both work, to some extent, against climate change. Scientists now say that studies of organisms in the West Antarctic known as bryozoans – or “moss animals” – show that these and similar creatures could also be accumulating and burying carbon. “We’ve found that a significant area of the planet – more than three million square kilometres – is a considerable carbon sink and, more importantly, a negative feedback on climate change,” says David Barnes of the British Antarctic Survey. Antarctica has not experienced the same net loss of sea ice as the Arctic, but ice has melted over continental shelves. In the new study, Barnes and his colleagues collected specimens across ice is shrinking. They know this because it’s been photographed since the 1970s. But we don’t know what the permafrost is doing. Do you think it’s been sitting there doing nothing the whole time?” So how do we stop the vicious cycle? That’s the billion-dollar question, Woodcroft says. Measures we can take now include curbing fossil fuel use, keeping forests intact and limiting emissions of “black carbon” – sooty particles that darken snow and ice and absorb heat. Ideally, climate scientists would like

Kymella polaris, a common Antarctic bryozoan that is quietly absorbing carbon. CREDIT: BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY West Antarctic seas and used highresolution images to calculate the density of life on the seabed. The data, collected over more than 20 years, reveals strong increases in annual production of shelf seabed carbon in the bodies of West Antarctic bryozoans. The researchers calculate that growth of the bryozoans has nearly doubled, and that the carbon they are absorbing is equivalent to about 50,000 hectares of tropical rainforest. “The forests you can see are important with respect to the carbon cycle and climate change, but two-thirds of our planet is ocean, and below it the life you can’t see is also very important in climate responses ,” Barnes says. to model the rate at which the permafrost thaws, along with the carbon emissions it produces. But it’s not that simple, Woodcroft says. Ecology can change completely within a couple of metres and new microbial effects, such as the heatproducers, are being uncovered all the time. The complex interactions in the Arctic environment muddy the waters. “It’s actually really simple if you keep it frozen,” Woodcroft says. “But once you let it thaw, it becomes a lot more complicated.”

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VIEWPOINT — 33

COSMOS

OPINIONS, IDEAS & PERSPECTIVES

VIEWPOINT

“CLINICAL PATHWAYS... ARE CRITICAL TO KEEPING PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC ILLNESSES OUT OF TROUBLE” NORMAN SWAN — HEALTH

NORMAN SWAN BODY TALK

KATIE MACK ASTRO KATIE

LAURIE ZOLOTH PHILOSOPHER’S CORNER

ALAN FINKEL INCURABLE ENGINEER

34 — VIEWPOINT

HEALTH

Issue 66

NORMAN SWAN is a doctor and multi-award winning producer and broadcaster on health issues.

BODY TALK Medicine without the theatre

Prevention is often better than a dramatic intervention. IN THE OLD DAYS – well, 40 or 50 years ago – when you got cancer or had a heart attack, you died fairly soon afterwards. There were no effective cholesterol lowering drugs, blood pressure medications had awful side effects, early cancer detection and therapy weren’t as advanced, smoking was common. It was also the era before jogging and 24/7 gyms. Doctors responded to specific “episodes” such as a broken arm or a stroke. And healthcare systems were designed and funded for episodic care. The problem is, they still are. Meanwhile, the way we treat disease has changed. It’s no longer a simple matter of illness followed by death. If you develop heart disease or cancer there’s an industry out there that can keep you alive and in quite good health. They don’t provide cures; you’ll have these chronic conditions for the rest of your life. The aim in high-quality care now is to keep diseases under control to avoid life-threatening “episodes”. But it’s expensive. Treating chronic diseases takes up 80% of the healthcare budget. Put another way, 1% of people with major chronic diseases consume 30% of the budget, with repeated episodes of decline and acute illness causing hospital admissions and increasing disability. The question is whether those resources could be better spent.

Clinical pathways, and the professionals – usually GPs – who direct traffic along them, are critical to keeping people with chronic illnesses out of trouble. The problem is the paths are still configured for the medicine of yesteryear. Knee pain? Well, better send you off for an expensive scan to tell me what I already know, namely that you have arthritis. But now that I have a scan showing an ageing knee that I think is diseased, I send you off to the knee surgeon who really only has one thing to offer: surgery, usually arthroscopy (keyhole surgery that tidies up torn cartilage, smooths out rough spots on the ends of the leg bones and washes out any debris). In most cases, the GP doesn’t really know how good the knee surgeon is because we don’t make the performances of individual surgeons available. Worse, there is no evidence that arthroscopy is of any long-term benefit to people aged over 50 or 55 as a June article in the British Medical Journal reported. What you end up with is an episode of care that costs many thousands of dollars, whereas a health system geared to long-term maintenance would funnel you on to a pathway that takes you to a physiotherapist, an exercise physiologist and a dietician, to get you fitter, thinner and moving. In some Australian states, people on the public waiting list for a knee or hip replacement, are already sent to a physiotherapist-led clinic where they are offered rehabilitation and a weightloss program. Some of these clinics have managed to reduce the waiting lists by 15-20%. And they don’t only help with knees and hips: patients with cancer for instance, receive better quality of care if treated by a multidisciplinary team. Episodic care reinforces the doctor as hero. But continuous, preventive, anticipatory care requires a team with diverse skills. Such teams exist but not

so much in the private sector where doctors are not remunerated to sit in a meeting with other specialists to discuss your case and are certainly not rewarded for delivering better health or continuous care. The incentives are to do more, irrespective of the benefits. Health systems around the world are spending a lot of money identifying and developing appropriate clinical pathways – but where they exist, they’re almost always in the public sector. So where does that leave you with your ageing mum or dad or indeed yourself, since a significant proportion of younger people have chronic illnesses? Governments need to reward teambased, coordinated and continuous care. They need to move away from fee for service – and pay for results. They need to collect data on how we’re treated – facilitated by having electronic medical records – then ask us what the outcomes have been and feed that back to the treating doctors. Regardless of whether doctors work in the public or private sectors, they respond positively to data about their performance in comparison to their peers. And we, the patients, need to learn that fancy scans followed by referral to a sub-specialist is not necessarily the pathway to good medicine.

ASTROPHYSICS

COSMOS

VIEWPOINT — 35

KATIE MACK is a theoretical astrophysicist who focuses on finding new ways to learn about the early Universe and fundamental physics.

ASTRO KATIE The pattern of matter

The search for symmetries leads to a deeper understanding of nature. TO A PHYSICIST, the highest form of praise for a theory is to say it is “beautiful”. Such a theory is not only logical and precise, it reveals deep fundamental truths about nature in the form of new patterns. The search for patterns has always been the bedrock of science. When Dmitri Mendeleev put together the periodic table of elements, he didn’t know about electrons and their orbitals, but he could see patterns in how elements behaved. So he grouped them by their masses and properties: the noble gases that did not react with other elements were on the right-hand side of the table, while the alkali metals, that were never found in isolation, were on the far left. Mendeleev knew the patterns hinted at something deeper, so he stuck with the system, even when it left gaps in the table. Eventually, other scientists determined that an element’s propensity to interact, and thus its place in the table, came down to the arrangement of the atom’s electrons. When new elements, such as gallium, were discovered, they slotted nicely into the vacant spots. The table paved the way for quantum mechanics and for a simpler, more beautiful world: instead of dozens of unique elements, there were now three building blocks – protons, neutrons, and electrons. Their arrangements determined their interactions and explained chemistry. Major discoveries in science almost

always come from identifying patterns, followed by theories to explain them. In particle physics, the patterns usually display symmetries. In everyday life, we consider an object to be symmetrical if it looks the same after a transformation of some kind. Reflection symmetry means an object looks the same when it is reflected in a mirror. An object has rotational symmetry if it looks the same when you turn it. In physics, the concept of symmetry is sometimes purely mathematical. If an equation describing a physical system stays the same even when you perform an operation on it (like changing coordinates or adding a number), that means the system has a symmetry. For instance, when calculating the equation for a swinging pendulum with no friction it doesn’t matter whether the start time is now or 10 years in the future – the equation has a time-translation symmetry. German mathematician Emmy Noether (see my previous column) showed every symmetry comes with a conservation law. So in the case of the swinging pendulum, time-translation symmetry means the system’s energy is conserved forever. Other kinds of symmetry lead to other conserved quantities. Noether’s theorem connects symmetries we can observe in nature to fundamental rules about how physics works. And in much the same way that Mendeleev’s patterns of elements predicted gallium, we can use the symmetries of particle physics to predict new particles, such as the Higgs boson. The physics of the subatomic world can be divided into theories of three basic forces of nature: the strong force that binds the nucleus together, the weak force that governs radioactive decay, and the electromagnetic force that attracts electrons and protons to each other. (Gravity, the fourth basic force, is extremely weak on these scales.)

In the 1960s, scientists discovered dozens of new particles with atomsmashing machines. Their interactions via these fundamental forces could be laid out in patterns in a microscopic-scale analog to the periodic table. These patterns led scientists to develop what we now call the standard model of particle physics, and once again it broke down the dozens of exotic particles into a few fundamental pieces: quarks, leptons and bosons. But, like Mendeleev’s table, something was missing – in this case a boson with particular interactions that should slot into a specific spot, completing the picture. It was the Higgs boson, found by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2013. While the standard model has been successful, we know it’s not the final theory. Problems in our picture of the fundamental forces hint at a deeper symmetry we have yet to uncover. This is the basis for the theory of supersymmetry, which adds a new symmetry to the standard model, and gives each particle a “superpartner” particle at a higher mass. If supersymmetry is correct, the LHC might find evidence for it. If not, we’ll develop a new model, guided by Noether’s theorem as we use new results to construct theories with more perfect symmetries. That, to my mind, is beautiful.

36 — VIEWPOINT

ETHICS

Issue 66

LAURIE ZOLOTH is a professor of medical ethics & humanities at Northwestern University, Chicago.

PHILOSOPHER’S CORNER Play it again, doctor

Reproducing experiments can help science regain its credibility. TEN YEARS AGO epidemiologist John Ioannidis blew the whistle on science. His paper: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, was published in August 2005, in PLOS Medicine. It became one of the journal’s most-cited articles. While climate sceptics, anti-vaccination campaigners and the rest of the pseudo-science community have dined out on this paper, arguably it has been a shot in the arm for science. Ioannidis (then at the University of Ioannina, Greece, now at Stanford University, California) argued the inherent bias of researchers made them too flexible with their study design. Sample sizes were too small to be meaningful, say; or if the initial data didn’t yield dramatic results, they re-analysed them until they got “better numbers”. In some cases, data that did not conform was eliminated (called “cleaning the data”). The tendencies were more pronounced if financial or ideological interests were at stake. In psychology, such practices have become the norm. An anonymous questionnaire of 2,000 psychologists published by Harvard Business School researcher Leslie John and colleagues in Psychological Science in 2012 found almost 100% of responders had excluded contradictory data from their research

papers. But no discipline is immune. Even in physics, reports of the discovery of gravitational waves in March 2014 were later dismissed. Drug companies conducting clinical trials neglect to publish the entire data set, potentially hiding unfavourable results. But drug companies are also victims. In 2011, drug company Bayer reported it could replicate only 25% of published findings related to drug targets for cancer, women’s health and cardiovascular medicine. In 2012 the company Amgen could only replicate 11% of cancer research results. This is shocking, but also understandable. A career in academic research is wildly competitive. University scientists have to raise grant money constantly, and to do so, you have to tell the funding agency that you think your project will work based on your past results. Only innovative work is funded. The rewards for success are huge: your salary depends on it. The editors of scientific journals also play their part, driven by the desire for high impact research and advertising. And the busy scientists they rely upon for the unpaid task of peer review can be lax about vetting a paper’s scientific rigour. Each link in the chain encourages dishonesty. Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, wrote in April: “Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” Something needs to change. In this spirit in November 2011, a group of American scientists led by Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, began The Reproducibility Project. They began with psychology, selecting 100 experiments that had been published

in peer-reviewed journals and 270 expert scientists to repeat them. To ensure they were doing the experiments correctly, they asked the original authors to participate. The findings were published on August 2015 in Science – 10 years after Ioannidis’s first paper. They found more than 60% of the experiments did not reproduce the original results. Even in the successfully replicated studies, the effect was about half that of the original studies. The good news is that this seems to be the beginning of a new wave of making science accountable. Nosek says major psychology journals have started publishing replications alongside original research. A reproducibility project for cancer research is next. What will be the impact? Knowing that research is going to come under replication scrutiny may lift the game for researchers and the journals that publish them. Some studies will always be nonreproducible – that’s the way of science. As the authors of the Nature reproducibility paper say: “Even research of exemplary quality may have irreproducible empirical findings because of random or systematic error.” But with systematic replication in place, science will work in the selfcorrecting way it is supposed to.

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ALAN FINKEL is an electrical engineer, neuroscientist and the publisher of Cosmos magazine.

INCURABLE ENGINEER

Banning killer robots

When humans control killing machines it is harder to wage war. ALL TECHNOLOGY COMES with risks that offset the benefits. Chemical weapons are gruesome and have no conceivable benefits, so we ban them. Cars are dangerous but have practical benefits, so we allow them. The newest category of concern is the AKM – the Autonomous Killing Machine. There is nothing wrong with autonomous machines per se; it is the killing part that makes me nervous. Driverless cars are autonomous. You give them a mission profile, such as “take me to the office”, and they work out how to do it. AKMs are equivalent, except for the crucial fact that their mission profile has lethal intent, such as “eliminate every human in a region”. AKMs are a big step beyond the drones that attack targets and terrorists in Pakistan and other troubled regions. Drones are operated by pilots sitting in a control room far away – this means that humans are still weighing each decision to drop a bomb. As it happens, American drone pilots have been resigning in large numbers, partly due to workload but also because they are traumatised by the video imagery of victims incinerated by their missiles. That humane concern could be a deterrent for decision makers thinking

about waging war. In contrast, AKMs will not quit, so it will be emotionally easier for generals to commit to a mission. And it will be financially easier. It is cheaper to send a drone to Pakistan than a piloted plane. And if you make the pilot in the control room redundant the cost goes down even further. It could be politically easier too. America lost heart in its wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan largely because voters were tired of seeing fellow citizens returned in body bags, maimed for life or mentally harmed. With AKMs waging war, that restraining influence is lost. By lowering the emotional, financial and political costs, AKMs will increase the willingness of politicians and generals to pursue battlefield solutions. The only countervailing factor will be ethics. Maybe, just maybe, leaders in advanced countries will refuse the temptation to wage machine wars, but I don’t have much confidence in the ethical values of most leaders. If we agree that AKM warfare is immoral, can we ban it? We banned chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons and cluster bombs, after they were used with dreadful consequences. More constructively, in one case at least, the use of a class of weapon was banned before its deployment. In 1998, the United Nations banned the use of lasers to blind enemy soldiers. The technology is easily available, but so far the ban has held. Likewise, the UN should ban AKMs despite the difficulty of monitoring such a ban. One complication is that there is no technological difference between an AKM that follows a mission profile and shoots to kill, versus an autonomous machine that follows the same profile but waits for a human’s permission before shooting. That last step of waiting for

permission, known as meaningful human control, could make the use of robots acceptable – and could also be bypassed in a heartbeat. One solution would be to require that the decision-making process be recorded to be reviewed for potential war crimes. A more extreme approach would be to ban autonomous target identification, regardless of whether a human makes the decision to shoot. Of course, all governments participating in conflicts will be afraid that their enemies are developing such weapons. Such fear drove the development of nuclear weapons. Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd won support from other scientists and politicians because he was convinced the Nazis must be working on a nuclear bomb. After Germany’s surrender it was clear there was no such project, but by then the Americans had developed their bombs. Despite knowing that nobody else had such weapons, they used them against Japan. This time round scientists and engineers should take a more principled stance. And they are. In July 2015, leading international researchers in artificial intelligence and robotics called on the UN to ban autonomous weapons. For the sake of us all, the UN must do so.

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HOLODECK: COMPILED BY VIVIANE RICHTER

SECRET LIFE OF PLANKTON FEAST YOUR EYES on this gorgeous spread of plankton because most of these wandering species are usually invisible, and until now, were unknown to science. That changed in May, when Science magazine published a study of the samples collected by the schooner Tara Explorer on its four-year global voyage. It revealed a treasure trove of new species ranging in size from viruses to centimetre-sized crustaceans. Chris Bowler, a member of the research team, told the BBC: “There are about 11,000 formally described species of plankton – we have evidence for at least 10 times more than that.” Plankton, from the Greek word for wanderer, may be microscopic, but their influence on the planet is huge. Collectively they generate 50% of the planet’s oxygen. CREDIT: CHRISTIAN SARDET

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SOFT CLOUDS AND TOXIC DAGGERS

It looks like an exploding galaxy. It’s actually a radiolarian Thalassolampe margarodes (left), less than a centimetre wide, caught off the French Mediterranean coast. The yellow centre houses the cellular machinery. The fluffy white material around it stores nutrients and controls buoyancy. Its surrounding galaxy of jelly is dotted with hundreds of photosynthetic microalgae that trade oxygen and sugar in return for their board and keep. The needle-sharp Pseudo-nitzschia (right) are diatoms, a type of algae. The pointy shape lets them glide effortlessly through water, but they also produce a toxin called domoic acid. The nervedamaging poison can accumulate up the food chain, causing food poisoning and brain damage in sea lions and even humans. CREDIT: (LEFT) CHRISTIAN SARDET / NOE SARDET. (RIGHT) NCMA SAMPLE COLLECTION, BIGELOW LABORATORY BOOTH BAY USA

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ARMOURED INSIDE AND OUT This square-shaped cell (left), also caught off the Mediterranean French coast, is Lithoptera fenestrate, a prey-capturing acantharian less than a millimetre across. Our skeleton is built from calcium but L. fenestrate uses strontium ions in seawater to build a tough internal cross frame – the only known marine organism able to commandeer strontium for this purpose. The solid scaffold makes an attractive home for symbiotic photosynthesising microalgae (yellow spheres). Dinoflagellate hunters such as this single-celled Protoperidinium (right), prefer armour on their exterior to avoid being eaten themselves. Their delicately patterned shells called “thecas” are made of cellulose – the same fibre that gives wood its strength. CREDIT: (LEFT) JOHN DECELLE / FABRICE NOT. (RIGHT) PHILIPPE CRASSOUS / GETTY IMAGES

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ETHEREAL SMOKE AND SAMBA QUEENS The fragile jellyfish Hippopodius hippopus (left), which grows up to five centimetres, drifts through the ocean like little puffs of smoke. Their flowerlike “swimming bells” are clear as glass most of the time, letting this jellyfish slink past predators or toward prey unnoticed. It flashes opaque white when touched – perhaps as a warning to fish that come too close. The larvae of cephalopods – the group that includes octopus and squid – are known as chameleons of the sea, and it’s not hard to see why. Planctoteuthis larvae (right), around a centimetre long, flash their red and yellow pigment cells to communicate with other larvae, or as a defence mechanism – making them look big and fierce to predators. CREDIT: (LEFT) STEFAN SIEBERT / BROWN UNIVERSITY USA. (RIGHT) KAREN OSBORN / SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY WASHINGTON DC

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IMMORTALITY AND THE FAST LIFE The mesmerising medusa Oceania armata (left) – a centimetre-wide jellyfish – may live forever. Its close cousin, Turritopsis dohrnii, has mastered immortality. When O. armata reaches adulthood, as shown here, it transforms from a free-swimming medusa back into a ball of cells that revert to an earlier stage in the lifecycle: a tethered branching polyp that eventually buds off genetically identical medusas. Stephanopyxis palmeriana diatoms (right) have no such patience. Under the microscope, these single-celled photosynthetic algae, thinner than human hair, look like strings of jewels. Up to a million cells long, they can be spawned by a single mother cell in three weeks. But these jewels don’t last. With each generation, the cells shrink. Once it reaches a critical size, a diatom will cast off its shell and spawn a big new parent cell to start the lifecycle afresh. CREDIT: (LEFT) DAVID LUQUET / OBSERVATOIRE OCEANOLOGIQUE DE VILLEFRANCHE-SUR-MER. (RIGHT) NCMA COLLECTION / BIGELOW LABORATORY

CREDIT Photos from Plankton: Wonders of the drifting world By Christian Sardet, University of Chicago Press 2015

“The kids really get into the lessons. They work the whole time and you could hear a pin drop.” – Damian, science teacher

Motivating students to engage with science can be difficult so we developed Cosmos for Schools lessons. Rich in relevance, each lesson is led by a breaking news story recently published by Cosmos Magazine Make the most of your time in the classroom and engage your Year 7-10 students with interactive, curriculum-mapped science lessons. Cosmos for Schools packages start from $500 for unlimited teacher and student access

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LESSONS FROM A WORKING DOG Australian kelpies have been bred to think for themselves. Could finding the genes that make them tick shed light on the way our brains work? HAZEL FLYNN and ELIZABETH FINKEL report.

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INSIDE THE STOCKYARD, eight nervous white sheep freeze or flow at Balgalla Bart’s command. Trainer Ian O’Connell is watching. The laser focus between dog and man never falters. O’Connell moves his head slightly; occasionally a hand emerges from the pocket of his well-worn jeans to signal with a tight gesture.

“IN THE WAY THE STEAM ENGINE CHANGED THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD, THAT KELPIE CHANGED FARMING.”

BART SEES IT ALL without ever seeming to shift his attention from the flock, backing away or racing to the head of the mob as required. Now and then O’Connell issues a terse whistle or word. No more is needed. Balgalla Bart is assessing and responding, not mechanically waiting for orders. Bart, a handsome 20 month old black and tan kelpie, and his renowned trainer are running through their paces before hundreds of onlookers at the Australian Kelpie Muster, an annual event in the tiny town of Casterton 350 kilometres west of Melbourne. The crowd can’t help but be awed by the sight of this dog – even experienced observers such as breeder Chris Malcolm and trainer Daniel Ball. “You watch them working, and they actually think. They don’t just follow instruction,” says Malcolm. Ball agrees there is something extraordinary about kelpie intelligence. “Border collies keep asking questions: ‘Is that what you want me to do?’ Kelpies go, ‘So you want the stock moved from there to there? OK.’ And then they start figuring out how to get it done.” Not all dogs have this ability to problem-solve; it has been bred into the kelpie by concentrating particular genes. Now Australian researchers are trying to identify them – not only to breed better kelpies but also to shed light on how something as intangible as behaviour can be writ large in DNA. CASTERTON NESTLES IN A VALLEY surrounded by fertile hills dotted with sprawling flocks of grazing sheep. The kelpie was first bred here to keep these unruly flocks under control. In 1871 grazier George Robertson of nearby Worrock station mated two black and tan collies brought from Scotland. One of the female puppies drew the eye of Jack Gleeson, a doughty drover at a neighbouring

property. A deal was finally made: the pup for one of Gleeson’s stockhorses. On the bank of the Glenelg River in the dead of night, pup and horse were traded. Gleeson gave the pup the Celtic name for water spirit: Kelpie. The young stockman moved to New South Wales where Kelpie produced several litters, some sired by an all-black collie, others by a red one. One of the pups, named for her mother, tied for first place in the country’s inaugural sheepdog trials at the 1879 Forbes Show. Word spread and soon the description “Kelpie’s pups” was replaced by the general term “kelpie” for any similar dog. For Malcolm, an elegantly dressed entrepreneur who grew up in Zimbabwe, this story brings Australia’s past to life. Leaning forward, eyes sparkling, he sketches the scene in his modulated accent. “Think back to that time. Australia was built on the sheep’s back. Can you imagine what it would be like if you had bred those dogs? It would be like inventing a tractor when everybody else is ploughing by hand. In the way the steam engine changed the industrial world, that kelpie changed the farming world overnight.” But not all kelpies are created equal. To discover why, a team from Sydney University Veterinary Science Faculty led by Paul McGreevy and Claire Wade is carrying out the Farm Dog Project. Funded by Meat and Livestock Australia to the tune of half a million dollars, it aims to identify the most desirable traits in working dogs and locate their signature in the dog’s DNA. For most of the 30,000 years or so since wolves first made themselves welcome at our campfires, dog breeding has been an art. Armed with a DNA map of traits as a guide, it is set to become a science. An estimated 300,000 farm dogs work in Australia

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02 Backing: a kelpie will jump on the backs of sheep to control the flock.

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and their breeders are keen to learn what they can from other industries. For instance DNA-assisted breeding has been worth $20 million a year to the Australian dairy industry alone. Malcolm has seen the successes of science with the prize-winning cattle he breeds as a hobby in Victoria’s Yarra Ranges. He first acquired kelpies to work with the cattle but then they too became a breeding passion. One of his pups achieved a record price at Casterton two years ago. “Part of the excitement is finding a [genetic] match that creates something quite extraordinary,” he says.

After three years of coming second, Daniel Ball and nine and a half year old Denny finally triumph in the 2015 pinball. The dog also gives her all in the 50-metre dash and the hill climb, events she won in her younger years. The climb has the dog handlers standing on the lip of a hill so high it affords views of the entire district, and so steep they lose sight of their animals as soon as they begin their gallop to reach them. All they can do is call continuously at the top of their lungs, hoping the dog is still following the sound of their voice. This year Denny doesn’t place, but that she made it to the top says

03

Top dog Balgalla Bart with trainer Ian O’Connell. CASTERTON IS A CLASSIC AUSTRALIAN country town with a main street wide enough to drive three tractors abreast, shade offered by the shops’ bullnose verandas and nothing taller than the twostorey historic pubs. The 1,800-strong population grows to a festive 10,000 during the muster weekend. Families and owners of pet kelpies flood in for the Saturday fun day, with sprint, high-jump and hill-climb competitions to test their dogs’ strength and stamina and crowd-pleaser novelty events such as kelpie pinball, where ducks are herded through a course.

everything about her as an exemplar of the breed: “She’s got heart and stamina. She just wants to do whatever it is you’re asking of her and she will do it to the nth degree.” Sunday, auction day, is when the event becomes serious. There are three categories: pups three months and under; ‘started dogs’, with some training aged three to 12 months; and ‘fully trained’ dogs, usually over 12 months. Some breeders bring seven dogs or more to sell. O’Connell is here to sell Bart. Born to the farming life, O’Connell is fit, lean and weathered,

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with blue-grey eyes that seek the horizon. He now splits his working life between farming sheep and training people to handle working dogs; around 500 people a year take his courses. He also breeds kelpies – selectively. “Perhaps two litters a year. I’ve got this thing about quality not quantity,” he says. “My hobby is to find the perfect working dog. I hope it never happens, otherwise I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.” They might not be perfect yet, but the dogs O’Connell breeds are exceptional as evidenced by the top auction prices he has claimed over the years. Sitting on the back of his ute, O’Connell affectionately rubs Bart’s handsome head. Bart’s brother Balgalla Coke topped the 2014 auction, selling for $10,000. Calm and relaxed in the lead up to the auction, which has drawn a paying crowd of 3,000, O’Connell has set Bart’s reserve at $5,100. He says: “If he doesn’t make that I’m only too happy to take him back with me. I just want him to go to a good home. I’ve spoken to a lot of people about him and I’ve told some of them they won’t suit him.” So what kind of owner-handler would be suitable? “Someone that understands traits, which is hard to find.”

THE FARM DOG PROJECT TEAM has homed in on 10 traits. O’Connell focuses on six: “The most important one is heading instinct, which most kelpies have. That’s the desire to get to the head of the stock: if stock are trying to escape they do whatever it takes to get to the head, turn it, and bring it back to me. Then there’s calmness, so they’re not what we call ‘fizzy’. “Presence is another big trait I look for. It’s an aura: stock just don’t like being near a kelpie with presence. And that makes them a great work dog, because you put a kelpie in a paddock and the stock move away from it. If a kelpie’s got the calm trait and it’s got great presence, well, it really doesn’t have to do an awful lot. It will work all day without wearing itself out.” Backing, O’Connell explains, is the willingness of a dog to jump up on the back of sheep and run over them to control their movements, while barking is, as you’d guess, the dog’s use of its voice to control stock. “The more of these good traits you’ve got in a dog the less you have to really train them. For a dog with all the desirable traits there are only two things you should have to teach it. One is to cease work and the other is to get it to go left or right: ‘brakes’ and ‘steering’.” Different traits are required for different jobs –

from the close, tight work of moving stock through narrow runs and on to trucks to the much greater coverage required in a paddock. This is where casting is needed. The handler can send the dog off to round up sheep at a significant distance, knowing it will go wide to get behind the animals without spooking them while ensuring the mob doesn’t break up. The casting trait comes from the breed’s two distinct forebears, says Nancy Withers, who manages to look elegant in a bush hat and dusty boots and exudes an air of easy authority. Her 40 years as a breeder have given her an encyclopaedic knowledge. “The original kelpie family were mostly what were called hill gathering or North County collies from northern Scotland. They would work a long, long way away from the shepherds. They were independent and you could trust them to work with sheep alone.”

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Not having the casting trait doesn’t make a dog inferior – it just means it won’t suit paddock work. Bart is a good example, O’Connell says. “He’s a very confident dog. He loves backing and barking. But he hasn’t got the trait of casting, so he’s going to be a dog for working in trucks or sheds or yards where he can be in amongst them.” That’s fine with Angus Kirton, a merino farmer who finally secures Bart with a winning bid of $11,000. Kirton paid $6,000 for an O’Connell dog in 2009. Kelpies, he says, are “worth more than 10 men” on his property. The Farm Dog Project team estimates a working dog is worth at least $40,000 to a farmer over its lifetime. In Bart’s case, stud service fees are likely to add to that return. But sharing a bloodline doesn’t necessarily mean sharing traits. “In one litter of six pups you might have two that work a bit more towards the paddock, two that might work

“SHE JUST WANTS TO DO WHATEVER IT IS YOU ARE ASKING OF HER AND SHE WILL DO IT TO THE N-TH DEGREE.”

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a bit more towards the yard and some perhaps in between,” says Withers.

“I SEE AMAZING DOGS WHO HAVE ALL THOSE WONDERFUL TRAITS BUT THE HANDLER’S GOT NO IDEA.”

ONE OF THE FARM DOG PROJECT’S biggest challenges was how to manage subjectivity when assessing a dog’s traits. Take ‘eye’, for instance. This is the way the dog holds a sheep’s gaze. O’Connell explains: “If you’re out in the paddock you definitely want a dog to have eye so it can fix its gaze on an animal that’s tending to want to break away. But not too much, otherwise it becomes ‘sticky’ – fixated on one animal. If I’m scoring eye, ‘one’ would probably be no eye whatsoever and ‘five’ would be very, very sticky – they’d just look at a sheep or cow for hours if you let them.”

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Teagan Eagle winning the high jump at Casterton. O’Connell’s scoring system is based on a lifetime of working with kelpies. But it’s also subjective – which can be a problem for geneticists such as Wade. Her goal is to map a trait to a precise stretch of DNA. But if the trait is imprecise to begin with, it could send her on a wild goose chase. “One of the things we’ve looked at is whether when one person says ‘eye’ they mean the same thing as someone else who says ‘eye’,” Wade says. “While people think they’re talking about the same thing they’re not always, and we needed to be really careful of that. We describe the things we’re asking for so that people respond on a level playing field.” So do breeders think science will help them breed better kelpies? It’s potentially very promising, says O’Connell, “but it’s only half the story; in fact not even half. I see amazing dogs who

have all those wonderful traits but the handler’s got no idea what they’re doing. If we’re going to spend all this time and money discovering these traits we’ve got to spend a lot more time teaching handlers how to work dogs correctly.” Joe Spicer has been breeding kelpies for more than 20 years. He puts the breakdown of genes and training at 50:50. He’s sceptical about the value of genetic analysis because “there are so many traits that negate each other. Eye, for example. The more eye a dog displays, usually the less bark it has. We’re trying to breed dogs with different types of instincts, many that counteract each other.” Ball, who has owned pound-rescue kelpies and pure-bred dogs, puts his guesstimate at 60:40 “or maybe even higher for genetics”. Malcolm agrees that “genetics play the biggest part in animals … I think the genetic mixing is probably 70% of the key factor in dogs and the other 30% is the environment.” Withers, with her strong recall of many generations of dogs, goes further: “I can remember seeing certain work patterns. And if a pup, the first or second or third time it sees sheep, shows for a split second a trait that you know its ancestor however many generations away had, then you know it’s got it too. I say my dogs are 85% genetics, 15% training.” And what of Claire Wade, the Farm Dog Project’s expert geneticist? “I expect what we see is about 20 to 30% ‘genes’ and the remainder is what would be regarded by as a geneticist as ‘environment’.” But, she points out, this is as high as many of the traits that sheep breeders select for. “You can do a lot with 20 to 30%.” And for Wade, finding these genes for behaviour and intelligence won’t just help kelpie breeders. “It will help us understand ourselves; for me that’s the most interesting part.”

HAZEL FLYNN is a feature writer, editor, author and former publisher. Her seventh book, Working Dog Heroes co-written with Steve Austin, will be published by ABC Books in March. IMAGES 01 Melanie Faith Dove / Paul Macphail of Beloka Kelpies 02 Melanie Faith Dove / Paul Macphail of Beloka Kelpies 03 Australian Kelpie Muster 2015, Casterton 04 Australian Kelpie Muster 2015, Casterton 05 Australian Kelpie Muster 2015, Casterton

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A GENETICIST’S BEST FRIEND

STARING DOWN A SHEEP , jumping on its back: how are such behaviours written into a dog’s DNA? When it comes to a physical trait such as dwarfism, it’s relatively easy to find the responsible genes – in dogs or humans. But behaviour? Geneticists have tried to get a handle on behaviour genes by searching the DNA of people with personality disorders. Perhaps they are barking up the wrong tree? Dogs might be a better place to look. Because as it turns out, dogs are a geneticist’s best friend. Canis lupus familiaris is a human creation. The date and place that dogs were first domesticated – Siberia, Europe, southern China or Tibet – is hotly contested. Evidence comes from dog-like wolf fossils more than 30,000 years old, found in caves in Belgium and Siberia, or by calculating when the DNA code in modern dogs diverged from a common ancestor. But it’s safe to say that going back 15,000-30,0000 years, Eurasian grey wolves probably kicked off the process.

As human hunters outcompeted them for prey, some tried their luck as scavengers. The less fearful, less aggressive and cuter ones were eventually welcomed by the campfire. Tameness and cuteness seem to go together – as a Russian study that bred tame silver foxes over 30 generations showed. (One theory, known as “neoteny” is that tameness and cuteness are holdovers from the juvenile wolf stage, so that the modern dog is, in fact, a big baby wolf.) Whatever route evolution took, the interlopers became useful as camp guards and hunting companions. By the time humans took up cattle herding and farming around 10,000 years ago, their first domesticated animal was by their side, ready and willing to help. That’s likely the family history of the village dogs that still scavenge around Asian and African hearths. But about 200 years ago, a new chapter in dog history began. Dog breeding became a fad in Europe – especially with the British. In 1873 Victorian dog fanciers established the Kennel Club and

CREDIT: AUSTRALIAN KELPIE MUSTER 2015 CASTERTON

breeding became strictly controlled. Only registered dogs with explicit traits were bred, ensuring bloodline purity. What followed was extraordinary: boxers and greyhounds, spaniels and fox terriers, collies and Jack Russells. They were bred to herd, hunt, protect, fetch, fight – or just to be cute. Some 400 breeds exist today and their diversity is unmatched by any mammalian species. With only the bones to go on, a palaeontologist might class a chihuahua and a great dane as different species. Yet the DNA of dogs does not change much. Across their 2.4-billion-letter genome – their complete DNA code – there is one difference every 1,500 letters or so: the same degree of difference you’d see between any two unrelated people. Geneticists are examining these minor code changes to see if they account for the conspicuous traits of different dog breeds. They’ve had great success. In 2007, just two years after the dog genome’s publication, geneticists fished out the

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bit of altered code that gave little breeds their short stature. It was a mutation in a growth-stimulating gene called insulin-like growth factor 1. In 2009, they found the code change that gave dachshunds their stumpy legs, a condition known as chondrodysplasia, that also causes some kinds of human dwarfism. It corresponded to a mutated extra copy of a gene called fibroblast growth factor. In its altered state, it causes the growing cartilage near the tips of the leg bones to solidify into bone too early, resulting in legs that fail to reach their full length. Discovering how extraordinary breeds had been created by the mutation of a single gene was a revelation. But this genetic bounty was the lowhanging fruit.

FOR GENETICISTS , the holy grail is to decipher genes that give rise to so-called “complex traits” – those controlled by more than a single gene. Our complexity as human beings is matched by our genetic make-up. A predisposition to mental illness or intelligence, for instance, is controlled by hundreds of genes – each individually having rather a small effect. But together they play a major role – as we know from twin studies that tell us genes account for at least 50% when it comes to explaining who is intelligent or who is likely to develop schizophrenia.

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Modern dogs diverged from a common ancestor, most likely Eurasian grey wolves. CREDIT: CUVELAND / ULLSTEIN BILD / GETTY IMAGES

But finding these genes is like panning for alluvial gold; the individual genes have a way of falling though the sifters. So far fossicking for them has largely proved fruitless in human studies. But there is good reason to believe the quest for behavioural genes might yield results if we look for them in dogs first. That’s because dogs generate complex traits in a much simpler way than humans. Take height – the normal variation you might found within a breed, not the mutations that give rise to dwarfism. As of 2014, an international team of researchers, sifting through the DNA of more than 250,000 people, managed to uncover 700

Geneticists found the code change that gave Dachshunds, left, their short stature, while DNA testing in Dobermans, right, gave new leads to develop drugs to treat OCD. CREDITS: BELIVE / ANETAPICS / GETTY IMAGES

height-related genes, each with a tiny effect. Even so, they only scratched the surface. Together, these genes only account for 20% of height variation in people. For dogs it is much simpler. In 2010, Adam Boyko at Cornell University and colleagues used the DNA of 915 dogs to unearth 12 genes that explain 80% of the normal variation of dog height. The fact that breeds were created through strict selection from large litters and often descended from a handful of sires and dames resulted in a dramatic shortcut in the way their physical traits were constructed. Geneticists believe this may also be the case for complex traits such as intelligence and behaviour. And if we can find out which genes are responsible for behaviour in a dog, there might be a payoff for humans. In the time-honoured tradition of studying fruitflies and lab rats, understanding a simpler system can give us a foothold for understanding ourselves. One example: the genes that cause obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in dogs. OCD is common in Dobermans, they curl up in a ball and suck their flanks for hours, or incessantly chase their tail. In humans up to 3% of the population have a comparable disorder that can manifest in obsessive hand-washing or hoarding. Humans and dogs with OCD are now treated with antidepressants that have about a 50% response rate. For these people and dogs, something seems to have gone awry in the way their brain is wired. Comparing the DNA of 1,500 people with OCD to that of more than 5,000 unaffected people proved fruitless. But in 2014, a study comparing the DNA of 90 Dobermans suffering from OCD with 60 healthy Dobermans uncovered four genes –all known to be involved in making connections between brain cells. The discovery gave researchers new leads to develop drugs that might treat the disorder. Some geneticists are now convinced canine DNA is the best place to look for the genes that control human behaviour. Witness the titles of these recent scientific papers: “The canid genome: behavioural

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Chaser, a Border Collie, has managed to memorise more than 1,000 words. CREDIT: SEBASTIEN MICKE / PARIS MATCH / GETTY IMAGES geneticists’ best friend?” or “A fetching model organism” or “Both ends of the leash — the human links to good dogs with bad genes”. Geneticist Claire Wade at the University of Sydney agrees. “They’re so much a part of our lives and we observe them so closely.” Her main quest is to find the individual genes behind behaviour. “It’s not obvious how they work. I’m keen to find out.” Kelpies are a great place to look. They have extraordinary problem-solving behaviours – most likely passed down from the border collies they were bred from. Patrolling sheep through the rough wilds of the Scottish borders, collies needed to solve problems independently and think on the fly, explains University of Sydney vet Paul McGreevy. And their ability to learn is legendary: McGreevey cites the example of Chaser, the border collie who can decipher sentences and recognises more than a 1,000 words. But kelpies also combine other curious psychological traits such as the ability to intimidate a sheep by giving it ‘eye’, fearlessness, or phenomenal resistance to pain as epitomised by the legendary Coil that won an 1898 Sydney dog trial, despite fracturing his foreleg in the first round. How do you write those traits into DNA?

That’s what Wade and McGreevey are trying to find out with the Farm Dog Project. But they face two obstacles. The first is that behavioural traits are harder to score objectively than physical traits. And if you want to find a trait’s DNA signature, you need to be sure that handlers, breeders and geneticists are all talking about the same thing.

THE QUEST FOR BEHAVIOURAL GENES MIGHT YIELD GOOD RESULTS IF WE LOOK FOR THEM IN DOGS FIRST. So the first task has been to get an objective measure of these behavioural traits. To do that, dog owners were asked to answer 100 questions to rank their dogs according to 10 traits. Were the owners objective enough? Wade believes they were. A comparison of owner assessments with those of an expert trainer showed good agreement. Questionnaires have been filled in for 200 dogs. Stage two will compare the dogs’ genomes to see if particular traits correspond to stretches of DNA. Wade already suspects at least some of the traits associated with working kelpies are likely to lie on a chunk of chromosome 3. This part stood out as being different

in the DNA of working kelpies compared to pet kelpies. Intriguingly, this chunk of DNA also carries genes associated with pain perception. “It wasn’t what we expected,” says Wade. “But it makes perfect sense – a working dog needs to be able to go out into a field full of prickles like rapiers.” But whether these pain tolerance genes explain kelpie traits is still an educated guess. The next step is to drill into the DNA to match traits such as eye to specific DNA signatures. The barrier is dollars. It costs around $200 to analyse one dog’s DNA code. Ferreting out the genes for intelligence and behaviour requires an estimated 5,000 dogs. An extra million might be beyond Meat and Livestock Australia’s budget. But it’s a drop in the bucket when one considers the vast sums spent trying to find genes that explain human behaviour and intelligence. The European Union’s Human Brain Project has spent more than a billion, promising to decode mental illness and disease by simulating the workings of the brain on a supercomputer. So far they have little to show for it. Adam Boyko who studies the DNA of village dogs knows why: “That’s because they’re not funding dog work.”

— ELIZABETH FINKEL

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CELEBRATING THE FATHER OF LIGHT

To end the Year of Light, ROBYN ARIANRHOD pays homage to James Clerk Maxwell, who found a light wave hiding behind his equations.

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THE LONESOME GRAVE lies in a tiny crumbling stone church beside Loch Ken in southwest Scotland. You might think some otherwise undistinguished local lord lies here – until you see the name on the granite headstone: James Clerk Maxwell.

MAXWELL WAS ONE OF “THE BEST MEN WHO EVER LIVED” SAID HIS CHILDHOOD FRIEND AND BIOGRAPHER.

THIS IS THE FINAL RESTING PLACE of a giant of physics, the man who discovered that light is a wave created by the mutual push of magnetic and electric impulses. His discovery 150 years ago opened the door to the modern era of wireless communication. Ask physicists to rank their heroes, and Maxwell is in the top three, standing a shade below Newton and Einstein. But when it comes to being celebrated by the public, somehow Maxwell got left behind. Einstein’s image is well known and Newton’s pilgrims regularly flock to his tomb at Westminster. But few of us would recognise Maxwell’s face or know of the forgotten grave in the crumbling kirk. It is a pity, because Maxwell was one of the most likeable men in the annals of science. How can you not like a man who sends a heartfelt letter of condolence on the death of a friend’s dog? A man who patiently nursed his dying father, and later his wife, and who regularly gave up his time to volunteer at the new “Working Men’s Colleges” for tradesmen? It seems that everyone who knew him thought of him as kind and generous, albeit a little eccentric. He was “one of the best men who ever lived”, according to his childhood friend and biographer, Lewis Campbell. Born in Edinburgh, Maxwell grew up on his family estate at Glenlair, not far from the church where he is buried. He became laird of Glenlair when he was only 24, on the death of his father with whom he shared a close bond – he was an only child and his mother died when he was eight. His interest in physics was a natural extension of his fascination with how things work, and his love of nature. Maxwell was also a gifted mathematician. At 14 he developed a new method of constructing some unusual geometric curves;

his father brought it to the attention of the Edinburgh Royal Society which declared “the simplicity and elegance of the method” worthy of publication in their proceedings. In his early 20s, Maxwell used Newton’s laws to show mathematically that Saturn’s rings are not solid, as they appear through a telescope, but are made of many smaller bodies. His paper won him a prize from Cambridge and more than a century later in the 1980s, Voyager proved him right. Maxwell also loved language: he was a poet and a lucid science writer. His feeling for mathematics and for language came together in his unique approach to the most important scientific problem of his time: understanding electromagnetism.

WE DON’T OFTEN THINK about the importance of language in making scientific theories. Yet language clearly shapes our perception of the world. Place English speakers with their single word for snow amid the Inuit of Alaska, and they’ll be at a loss to describe details of the landscape. The Inuit by contrast have dozens of words to describe snow in all its forms. Language can also express a prejudice or lock in an attitude. For instance, do we describe a wilderness as beautiful or threatening? If everyday language can be so subjective, then what about scientific language? Science’s guiding principle is objectivity: scientists must be able to agree upon the results of a given experiment, regardless of their personal beliefs. At the same time science stands at the cusp between reality and language – between what is really out there, and what we are able to describe. Maxwell’s genius lay in recognising that problem and painstakingly searching for the right mathematical language to minimise it. But we’ll get to that shortly.

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FIRST, LET’S SET THE SCENE. What did physics look like when young Maxwell entered the picture? Most auspiciously he was born in 1831, the same year that the self-educated English physicist Michael Faraday made an astounding discovery. Faraday slid a magnet through a coiled wire, and presto, an electric current began flowing through it – no batteries required. Ten years earlier, Danish physicist, Hans Øersted had discovered the opposite: by switching on an electric current, he found a nearby magnetic compass needle jumped, as if the changing electric current were itself a magnet. This mysterious interaction between electricity and magnetism was called “electromagnetism”. No-one knew how this force was actually transmitted between wires and magnets, but most physicists assumed it acted instantaneously, without any intermediary mechanism – the same way gravity, magnetism and static electricity seemed to act. Apples immediately fall to the ground. Iron nails placed near a magnet are immediately pulled towards it, and two electric charges immediately attract or repel each other.

worrying about how the force of gravity travelled from the Sun to the Earth, for instance. So if the maths worked without the need to consider how gravity moved through space, then maybe gravity really did act at a distance? This is how most of Newton’s disciples saw it – although Newton himself did not. As it happened, action at a distance was a headache for Newton: in the late 1600s many scholars dismissed his whole theory because they couldn’t imagine how gravity could possibly act instantaneously across a vast chasm of nothingness, no intermediary required.

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Michael Faraday, who discovered electromagnetism, did not accept this force could act without a go-between.

Newton’s law of gravity assumed gravity acted instantaneously at a distance with no go-between. This kind of remote, instantaneous process was dubbed “action at a distance”. But by giving it such a name, physicists were playing with words: it was just an intuitive idea yet it seemed to be confirmed by mathematics – particularly Newton’s inverse square law (which says the force of gravity between two objects decreases according to the square of the distance between them). Using Newton’s laws you could work out the paths of planets without

Nevertheless, Newton’s laws worked. As well as describing planetary motion, they accurately predicted phenomena such as the date of the return of Halley’s comet and the existence of Neptune (deduced from distortions in the orbit of Uranus). In time, action at a distance was accepted as selfevident. This idea became even more entrenched when, in 1785 – nearly a century after Newton formulated his theory – French physicist CharlesAugustin de Coulomb showed that the electric force between two charged particles obeyed the same kind of inverse square law as gravity. With the discovery of electromagnetism in the 19th century, the picture became much more complicated. Most physicists – the so-called Newtonians – assumed action at a distance still applied. But Faraday dissented. The co-discoverer of electromagnetism thought the electromagnetic force must be communicated step by step through space, just as a breeze blowing through a farmer’s

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04 Mathematician and poet James Clerk Maxwell.

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field moves every stalk in turn. Indeed he used the term “field” to describe the space around magnets and currents, and he imagined the field contained lines of force radiating from the electric and magnetic sources. He didn’t believe gravity acted remotely either, and knew that Newton had never thought so: just because the maths seemed to imply action at a distance, that didn’t mean the concept was real. “Newton was no Newtonian,” Faraday once quipped. But the 19th-century Newtonians held sway. Their maths worked brilliantly for gravity, as well as for static electric and magnetic forces; they saw no reason not to apply it to electromagnetism too. As George Airy, Britain’s Astronomer Royal summed it up: “I declare that I can hardly imagine anyone … to hesitate an instant in the choice between the simple and precise [Newtonian] action, on the one hand, and anything so vague as lines of force on the other …”

THIS WAS THE INTELLECTUAL backdrop against which Maxwell, newly graduated from Cambridge, began developing a theory to explain electromagnetism. He carefully considered both sides of the debate. But something about Faraday’s lines of force resonated with him. As a two-year-old at Glenlair, he had been amazed that when he pulled a rope in one room, a bell rang in another, as if by magic. Then he discovered the holes in the walls where the bell-wires came through, and he dragged his father through the house, enthusiastically pointing them out. Now, all these years later, he recalled those bell-wires. They deepened his conviction that just as a bell needed a wire, so electromagnetic effects must act through the agency of some sort of field. Faraday’s lack of formal education meant he hadn’t been able to present his field concept in mathematical language. This is why Airy called the idea vague, and why few mainstream physicists paid it much attention. Maxwell believed that if he could find the right mathematical language to describe Faraday’s meticulous measurements of the forces surrounding electromagnetic objects, then perhaps the Newtonians might reconsider their objections. For Maxwell, language held the key to unlocking the true nature of electromagnetism. He felt physicists’ choice of language was partly influenced by their style of thinking – by whether they tended to think primarily in mathematical terms or with the help of concrete images. Each style had its advantages and disadvantages,

which Maxwell summed up later in a speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The “natural mathematicians” are “quick to appreciate the significance of mathematical relationships”, he said. But the problem in physics was that such a thinker was often “indifferent” as to whether or not “quantities actually exist in nature which fulfil this relationship”. (Maxwell might also have been thinking here about those who used mathematics to justify a “magical” concept such as action at a distance.) On the other hand, some scientists need concrete imagery to flesh out their equations. Such thinkers, Maxwell said, “are not content unless they can project their whole physical energies into the scene which they conjure up. They learn at what rate the planets rush through space, and they experience a delightful feeling of exhilaration. They calculate the forces with which the heavenly bodies pull at one another, and they feel their own muscles straining with the effort. To such men, [concepts such as] momentum, energy, and mass are not mere abstract expressions of the results of scientific enquiry. They are words of power, which stir their souls like memories of childhood.” Maxwell employed both types of thinking.

TO EXPLORE FARADAY’S field idea, Maxwell began by searching for analogies, “words of power” that conjure up concrete physical images. In his first electrical paper, he showed how Faraday’s imaginary lines of force around magnets and electric charges could be modelled using the analogy of streamlines, such as you see in eddies in a flowing river. The mathematics of fluid flow had been pioneered in the 18th century, and Maxwell adapted these equations so they fitted the meticulous data Faraday had collected measuring the forces in the space around magnets and currentcarrying wires. Maxwell sent a copy of his streamlines paper to Faraday. Now 65, and depressed at the mainstream rejection of his idea, Faraday was overjoyed to hear from this unknown 25-year-old. He wrote to Maxwell that he had “never communicated with one of your mode and habit of thinking”. He also asked if Maxwell could express his work in “common language” as well as in mathematical “hieroglyphics” so that he could understand it? Maxwell spent the next five years developing mathematical descriptions of various mechanical models that helped him imagine how a field could transmit changing electromagnetic forces. Yet he knew that such models did not qualify as a true

MAXWELL WAS CLEAR: ANALOGIES ARE USEFUL AS SCAFFOLDS IN ERECTING A THEORY, BUT SHOULD NOT BE MISTAKEN FOR REALITY.

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theory of electromagnetism. It was about language again: by imagining Faraday’s field to be like a fluid – or like heat, or acting via mechanical cogs and flywheels – he was making assumptions for which he had no actual evidence. Maxwell was clear in his writing about this: models and analogies are useful as scaffolds in erecting a theory, but they should not be mistaken for reality. So, with the mathematical insights he’d gained from his models now in hand, he dismantled

LIGHT IS NOT JUST A WAVE Not even a theory as good as Maxwell’s is the last word on reality. In his search for the “right” mathematical language, Maxwell had chosen a continuous rather than a discrete view of electromagnetism. By the end of the century, however, it was known that light (and other electromagnetic radiation), is produced by electrons shifting between energy states in their atomic orbitals. In 1905, Einstein showed – building on the work of German physicist Max Planck – that if you look at it from the atom’s point of view, light is emitted not in continuous waves but in bundles of energy, or quanta. Yet light also clearly acts like a wave, for instance, creating interference patterns as English polymath Thomas Young showed in 1801, and as Maxwell’s equations predicted. Physicists were forced to conclude that nature often defies neat categories, and to accept that light behaves sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle or “photon”. In 1905 Einstein also deduced his immortal equation E=mc2, which led to the astonishing conclusion that mass and energy are equivalent. Twenty years later, as if to break down once and for all the boundary between what is discrete and what is continuous, French physicist Louis de Broglie suggested that if light could behave as particles, then maybe the converse was true: particles of matter might behave like a wave. With the development of quantum mechanics, physicists accept the bizarre conclusion that matter, too, sometimes behaves like a wave.

his scaffolds, and started erecting his theory from scratch. His goal was to build a mathematical theory using only established physical principles, and the data gleaned from the papers of electromagnetic experimentalists such as Faraday. It would take him three more years. Finally, by 1865, Maxwell was able to describe all that was known about electromagnetism in a set of “partial differential equations”. That in itself was a remarkable feat. Then he combined his equations and carried out one more mathematical operation. And something extraordinary happened ... He found himself looking at the mathematical description of a transverse wave – the sort that travels along a plucked string. With growing excitement, Maxwell realised his purely electromagnetic wave had exactly the same signature as a light wave – the same form, the same speed. The mathematical coincidence was too delicious to ignore. In his 1865 paper, he announced with understated triumph: “We have strong reason to conclude that light itself (including radiant heat, and other radiation if any) is electromagnetic …”

IN ONE FELL SWOOP, Maxwell’s equations seemed to resolve two of the major conundrums in physics: how electromagnetism is transmitted through space and the nature of light. As Einstein said later of this discovery: “Imagine Maxwell’s feelings … at this thrilling moment! To few men in the world has such an experience been vouchsafed.” If Maxwell was right, then Faraday was vindicated: electromagnetism did not act instantaneously at a distance, but through a field. And fluctuations in this field were propagated as waves. Just as a wave rippling along a string can vibrate with a range of frequencies, so too electromagnetic waves had different frequencies, some of which we perceive as light. The rippling light wave was created by the mutual nudging of electric and magnetic fields. It was not so different to the way a Mexican wave travels across a stadium: one row of fans stand up and sit down, and trigger the next row to do the same. But in this case, the stadium is populated by electric and magnetic fields, each nudging the other on. BUT DID THE WAVES that Maxwell described mathematically actually exist? To prove it, someone would have to generate an electromagnetic wave from electrical and magnetic impulses. German physicist Heinrich Hertz took up the challenge.

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He rigged up an electric circuit that sent sparks jumping back and forth between a spark gap made of two brass knobs. According to Maxwell the changing electric current would generate an electromagnetic wave.

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Heinrich Hertz proved electromagnetic waves existed. To detect it, Hertz set up a receiver a few metres away – a loop of wire with a spark gap but no source of electricity. Then he started generating sparks from his oscillator. Lo and behold, across the room, another series of sparks began oscillating in the receiver! To prove that these sparks had been generated from energy carried by an electromagnetic wave, Hertz aimed his oscillator at a metal screen. If the oscillator really did produce waves, then the screen would reflect the incoming waves, and a reflected wave would combine with an incoming one to form a series of “nodes” where the two waves cancel each other out. This is what happens when the ripples from two pebbles dropped in a pond combine. By moving his apparatus, Hertz did indeed detect the neutral spots that must be the nodes; measuring the distance between adjacent nodes, he found the wavelength of his radiation. The year was 1887, more than two decades after Maxwell’s theory was published. Hertz had produced the first deliberately engineered radio waves. They had the same speed as light but a different frequency and wavelength, so they are part of what is now called the electromagnetic spectrum. Sadly, Maxwell did not live to see Hertz’s confirmation of his theory. Nor did he live to see the widespread consequences of his mathematical

field analysis, so that today we speak not only of electromagnetic fields, but also of gravitational and quantum fields. A hundred and fifty years ago, though, Maxwell’s theory was so controversial that many of his peers refused to teach it. Critics such as Maxwell’s friend, Lord Kelvin, thought mathematics should describe tangible facts, analogies and models. They did not think that mathematical language itself might reveal new knowledge about the physical world. Today, Einstein’s E=mc2 is the best known example of the power of mathematical language to reveal hidden truths. Einstein hadn’t set out to prove that energy and matter were essentially the same – but there it was in his equation! Similarly, Maxwell hadn’t assumed anything about the nature of light – but there, hidden in his electromagnetic equations were mathematical waves travelling at the speed of light. They were not ordinary waves travelling through a medium such as water or air, but purely mathematical waves of changing electric and magnetic intensity. In abandoning his earlier concrete models, Maxwell instinctively seemed to know that in the unseen realms – the “hidden, dimmer regions where thought weds fact”, as he put it – the closest we may come to perceiving physical reality is to imagine it mathematically.

THE SHY POETIC MAXWELL may not have achieved the celebrity status of Einstein, but in 2015 – the Year of Light – he deserves to be celebrated. You could do worse than don one of the T-shirts occasionally worn by students at university physics departments. They read: “And God said … Maxwell’s equations … and there was light.”

ROBYN ARIANRHOD is a mathematician and author of Einstein’s heroes and Seduced by logic. IMAGES 01 Twin Cities Brightest 02 Sir Godfrey Kneller / Getty Images / (background) Sola 03 SSPL / Getty Images / (background) Sola 04 SPL / Getty Images / (background) Sola 05 Henry Guttmann / Getty Images / (background) Sola ILLUSTRATION Jeffery Phillips

MAXWELL HADN’T ASSUMED ANYTHING ABOUT THE NATURE OF LIGHT.

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SOLVING THE ASTHMA RIDDLE

Could the answer be found on Bavarian farms? ELIZABETH FINKEL reports.

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THE BAVARIAN HILLS look like they could be a set from The Sound of Music. The air is crystal clear, cowbells are tinkling and the countryside is dotted with picture-perfect wooden farm houses.

IN RURAL GERMANY, SWITZERLAND AND AMONG THE AMISH, RURAL LIVING ALMOST HALVES A CHILD’S ASTHMA RISK.

OVER THE LAST 100 YEARS , farming has not changed much here. Cows, pigs and chickens live in barns beneath the houses. Mothers tend to the barn animals. Children grow up doing farm chores and drinking fresh, unpasteurised milk. It’s an idyllic, healthy way to grow up. And it shows. These farm children have around half the rate of asthma of children in nearby towns. This natural human experiment has intrigued researchers. Around the world asthma rates rise with modern living. But why? Is it city life, with its greater exposure to smog and other pollutants? Or does an ingredient in the rural lifestyle hold the secret to healthy lungs? Asthma researchers agree there is no simple answer. Multiple factors influence who becomes asthmatic: genetic make-up, viral infections that damage the airways, microbes in the gut, exposure to household chemicals and air pollution all play a part. Another complication is that asthma diagnosis varies with the latest medical fads, making it difficult to compare asthma rates over time. But the Bavarian experiment has reduced some of the variables. The people in the towns and farms, for instance, are of the same genetic stock, and are being diagnosed with the same tests. And researchers are taking advantage to drill down into what is protecting children on the farm. In a paper published in Science in September, an international team led by Ghent University researchers in Belgium exposed mice to dust collected from a Bavarian cow barn – and it protected them from asthma. Intriguingly, though, the dust only protected mice that carry an intact copy of the gene A20 that plays a key role in training the immune system. People lacking a functional form of A20 are also more susceptible to asthma, the team showed. “What’s striking about this study is how complete it is; it seems to add up and make sense,” says Manuel Ferreira, who studies

genetic predisposition to asthma at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. The results offer new leads for preventing and treating asthma in the form of vaccines or drugs that mimic the effects of farm dust. “It’s a big step forward,” says Erika von Mutius, a co-author of the present study who heads the Asthma and Allergy Department at the Children’s Hospital of the University of Munich.

ASTHMA RATES BEGAN TO RISE in the 1950s, especially in Western countries. In Australia the rise was particularly dramatic. In 1964, the percentage of seven year olds with asthma or wheeze was reported as 19% based on parents’ responses to a survey. By 1990, the same type of survey reported that 46% of children were affected. In Scotland the rate rose from 28% in 1964 to 64% in 1999. Such spikes could be attributed, at least in part, to a medical fad. What had once passed as wheezy bronchitis was relabelled asthma. But there’s no doubt the overall trend was real. “However you define it, many studies showed a rise,” says epidemiologist Guy Marks at the University of NSW. Yet since its peak in the mid-1990s, the rate of asthma has fallen and now seems to have plateaued. In Australia, the latest (2011) report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is that the percentage of school-aged boys with asthma is 11.4%; for girls the figure is 7%. It’s difficult to compare asthma rates over the last six decades, but it’s clear something about modern living raises the risk – a finding supported by rising asthma rates in developing countries. One theory is that modernity makes us too clean. Known as the hygiene hypothesis, the term was coined by British epidemiologist David Strachan in 1989. He observed that the more elder siblings a child had, the lower their risk of allergies. Strachan’s hypothesis has generally come to mean that the cleaner the environment, the higher

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And like all armies it relies on sentries – a collection of cells known as the innate immune system. They are the first responders and they brief the command centres on the nature of the assault. Do the invaders like to hide inside cells – like viruses and some bacteria? Or are they like tiny helminth worms – a type of parasite – that proliferate openly in the bloodstream? Different invaders require a different response. If it’s the intracellular variety, the immune system mounts a TH1 response. Like sending troops to fight within a town, the immune forces must carefully go from house to house to check for hidden combatants. If it’s worms in the bloodstream, the immune system mounts a TH2 response; that’s more like dropping bombs on an enemy out in the field. It’s less precise and runs the risk of more collateral damage. At birth, the human immune system seems to be set to a TH2 default state. During the first years of life, as it is exposed to the environment, it learns to rebalance towards TH1. In asthmatics, the immune system seems to have adapted badly: they remain more inclined towards the carpet bombing of a TH2 response.

WORLD ASTHMA PREVALENCE

40 35 Prevalence of Asthma (%)

the risk of asthma. Children in affluent countries grow up in small families with little exposure to animals, and antibiotic use reduces their exposure to microbes. This might leave their immune system with not enough to do, making it more likely to over-react to “innocent” environmental factors – most often house dust mite poo, mould, cat hair (actually salivary proteins left after licking) or grass pollen. Farm studies that compare asthma rates between town and country folk in a particular region have been one of the best ways to put the hygiene hypothesis to the test. More than 30 of these studies, carried out over the last 20 years, have found farm living protects against asthma, as well as against the related allergic conditions eczema and hay fever. Large effects are seen in rural Germany, Switzerland and among the Amish of Pennsylvania, where farm-living almost halves a child’s risk. Australian studies have found a link too – and shown that not just any farm will do. A 2001 study by Sara Downs at the University of Sydney, showed children growing up with livestock in Wagga Wagga were more protected from allergies than those from Moree, a cropping region. As von Mutius points out, the protective effects are strongest when children are raised in traditional farms with close exposure to animals. The critical period of exposure seems to be the first two years, and before – the time a mother spends in the barn while pregnant also offers protection. And the more types of animals she is exposed to the better. Many factors have been linked to the protective effect of farm living: hay, exposure to a variety of microbes, drinking unpasteurised milk. The Belgian researchers wanted to drill down further. They starting by testing farm dust from Bavarian cow barns. For two weeks, mice were exposed to barn dust every second day; the dust was daubed on their nostrils. Then they were exposed to a notorious trigger of asthma: house dust mite poo. The untreated mice duly had an asthma attack. The barn dust snorters did not. What was the magic ingredient in the cow barn dust? At least in part, the protective agent was a substance called endotoxin – the broken up bits of the cell wall of “gram negative” bacteria. Dosing the mice with endotoxin alone partly replicated the dust’s protective effect, the team showed. But how, exactly, was exposure to endotoxin preventing the mouse immune system overreacting to the presence of dust mite poo? The immune system operates like an army.

30 25 20 15 10 5

ASTHMA RATES have risen worldwide since the mid ’60s with Australia leading the pack. Since the ’90s there has been a drop off. The same country may have more than one entry on this graph, reflecting different ways of measuring asthma.

Australia United States Canada Switzerland Germany United Kingdom Norway Finland Estonia Poland Italy Spain Israel Singapore Hong Kong Taiwan Korea

1960

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SOURCE: THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, 2006

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Endotoxin may be one of the environmental triggers that helps usher the immune system from TH2 to TH1. How does endotoxin achieve this? Researchers knew it must be connected to the way the immune system’s sentry cells signal the state of the battlefield to command headquarters. Endotoxin is known to activate receptors on sentry cells. But what was the next signal? The researchers suspected it might be the product of a gene called A20. To prove A20 was the crucial go-between, the Ghent team eliminated it from mice. They found the protective effect of endotoxin and farm dust was greatly diminished, confirming the importance of A20. It was not only the sentry cells that relayed the A20 signal to the immune system. The cells that line the airways and provide a barrier against microbes – so-called epithelial cells – also played this role.

SO THAT’S THE STORY IN MICE . What about humans? To find out, the researchers took swabs of epithelial cells from the airways of normal and asthmatic patients and grew these cells in dishes. They were exposed to endotoxin every second day for one week, and then sprinkled with house dust mites. Cells in dishes can’t have an asthma attack, but they did produce chemicals typical of a TH2 response. However, just as in the mice, the cells pre-treated with endotoxin showed far lower levels of these chemicals. Interestingly, the cells from asthmatic people produced less A20 than those of non-asthmatics – a finding consistent with the notion that their immune armies had been poorly trained because they carry a defective form of this gene. These findings tally well with studies of children living on farms. For instance the GABRIELA study of 1,707 rural children aged six to 12 from four European countries (including Germany), found that those children most susceptible to asthma carried a defective form of the A20 gene. “The new study adds to decades of research that all point in the same direction,” says Peter Sly, director of the Children’s Health and Environment Program at the University of Queensland. Starting from the womb, infants are exposed to farm dust which carries endotoxin among other things. It triggers the release of A20, which signals the assembly of a better functioning immune army. So should pregnant mothers start sniffing farm dust and giving it to their infants as well? “Although tempting, I wouldn’t advise it,” says Martijn Schuijs, the lead author of the

Belgian study. “We are still not sure what it is that is protective in the cocktail of farm dust.” It’s not likely to be endotoxin alone, since that is plentiful in cities too – it exists wherever there are bacteria. He suspects the protective element is connected to cows and hay. But he does not rule out a type of vaccine in the future that, like endotoxin, could be used to train the human system. Alternatively, knowing the crucial signalling role of A20 points to a new target for developing drugs that raise its activity. In the meantime, should children attend farm-based crèches? “Yes, I like that idea,” says von Mutius, who has studied these farming environments for more than a decade. Farm crèches are already popular in the Netherlands. But childhood exposure may not be enough to recruit a healthy immune army for life. A 2014 study in Silesia, Poland showed that once people in traditional villages stopped keeping animals they lost much of their protection against allergies. In 2003, their rates of allergy were about a third that of people in the nearby towns. But in 2004, Poland joined the European Union and many villagers, rather than conforming to costly new husbandry standards and the requirement to pasteurise their milk, jettisoned their animals. The result was that their allergy levels rose to match the level of the people in the towns. Asthma rates have not followed suit, but Paul Cullinan, a respiratory physician at London’s Imperial College and senior author of the study, suspects this will come. He cites the “allergic march” often seen in apprentice bakers. First they develop allergies to wheat flour; after several months their allergic response is followed by asthma. For Cullinan, the lesson of Poland is: “If you want to stop being allergic, you need to live like an 18th century villager.” But there are costs. Drinking unpasteurised milk carries the risk of being infected with dangerous bacteria including listeria, salmonella and enterohaemorrhagic E. coli that can damage the kidneys. Since living like 18th century villagers is not an option for most of us, let’s hope the new findings on how barn dust trains the immune system will provide another answer.

ELIZABETH FINKEL is the editor-in-chief of Cosmos magazine. ILLUSTRATIONS Lachlan Conn / Jacky Winter Group

A TYPE OF VACCINE IN THE FUTURE COULD BE USED TO IMPROVE THE IMMUNE SYSTEM.

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THE FOUR BUGS THAT PROTECT US FROM ASTHMA WHILE RESEARCHERS have yet to figure out exactly how growing up on a farm protects against asthma, all indications are that it is connected to exposure to certain microbes. Modern living has changed the bacteria in our environment. Is it possible to identify what an ideal bacterial community should like? A team of Canadian researchers embarked on that mission and came back with an astonishing result: just four species of bacteria provide protection against asthma. The report was published in Science Translational Medicine in September. Thousands of species of bacteria inhabit the human gut, so identifying what the right bacterial community should look like is daunting. The Canadian team took courage from state-of-the-art techniques that allowed them to read the DNA signatures of bacteria in the poo of three month old Canadians – 319 of them. Their mothers had obligingly enrolled in the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Study (CHILD). The infants were followed for a year to see which of them became allergic and wheezy – strong predictors of asthma. It turned out the wheezy babies

were more likely to be missing four types of bacteria: Lachnopsira, Veillonella, Faecalibacterium and Rothia. Could only four types of bacteria protect against asthma? Yes, as the team showed with mice. A pregnant mouse was raised in a sterile environment. Her gut was inoculated with microbes from the poo of a three month old human infant with low levels of the four bacteria. The mouse pups developed asthma. But if the mouse mother’s inoculum was supplemented with the four bacteria, her pups were protected! Could a variation of this treatment work for human infants, perhaps by introducing these bacteria to pregnant mothers? “That’s the question we are addressing now,” says Stuart Turvey a paediatric immunologist at the University of British Columbia and co-author of the study. The opportunity for these bacteria to modify the immune system from an allergic state to a non-allergic one, seems to lie within the first 100 days of life. While the microbial communities of the three month old babies showed differences, by the time they were a year old, those differences had almost vanished.

So early life exposure may be key, says Turvey, a finding that matches what was found in the Bavarian farm studies. So could you pick up these four types of bacteria on a Bavarian farm? The Canadian team doesn’t know. The one bit of information they do have, says Turvey, is that some of them produce endotoxin, the fragment of the bacterial wall that helps train the immune system (see main article). They also produce acetate in the gut. This short chain fatty acid travels through the bloodstream, and has also been shown to help modulate the immune system. Could the solution to the asthma epidemic could be as easy as restoring the ecological balance of a baby’s microbial community with four bugs? “While this research is still in its infancy, it raises an exciting possibility,” says Rhys Allan, an asthma researcher at Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

— ELIZABETH FINKEL

Bacteria found in a sample of human faeces. Four species may provide protection against asthma. CREDIT: EYE OF SCIENCE / GETTY IMAGE

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WHAT THE ROBOTS TAUGHT US

The Fukushima nuclear disaster showed us that sometimes humans need a helpful robot. So a competition was designed to build one. ERICO GUIZZO and EVAN ACKERMAN report.

THE THOR ROBOT, a contender in the robotics challenge, was built from the ground up in three months by the Terrestrial Robotics Engineering and Controls lab at Virginia Tech .

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IN WHAT MUST BE the biggest public display of robot adoration and empathy ever witnessed, thousands cheered as the team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology won the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Robotics Challenge in Pomona, California.

ITS ROBOT, an adaptable humanoid called DRC-Hubo, beat 22 other bots from six countries in a two-day competition organised with the aim of advancing the field of disaster robotics. The team from Daejeon, South Korea, walked away with the $2 million grand prize. DRC-Hubo’s ability to switch from walking bipedally to rolling on wheels gave it a distinct advantage. Many bipedal bots had spectacular and sometimes comical falls while trying to perform tasks such as opening a door or operating a drill. But DRC-Hubo’s unique “transformer” design allowed it to perform tasks faster and, perhaps more importantly, to stay on its feet – and wheels. DRC-Hubo prevailed over the other robots because it finished the competition’s eight tasks with time to spare: steering a utility vehicle through an obstacle course, getting out of the vehicle (which is more challenging than you might think), turning a handle and opening a door (simple for us, but hard for a robot), opening a rotating valve, using a battery-powered tool to cut a hole in a piece of drywall, inserting a plug into a wall socket, overcoming rough terrain or clearing debris, and climbing a short flight of stairs. Now that the robotics challenge is over, what have we learnt?

the drivers were not allowed to watch the robots directly during the competition. One of DARPA’s main goals with the challenge was to generate significant improvements in the ability of robots and their human operators to work in concert to perform difficult tasks, but we felt that the tasks could have been – and perhaps should have been – even more challenging. For example, in the task requiring the robot to navigate over a pile of rubble, we wanted to see teams push a “go over rubble” button that would make the robot scan the terrain, compute a viable path, and then traverse the obstacles without any further assistance. Granted, autonomy is a difficult hurdle to scale, but it’s key to the future of disaster-response

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SOFTWARE IS A HARD PROBLEM — At an event like the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, it’s easy to focus on the hardware because it’s the part we can see. But something just as important was going on in the garages hundreds of metres away. That’s where the operators (“robot drivers”) received data from the robots’ sensors, interpreted it, and told the machines what to do, because

The most effective disaster-response robots will be autonomous, but designing software that can deliver this remains a huge challenge.

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challenge it shouldn’t minimise the future potential and value of bipedal walking. As roboticists from the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, in Pensacola, Florida, pointed out during a postcompetition workshop, bipedal walking lets you move across areas where you only have a footstepsize safe place to move, and, unless you can fly, no other mobility design does that.

FALLING IS USUALLY OK ... From what we could tell, none of the teams expected their robots to survive falling as well as they did. To be honest, we were expecting shattered limbs and geysers of hydraulic fluid across the course. But with a few exceptions, the hardware stood up very well. Or rather, the hardware was stood up by a team of humans after it fell.

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Team RoboSimian’s entrant attempts to drill a hole in a wall using power tools. robots because relatively untrained users will need to be able to interact with this hardware. And that means letting the robot (or more accurately, the software) deal with as many complex tasks as possible on its own.

RIGHT NOW, NOT WALKING IS A BIG ADVANTAGE — Of the top three robots in the finals, third place went to a robot that rolled on tracks, second place went to a walking biped, and first place went to a biped equipped with wheels that it could use instead of walking. During two days of watching robots fall over, we were most impressed by the ones that had the option to avoid walking. “Bipedal walking [for robots] is not very stable yet,” Jun-Ho Oh, a professor of mechanical engineering who led the winning Korean team, said. “One single thing goes wrong, and the result is catastrophic.” It’s important to note that in a real disaster area, wheeled mobility may be close to useless. So despite how well the wheeled designs did at the robot

Team IHMC’s Running Man robot tumbles while attempting to clamber over a pile of rubble. Take, for example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Atlas robot. It fell while getting out of the vehicle on the first day and broke its right arm. Still, after a quick tweak to the robot’s software, it was able to perform the remaining tasks with only its left arm. An all-night repair session restored use of the damaged limb for the second day’s tasks. It was a bit disappointing that only one of the robots that fell over, Carnegie Mellon University’s CHIMP, managed to get back up again on its own. In fact, CHIMP was the only robot that even attempted to right itself. Though it’s understandable that the teams didn’t want to

FALLING AND GETTING UP IS SOMETHING ROBOTS ARE ABSOLUTELY GOING TO HAVE TO CRACK.

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05 Winning ways – Korea’s DRC-Hubo entrant, winner of the $2 million prize, shows how to clear rubble.

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over-engineer their robots, falling happens – even to humans – and we’re much better at walking than robots. If legged robots are ever going to be truly effective, falling and getting up is something that they’re absolutely going to have to crack.

... EXCEPT WHEN IT’S CATASTROPHIC —

THE ROBOT LAY THERE BLEEDING IN A PUDDLE OF GREEN GOO.

There were a few unlucky robots that hit the ground hard and couldn’t recover. The most disastrous fall of the competition was the tumble taken by TRACLabs’ Atlas robot on day two, right after it exited the vehicle it had driven through an obstacle course. On impact, there was a two-metre-long spray of hydraulic fluid, and the robot lay there “bleeding” in a puddle of green goo until it was hoisted up and hauled away.

About 10 years ago, DARPA held a grand challenge and an urban challenge for autonomous vehicles. They were successful, with a handful of self-driving cars and trucks completing the courses. Today, we’re just starting to see autonomousvehicle technology reach the cusp of mainstream adoption. So when we have real disaster-response robots in five or 10 years, we can thank the DARPA contest for starting it all.

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ADAPTATION IS A HUGE CHALLENGE — You never know what a robot is going to encounter as it traverses the scene of a disaster. But as things stand now, even tiny changes in an area’s layout, or small errors in programming or commands, can lead to catastrophic failures. This is why robots are not ready for real-world disasters – and won’t be for quite some time. The robots that competed in the finals are more versatile and adaptable than any we’ve seen before. However, it’s worth noting that the teams were given the choice of having the robot clear a path through debris or manoeuvre over uneven terrain: no legged-robot team chose the debris clearing and no wheeled-robot team tried to tackle the terrain. Teams understandably took the easiest course open to them, but in a real disaster area, a robot would likely have to deal with both rough terrain and debris. That’s one downside of a competition of this type: it fosters a focus on mastering specific skills as opposed to developing the most capable and versatile robot – and those two things aren’t always the same.

The next challenge: NASA’s Valkyrie robot is a prototype for space exploration. It’s not likely that we’ll see another humanoid challenge of the same magnitude for some time, but there are still things to look forward to: this year, NASA will hand over several of its Valkyrie humanoid robots to university teams in preparation for a robotics challenge intended to explore the possibility of sending humanoid robots into space and, eventually, to Mars.

ERICO GUIZZO is the senior editor and EVAN ACKERMAN is a senior writer for IEEE Spectrum’s robotics blog Automation. CREDIT: IEEE Spectrum

WHAT’S NEXT — DARPA’s goal with this competition was not to present a robotic platform that could immediately be deployed into disaster areas. DARPA is all about high-risk, high-reward, long-term technological pushes, and that’s the context in which the robot challenge should be considered.

IMAGES 01 Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images 02 MIT 03 DARPA 04 DARPA 05 DARPA 06 NASA 07 DARPA

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07 Clambering out of a vehicle is hard for a robot, but Carnegie Mellon University’s CHIMP entrant managed to do it.

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IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF WALLACE

He came for the insects, now he’s a champion for the people of New Guinea. JO CHANDLER meets Vojtech Novotny.

NOVOTNY PULLS NO punches in challenging conservationists.

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ON A BEACH OVERLOOKING the luminous waters of Nagada Harbour, beneath colossal mango trees, lie the ramshackle headquarters of the Papua New Guinea Binatang Research Centre. Here, in sweaty proximity, crews of European and Papua New Guinean scientists huddle over their latest haul of forest specimens.

“THE GREATEST TERRA INCOGNITA THAT STILL REMAINS FOR THE NATURALIST TO EXPLORE.”

IN THE HERBARIUM, botanists compare fresh cuttings of fruits and leaves with dried ones filed between yellowed pages of scrounged newsprint. Next door, huddled over laptops, biologists plot data on shifting bird and frog populations. But in the main laboratory it’s all about bugs, or “binatang” in PNG’s lingua franca. Glass showcases filled with flamboyant swallowtail butterflies are crowded alongside more soberly attired geometer moths. Jammed between them, busy ranks of young researchers are cataloguing freshly captured butterflies and beetles, larvae and leafhoppers, fruit flies and fig wasps. Navigating a path through this clutter is the director, Vojtech Novotny. Pale-skinned, 50, wearing a ponytail limp with sweat and wild red whiskers, he’s something of an exotic species himself. Hailing from the hills between Bohemia and Moravia in the Czech Republic, he spends six months a year trading life as an academic at the University of South Bohemia, for these digs. His wilted tropical fatigues and sandals have seen some serious jungle miles. Few outsiders know this landscape, its creatures and people as intimately. NOVOTNY’S WORK HAS PUT PNG on the map as a global laboratory for understanding the interactions between insects and the forests they live in. “He’s got a huge legacy in PNG and globally,” enthuses colleague Nigel Stork, a beetle ecologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Sauntering through the main lab, Novotny lingers at a bench where two young men process the catch from a lowland rainforest not far from their own village. Byron Siki and Dominic Rinan are paraecologists, home-grown experts whose native knowledge of the forests is being augmented with scientific training. They come from Wanang on the lower reaches of the Ramu River, only about 100 kilometres distant as the hornbill flies.

The forest of Wanang is in good shape thanks to a decision by villagers to put aside 10,000 pristine hectares for conservation. But elsewhere on the river, villagers have sold their trees to loggers who are stripping away 100,000 hectares of neighbouring jungle. This is the more common story. Conservationists are alarmed at the destruction of PNG’s forests, the third largest remaining area of tropical canopy after the Amazon and Congo basins. In precise, Czech-inflected English, Novotny explains: “Wanang village had logging offers like the others. But its people took a different path.” Novotny’s centre established a field station at Wanang about 10 years ago. It employed villagers as camp crews and forest guides, as well as training some paraecologists such as Siki and Rinan, or supporting them through Masters and PhD studies. It’s a template for the kind of healthy symbiotic relationship to which many forest dwellers and conservationists aspire. But it’s not the kind of endeavor Novotny imagined being part of when he arrived in Papua New Guinea 20 years ago. He came for the adventure and the insects. The nation is home to some 5% of global biodiversity, but its seven million strong human population is also extraordinarily diverse. One thousand languages are spoken here. “Isolation is a magnificent generator of diversity,” human and otherwise, Novotny reflects. What he has seen here changed him. Today he is more interested in the country’s people than in the insects. He has become dismayed with the priorities and strategies of the international green agenda, admonishing it for “a very misleading rhetoric, where they promise economic change as a direct outcome of conservation, but at the same time they are not bringing it”. Without meaningful support, the initiative and

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determination of communities such as Wanang to preserve their forest treasure is, he fears, doomed.

NEW GUINEA HAS LONG FASCINATED naturalists and adventurers. On a beach, only a few kilometres from Novotny’s laboratory is the site where, 145 years ago, Count Nikolai Nikolaievich MiklukhoMaklai waded ashore, waved off his compatriots and set up camp. Maklai was inspired by British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who, in parallel to Darwin, lit upon the theory of evolution through natural selection. After spending three months exploring what is now part of West Papua, Wallace described New Guinea as “the greatest terra incognita that still remains for the naturalist to explore”.

Australian newspapers and petitioned powerful players about his concerns that European influences were corrupting New Guinea, and that its people and resources were being exploited. Novotny writes papers challenging his fellow naturalists and conservationists over their largely futile efforts to preserve PNG’s forests, accusing them of romanticising forest people, and ignoring their hardships. He wants the complex human imperatives that lead to forest loss to be recognised, and suggests hard-currency strategies to tackle them. His insights are shaped by his engagement with forest dwellers trying to make conservation pay in villages such as Wanang and Ohu, another lowlands community where he has worked intermittently for two decades.

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The New Guinea Binatang Research Centre: a humble-looking outfit with a global reputation for its research into the biodiversity of PNG’s insects. Novotny was also irresistibly drawn to the island. Fascinated by insects since the age of 10, he dreamt of an adventurous life chasing down more sublime varieties than those found in the tamed forests of his homeland. Twenty years of trudging in the footsteps of his heroes have made Novotny a member of a rare breed. Few scientists today venture as wide and deep into remote landscapes as Wallace or Maklai. “Novotony’s research has shifted everything. He expanded what we can do and where we can do it ,” says Stork. Like his heroes, Novotny has also paid the price of doing business in the lowland tropics, repeatedly enduring what he calls “malaria intermezzos”. The paths taken by Novotny and Maklai share another resonating chord. Maklai wrote letters to

OHU IS ONLY 15 KILOMETRES INLAND from the Binatang headquarters and the provincial coastal capital of Madang, but the trip takes 40 boneshaking minutes aboard Novotny’s troop carrier. Some 25 years ago the people of Ohu set aside a 300 hectare corner of forest to nurture a butterfly habitat. They hoped it might lure tourists into visiting Madang. They cultivated flowers with nectar to attract the adult butterflies, and vines where they could lay their eggs. “We wanted to preserve the land, we didn’t want the logging to come down and spoil our species in here, especially the bird of paradise,” recalls elder Jerry Kasom, one of the clan leaders who instigated the conservation zone. A well-travelled merchant seaman, he has seen much environmental

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The dazzling moth collection at Binatang is emblematic of the extreme biodiversity of PNG’s forests..

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destruction first-hand, particularly in South America. He supported tourism as an alternative way of bringing services and jobs to the village and its rapidly growing population. And so the butterflies came to Ohu, but the tourists? Not so much. The community did not have the resources to secure the buses and roads that the butterfly fanciers also required. The problem is expressed plainly in the Lonely Planet travel guide’s directions to Ohu’s butterfly site. It suggests visitors ride one of the crowded, dilapidated minibuses to the nearest drop-off, and then set out on a 70-minute walk into the forest. They should achieve this before dawn if they hope to also glimpse the birds of paradise in their ritual display. Even for tourists intrepid enough to find their way to Madang, it’s a big ask. It is also symptomatic of the hurdles faced by forest communities across PNG. Ohu’s experiment clings on today, thanks to an adventure-hungry young Czech naturalist who dreamed of Wallace’s New Guinea.

NOVOTNY ARRIVED IN MADANG , aged 30, in 1995 on a six-month posting with the Christensen Research Institute, a private American enterprise. This grew into a two-year stint of well-resourced scientific and cultural exploration. During this time all the practical difficulties of working in the remote field were someone else’s problem. When Christensen decided to pull out of PNG in 1997, Novotny was shocked. “It was the only functioning station for terrestrial research in the country,” he says. With his French friend and colleague Yves Basset, Novotny then set up Binatang, securing start-up funding from the US National Science Foundation, then tackling the complex practicalities of doing business in PNG. At Ohu, as they would later do at Wanang, the Binatang teams employed local people and set up a bush laboratory. Data pulled out of the forest became the basis of several major papers. These included one in Nature, investigating the grazing habits of insects in tropical forests – they are much less picky and able to forage on a wider variety of plants than previously assumed – and another in Science, questioning why tropical forests harbour so many species of herbivorous insects. As one might imagine, the insect population reflects the multitude of plant species. But, notes Stork: “While we tend to make assumptions, Novotny goes out and tests them.” Fieldwork became a mainstay of income around Ohu and later Wanang, but it’s a fragile relationship – science requires pristine forest, but science can’t pay to preserve it. Nevertheless, the centre has

capitalised on its relationships with the surrounding people and its prize location. It is within striking distance of field sites from the shores of Madang Lagoon to the top of Mt Wilhelm – PNG’s highest peak, at 4,500 metres. Survey teams can traverse a range of jungle environments in two (exhausting) days, from the shores of the Bismarck Sea, the realm of the King bird of paradise, to the mountain peak, the territory of Stephanie’s astrapia and the Black sicklebill. “This is something that can’t be done in many other tropical countries,” says Novotny.

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SCIENCE REQUIRES PRISTINE FOREST, BUT SCIENCE CAN’T PAY TO PRESERVE IT.

Novotny documented 370 caterpillar species over 75,000 square kilometres, the size of Ireland. Binatang’s toehold in one of the planet’s biodiversity hotspots saw its reputation grow. It was chosen to partner France’s National Museum of Natural History in an epic 2012 expedition involving 200 researchers over three months. (Novotny was co-leader of the PNG project.) The expedition formed part of the Our Planet Reviewed program that aims to collate an inventory of unknown plant and animal species. The Binatang team also spent three years working their way across 75,000 square kilometres of rainforest and marshland (the size of Ireland) on the Sepik River, digging in for three months at a time in eight villages, studying the range of butterflies and moths. It was an ambitious project much in the Wallace tradition, inspired by the naturalist’s “unputdownable” book The Malay Archipelago (1863). Novotny’s own expedition was “a fairly interesting study logistically,” he recalls, with

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HIS FRUSTRATION IS THAT THE WORLD CAN’T SEEM TO SEE THE PEOPLE FOR THE TREES.

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characteristic understatement. It involved hairraising flights on to grass runways, paddling crocodile-infested rivers in dugout canoes, and one angry arrow fired at his team (it missed). His account is partly captured in his own book Notebooks from New Guinea, originally published in Czech in 2009 and since translated into English. “It’s cleverly constructed, whimsical with a dry sense of humour, but clever and thoughtful. It typifies what he’s like as a person,” observes Stork. The scientific purpose of Novotny’s expedition was to try to penetrate the hidden world of jungle insects. More than half of all described species are insects (and half are beetles). Yet it’s estimated that 80% of insect species remain to be identified. Finding them is a vexed issue. Scientists can’t measure what lives in every square kilometre of the Earth. So they sample a particular area and scale up. But how representative are the tested areas? And how consistent is the picture across a landscape? Answering these questions is crucial for determining how best to safeguard rare species from logging. One approach is to measure the number of insect species that feed on a particular type of tree. Then you measure how many species of tree live in the forest. If there are 100 insect species for one species of tree, and 100 species of tree in the forest, you estimate 10,000 insect species. That’s the type of analysis Novotny’s team carried out based at the eight villages spaced 150 kilometres apart across the Sepik basin. Within each study site, they selected strategic tree species and collected every caterpillar and what they were munching on: foliage, fruit or wood. They reared the caterpillars in bags and once the moths emerged, identified some 370 species (caterpillars are hard to sort into species). “He does extremely careful work, builds up the picture as he goes along. He couldn’t do it without his big team. He takes people from local villages as well as students from the city and builds them up,” notes Stork who has visited Novotny in the field. Their key finding was that although the species diversity in each of the eight study sites was extremely high – so-called alpha diversity – that pattern remained similar across a 500-kilometre area. So long as the altitude, climate and soil conditions stayed similar, the number and types of species – so called beta diversity – changed little. Until then no such data had been collected for lowland tropical rainforests anywhere. These findings, published in Nature in 2007, had implications for conservation in PNG. They provided hope that as forests continue to fall, some carefully sited reservations could protect a substantial number of species, says Novotny.

It is even possible that, with some money and creative effort, the PNG has the capacity to retain significant biodiversity despite the bulldozers. Meanwhile, the scale of the threat remains. A 2008 analysis of satellite images from 1972 to 2002 showed PNG’s forests were vanishing at a rate that would wipe out 50% of the total forest area by 2021. An updated satellite analysis is due for publication by early next year but all evidence suggests deforestation continues apace. PNG’s thriving logging trade was valued in 2012 at $306 million – with almost one third of the logs coming out of illegally leased sites. International concern about the vulnerability of PNG’s forests has spiked with revelations that more than five million hectares have been swept up in foreign land grabs, most of them sly logging enterprises dressed up as plantation agriculture. The deals were exposed by a 2013 PNG Commission of Inquiry as almost entirely illegal and without landowner consent, but there’s been no action to shut them down. Novotny is trying to find ways to preserve the forests. But he also sees communities desperate for basic services. He sees how profoundly aspirations in PNG have changed, particularly in the younger Facebook connected generation. And he is aware that land lease deals raise complex questions around justice, economy, culture and land rights. His frustration is that the world can’t seem to see the people for the trees.

“WHEN I FIRST CAME TO PNG, the forests here didn’t seem to be under any serious threat compared to other parts of Asia and the Amazon,” Novotny reflects. “Since then the situation has really changed.” He’s witnessed “the tidal wave” of logging, which has swept across the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, push into New Guinea, “the last large area of rainforest”. But that is not the only threat to forests. PNG is on track to double its population to 15 million in 23 years. More than 80% of its people are rural folk sustained by their garden crops. To feed their children, villagers make deeper and deeper incursions into wild country. Land conversion to agriculture, whether it is small-scale garden crops or mega oil palm, cocoa and coffee plantations, is a more insidious threat to biodiversity than foreign logging, says Novotny. “Lots of people will not agree with me. But we have to do a sort of triage, look at where we can achieve the best effect with the limited resources we have.” He believes the humid tropics will be less affected than other landscapes by climate change, though he nominates altitudinal changes – where species migrate up to cooler spots on the

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05 In the Ohu conservation area, near Madang, villagers have chosen to reject logging. Forest dweller Pius Isa collects cordyline plants for his garden.

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“HOW THE STORY OF FOREST BIODIVERSITY ON PNG WILL END IS STILL IN FRONT OF US.”

Slash and burn agriculture in action: the forest is cut down to make way for a food garden to feed a growing population. Modern agricultural methods could save PNG’s forests, says Novotny. mountainside – as a concern. “But to me this is really secondary to the more important habitat change being caused by population growth, forestry and agriculture,” he says. In a 2010 paper in the journal Biotropica (“Why forest dwellers prefer loggers to conservationists”) Novotny proposed a scheme of conservation royalties that would make conserving forests as lucrative as cutting them down. This echoes the mechanism proposed by the United Nations REDD schemes (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) but rather than pricing the canopy as a carbon sink, the payment recognises forest dwellers as caretakers of biodiversity. “We need to protect it for its own sake,” he says. Sitting on the deck of the Binatang centre, he puts it plainly: “If remote communities have a choice between logging development and no development, they will choose logging.” Even more appealing are the small oil palm enterprises that can deliver better health, better incomes, more education, and preserve communities (at least in the short to medium term). The risk is that the plantation momentum can quickly build, “which will get us to the same situation as Borneo, in which everything that can be converted is converted to oil palm”. Novotny argues the most powerful action conservation groups can take to save PNG’s biodiversity is to invest in modern agriculture, to help farmers improve yields and use land more efficiently, thereby preserving forests. In case the

wider world doesn’t engage in this strategy – and he’s not optimistic – Novotny is incubating Plan B at the Binatang centre. He’s training young people from forest communities, building up a small, indigenous army of scientists. Novotny’s main objective is for this cadre to help build PNG’s scientific capacity, so that local voices, with intimate knowledge of country and culture, can go on to study sustainable agriculture, manage forests, and inform policy at the highest level. Nurturing this expertise has now become his central mission. It’s a more profound, lasting legacy than anything he might deliver in a journal paper. What’s the use of a breakthrough insight into the ecology of PNG’s forests if the nation is unable to make use of that information? “How the story of forest biodiversity on PNG will end is still in front of us,” he says. “There is no trajectory that is already set that can’t be changed. But decision time is approaching.”

JO CHANDLER is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. IMAGES 01 Mayeta Clark 02 Mayeta Clark 03 Tim Laman / National Geographic Creative 04 Tim Laman / National Geographic Creative 05 Mayeta Clark 06 Mayeta Clark

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PEOPLE, CULTURE & FICTION

SPECTRUM

ZEITGEIST

The Buzz about Mars Apollo veteran Buzz Aldrin is a Mars mission enthusiast. DREW TURNEY reports on his crusade and its prospects.

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ZEITGEIST

The Buzz about Mars Astronaut and author Buzz Aldrin had hardly settled back on Earth in 1969 when he was advocating expanding the space program to put humans on Mars. In the years since, more voices have joined the chorus. Despite a generation of setbacks, Aldrin has stuck to his guns. His 2013 book Mission to Mars outlines his vision, and this year he published Welcome to Mars, a children’s book that sells his plan to the generation who will engineer and deploy the necessary technologies. Aldrin has a lot of supporters, and not all of them are kids. A new generation of billionaires are not shy about parlaying their incredible wealth into passion projects. Elon Musk and Richard Branson have become synonymous with such ambitions, but a Dutch entrepreneur seems to have the most advanced plan. Bas Lansdorp is the CEO of Mars One, a company that intends to fly colonists to Mars by 2025 and to pay for the adventure by chronicling their efforts on a reality TV show. The financing model has already proved fickle. Endemol – producer of the Big Brother series and Mars One’s media partner – has backed out. Mars One also planned to use SpaceX vehicles for the mission, but in February this year, the Guardian website reported that SpaceX had less than $1 million in the bank. Even if Mars One reaches its $6 billion target, experts say it won’t be enough – NASA prices a return trip to Mars at $100 billion. Researchers have also pulled Mars One’s plan apart from technical and engineering perspectives, and even a former candidate has spoken out against it. Former NASA researcher Joseph Roche said candidates advance through the selection process by amassing points. It seemed harmless enough until he revealed points were accrued by buying Mars One merchandise or donating to the project. Meanwhile, Aldrin’s enthusiasm for Mars remains undimmed. As he told AOL.com: “Since the Apollo 11 landing in July 1969, I have had a long-held belief that Earth isn’t the only world for us any more. In my view, we must all strive for a continuously expanding human presence in space.” He recently signed an agreement with the Florida Institute of Technology to establish The Buzz Aldrin Space Institute, a think tank that will sketch out a viable Mars mission blueprint in the hope of influencing NASA’s plans. Aldrin’s idea is to build up a series of spaceship networks on the Earth, the Moon and Mars.

Instead of shooting a rocket full of people straight to Mars we’d stop off at the Moon, catch some asteroids for materials, build a staging area on the Martian moon Phobos and then complete the journey. Despite his idealism, Aldrin is a political realist. He suggests Obama could lay the groundwork for space exploration and that the next president could continue it, in the same way that Kennedy’s vision to land humans on the Moon was completed by LBJ. Aldrin also believes that the initial trip to Mars will be a one-way ride. “It will cost the world – and the US – billions and billions of dollars to put these people there, and you’re going to bring them back?” he asked an MIT conference in 2014. “What are you going to do when you bring them back here that can possibly compare to the value they would be if they stayed there and Mars wasn’t empty? And then, they helped to work with the next group and it builds up a cadre of people. When we’ve got 100 – or whatever it is – then we start bringing people back.”

02

Aldrin has been an enthusiastic space advocate since making his historic journey to the Moon. Aldrin recently appeared on the CBS news show Face the Nation accompanied by former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has his own space colonisation ambitions. Gingrich pointed out that Kennedy created a new bureaucracy to go to the Moon. “If we put that same amount of money in today and built a brand new mission to Mars bureaucracy aimed only on that assignment, you’d get there very fast,” he said. Aldrin envisages the Mars mission could be shared by America with other space-faring nations such as China, South Korea or India. We already have a pretty successful (fictional) model

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of how to colonise Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994) and Blue Mars (1996). Scientists have praised the scientific authenticity of the novels, and Robinson believes they still hold up. “Mars should be thought of like Antarctica or a Moon base with a base staffed by rotating crews of scientists and support people who visit, work and return home,” he says. “That arrangement may last for a long time while we study the effects of living there – we have no idea what living long-term in 38% of Earth gravity will do to people.” Unfortunately, that’s one of the many things we don’t know about Mars. A 2014 study at MIT claimed humans who reached Mars would be dead within about two and a half months.

NASA’s Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter were both lost in the late ’90s, and up to 19 Russian efforts have either failed altogether or not achieved their full mission objectives. Our success at reaching Mars stands at well below 50%.

03

“IT WILL COST THE WORLD BILLONS AND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO PUT THOSE PEOPLE THERE, AND YOU’RE GOING TO BRING THEM BACK?”

Even though the Mars trilogy is still a good benchmark, we’ve discovered a lot in the years since it was written. Robinson didn’t account for the levels of percholates (salts poisonous to humans) in the Martian soil. There’s not as much nitrogen as he thought (probably enough for agriculture, but not for the bulk neutral gas we need for an artificial atmosphere). They’ve also found brain damage in mice exposed to cosmic rays. Astronaut Chris Hadfield has also come out against Mars. He thinks the Mars One approach of selecting a specific number of astronauts and then designing the technology around them is putting the cart before the horse. He also suspects we’re over-reaching. “We absolutely need to do it on the Moon for a few generations,” he told Business Insider Australia last year. “On average, the Moon is about 600 times closer to Earth than Mars. That means if something goes wrong with a colony, we can dispatch help from Earth that will reach the Moon in a matter of hours instead of months. Developing a working Moon colony would be an important first step to living on Mars.” What kind of things might go wrong, we can scarcely imagine. Carl Sagan observed that “precisely because Mars is an environment of great potential biological interest, it is possible that on Mars there are pathogens, organisms which, if transported to the terrestrial environment, might do enormous biological damage – a Martian plague, the twist in the plot of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, but in reverse. This is an extremely grave point.” The success of the Curiosity rover Mars landing in August 2012 captured the world’s imagination, but

Robots, such as the Curiosity rover, are already exploring Mars. Are humans needed too? But Mars is close enough that every two years or so we can reach it in eight months. That doesn’t mean it is the best destination in the Solar System. There’s evidence Europa (a moon of Jupiter) or Enceladus (a moon of Saturn) might offer far more resources and better odds of survival for us. Kim Stanley Robinson agrees Mars might have become a symbol of exploration no matter how scientifically feasible it is. “There are people who really want all this to become fact, it’s like a religion for them,” he says, “and as with religion, they tend to ignore new findings that threaten their belief system.”

DREW TURNEY is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles. IMAGES 01 Historic England / James O. Davies 02 Buzz Aldrin Enterprises 03 NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

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Fire and ice

“SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE , some say in ice.” Robert Frost’s lines could have been inspired by the lava field of Holuhraun, north of the Vatnajokull ice cap in the Icelandic highlands. Lava has been oozing through fissures here since 29 August, 2014. The lava field now covers more than 85 square kilometres – the largest seen in Iceland since 1783. Frost would have appreciated the desolate spectacle. His poem ends: “From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favour fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.” IMAGE Iurie Belegurschi

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COSMOS

SCIENCE FICTION

NORTH

WORDS — THORAIYA DYER ILLUSTRATION — GATSBY

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ELEANOR IS IN THE HOUSE when it lurches and falls a few metres. Farmers’ children scream, grab their parents’ legs and scrabble on the wooden floorboards; the plasma ball they’d been playing with slips and shatters; naked, antique, incandescent light bulbs swing on the ends of their yellowed, cotton-sheathed cords. Nobody is hurt.

THE HERITAGE-LISTED HOUSE has begun to decline in the days since Eleanor’s mother’s death, as have the scientific curiosities within it. If Harriet had not tinkered with the house it could not hover over the mirror-bright, tannin-dark surface of the artificial lake. Nobody but Eleanor knows there are no stilts underneath the house. Nothing tethers it to the Earth. Only the wooden rail-bridge connects the house to the dock at the lake’s edge, and that won’t hold it up when the anti-gravity device fails completely. “Everything down to half-price,” Eleanor announces brightly via vibe-to-voice as the house settles temporarily. She beams at the children, white-knuckled at the carved oak banister of the spiral stair. The light through the bay window makes patterns of red waratah petals and emerald leaves over her arms, which are made paler by the pathogen-excluding membrane that she swelters in, now, every time she visits home. Let the curious country youngsters take away the holograms, the self-playing piano and the displays to explain static, gravity and magnetism. Some of them might be born geniuses, like Harriet was. Maybe one of them will return to a house half-sunken in the lake, snow-covered on its high plateau, whipped by wind, and excavate the device hidden in its depths. Eleanor has looked for the silver, keel-shaped case once glimpsed as a child. Her engineers have looked for it; the ones that she brought in to disconnect the lower floor from mains power and to seal up the maze because she feared some child being lost in it. But the device isn’t really important – it is only a toy for amusement, like these other toys. Harriet treated Eleanor like a toy when she was young and liked to laugh. Then, when Eleanor abandoned her mother for the rich cultural environment of the DensityCentre, Harriet shrugged and kept tinkering with her non-living toys.

“How much for this?” someone waist-high and hopeful asks, holding up a model of a homing pigeon’s brain. A HERITAGE HOUSE IN THE MOUNTAINS. Extravagant original features. Three storeys, one level now inaccessible due to immersion/subsidence. Others are luxuriously appointed and certified to have stabilised. Solar panels imitate ironbark shingles. Wrought iron wrap-around verandas. Bridge connects house with original wooden dock at lake’s edge. With scenic, northfacing views over the valley, where lies the dome of the local DensityCentre, this is a rare chance to live or work outside the human-only sterile zone. Eminently suitable for animallovers and/or those seeking to reconnect with nature.

GOD SPEAKS IN MATHS. When Eleanor dreams of Him, His lips fall open. Equations made of stone or water drip or crash from his open mouth, causing falls or avalanches. She wakes, still feeling the cold spray and tremorconvulsions of these upheavals. And she doesn’t speak maths; never has. She sings soprano, all the notes available to a sterile throat. Harriet, Eleanor’s mother, always preferred birdsong to the human voice, and told her that the carolling magpies spoke maths, too; that she’d be a rubbish musician without instinctive measurement of oscillation and time. Sitting up in bed, Eleanor taps her ear to receive the call. “It’s Stefano,” the real estate agent says unnecessarily; there’s no mistaking the throaty, goatee-stroking overconfidence. “I’ve got a professional couple interested, no kids. A pair of veterinarians. They can’t run their practice in the DensityCentre and figure they’ll make enough money from ferals and farmers to make the

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payments on the house. But they want to rent first, for six months. The stupid woman isn’t sure about the subsidence. The husband’s got a thing for birds. You want me to tell them to get lost?” “No,” Eleanor says at once. A thing for birds. “Give it to them.” “You sure you don’t want to wait for a real buyer? Way less hassle.” “Put together a six-month lease. Give them the keys. Bring the papers here to me and I’ll sign them.” “Can’t get paper into the DensityCentre after ferals have put their grubby hands on it. It’ll cost you extra in gas sterilisation fees.” “Fine. I’ll go there. Next week.” She knows why he’s annoyed. He anticipated a big slice of the deposit as his commission. He wants a new car for Christmas and the rental management fees won’t get him so much as a scooter. If Harriet hadn’t appointed him, the grandson of an old friend, to oversee the sale, Eleanor and Stefano would never have spoken; Eleanor has seen his humiliating office space, a rat-hole behind a structural column, a corner Stefano shares with a recycling chute. “My mother wasn’t a feral,” Eleanor tells him. “Right. I mean rural producers. Short-lifers.” Outside the DensityCentres, life is short. Eleanor expects to live for at least 200 years. That is because all the DNA in her body is her own. With a few surgical adjustments to her digestive system and the month-long process of purging all microorganisms from her body’s rich ecosystem, she became a modern woman.

ELEANOR EXPECTS TO LIVE FOR AT LEAST 200 YEARS. THAT IS BECAUSE ALL THE DNA IN HER BODY IS HER OWN.

“That’s the sacrifice they make so we can eat. I’ll see you next week.” Eleanor ends the call, distracted by memories of her transformation from DC outie to innie. Some of the bacteria in her gut, the doctor had told her teenage self, making chit-chat to distract her from the pain, were the end-points of families that had survived in human innards, and the innards of their evolutionary forebears, for millions of years. I am the end-point of my family, Eleanor thinks. But traits will pop up, undoubtedly, in other people’s children, which mimic my traits. Certainly those unknown children, destined to pour their souls into their songs, have more in common with her than she did with her mother; she feels like they are more her children than any roulette-spin offspring she might have biologically. When

Eleanor dies, her money will go to where the singers and songs are, just as her mother’s house should go to someone who speaks maths. The husband’s got a thing for birds.

MICHELLE WATCHES HER HUSBAND handling the cages in the blue-bronze dusk. Shaggy-haired. Stooped. Slim-waisted. He carries a box of bleeping finches balanced on top of the red-sand, desert-mimicking environment he’s had built for them; she doesn’t think the power supply will be up to the task of too many of those custom tanks, but he refuses to be without them. A couple of local farmers wrangle the X-ray machine across the bridge that connects the half-sunken old house with the dock. “THE HOUSE IS STABLE,” STEFANO SAYS AGAIN, AS IF SAYING IT CAN MAKE IT TRUE.

“You really should buy it outright,” Stefano says, holding the papers limply in his black-gloved hand. “Then you could renovate it straight away to suit your needs.” He’ll take them back to a deposit-box in the Mountain Bank, a “dirty” workplace where DensityCentre officialdom leaves “soiled” documents that both sides may need access to again. Michelle feels like leaning against the polished chrome of his car and farting. “Husbands and wives,” Michelle says, staring at Michael’s silhouette, “stop each other from walking blindly off cliffs”. He’s not capable of being sensible about his dream to start with a small wild bird ward and subsidise it with the money from large animal work. He wants to end up releasing wedge-tailed eagles from the shonky gables of the crooked old mansion into the valley’s wide expanse. But so much can go wrong, even without choosing this wreck as a base of operations. Michelle’s mother is an architect. She’s always believed in building on solid foundations. “The house is stable,” Stefano says again, as if saying it can make it true. “So why the big pumps?” “In case of emergency. Insurance company insisted. They did the maths. They have risk-reducing algorithms. But they’ve never even seen the house. What do they know?” “You’ve never slept in it.” “No-one has, since the old woman died. You’ll be the first, tonight.” Michelle, slightly creeped out by Stefano imagining her sleeping, says: “I heard there was a secret device

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somewhere in the lower level. Before it got flooded, there was a maze. All magnets and coils of wire. The professor used to put animals in there. Sometimes people. They never reached the heart of it. The maze protected the device, which was a kind of anti-gravity machine. It kept the house hovering over the lake, but the professor was the only one who could keep it running.” Stefano’s reaction is a curled lip. Confusion. Disdain. Or maybe his eyes are too close together and he’s trying to lick a bit of compacted, petri-dish grown protein out of his teeth. Maybe all the effort he puts into shaving patterns into his stubble causes his native intelligence to shave away, layer by layer.

LIKE A WITCH IN A GINGERBREAD HOUSE, LURING CHILDREN INSIDE.

“That’s like a movie, isn’t it?” he says. “Anti-gravity? Just for laughs. Like the other junk the old woman had in there, desperate to get the kids to come around. Like a witch in a gingerbread house, luring children inside. Maybe the birds used to be human and she put a spell on them.” “It’s not junk,” Michelle says angrily. Do the owners know how incompetent a salesman he is? “Anyone would pay billions for anti-gravity. Innies want it badly. Getting pretty hot inside your sterile bubbles, isn’t it? With antigravity, they could move the Earth a little further from the Sun. Cool it down. Undo some of the mess we’ve made.” Stefano stares at her. “Right,” he says with apparent incomprehension. Michelle leaves him with his flashy vehicle, which she suspects is a rental, and crosses the creaking boards of the bridge. It has moss and lichen on the pilings, carries a cormorant with its head tucked under a wing. A chorus of frogs accompany her. The final section is concrete slab, hastily positioned to reunite bridge and house. A hole’s been knocked in the wall to accommodate the ramp’s insertion into what must once have been an enormous fireplace in a grand upstairs bedroom. She finds Michael setting his tank on a kitchen benchtop. There’s an antique wood stove on cast-iron hawk’s legs and a Christian prayer engraved in the bricks over the alcove. “We’ll need some place to prepare food,” she points out. “Temporary,” Michael says, his voice muffled, his head in the base where the tank’s filter resides. “Have you got a torch?” Michelle tells herself it doesn’t matter; she’ll hardly see the inside of the house. While Michael palpates chicken abdomens and stares at smears of their eye-juice

on glass slides, Michelle will be roaming the mountains by rover, the mobile bovine obstetrician, rearranging stuck calves and ensuring the breeders meet methane emission guidelines. She has a portable DNA sequencer for testing the cattle’s gut bacteria. Also, her capsules of wallaby poo, whose bacteria produce no methane, and which are a delight to load into a bolus gun and shove elbow-deep down saliva-swimming cow throats. Who wouldn’t have a government job? In the pantry, she discovers nothing but tiny glass jars of anchovies in brine, a dozen deep. “Looks like the professor lived on stinky little fish,” she calls out to Michael. “Cormorants,” he shouts back. At least, that’s what she thinks he answers. When she takes one of the tiny bottles out on to the north-facing kitchen balcony, three cormorants appear like magic on the crap-encrusted railing. “So,” she says to the beady-eyed audience, smiling. “She used to feed you these?” She moves the jar from her left hand to her right hand and all three turn their skinny heads on their skinny necks and look at her. “Are you transformed children, then, or what?” she asks softly, and immediately feels stupid. She doesn’t actually want to feed them. Michael’s the one who gets so worked up about birds. Seeing them kept sterile as pets in the DensityCentre makes him furious. He raves about flight and migration being their genetic heritage, their right. Swinging through trees is Michelle’s genetic heritage but she doesn’t get worked up about that.

HE RAVES ABOUT FLIGHT AND MIGRATION BEING THEIR GENETIC HERITAGE. THEIR RIGHT.

“Go catch your own fish,” she murmurs, tucking the jar into her pocket with one hand. She sets the other on the railing, ready to watch the last light fade over the distant dome of the DensityCentre in the valley below, recoiling when she realises she’s put her palm into fresh cormorant poo. “Don’t feed them,” Michael bellows, sounding clearer, as if he’s taken his head out of the tank. “They’re supposed to migrate in winter. If you feed them, they won’t go north.” GRAND OPENING. Heritage Veterinary Centre. All species welcome. Vaccination, health checks, sequencing, gut flora adjustments. After Hours Emergencies. Please do not bring large animals to the centre. We perform house calls. Payment in produce accepted.

COSMOS

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ELEANOR TAKES THE PACKAGE from the deliverybot. Inside her channelled-sun-lit residential cubicle, she peels back the plastic film, exposing the rough-textured paper of two perfect bound journals she’s paid a great deal of money to have gas sterilised. It’s taken weeks for them to arrive. The writing on their covers has flaked away, but Eleanor remembers them; remembers creeping down the spiral stair to examine the contents of the locked, forbidden drawer by torchlight. Breathlessly, she’d guessed password after password, until the lock clicked. Cormorant. She holds one journal in her left hand, the other in her right. “Gravity,” she had whispered to herself in the middle of the night in her mother’s study. “Magnetism. Aren’t they the same thing? Invisible magic that nobody really understands?” “Absolutely not,” Harriet had said coldly. Eleanor had peed a little in her pants. “Gravity is attractive and acts between objects with mass. Magnetism arises from electron-electron repulsion and electron-positron attraction. Can’t you understand the difference in spin between the photon and the graviton?” Eleanor couldn’t. Not then. Not now. She can’t explain her attraction to these treasured journals, either; she should hate them, or be jealous of them, but instead it seems to her that her mother, who never sang where Eleanor could hear her, sang in these journals in some other dimension. SHE FEELS THE VIBRATION, STRONGEST HERE AND KNOWS SHE SHOULDN’T GO DOWN. IF THE PUMP FAILS, SHE COULD DROWN.

She opens the volume titled Magnetism. Inside, there’s a diagram of the internal structure of a capsule-shaped spacecraft. No, it’s a bacterium. One. Single. Cell. Inside, the book bears the physical traces of her mother’s restless intelligence. Metal components are labelled in silver. The bacterium is a permanent magnet; this fact has been underlined. Also underlined are the words: FEED TO CORMORANTS? Eleanor closes the book. She shivers with delight. Doesn’t want to experience all of the mystery at once. She will read a page every day. She opens the second volume, the one dedicated to gravity. There’s a diagram there, too. This one shows the bulbous bow of an ocean-going cruise ship. Red arrows. Blue arrows. Black lines, here a grid, there a

funnel. Waves cancelling waves. Eleanor tries to resist turning to the next page, but she can’t help it. This journal seems even more pictorial. She finds another diagram. This one shows a woman, dressed as Harriet usually dressed, in overalls and steel-capped boots, soaring above the DensityCentre in the valley. A pointed, silvery device, strapped to her chest, reflects gravitational waves and cancels them out, so the woman floats in a gravity-free parabola. It isn’t perfect. Objects falling into the open cup-shape behind her fly apart dramatically. Eleanor’s mother seems stumped by the damage control measures she’ll need to put in place if she’s going to take to the skies, heading north, as the hand-drawn compass, included in the diagram, clearly indicates in scarlet ink. North. Eleanor flips back to the magnetism journal. The same word is there, in the margin, written in silver, the colour of the metal particles inside the bacterium. North. How strange to find this connection, when Harriet so strenuously denied the two forces had anything in common. But perhaps Harriet’s brain, mulling them over, was the only thing they did have in common? Perhaps she entangled them. Eleanor tucks them away. She goes to the cooler, takes out a little glass bottle and makes herself an anchovy sandwich. Then she gets a message from Stefano. It’s apparently been weeks and she hasn’t signed the rental papers yet for her mother’s house. Can she meet him at the Mountain Bank tomorrow morning? Eleanor munches slowly, tapping her silent assent.

THE BED FRAME SHAKES Michelle out of a pleasant dream and into the pitch-blackness of the house. It’s just contracting as it cools, she thinks blearily. But then the fear she’s felt from the first, the fear that the house will sink into the lake and turn two humans and their animal charges into fossilised bones for future generations to discover sends her out of bed, clumsily backwards, to crack her tail-bone on the floor. She stifles a howl, rolls on to her belly and rubs her bum. Through the juddering boards she feels it; she can faintly hear it, too. The pumps, downstairs, are switched on. They’re supposed to be silent up to their medium setting, and so must be working at full capacity. “Michael,” she moans, but he’s draped in that deadto-the-world sprawl that tells her only ice water in his face will wake him. He’s already been out to two emergencies since the sun went down, taking her place with the cattle in the face of the dreadful diarrhoea she’s had in the past few days. Her belly still aches. And her head feels strange.

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Not like dizziness, but like she can see something in the dark. No, it’s not her eyes. It’s her gut, trying to lead her in a certain direction. She doesn’t take a torch. Barefoot in her pyjamas, she takes the spiral staircase in the dark. When she gets to the place, the square in the floor where the lake-water bubbles up, her foot finds only damp wood. The flooded lowest level of the house has been evacuated by the powerful pump. She feels the vibration, strongest here and knows she shouldn’t go down. If the pump fails, she could drown. But her gut is telling her to go. It’s tracing an invisible path for her. Ankle-deep in lake sludge, she follows the invisible path. Comes to an arched doorway where a gleaming, modern car battery has been connected to a switchboard which pre-dates it by at least a century. Lights on the battery cast the hallway, the entrance to the maze, in a green glow. Nail-studded particle board has been eased off with a crowbar to permit passage to someone wearing long, narrow shoes.

LINES SPRING INTO EXISTENCE ALL AROUND HER. SHE GASPS AND REACHES OUT FOR THEM, A CHILD REACHING FOR FIREWORKS ...

The footprints are easy to see in the glow, but Michelle doesn’t need to follow them. She enters the maze without hesitation. When the glow fades, her gut-sense leads her on. Left turns and right turns. Her fingertips brush brick walls and the air is heavy. ‘I’m going to die. Turn back’, she tells herself, ‘I’m going to die!’

But she doesn’t die. She finds a compass discarded in the muck. It, too, casts a green glow with its row of LEDs, and by this light she sees the cavity under the floorboards where somebody, quite recently, has removed a wooden cube and pried open its lid. The cube is empty. Whatever was inside is gone. Over the shudders of the pump, the squelch of her toes and the thudding of her heart, Michelle hears the rumble of the rover’s engine turning over. Someone, not Michael, has started it up. The thief who has taken the contents of the cube is using her rover to make a quick getaway. Michelle turns around, outraged at the audacity of the break-and-enter. The mountains are full of stories and she never took this one seriously. The maze protected the device. The anti-gravity device. Anyone would pay billions. She pulls against that string tied to her gut, using it to retrace her steps. She struggles out of the maze, up on to the spiral stair, just as the car battery dies. The string that led her through the maze fades along with the greenish light. A lump comes to Michelle’s throat as she stands, stock-still, in darkness. Gradually, powerfully, another feeling comes over her. This, too, arises in her gut. Its pull is magnitudes stronger than the light string tied to her before. It urges her to go north. Lines spring into existence all around her. Silvery lines of force that Michelle senses but cannot see. She gasps and reaches out for them, a child reaching for fireworks or fairy lights. The whole planet. She sees it. It sees her. North, it says. Michelle pulls on her running shoes by the door that

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leads to the bridge. North suits her. From the retreating sounds of the rover, her quarry is heading north, too. She sprints across the ironbark slabs, arms outstretched, momentarily possessed by the thought that she can fly after the thief. Thorny bushes snag her legs and rotting scum has no doubt wrecked her socks, but she can’t stop. Not until Michael catches her at the rocky cliff edge. He jerks her back, sounding like he’s having an asthma attack in her ear. Michelle returns to her right mind at the smell of him; aniseed, ammonia and chook feed.

IT LOOKS LIKE HE’S GONE FOR A RATHER STRENUOUS HIKE DOWN INTO THE VALLEY.

“What on earth are you doing?” he demands hoarsely. “I was chasing someone,” she says. There’s no sign of the rover she was pursuing, but she still feels the earth singing. Her gaze falls on the dazzling gem of the night-lit DensityCentre, so far below, and it hits her how close she came to dying. Husbands and wives, she thinks, stop each other from walking blindly off cliffs. She laughs and cries at the same time and the strangled peals echo over the valley.

ELEANOR CAN’T FIND STEFANO at the Mountain Bank in the morning. She goes to the house. Cordially greets her new tenants. Asks if they have had any visitors since sunrise. The wife tells her an odd, disjointed story about a thief in the night. When Eleanor taps her earpiece, she finds the young

real estate agent has left a MeetUp application running, one which shows his position on a map via GPS tracking. It looks like he’s gone for a rather strenuous hike down into the valley, which seems at odds with his sharp manner of dressing and scorn for the countryside, but Eleanor shrugs, changes her pathogen-excluding membrane in a cubicle in town – the one she was wearing was starting to get quite sweaty and disgusting on the inside – and sets off after him. She finds his body, crushed in a rock crevice, and doesn’t know how to feel. When she looked at her mother’s body, peaceful, as if sleeping, she had felt sadder for the children who came to the house than she had for herself. They had been apart for so long and Eleanor had already said her goodbyes. Besides, Harriet accepted that her burden of gut flora would seriously limit her life. This young man could have gone on for centuries. What was he thinking when he flew over the edge? What was he feeling? The exhilaration of flight? The thrill of speed that his fancy car would have given him? Perhaps simple freedom from the columns trapping him, bent practically double, in his prison cell of an office. She hopes it was enough to outweigh his fear in the final moments when the valley floor began to rush at his designer stubble and outstretched, manicured hands. Eleanor bends over to uncurl his right thumb. The silver, keel-shaped device is there in his palm. When she looks back over her shoulder, she can’t see any damage to the landscape. “Oh, mother,” she whispers. “How you sang.”

THORAIYA DYER is an award-winning Australian writer based in Sydney.

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GADGETS AND GIZMOS

3D printers for early adopters THE FUTURE HAS arrived. A range of 3D printers are now within reach of ordinary households, but the technology is still in its infancy, albeit developing rapidly. So be warned, whatever option you choose is likely to be outdated very fast indeed. What’s more, we’re not yet at sci-fi levels of performance – printers are slow, offer a limited range of materials (most use two types of thermoplastic, called PLA and ABS) and can build objects of a limited size – about the size of a loaf of bread for the biggest available printers. Nevertheless, if you are an early adopter, there are already plenty of options to jump right in and start making.

1 3DOODLER PEN 2.0 It took just 16 minutes for the Kickstarter campaign to reach its $30,000 target funding in January this year to update the popular 3Doodler Pen 1.0, the first device of its kind in the world. It ended up with more than $1 million in pledges. The pen allows you to “draw” in the air with extruded heated plastic filament that cools almost instantly into a solid, stable structure. The plastic is all 3 mm in diameter and comes in a variety of colours.

2 AIRWOLF AW3D HD The AW3D HD gains praise for striking the right balance between speed and quality. It also has a large capacity and, at around $3,000, is suitable for home or office use. Speeds can reach up to 150 mm per second, while prints can be as large as 30 x 20 x 30 cm. It features an LCD screen and an easy to navigate interface. Airwolf provides an online model database or you can create your own using software that comes with the printer.

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3 MAKERBOT REPLICATOR The Replicator is now in its fifth generation so the bugs have been ironed out. It has a steel chassis with an easy-touse LCD screen display. This is a fast, low maintenance printer with good support from the company. It doesn’t print with ABS, only PLA and is able to print objects up to 15 x 15 x 27 cm.

5 AFINIA HD480 The HD480 can print both the ABS and PLA types of thermoplastic and comes with all the tools you will need to design, print and finish your creation. At just over $1,000, the printer is ideal for beginners or people on a budget. One drawback, however, is that the unit can only print small objects. And beware – the HD480 does not have a safety enclosure to protect you from the heated plate or moving parts.

4 LULZBOT MINI Aleph Objects, the Colorado-based manufacturer, says the Mini is aimed at a wide audience – households, schools, libraries and businesses. At around $1,300 it is suitable for modelling prototypes and limited production. The hardware and software the company creates is free to be modified or converted by users.

6 PRINTRBOT SIMPLE MAKER KIT The Printrbot is the cheapest 3D printer on the market right now at around $350 for the kit and about $100 more for a fully assembled unit. It’s a no-frills option, stripped down to the bare bones. But the design is user-friendly and attractive in a raw industrial sort of way. A great introduction to 3D printing but you will have to think small – at capacity of 10 x 10 x 10 cms you can print a small figurine but not even a case for an iPhone.

— BILL CONDIE ILLUSTRATIONS Jeffrey Phillips

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REVIEWS

Our debt to Arab scholars

NON-FICTION Light from the East: How the science of Medieval Islam helped to shape the Western world by JOHN FREELY I.B. Taurus (2015)

IN THEIR FRUSTRATION and disgust at the barbarity of the modern day Islamic extremists, many commentators in the West, groping for a context in which to place the cruelty and inhumanity they have witnessed, have branded Islam mediaeval – by which they mean the antithesis of science and reason. It is understandable that a westerner would equate the mediaeval period with ignorance. Mediaeval times in Europe were also the “Dark Ages”, a long period when humanity went into reverse, unlearning the science, technology and art that had made Greece and Rome beacons of ancient civilisation. But in the Islamic world the cultural climate at this time was quite different. During the years Europeans were wallowing in mud, ignorance and disease, Islamic lands were experiencing a golden age – an era as far removed from the perversions of the religion being expressed in Iraq and Syria today as modern Europe is from the Spanish Inquisition. During this great awakening in the Islamic world, the arts and sciences flourished. They helped to preserve the wisdom of the ancients and added to the legacy that helped shape the Western world – a contribution that is still felt today. Freely’s book elegantly explains the scale of this achievement and how the blaze of creativity that began in Baghdad eventually gave birth to modern science in the West. Fittingly, Freely himself is something of a renaissance man. Now aged 85, he is a physicist with a PhD from New York University, post-doctoral studies in the history of science from Oxford and a string of history and travel books to his credit. He taught physics at Bosphorus University in Istanbul from 1960. He tells the story of the birth of Islamic science with the translation of Greek manuscripts into Arabic in eighthcentury Baghdad and how these were enhanced by the knowledge acquired from Mesopotamia, India and China. He describes the “Roads to Baghdad” that brought influence to Islamic thinkers from Athens, Alexandria, Constantinople and Khorrasan.

Then he charts how Islamic scientists developed and expanded this knowledge and how astronomers, physicians, philosophers and mathematicians – along with those prototype fraudsters, the astrologers and alchemists – carried what they had learnt and discovered around the world, from Samarkand and Baghdad to Cordoba and beyond. With a great deal of wit and a good ear for wonderful anecdotes and tidbits, Freely lists the achievements this melting pot culture produced. There are the institutions such as the Bayt al-Hikma, the great House of Wisdom in Baghdad, that brought together Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars from the ninth to the 13th centuries, the dozens of libraries in Cordoba and the more than 100 paper mills in Baghdad.

THEY HELPED TO PRESERVE THE WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS AND ADDED TO THE LEGACY THAT HELPED SHAPE THE WEST.

Algebra, geology, astronomy and medicine were all born or thrived at this time, nurtured and developed by some of the greatest scientific thinkers the world has seen – Al Khwarizmi, the father of algebra, Al Biruni, whose pioneering pharmacopoeia describes more than 700 drugs and their therapeutic properties, Ibn Sahl, who developed the law of optical refraction and Ibn Sina, whose canon on medicine, Al Qanun fi al-tibb, became the essential guide for Western physicians. And in these pages there is hope. Islamic scholars of the time were no strangers to clashes with clerics but were happy to take them on, as philosopher Al Shirazi did with his five-volume defence of Ibn Sina against the theologians. Lessons, perhaps, for moderate Muslims today. Though the outlook may seem bleak at times, perhaps a greater awareness of the heritage of Islamic scholarship – and the debt the West owes to it – will mean that science can once again play a pivotal role in bringing two disparate worlds together.

— BILL CONDIE

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NON-FICTION Becoming fluent: How cognitive science can help adults learn a foreign language by RICHARD ROBERTS and ROGER KREUZ MIT Press (2015)

THE GOOD NEWS FOR ADULTS struggling to learn a foreign language is that there is no such thing as someone who is “good” or “bad” at languages. We all speak at least one language – which proves that we can do it. Psychologists Roberts and Kreuz say the evidence suggests an adult can learn new languages even more easily than children. Children are superior in only two ways – acquiring a native accent and a lack of anxiety about the project. So why the disconnect between appearance and reality? The answer may lie in how we try to learn. As the authors note, children’s brains are different from adult brains, therefore “why would anyone expect that the same teaching techniques that work for children would be appropriate for adults?” The answer, they say, is for adults to build on their strengths and not to try and mimic how children learn a language. Not least of these adult skills are an understanding of their own mental processes. Roberts and Kreuz explore the research and theories in cognitive science that explain how

adults learn. They explore how to leverage our adult skills when we learn a new language. The book is helpful for the adult language student but also full of useful information that we can use in other learning situations. One of the keys to success, the authors say, is to set reasonable goals. You’re not going to achieve native-fluency in Chinese in a year, so don’t set yourself up to fail. Aim high, sure, but make it a long-term goal so that frustration and failure don’t force you to drop the enterprise entirely. The book is highly readable, drawing on the authors’ personal experiences as well as experimental discoveries. They make no bones about it – learning a language takes effort. A major part of it is to practice reading, writing and speaking over and over again. But, the authors say, if adult learners apply the tools acquired over a lifetime, this can be enjoyable and rewarding.

— BILL CONDIE

DR KARL’s

SHORT BACK &

SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

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NON-FICTION Infographics: Space – Understand the facts in the blink of an eye by JENNIFER DANIEL Big Picture Press / Hardie Grant (2015)

The International Space Station is a working laboratory orbiting 240 miles above Earth. It is as large as a football field and consists of a series of metal modules.

Just as on Earth, the crew read, watch films, play music, cards and computer games, and talk to their friends and families.

The international crew live on the Space Station from 6 months to a year.

They can also gaze out of the window at the panoramic view of Earth below.

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The crew conduct scientific research, and medical experiments on the effects of living in a microgravity environment.

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The microgravity on the ISS makes everything practically weightless, including the crew! To prevent loss of muscle and bone density, they need to do two hours of exercise a day.

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— BILL CONDIE

Living in Space

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THIS IS A WONDERFUL and informative book to browse with infographical data presented in attractive and inventive ways that are likely to grab a child’s attention and help them focus on the facts. Divided into seven key topics, the book looks at: The Universe, Galaxies and Stars, The Solar System, The Sun, the Earth and Moon, Observing Space and Exploring Space. It is billed as recommended for ages 8+ but make that 8+++ because people from all ages right up to adult will find plenty in this clever little book that is amusing and informative.

They also have to maintain the ISS, and keep it neat and tidy!

eaTing anD DRinKing

Most food on the ISS is dehydrated, so water needs to be added. It comes from a machine that recycles and purifies urine and condensation.

There are no showers, so the crew use special soap and shampoo that needs no rinsing. The toilet sucks waste into a waste tank.

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NON-FICTION The brain electric: The dramatic high-tech race to merge minds and machines by MALCOLM GAY Text Publishing (2015)

NON-FICTION The handbook: Surviving and living with climate change by JAMES WHITMORE and JANE RAWSON Transit Lounge Publishing (2015)

DIGITISING AND TRANSPORTING the neural activity of the brain has long been a theme in science fiction. Don’t think so? How else do we explain the run of “body swap” comedies in the ’80s and the serious sci-fi dramas of the last few years that deal with transplanting someone’s consciousness into a new body via a machine? By one reckoning, all we are, think, see, feel and dream is the expression of collections of bioelectrical sparks. And any attempt to untangle it – in order to manage our mental health or teleport our thoughts to a robot or alien – must start with equipment that can isolate and translate each individual spark. The Brain Electric reveals that we might be closer to doing this than we think. As a Boston Globe arts reporter (of all things), Malcolm Gay has collected stories from across the front lines of brain/electronics interfaces, and his book makes for inspiring reading. So far, digitising brain signals into binary code is in its early stages. It usually involves planting electrodes into a brain and the readings are crude. But if you’ve seen news stories in the last couple of years about quadriplegic people moving robot

arms to drink coffee just by thinking about it, then you can see the possibilities. Gay starts his story with the example of a pioneering neurological surgeon and biomedical engineer who implants electrodes into the brain of a severe epilepsy patient to try and quiet the storm of neural activity overshadowing the normal patterns. The Brain Electric then describes digital interfaces or transmission systems that could transform areas of our body that have gone wrong because of the foibles of biology. Imagine a prosthetic limb that delivers the sensation of touch to the brain, for example. Millions of dollars in funding for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the US and promising animal studies are also part of Gay’s story. Both have contributed to a better understanding of how computers can communicate with the body. As Gay explains, principles such as Moore’s Law, better materials science and the breakneck pace of our understanding about the brain are all going to take us into a more connected future than most people have imagined.

IN A PARALLEL to the stages of grief, it appears many of us are approaching the prospect of a warming planet with something like acceptance – or at least an acknowledgment that, even if action sufficient to halt carbon emissions were taken tomorrow, we will inevitably face changes to our way of life. In the previous issue of Cosmos we reviewed Tim Flannery’s new work, Hope, that looked optimistically at the technology and inventiveness that may help us cope with rising temperatures. This fascinating book takes a pragmatic look at the world to come. It asks questions such as: How will we survive (including how to survive extreme climate events)? Where and how should we live? What kind of dwellings should we build? One of the authors, James Whitmore, an occasional contributor to these pages, says the genesis of the book was the 2013 election of former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, a climatechange sceptic. Whitmore and co-author Jane Rawson looked on with alarm. There was little chance the government would take meaningful action to prevent climate change, so what could they do? Prepare for the worst, was the answer. The Handbook is a detailed practical guide to future-proofing our lives. It is premised on the idea

that no matter what we do, climate change will occur. The world has committed to 2°C of warming – and that may be on the low side given present inaction. For Australia that inevitably means more droughts, heatwaves and bushfires along with power outages and frequent disasters. Rawson and Whitmore look at what we can do to make ourselves more comfortable with the changes set to rock our world. It covers topics such as becoming more selfsufficient, building a bunker, fireproofing your home, surviving a flood and overcoming power outages by building community microgrids. The book closes with a rallying call to arms. In all this lies an opportunity to create grassroots changes that go to the heart of how we live. They observe that how much climate change matters “depends a great deal on the kind of society we decide to live in”. They acknowledge that the more money you have the less you will suffer. “Right now you may be one of the well-off, but climate change could undo that more quickly than you realise. Whether you’ll make it through may depend on who you vote for now.”

— DREW TURNEY

— BILL CONDIE

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REVIEWS

Holiday reading work form an unexpected but delightful preamble on the way to Wonderland. The book celebrates the inspired and magical effects of the Lewis Carroll classic on the surrealist artist.

mathematics is the search to understand the patterns of the Universe in their purest form. This is an ideal way to start that adventure, whatever your age or familiarity with mathematical concepts. We have replaced the crossword this issue with a sample from the book to try for yourself (see page 129).

FICTION Alice’s adventures in Wonderland: 150th anniversary edition By LEWIS CARROLL Illustrated by SALVADOR DALÍ Edited by MARK BURSTEIN Princeton University Press (2015) YOU MIGHT THINK there are already enough editions of the Lewis Carroll classic until you pick up this stunning new offering to mark the 150th anniversary of the book’s original publication. You could also be forgiven for wondering why it’s included in a science magazine but there is a connection – a mathematical one. In a rewarding two-part introduction to the work, Lewis Carroll expert Mark Burstein discusses Dalí’s connections with the author while Thomas Banchoff, a former professor in maths at Brown University, and an old friend of the artist, explores the mathematical undercurrents in Dalí’s work. The artist created many images inspired by ideas from science and mathematics, we are told, and enjoyed the respect of scientists and mathematicians around the world. He was also a keen experimenter with science and technology in his art. Indeed it was when he was looking to include stereoscopic effects in his oil paintings that he first met Banchoff to explore how he might go about it. Banchoff’s reflections on his friendship with the painter and insights into his

NON-FICTION Snowflake seashell star: colouring adventures in Numberland By ALEX BELLOS Illustrated by EDMUND HARRISS Canongate Books (2015)

SCIENCE FICTION Nebula Awards Showcase 2015 Edited by GREG BEAR Pyr (2015)

ALEX BELLOS, Cosmos Magazine contributor and the author of bestselling maths books including Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, along with illustrator, maths teacher and artist Edmund Harriss take aim at the unlikely new market for “grown-up colouring books”, albeit with a mathematical take, with Snowflake Seashell Star. I guess you could just colour in the elaborate and beautiful designs, but it would rather miss the point. Every page can be coloured with four colours and is either an existing beautiful mathematical image, or a visual representation of a mathematical idea with comprehensive explanations of what you are seeing at the back of the book. The range of mathematical patterns and concepts covered includes a sevenway Venn diagram, periodic tiling, nonperiodic tiling, Voronoi diagrams, fractals and even Hindu mandalas. As Bellos explains in the introduction,

THE NEBULA AWARDS SHOWCASE volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories of the Nebula Awards, which are voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This year’s volume is edited by American science fiction and fantasy writer Greg Bear, author of more than 30 novels. It includes Ann Leckie, author of runaway bestselling debut novel Ancillary Justice, Liu Cixin, winner of this year’s Hugo Award for best novel with The Three-Body Problem, Nalo Hopkinson, Rachel Swirsky, Aliette de Bodard, Vylar Kaftan and others. Hours of entertainment lie ahead for the sci-fi fan when the collection is published in December. — BILL CONDIE

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TOP 5

Desperate measures

Bestsellers 1 The Wright brothers by DAVID M c CULLOUGH Simon & Schuster (2015) RRP $32.99

2 Being mortal: Illness, medicine and what matters in the end by ATUL GAWANDE Profile Books (2014) RRP $22.99 DOCUMENTARY Frackman Madman Entertainment (2015) Runt ime: 87 mins RRP $24.95 A FORMER CONSTRUCTION WORKER and kangaroo shooter called Dayne Pratzky is the unlikely hero at the centre of Frackman, a feature-length documentary on the divisive issue of coal seam gas. As he tells us: “I used to cut down trees, drive a diesel four-wheel drive and harvest kangaroos. I’m the worst environmental activist this world’s ever seen.” The filmmakers claim their work represents the “new politics” that “brings together old and young, city and country, conservative and progressive in a shared effort to prevent an environmental catastrophe”. And it is hard to see another issue that would bring together the odd bedfellows of right-wing radio shock jock Alan Jones and veteran Greens politician Bob Brown. According to Jones, 437 million hectares of Australia is covered by coal seam gas licences or applications. That means potentially 50,000 wells in Queensland alone. The film looks at the possible impact on the environment and

people’s health that these licenses pose. The answer appears to be horrific: water sources bubbling gas that can be set alight, bores so toxic that they kill wildlife and poisonous air that leaves children chronically ill. And all of this delivered courtesy of companies who can walk on to people’s land and do what they like, fully backed by the law (although the Government is now considering giving farmers a veto). Pratzky and the film’s producers said they wanted the documentary to set off a national conversation. But its contribution is unashamedly on the “no fracking way” side of this debate. As such, its focus on the little guy against the machine. It is a powerful statement, raising many questions about the safety of this industry that deserve answers. It will not be good enough for the industry, scientists and politicians to simply deny and ignore. That attitude has led us to where we are today, after all.

— BILL CONDIE

3 Neurotribes: The legacy of autism and how to think smarter about people who think differently by STEVE SILBERMAN Allen & Unwin (2015) RRP $35.00

4 The man who mistook his wife for a hat by OLIVER SACKS Macmillan (2015) RRP $19.99

5 Superbetter: A revolutionary approach to getting stronger, happier, braver and more resilient. Powered by the science of games by JANE Mc GONIGAL Harper Collins (2015) RRP $29.99

IMAGE Freshwater Productions / Smith & Nasht / Aquarius Productions / Screen Queensland / ScreenWest / GetUp /Screen Australia

— FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES SCIENCE BESTSELLER LIST

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PAUL DAVIES is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and best-selling author.

Abacus True story of a number wizard

Ramanujan’s extraordinary mathematical ability has become the stuff of legend. THE NUMBER 1,729 is not one to make the average person’s pulse race, but it is the subject of one of the most remarkable stories in the history of mathematics. Most of us learnt basic arithmetic at school, and we all remember that some students were better at it than others – the bright girl who could do sums twice as fast as the rest of us, or the boy who could prove theorems in a trice. Of course all subjects attract a range of skills, but almost unique to mathematics are a handful of extreme outliers who are so good it seems they are deploying some form of magic. The best-known genius of this type was Srinivasa Ramanujan. Born in 1887, Ramanujan was an eccentric young Indian student who lived in obscurity in the town of Kumbakonam in the state of Tamil Nadu. Bestowed with remarkable analytical skills, by the age of 13 he had devised his own scheme for computing the digits of pi that is still in use today. He spent much of his spare time scribbling formulae in notebooks or on a small blackboard. By the age of 23 Ramanujan was convinced he was making important new discoveries in mathematics, and was enterprising enough to write a letter to the eminent Cambridge Professor of Mathematics G.H. Hardy. “I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the accounts department of the Port of Madras,” he began. “I have had no

university education.” Ramanujan then set out some of his remarkable results. It is easy to imagine a distinguished professor such as Hardy shrugging aside this letter arriving out of the blue from an unknown amateur in faraway Madras. But to his great credit, Hardy recognised a touch of pure genius in Ramanujan’s theorems, many of which were highly unusual in their form and betrayed an extraordinary originality. And this although most of Ramanujan’s theorems were merely stated as fact, with no formal proof accompanying them. It was almost as if the young Indian had plucked the results ready-made from some abstract realm of mathematical forms and relationships. When Hardy replied asking about proofs, Ramanujan was coy, saying he had his own unusual methods and that, without proper explanation, “you will at once point me to the lunatic asylum”. Recognising that genius and eccentricity often go hand-in-hand, especially in mathematics, Hardy arranged to bring Ramanujan to England. But there were serious obstacles. As a devout Hindu and an orthodox Brahmin, travelling to a foreign land presented many cultural difficulties, not least in regard to his strict diet. After months of deliberation and consultation, Ramanujan finally decided to accept Hardy’s offer, and on 17 March, 1914 he set out by ship with some trepidation. Once in Cambridge, the young Indian set about working on hundreds of new theorems, dazzling his peers who were baffled as to the source of his extraordinary abilities. Hardy said: “I have never met Ramanujan’s equal.” Because of his lack of formal education, Ramanujan was able to work at Cambridge only by being enrolled as a student at Trinity College. Although he was now ensconced in the world centre of pure mathematics and was at last receiving the recognition he deserved, Ramanujan did not fare so well in his private life. His sensitive and

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A previously unrecognised number takes its place in history. unusual personality and strict dietary requirements proved deeply problematic. He had trouble obtaining the correct ingredients for his meals and his religion forbade him from eating with others in his Cambridge college. He became homesick and began to lose weight. His fragile health suffered, especially during the English winters. He even became suicidal. Eventually Ramanujan was confined to a nursing home to await his return to India. Hardy paid frequent visits to his friend and colleague. Not surprisingly, the conversation usually turned to mathematics. On one such visit, 1,729 cropped up. This was the number of the taxi cab Hardy had taken to the clinic, and as befits two number theorists they discussed its significance. Hardy thought 1,729 to be a boring run-of-the-mill number, but Ramanujan disagreed. “That is a really, really interesting number,”

ILLUSTRATIONS: JEFFREY PHILLIPS

he declared. How so? “It is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways!” Ramanujan could see immediately that: 123+ 13 = 103 + 93 = 1,729. This amusing anecdote came to symbolise Ramanujan’s humble genius, and numbers that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two separate ways are known as “taxi numbers” in recognition. Other taxi numbers are 4,014, 13,832 and 20,638. But 1,729 is the smallest. Sadly, Ramanujan never regained his health. He died on 20 April, 1920 in a care home near Madras (now Chennai). He continued working on new theorems even on his death bed. To this day nobody can say how Ramanujan came to have this incredible ability, but it is fascinating to speculate that there may be other Ramanujans out there, awaiting an enlightened mentor such as Hardy.

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JASON ENGLAND is a magician based in Las Vegas and a renowned authority on casino gambling and card handling.

Smoke & Mirrors Magic by the numbers

This arithmetical stunt is not difficult when you know how. MAGICIANS OFTEN INCLUDE ACTS that are not strictly magic, but leave their audiences feeling that they have witnessed something impossible. Memory stunts, unusual scientific demonstrations, playing chess blindfolded and rapid mental mathematics are some examples. Successful stunts of this kind suggest the performer has an enhanced talent. In some cases, this is true – they may have an extraordinary memory or be a chess grandmaster. But in most cases the performer is using a system. These systems can be simple, or can require tremendous skill – but they are still easier than doing the stunt without any system at all. A popular mathematical stunt is to create a “magic square”. This is a grid, most commonly 3x3 or 4x4, filled with numbers. The numbers in every row add up to the same number. Here is an example:

8

1

6

3

5

7

4

9

2

As you can see all the rows add up to 15. Notice that each number from 1 to 9 is used once. If you could repeat numbers, many magic squares would become trivially easy, like a grid made entirely of 1s that added up to 3! There’s nothing amazing about that.

Making a magic square before an audience, if done properly, can be an impressive demonstration of one’s apparent command of higher-level mathematics. I’ll show you how to do this, using a seemingly more difficult 4x4 grid. Take a business card and write this 4x4 magic square on the back:

8 13 3 10

11 2 16 5

14 7 9 4

1 12 6 15

This magic square adds up to 34. This is the smallest sum possible using the numbers 1 to 16. Keep this card and you’ll be able to perform this stunt any time you wish. After dinner, say, turn the conversation towards numbers and bring out your business card. Explain the basic idea behind a magic square; that every column and row adds up to the same number. Let your companions verify this if they wish by adding the columns and rows. Tell them you’ll try and make a magic square just for them. Ask them to give you any two-digit number higher than 34. Let’s assume they give you the number 87. Leave your business card where you can see it and bring out another piece of paper. Draw a 4x4 grid. From the target number that your guests named, subtract the number 34. In our example 87 is the target number: 87 minus 34 = 53. You then divide 53 by 4, to the nearest whole number. That gives 13 with a remainder of 1 (13 x 4 = 52; 52 + 1 = 53). Remember the number 13. We call that the quotient, and it’s one of two special numbers you’ll need. The other special number is the quotient plus the remainder. In our case, that’s 14 (13 + 1). Now you’re set. Begin by stealing a glance at your business card. Look at the top row. Add your first special number to the 8 that appears in row 1, column 1

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COSMOS

of your card: 13 + 8 = 21. Write this down in the corresponding box on your new grid. You will continue on like this for all 16 spaces in the grid, with four exceptions. When you get to the numbers 13, 14, 15 or 16 on your original card, you have to add the special number plus the remainder. The correctly filled grid will look like this:

21 24 28 14 27 15 20 25 16 30 22 19 23 18 17 29 Notice that each result in this grid is simply the number from your original business card added to 13, with the exception of the four numbers in red. These are your original numbers plus 14. You can now show that every row and column adds up to 87. But wait, there’s more! You also managed to get the two diagonals to add up to 87, as well as the four numbers in each of the corner quadrants …

21 24 28 14 27 15 20 25 16 30 22 19 23 18 17 29 … and the top centre and lower centre quadrants!

21 24 28 14 27 15 20 25 16 30 22 19 23 18 17 29

Unfortunately, the two side quadrants will not add to 87 but the four corners of the large grid will!

21 27 16 23

24 15 30 18

28 20 22 17

14 25 19 29

The truth is, the diagonals, quadrants and the four corners added up to 34 on your original business card too, but don’t reveal this beforehand. Save that for the magic square that you make for your guests. Because 87 is an odd number, we had a remainder that we needed to use for the boxes with 13, 14, 15 and 16 in them. If your spectator names an even number (such as 54) you won’t have any remainder. Remember the equation: 54 (the target number) minus 34 (our original magic square total) = 20. And then you divide 20 by 4 to get 5 with no remainder! All you have to do is add 5 to each of the 16 numbers in your new grid and it will work. Incidentally, if your target number is even, then those two side quadrants will also add up to the target number. If you want to make this look tougher, you can memorise your original magic square that adds up to 34. That way you don’t have to look at your crib sheet. Also, instead of working straight across the rows one at a time, you can ask your spectator to point to any empty box and you can add your special number (or special number plus remainder) to whatever number belongs in that box. You’re now well on your way to being a mathematical genius! BYO business card.

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Issue 66

WHY IS IT SO?

WHY DO PEOPLE SNEEZE IN SUNLIGHT? Nobody knows why some people sneeze when they go out from the dark into the sunlight, writes KARL KRUSZELNICKI.

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AROUND 350 BC , the great Greek thinker Aristotle tried to understand why sunlight would sometimes cause sneezing. He thought the heat of the Sun was doing it. In Book XXXIII of his Problemata, in the section entitled “Problems Concerning the Nose”, he wrote, “Why is it that one sneezes more after one has looked at the Sun? Is it because the Sun engenders heat and so causes movement, just as does tickling the nose with a feather? For both have the same effect; by setting up movement they cause heat and create breath more quickly for the moisture; and it is the escape of this breath which causes sneezing.”

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In 1635, the English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon also tried to work it out. “Looking against the Sunne, doth induce Sneezing. The Cause is, not the Heating of the Nosthrils; for then the Holding up of the Nostrills against the Sunne, though one Winke, would doe it; But the Drawing downe of the Moisture of the Braine. For it will make the Eyes run with Water; And the Drawing of Moisture to the Eyes, doth draw it to the Nosthrills, by Motion of Consent; And so followeth Sneezing . . .” On one hand, Bacon showed that the heat was not the cause. His eyes needed to be open for it to happen. On the other hand, he thought that tears (induced by the bright sunlight) caused the sneeze. Unfortunately for his explanation, sneezing happens long before the tears would have had time to be generated. It took until 1954 before Dr J. Sedan first described it in the medical literature. He called it photosternutatory reflex. In 1964, Dr H.C. Everett published the first major survey of sunlight-sneezing. He found it to be present, to varying degrees, in about one quarter of Harvard medical students. In 1984, Dr Stephen J. Peroutka noted that three generations of his family had sunlight-sneezing. He called for further research. In 1993, Dr R.A. Breitenbach wrote about it as a potential hazard for combat pilots. It could also be a hazard for other professions, such as high-wire trapeze artists if the circus lighting changes. In 1978, W.R. Collie whimsically came up another name for the photic sneeze reflex while at a conference dinner. He called it the ACHOO syndrome. He made the A stand for autosomal dominant. Correct: the

photic sneeze is genetically dominant. If one parent has it, then their children have a 50% chance of also having it. There seem to be associations with genes on chromosomes two and 15. The C stands for compelling. But the reflex is not all that compelling. Roughly one quarter of us have this strange reflex of sneezing in the light – but there’s a wide spectrum of responses. A small percentage of people will sneeze as regular as clockwork whenever they go into the light – always the same number of times – so they are strongly “compelled” to sneeze, whether they want to or not. At the other end of the spectrum are people who are not compelled; they have control over this reflex. Suppose they are just on the point of sneezing for some other reason, with the inside of their nose tickling away like crazy. They will sneeze only when they deliberately then stare into a very bright light. So “C” for “Compelling” is more artistic than accurate. Next in the word ACHOO is the letter H. This stands for Sun, from the Greek word for Sun, Helios. That’s not too big a stretch. Finally, we have the two Os at the end. The first stands for ophthalmic, coming from the Greek word ophthalmos meaning eye. I guess the eye got in there because you have to see the Sun with your eyes … The second O stands for outburst. OK, an outburst could be loosely thought of as a sneeze. A sneeze is a protective reflex that cleans the upper airways. This reflex is exquisitely coordinated, involving many nerves and muscles firing off at exactly the right time. The fact that it’s a reflex means that you don’t have a lot of control over it. So what makes people sneeze in bright light? We still don’t know.

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One theory says that in some locations in your brain, the nerves that set off a sneeze are physically close to the nerves that carry visual information. The theory then says that information “leaks” between the separate nerves. This leaking is also called “cross-talk”. So the nerves-that-carry-lightinformation accidentally fire off the nerves-thatstimulate-sneezing. The other major theory says that it’s related to the parasympathetic nervous system. We know this system makes your pupils smaller when light lands on your eyes. It is also involved in triggering sneezes. Again, various locations have been blamed for cross-talk from one nerve to another. Or maybe it’s a evolutionary hangover from when we were cave-dwellers, living with a smoking fire. A good sneeze would have felt wonderful. Indeed, a few people with the photic reflex have told me that they deliberately start the day by looking briefly at the Sun. They get “cleaned out in the airways” – and get a “feel good” moment from the light.

KARL KRUSZELNICKI is an author and science commentator on Australian radio and television. CREDIT : Edited extract from House of Karls, Macmillan 2014 IMAGES 01 Catherine Delahaye / Photononstop / Corbis 02 William Andrew / GettyImages ILLUSTRATIONS Jeffrey Phillips

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PORTRAIT

Phong Nguyen, developmental biologist

PHONG NGUYEN has had a life of firsts. The first-generation Australian was the first in his family to go to university. While there, he was part of a team that was the first to uncover a mechanism by which an embryo starts to form its first blood cells. And now, in the first year after his PhD, that work has snared him a share in the 2015 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research. Born in Melbourne to Vietnamese parents, Nguyen always loved reading and science. While working on his PhD at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, he studied mutant zebrafish. He and his colleagues noticed one type that had several times the normal population of “blood stem cells” – the reservoir from which animals make new blood cells throughout their life. From the mutant fish, Nguyen and colleagues identified a gene responsible for forming “helper cells” in the embryo. By means of an unknown mechanism they attach to developing stem cells, turning them into blood stem cells. Understanding the process could have huge implications for leukaemia and other blood diseases. “Imagine if you could cultivate a patient’s stem cells ... grow them into blood stem cells, then pop them back in their body,” he says. “Cure for leukaemia” might even join his list of firsts one day. — BELINDA SMITH IMAGE Peter Tarasiuk

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