New Scientist (UK) - 25 December 2010

2011 PReView The big stories to look out for next year

December 25, 2010 - January 7, 2011

Holiday special

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The roast of Christmas future Victorian science tales Sozzled superconductors Sequence my Stilton Extreme beer Horror lizards Steampunk Lego Booze myths busted Secret Santa’s secret Jingle hells Electric elk Plus much, much more...

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CoNteNtS

Volume 208 No 2792/2793

This issue online www.newscientist.com/issue/2792

News

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THIS WEEK Your environment matters more than your genes. Dog masters 1000-word vocabulary. No black holes found at the LHC – yet. Microwave map hints at other universes 12 IN BRIEF Google’s fossil record of 5 million books. Chimp juveniles “play mother”. Black holes saved by superhero move. on the origin of earth’s oxygen

Stories to look out for in the coming year, plus a look back at 2010

De MALGLAIVe etIeNNe/ABACA/PA

Goodbye 2010, hello 2011

Technology 15 Photo editing enters the third dimension. Protecting trappist beer from imitations

Features

40 Holiday features 40 Sozzled superconductors 42 Once upon a time 45 Botanical ballistics 48 Steampunk Lego 50 Wherefore art thou robot? 53 Booze truths 56 The gunpowder gang 58 Santa strategy 60 No accounting for taste 63 Attack me if you dare 66 Alive, alive o! 68 The roast of Christmas future 70 Jingle hells 73 Big bird 76 Bambi bites back

Brett rYDer

40 See left

Opinion 5

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Culturelab 78 2010 FlaSH FICTION COMpETITION Science fiction author Neil Gaiman picks the winners from stories set in worlds where discarded science turned out be true 80 INTERvIEW Neurologist Kevin Nelson on his fresh take on near-death in The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain REvIEWS 81 Gruff Davies’s thriller poses deep questions 82 the “Scientist Pope” is given his due by Nancy Marie Brown

GreGG SeGAL/CorBIS outLINe

Ray Kurzweil vs mortality He wants to live forever, so how fit is he now?

EdITORIal Ask the right questions and you can predict the future Strife on Mars Don’t wreck the search for et, pleads Barry e. DiGregorio One minute with… Apollo 13’s crew Listen in to the astronauts before and after the explosion that almost took their lives lETTERS Holiday fun, with number puzzles, atomic limericks and robots hands The real me New year, new diary. But what do you really want to record about yourself, asks Alun Anderson Ray Kurzweil vs mortality (see left)

Regulars

Coming next week… Fuzzy evolution Life is even more random than anyone thought

34 ENIGMa 88 FEEdBaCK Interesting lives 89 ENd OF yEaR quIz test your recall of 2010’s events and advances 84 JOBS & CaREERS

Instant expert: Metamaterials How the invisibility cloak became a reality

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EDITORIAL

LOCATIONS USA 225 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA 02451 Tel +1 781 734 8770 Fax +1 720 356 9217 201 Mission Street, 26th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel +1 415 908 3348 Fax +1 415 704 3125 UK Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1200 Fax +44 (0) 20 7611 1250 Australia Tower 2, 475 Victoria Avenue, Chatswood, NSW 2067 Tel +61 2 9422 2666 Fax +61 2 9422 2633 TO SUBSCRIBe Tel 888 822 3242 [email protected] An annual subscription in the USA is $154‑including delivery. An annual subscription in Canada is CAN$182 including delivery. Canadian subscriptions distributed by RCS International, 12182 Belden Ct, Livonia, MI 48150

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The future of futurology The art of prediction is becoming a science FUTUROLOGY has a chequered next week’s lottery numbers will past. Croesus, king of Lydia, be, or which country will win the consulted the oracle at Delphi 2014 football World Cup. But the and was advised, “if King Croesus future is not a closed book, so long should cross the Halys river, a as you pick the right questions great empire would be destroyed”. and methods. Believing the oracle’s Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the divination to be favourable, self-styled “predictioneer”, uses Croesus attacked Persia in 547 BC. game theory to calculate the likely However, it was his own empire outcome of political negotiations. that ultimately crumbled. Complexity theorists, meanwhile, Today’s oracles seem no “The future isn’t a closed more reliable. Who five years book, so long as you ago was predicting that the world pick the right questions economy would now be on its and methods” knees? Did anyone foresee an African American president of the US, or that swine flu, not are increasingly confident bird flu, was to go pandemic? that they can detect warning As the great quantum physicist signs of imminent collapse Niels Bohr once remarked, in systems such as the global “prediction is very difficult, economy. Google even believes especially about the future”. it can use all the personal data That is true, but only to an it continually harvests to guess extent. Nobody knows what what you’ll do next.

Now New Scientist is playing the prediction game. We teamed up with Samuel Arbesman of Harvard University, who uses measures of scientific progress to predict the timing of new discoveries, to make some forecasts (see page 19). There’s something inherently satisfying about using science to make predictions about science. It brings futurology closer than ever before to genuinely following the scientific method. Futurology is also useful: it helps focus the mind on, say, what to do next should Earth’s twin be found in 2011 (see page 22). We’ve tried making predictions before, but hopefully our strike rate will be higher this time. Whatever the outcome, though, we confidently prophesy that the science of prediction is here to stay. Or, to put it another way, the future is not what it used to be. n

Personal exposomics

will start to cause problems. Perhaps the most exciting implications of the exposome is that it will personalise environmentalism, like the genome personalised medicine. As biomonitoring tools become wearable, and can work in real time, people will take their exposome into their own hands. In the long term, exposomics will give individuals more power to lobby companies, politicians and the workplace for a better environment. n

WHAT can a sample of your blood reveal? Genetic information can uncover clues about what diseases you may develop in your lifetime, of course. But looking for environmental markers could prove to be a lot more helpful. Researchers hope to study the “exposome”, everything that a person encounters in daily life – from diet and drug use to stress – and what risks these

exposures pose to an individual’s health (see page 6). Despite scare stories about carcinogens in all that we eat, drink and breathe, we need to link the level of exposure to actual risk. By finding and comparing breakdown products in blood and urine across populations, researchers hope to figure out what these levels are, and work out how much of which chemicals

We want to hear from you New Scientist is always looking for ways to make your science and technology weekly even better. Now is your chance to help shape our future. All you have to do is go to bit.ly/helpns. By completing the short

survey, which will only take a minute, you will be able to join us in more detailed studies next year. You will also be automatically entered into a draw to win a New Scientist branded laptop bag with a copy

(one signed) of five of our books: Does Anything Eat Wasps?, Why Don’t Penguins Feet Freeze?, How to Fossilise a Hamster, Do Polar Bears get Lonely? and Why Can’t Elephants Jump? Ten bags are on offer.

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 5

Welcome to the exposome

MIKE CLARKE/AFP/GETTy

THIS WEEK

Genes are useless for predicting diseases, so start with drugs, stress, and exposure to chemicals Jessica Hamzelou

the incidence of heart disease in this group (The Journal of the American Medical Association DOI: 10.1001/jama.2010.119). On the other hand, the impact of environmental influences is still largely a mystery. “There’s an imbalance between our ability to investigate the genome and the environment,” says Chris Wild, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, who came up with the idea of the exposome. In reality, most diseases are probably caused by a combination of the two, which is where the exposome comes in. “The idea is to have a comprehensive analysis of a person’s full exposure history,” says Wild. He hopes a better understanding of exposures will shed a brighter light on disease risk factors. There are likely to be critical periods of exposure in development. For example, the time from birth to 3 years of age is thought to be particularly important. “We know that this is the time when brain connections are made, and that if you are obese by this age, you’ll have problems as an adult,” says Nicholson. In theory, a blood or urine sample taken from an individual could provide a snapshot of what that person has been exposed to. But how do you work out what fingerprints chemicals might leave in the body? The task is not as formidable as

WHEN it comes to health, which is more important, nature or nurture? You may well think your genes are a more important predictor of health and ill health. Not so fast. In fact, it transpires that our everyday environment outweighs our genetics, big time, when it comes to measuring our risk of disease. The genome is out – welcome the exposome. “The exposome represents everything a person is exposed to in the environment, that’s not in the genes,” says Stephen Rappaport, environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. That includes stress, diet, lifestyle choices, recreational and medicinal drug use and infections, to name a few. “The big difference is that the exposome changes throughout life as our bodies, diets and lifestyles change,” he says. While our understanding of the human genome has been growing at an exponential rate over the last decade, it is not as helpful as we hoped in predicting diseases. “Genes only contribute 10 per cent of the overall disease burden,” says Rappaport. “Knowing genetic risk factors can prove absolutely useless,” says Jeremy Nicholson at Imperial College London. He points to work by Nina Paynter at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who investigated the effects of 101 genetic markers implicated “A blood or urine sample in heart disease. After following could provide a snapshot over 19,000 women for 12 years, of what someone has she found these markers were not able to predict anything about been exposed to”

it sounds. For a start, researchers could make use of swathes of biobank information that has already been collected. “There has been a huge international funding effort in adult cohorts like the UK Biobank already,” says Wild. “If we improved analysis, we could apply it to these groups.” Several teams are also working towards developing wearable devices to measure personal exposure to chemicals in the environment, for example (see “Bugging your biosphere”, right). “We can put chemicals in categories,” says Rappaport. “We could start by prioritising toxic chemicals, and look for markers

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of these toxins in the blood, while hormones and metals can be measured directly.” Rappaport is looking at albumin, a common protein in the blood that transports toxins to the liver where they are processed and broken down. He wants to know how it reacts with a range of chemicals, and is measuring the products. “You can get a fingerprint – a display of all the products an individual has been exposed to.” By combining this information with an enhanced understanding of how exposure affects health, the exposome could help better predict a person’s true disease risk. And

storemags & fantamag - magazines for all In this section n Dog masters 1000-word vocabulary, page 8 n Microwave map hints at other universes, page 9 n Protecting Trappist beer from imitations, page 16

we shouldn’t have to wait long – Rappaport reckons we can reap the benefits within a generation. To this end, the US National Institutes of Health has set up an exposure biology programme. “We’re looking for interactions between genes and exposure to work out an individual’s risk of disease,” says David Balshaw, who manages the programme. “It would allow you to tailor the therapeutic response to that person’s risk.”

“Wearable devices to measure personal exposure to chemicals will soon be available”

BuggIng your BIosphere How does air pollution or stress leave a trace in the blood? The US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is trying to find out. One group funded by the NIH and led by Nongjian Tao at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute in Tempre is developing wearable wireless sensors to monitor an individual’s exposure to environmental pollutants. The group have come up with a wearable sensor – roughly the size of a cellphone – that detects levels of pollutants from car exhaust. The sensor then converts this

information into an electrical signal, which is transmitted via Bluetooth to the wearer’s cellphone, which then displays what chemicals you are exposed to. Tao’s team started by creating software for Windows phones, but they are working on apps that could be used on any smartphone. In theory, anyone could pop on a sensor and download an app to receive real-time information on exposure to environmental pollutants. At the same time, smartphones monitoring your location can combine the level of pollution with an exact

An understanding of this interaction, reflected in a person’s metabolic profile, might also help predict how they will respond to a drug. Nicholson has been looking for clues in metabolite profiles of urine samples. Last year, his research group used these profiles to predict how individuals would metabolise paracetamol. “It turned out that gut microbes were very important,” says Nicholson. “We’ve shown that the pre-dose urinary metabolite profile could predict the metabolism of analgesic drugs, and therefore predict drug toxicity.” The findings suggest that –You’re surrounded– metabolic profiles of exposure could help doctors tailor therapies and enable them to prescribe personalised medicines. time and place. Tao presented his Justin Stebbing at Imperial sensor at the Circuits and Systems College London has already for Medical and Environmental shown that metabolic profiles of Applications Workshop in Yukatán women with breast cancer can Mexico last week. predict who will respond to certain “We’re now moving prototypes therapies. It is early days, but the into human studies, and progressing initial findings look promising. those prototypes into products,” says “We’re reaching the point David Balshaw of the NIH. where we’re capable of assessing Earlier this year, Tao’s group tried the exposome,” says Balshaw. out the sensor on individuals taking With the implications for a stroll around Los Angeles, understanding disease causes California. They were able to measure and risks, and a real prospect of how exposure to pollutants changed developing personalised as each person wandered near busy medicine, the exposome is roads and petrol stations. showing more promise than the genome already, he adds. n 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 7

THIS WEEK

Border collie is fluent in toyspeak Jessica Griggs

joHn W. pIllEy & AllISon K. rEId

IN THE age-old war between cats and dogs, canines might just have struck the killer blow. A border collie called Chaser has been taught the names of 1022 items – more than any other animal. She can also categorise them according to function and shape, something children

learn to do around the age of 3. Chaser follows in the footsteps of Rico, who trained at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Rico had a “vocabulary” of 200 words and could identify new objects in a group of familiar objects by a process of elimination, according to a study published in 2004.

No black holes found at the LHC – yet PREDICTIONS that the world’s largest particle smasher could create black holes have inspired numerous scare stories in recent years. So far, the Large Hadron Collider has not lived up to the hype. But many theorists hope the LHC, based at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, will create short-lived, miniature black holes. These are not

considered dangerous, and would be a consequence of the hypothetical extra dimensions that might lie beyond the three-dimensional world we normally experience. If these dimensions exist, gravitons, the particles thought to transmit the force of gravity, could leak into them, providing a much-needed explanation for why gravity seems much weaker than the other forces. At the high energies created inside the LHC, even colliding protons could be affected by gravitons in the extra dimensions, making gravity strong enough to create

To find out whether there was a limit to the number of words a border collie could learn, psychologists Alliston Reid and John Pilley of Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, started an intensive training programme with Chaser. Over three years, they taught the collie the names of 1022 toys by introducing them to her one by one, getting her to fetch the toy and then repeating the name to reinforce the association. The team regularly tested Chaser on her entire vocabulary. Groups of 20 toys were chosen at random and put in a separate

room from where Chaser had to retrieve them by name. The toys were in another room so the trainer would not unintentionally give Chaser cues about which toy to choose. According to Reid, the dog completed 838 of these tests over 3 years and never got less than 18 out of 20 right (Behavioural Processes, DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2010.11.007). Chaser was also taught to categorise the named objects, complete tasks such as touching the toy with her nose or paw, and like Rico, she could infer the name of a new object from a set of familiar objects. “The experimenters did a lot of controls to exclude alternative explanations, although from my experience the results are simply too good,” says Ádám Miklósi, founder of the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. Other dogs perform similar tasks, he says, but they usually make more mistakes. He thinks Chaser’s intensive training explains the difference. “This study shows that this dog has good skills for comprehension but the production side of communication is missing,” says Miklósi. Others animals have demonstrated impressive feats of learning in which they also vocalise the words they learn, such as Alex, the grey parrot, who could make sentences out of –That’s my toy!– about 100 words. n

fleeting, microscopic black holes. These would make themselves known by producing an excess of high-energy particles at near right angles to the proton beam. Researchers working on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the LHC report that they have seen no such signal as yet. This rules out the emergence of black holes at energies between 3.5 and 4.5 teraelectronvolts

“Black holes would be a consequence of the extra dimensions that might lie beyond the 3D world”

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or TeV, report the researchers (arxiv.org/abs/1012.3375). Extra dimensions may exist, as black holes might appear at higher energies, says CMS spokesman Guido Tonelli. “The search will continue.” The new result does rule out some variations on the extra dimensions hypothesis. It also means extra dimensions, if they do exist, are harder to detect than some hoped. “It puts an important constraint that theorists will have to abide by,” says Dmitri Kharzeev of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Kate McAlpine n

storemags & fantamag - magazines for all For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news

COLLISIONS between our cosmos CMB data from NASA’s Wilkinson and other universes may have Microwave Anisotropy Probe. left round “bruises” in a map The search turned up four of ancient cosmic radiation. circular patches, each spanning Our universe is thought to an area of sky equivalent to at have expanded rapidly in a least eight full moons (arxiv.org/ process called inflation in the abs/1012.1995). One is a cold first moments after the big bang. spot that had already been cited Some physicists suspect inflation as evidence of another universe is still happening, starting up in interacting with our own. some regions while stopping in “There’s no obvious, boring others, such as the part of the explanation for the features,” universe we live in. In this picture, says team member Matthew called eternal inflation, new Johnson of the Perimeter universes are continually popping Institute for Theoretical Physics into existence like bubbles in a in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. vast, expanding sea of space-time. If collisions with other Many of these universes universes did indeed create these should be carried away from patches, they should have left one another as soon as they other calling cards in the CMB, form. But universes born close such as a telltale signature in the together could collide if they are orientation, or polarisation, of expanding faster than the space CMB photons. The European between them. Space Agency’s Planck satellite, If our universe was hit by which launched in 2009, should another bubble universe, the be able to detect these signs. impact would release colossal Its first full maps of the sky are bursts of energy. If this occurred expected in 2012. before inflation ended in our Even if just one of these spots patch of the universe, it could turns out to be a bubble collision, leave an imprint that might still it would be “a discovery of the be detectable today. Now Stephen first magnitude”, says Thomas Feeney of University College Levi of the University of London and colleagues say they may have spotted such imprints “Collisions with other universes should have left in the cosmic microwave a telltale signature in the background (CMB), the all-sky microwave background” glow that comes from photons emitted when the universe was less than 400,000 years old. British Columbia in Vancouver, A collision would alter how Canada. The finding would long inflation lasted in the bolster theories – such as string impact zone. If it prolonged the theory – that call for a vast expansion phase, the density of number of universes with matter in the impact zone would different properties. be lower than in surrounding “It is encouraging they found regions. This would show some candidates,” says Alexander up as a cold spot in the CMB. Vilenkin of Tufts University in Conversely, a shorter period of Medford, Massachusetts. But he inflation would create a warm adds that even if bubble universes spot in the CMB. exist, they might not form at a The team calculated the likely rate that would guarantee one temperature profiles for such would have collided with our impacts and searched for them in universe. Rachel Courtland n

gsfc/nasa

Microwave radiation map hints at other universes

–Spot the collision marks–

Sainsbury PhD Studentships in Plant Science Enhanced four year postgraduate studentships starting in October 2011, will once again be awarded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts. Each of the supervisors below will select a candidate who will then compete at interview, with Sainsbury Undergraduate students, for one of up to three Sainsbury PhD Studentships. Interviews will be held in London on Friday, 4 March 2011. It would be expected that the studentship holder spend six months during their 3rd or 4th year at another university/institute to gain additional experience. Interested applicants should write, attaching a CV, before 27 January 2011, to one or more of the following: ‘Novel genes modifying Polycomb-group gene action in Arabidopsis.' Dr Justin Goodrich, Inst of Molecular Plant Sciences, Univ of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JH Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0) 131 650 7032 ‘Investigating whether stomatal development can be optimised for current and future CO2 environments’ Professor Julie Gray, Molecular Biology & Biotechnology, Univ of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0) 114 222 4407 ‘Maternal and paternal effects on seed size’ Dr Paula Kover, University of Bath, Dept. of Biology and Biochemistry, Bath BA2 5DW Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0) 1225 385059 Understanding the molecular basis of the influence of climate change on seasonal growth cycles’ (NB, this project will be based at Univ of Exeter) Dr Steven Penfield, Dept of Biology (Area 8), University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD Email [email protected] Tel: +44 (0) 1904 328755 ‘Plants in a warmer world: understanding the molecular basis of temperature perception.’ Dr Philip Wigge, Cell and Developmental Biology Department, John Innes Centre, Norwich NR4 7UH Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0) 1603 450 576

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 9

To a brighter, safer world “Do they discourage crime and rowdyism? Do they increase the value of your real estate? Do they cause you to hold up your head in pride?” What are “they”? Street lights, of course. This is how the first electric street lights were advertised in the US a century ago. Today people in wealthy nations take street lighting for granted. So you might be surprised to hear that improving urban lighting remains a hotbed of research, with a new kind of light source now promising to deliver a revolution. As pedestrians, we want street lighting to give us enough light to see where we’re going without being blinded by glare, and we want to feel safe. It turns out that relatively dim light is enough for us to navigate, but issues around glare and feeling safe represent more of a challenge. Simply put, the brighter a street is, the less threatened we feel. The problem is that brighter lamps also increase glare and their light spills intrusively into people’s homes. So, unable to simply increase light levels, researchers are searching for deeper triggers that make us feel safer, such as our perception of brightness. Sodium lighting, which generates the yellow glow we’ve all seen over urban areas, was chosen in part because the cone cells in our eyes are very sensitive to yellow light. But we now know that when light levels are low, our perception of brightness is governed by a different type of cell in the retina – rod cells. These are more sensitive to blue light, so ideally night lighting should tend towards blue. Another factor that makes us feel safe is the

ability to recognise faces. “We don’t like to get close to people unless we can recognise them,” says Peter Raynham of University College London. For reasons that are not yet fully understood, at night we see faces better in white light, he says. With these issues in mind, Philips commissioned research to compare people’s reactions to the yellow light from sodium lamps and to white light produced by metal halide lamps, which contain a vapour of mercury and metal salts. Researchers in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Navalcarnero in Spain and St Helens in the UK quizzed 300 people on how they felt about the two types of lighting. In all three locations, white light was regarded as being brighter, helping people to see farther and more clearly, and people in all but one street surveyed in St Helens said white light enabled them to recognise faces from further away than yellow light. “Everyone agrees that white is more pleasant, more natural and feels better and safer,” says Klaas Vegter, Chief Technology Officer for Philips Lighting. If switching to white light is a step in the right direction, switching to LEDs promises a giant leap. LEDs are light-emitting diodes, tiny chips that glow extremely brightly when a current is passed through them. With LEDs, flexibility is the name of the game. By changing the materials they are made of and covering them with different coatings, LEDs can be made to shine in just about any

We are used to yellow light from street lamps (top) but research shows that we prefer white light

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Can you improve city life? Giving people good-quality lighting after dark is just one way to improve the health and well-being of urban-dwellers. If you have a simple solution for enhancing city life, now is your chance to make an impact by entering the Philips Livable Cities Award. Philips is offering €75,000 to turn one winning idea into reality, plus €25,000 each for two runners-up. To enter the Philips Livable Cities Award or to find out more about it, please go to www.philips. com/because. The closing date for entries is 28 October 2010.

Off-grid football Life in wealthy nations carries on after dark. But for a quarter of the world’s population little commerce or social activity takes place after sunset. They have only poor light because they live beyond the reach of the electricity grid. This year, soccer was used to show that a grid connection is no longer essential for reliable lighting. Philips toured Africa with solar-powered floodlights capable of illuminating a five-a-side soccer pitch for eight hours on just one charge. “We’re very excited to see light in our place for the first time,” said Albertina Mathole, who watched a night match in Johannesburg, South Africa. Soccer was chosen because matches are important social gatherings in Africa. “It helps people to bond and creates social activity at night,” says Klaas Vegter of Philips Lighting. Beyond football, solar-powered lighting has the potential to illuminate other night-time events, as well as streets and parks. By integrating the solar panels with batteries for energy storage and low power LEDs, Philips aims to ensure that the lights will be bright enough and stay on long enough to please users. “We want people to have reliable light all the time,” Vegter says, “and we want it to work for 10 years with no hassle.”

color, including different shades of white. And because each LED chip has its own reflector and lens, the light can be focused as the need requires. “You can put different amounts of light in different areas, so you can cut down spill to the sky and onto buildings,” Vegter says. LEDs can also be dimmed, offering even more flexibility. “You can tailor the lighting level to the needs of an area or a street,” Vegter says. “If it’s busy you can turn up the light. If it’s not crowded you can turn it down.” Being more precise and efficient brings other benefits too. “With LEDs you can make the whole lighting device a lot smaller and lighter,” Vegter says. “You can even imagine getting rid of the lamp post altogether and integrating LEDs into the city furniture. This could create a much less cluttered and more pleasant city environment.” 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 11

Michael St. Maur Sheil/cOrBiS

iN BrieF On the origin of Earth’s oxygen GENE families involved in

Five billion words at their fingertips, courtesy of Google GOOGLE’S “fossil record” of digitised books now covers 5 million books, spans 500 years and more than 500 billion words. Already it is possible to trace the accelerating evolution of the English language, map the rise and fall of various people, and uncover patterns of censorship in Soviet Russia, modern China and 1950s America – and that’s only a beginning. “This dataset is going to underwrite a field which is far, far more interesting than anything we could talk about in a single paper,” says Erez Lieberman Aiden, who led the research at Harvard University with Jean-Baptiste Michel.

From the more than 15 million books digitised to date, Aiden, Michel and colleagues from Google and Harvard selected the 5.2 million with the most reliable data, for example, they know the author and date. If written as a single line of text, this would stretch to the moon and back 10 times (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644). The researchers counted up the number of times each word appeared in the dataset during each year from 1800 to 2000, allowing them to follow changes in word use. Similarly, they tracked the mention of people’s names, a crude measure of fame, and found that people today become famous earlier in life than they used to – around the age of 29 in the mid-20th century, down from 43 in the early 19th century. However, fame today is more fleeting, they found.

Autistic ability falters in real world THE astonishing ability of many children with autism to rapidly locate concealed on-screen symbols falls apart in an experiment that mimics hunting for objects in the real world. The experiment took place on an array of 49 lights resembling a disco dance floor. For each game, researchers switched on an apparently random pattern of 16 green lights. Children then had

to dash around pressing them, searching for one that turned red. Twenty children with autism and 20 without took turns to complete the game as fast as possible. The game was biased so that 80 per cent of the time, the light that turned red was located in a specific half of the room. Children with autism were expected to spot this pattern faster but the reverse happened. Non-autistic children

spent 60 per cent of their time searching the target-rich half, compared with 45 per cent for those with autism. The team, led by Liz Pellicano of London’s Institute of Education, suggests that while autistic kids may be good at spotting preset visual patterns, they find it harder to work out rules from apparently random events (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1014076108).

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respiration and photosynthesis arose in a short evolutionary burst that began nearly a billion years before Earth’s atmosphere became rich in oxygen. Lawrence David and Eric Alm from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mapped the evolutionary history of 3983 gene families that occur in a wide range of modern species. They were able to show that 27 per cent of these gene families appeared in a short evolutionary burst which began about 3.3 billion years ago (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09649). Many of the genes from this time were involved in electron transport – a key step in respiration and photosynthesis, which ultimately led, say David and Alm, to oxygen-producing photosynthesis and the “great oxygenation event” 2.4 billion years ago, when the atmosphere became oxygen rich.

Black holes saved by superhero move BLACK holes may dodge the speeding “bullets” that would otherwise strip them naked. The event horizon surrounding a black hole means nothing, not even light, escapes. But in 2009, theorists showed that incoming particles might cause a black hole to rotate so fast that this horizon is destroyed, allowing light to escape. The trouble is, this “naked singularity” violates Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Now Enrico Barausse of the University of Maryland in College Park and colleagues reckon such particles needn’t strip black holes. Instead, approaching matter distorts a black hole’s gravity so that it shrinks away from the particles, which speed on past (Physical Review Letters, in press).

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Breast milk boosts Dolls aren’t just for humans – wild chimps make their own schoolboys’ brains WHEN Jane Goodall first reported them to sleep in at night – and in essence, as dolls. This last class

juzANt/DIgItAl vISION/getty

that chimps use tools, our concept of human uniqueness was rocked. It has never quite recovered. In another twist, a population of wild chimps in Uganda’s Kibale National Park appears to be using objects as toys. That’s remarkable in itself, but Sonya Kahlenberg of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and Richard Wrangham of Harvard University found that juvenile chimps in this population play with sticks like children play with dolls, cradling them and even making nests for

they found that the behaviour is more common in females. “Stick carrying may be practice for the adult role of motherhood,” says Kahlenberg, “perhaps similar to functions of other kinds of play, being practice for adult roles.” Kahlenberg and Wrangham analysed data from 14 years of observation of wild chimps and categorised stick-use into four classes: as probes to investigate holes; as weapons during aggressive displays or attacks; as a prop during solitary play; and,

they call “stick carrying”, and in 301 observations it turned out to be more common in juvenile chimps, more frequent in females than males, and only occurred in females before their first birth (Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/ j.cub.2010.11.024). “It was striking that this behaviour was seen in some adult females, but never after they became mothers,” says Kahlenberg, adding that the chimps learned the behaviour by copying other juveniles.

NASA/SDO/AIA

BREASTFEEDING improves later academic performance in boys but appears to have no such effect in girls. Wendy Oddy at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Subiaco, Western Australia, and colleagues examined whether having been breastfed affected the test scores of over 1000 10-year-olds. Studies have suggested that children who were breastfed have higher IQs than those who were not, but few separated out boys and girls. Mothers who breastfeed are on average wealthier and more educated, so Oddy’s team accounted for these factors. Boys who were mainly breastfed for at least six months scored 9 per cent higher in mathematics and writing tests, 7 per cent higher in spelling, and 6 per cent higher in reading, compared with boys fed with formula milk or breastfed for shorter periods. There were no significant differences in results for girls (Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2009-3489). “We know that breast milk contains the optimal nutrients for development of the brain and central nervous system,” says Oddy, but the gender differences were surprising.

New genes on the block prove vital ARE your oldest genes your dearest? Geneticists thought that a creature’s vital genes are its oldest, not the new ones that constantly arise via mutation – after all, it got along fine without the newbies. This theory has now been proven wrong, in fruit flies at least. Sidi Chen at the University of Chicago and colleagues found that about a third of fruit fly genes are vital, regardless of when they appeared. Surprisingly, the young genes found to be essential don’t deal with modern hazards such as pesticides, but the fly’s basic biology (Science, vol 330, p 1682). The team created flies with a type of RNA that silenced certain genes. It either turned off one of 195 genes that arose in fruit flies less than 35 million years ago, or one of 245 genes from further back. In both groups, 30 per cent of flies died, with specific defects showing that the silenced genes controlled mainly early-stage development. Even very recent genes were vital. The team describes new genes like go-getting new employees. They interact with existing genes to create some new function. If this is profitable and then selected for by evolution, the newcomer quickly becomes indispensable.

Sun’s eruptions turn out to be global ERUPTIONS on the sun’s surface may spark similar blasts across the star. The finding could help improve the forecasting of these eruptions, which disrupt power grids on Earth. Solar eruptions are known to prompt further explosions nearby. But when two major eruptions, separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometres, both occurred on 1 August, Karel Schrijver and Alan Title of the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, California, wondered whether they were connected. The pair turned to detailed images

of the sun from August. Only a portion is visible at one time, but over a week, hidden areas became visible, revealing previously unknown distortions to the magnetic field. The researchers used these to estimate the magnetic field lines on 1 August over the sun’s entire surface and to map all solar events onto these lines. This showed that the two major eruptions were linked to each other, and to other events, via the same deformations of the sun’s global magnetic field. The work will appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 13

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TECHNOLOGY

3D image editor that’s never out of its depth Software that lets you cut-and-paste in three dimensions could transform 3D images and video Paul Marks

Jeroen van Baar of Disney’s research lab in Zurich and WanYen Lo of the University of Bern – demonstrated the first copy-andpaste editing software for still 3D images. Their software maintains the apparent depth of a 3D image object copied and pasted into any point in another 3D image, even if photographed

WHILE 3D compact cameras and TV sets are bringing mindblowing ways to view digital pictures into our living rooms, there’s something missing from these gadgets: software that lets you edit the images. Packages like Adobe’s Photoshop make it easy to copy “The software maintains and paste objects from one 2D the apparent depth of a 3D computer image to another. But image cut and pasted into until now there has been no way any point in another one” to edit the stereoscopic images shot by 3D cameras because of the different “depths” of the from a different viewpoint. elements within the 3D pictures. This was far from easy, says At the recent Siggraph Asia Matthias Zwicker, who headed computer graphics conference the Bern team. “We have to in Seoul, South Korea, two automatically find the right Switzerland-based engineers – alignment of the pasted object

in a new scene. And that means our software needs to know the 3D structure of the source and target stereoscopic images.” The compact 3D digital cameras on the market make it possible to do this. They simultaneously snap two photographs of the scene from slightly different positions to create a pair of stereoscopic images, which are combined into a single 3D image – with traditional “anaglyph” 3D technology, one of the two images is tinted red and the other cyan. The greater the distance between an object’s red and cyan versions, the deeper it appears to be within the 3D photograph. Using that separation distance as a proxy for depth, the software establishes a “depth map” of both the

Drag and drop from image to image The distances between red and cyan versions of objects within a 3D image are used to generate a depth map The user cuts out an object and pastes it into a different location The pasted object is automatically resized to match its new position within the depth map

SOURCE: ACM/SIGGRAPH ASIA 2010

A new 3D image can then be generated

source and target pictures. The researchers developed a four-stage software algorithm. First it establishes the apparent depth of all parts of the source and target 3D images. Next, the user draws a rough line around the source object they want to cut out, much as they would with Photoshop, and the software snaps to the edges of it, allowing it to be copied and moved into the target image. The depth maps are then used to match the incoming object’s size and alignment to that of the area of the target image it is placed in. If pushed to the back of the target image, the object automatically shrinks to fit, and gets bigger when pulled into the foreground. The user can move the object around inside the image to any aesthetically pleasing point as the software automatically computes the size adjustments and adds shadows beneath the object to visually anchor it in place. Multiple copies of the same image can be placed in the target, too (see image). Finally, the software reverses the first stage of the process: using the depth map of the edited picture it generates a pair of stereoscopic images so that the 3D image looks as natural as it did before the cut-and-paste algorithm got to work. The researchers hope it will be a killer app for the 3D market – especially when, later on, it is extended from its 3D stills to editing 3D video. They could be right, says Ben Wood, an analyst with CCS Insight, a London-based market research firm, who thinks the software could make it easier for developers to create content for the plethora of 3D gadgets that are on the way. “Consumers are going to face an onslaught of 3D devices across all platforms: on satellite TV, on Android-based tablets and also on 3D-capable cellphones with stereoscopic cameras,” says Wood. “This software is part of the growing momentum behind 3D.” n

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 15

Owen Franken/COrBIS

TeCHnOLOGY

Cheers, make mine an Orval… accept no imitations IF YOU are pouring yourself one of the fine beers brewed at Europe’s Trappist monasteries this holiday season, spare a thought for the Cistercian monks behind your tipple. Their beer sales suffer at the hands of breweries trading falsely on the monastic name. The monks sell their ales to generate cash for their

“Each Trappist beer has its own secret recipe. The abbeys will welcome this authentication method” monasteries, with any excess going to charitable causes. Sales suffer at the hands of copycat brews that trade on the monastic moniker without any Trappist connections. A test that can distinguish Trappist beer from a cheaper copy could soon put paid to that. Of the hundreds of Trappist monasteries worldwide, just seven brew the famous beers: those at Achel, Chimay, Orval, Rochefort, Westvleteren and Westmalle in Belgium, and at La

Trappe in the Netherlands. In the latest edition of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (DOI: 10.1021/jf102632g), Claude Guillou of the European Commission’s Institute for the Health and Consumer Protection in Ispra, Italy, says little is being done to defend the beers against commercial breweries who use heavy advertising to suggest a “monastic origin”. “Trappist beers are interesting because each abbey has its own recipe built over centuries and kept secret – so their taste is very specific to each,” he says. “We wondered if their characteristics are distinct enough to be reflected in their analytical profile.” So his team used a technique called liquid chromatographymass spectrometry (LC-MS) to seek out telltale profiles of compounds metabolised in the Trappists’ unique fermentation process. LC-MS separates out chemical groups of interest and then ionises each for injection into a mass spectrometer – where

–No, you can’t have the recipe–

STepHen FrInk/COrBIS

Blast of noise will ward off underwater intruders UNDERWATER saboteurs beware. Harbours could one day be defended by systems that target unwelcome divers by using the sound of their own breathing against them – with the help of a bit of time trickery. High-intensity sound can, in principle, be used as a non-lethal deterrent against divers. However, blanketing an underwater area with sound is costly and would put marine life at risk. So Alexander Sutin of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, has proposed a system that can direct the sound to the diver’s location. The system first has to pinpoint

the array of molecular weights of the compounds can be identified. In multiple tests, the “fingerprint” this generated for one Trappist beer, Rochefort 8, allowed them to “clearly identify” the monks’ brew from 232 other beers. It’s a worthy cause, says Iain Loe, communications manager of

the European Beer Consumers Union. “There has long been confusion and perhaps some deceit in some bars about the sale of Abbey-style beers,” he says. “The Trappist breweries should welcome this new way of authenticating their beers.” Paul Marks n

where the diver is. It does this with a network of hydrophones, which are simpler to use and deliver better detection rates than sonar, according to Sutin. They listen for the diver’s breathing – an acoustic signal that Sutin says is distinct from any

signals from the transducers converge on the diver. The technique, known as time-reversal acoustics, is akin to rewinding a video of ripples expanding outwards from where a stone was dropped into a pond. “It is the only system that can focus sound on the diver,” says Sutin. He has shown that an array of 20 100-watt transducers can produce a focused sound at 180 decibels – which is intolerable for a diver – at a distance

produced by marine life. There is another reason to favour hydrophones. Once the diver has been located, a much louder version of the sound picked up at each hydrophone is reproduced by a transducer attached to it, and aimed back at the diver. Focusing a beam of sound under water is difficult, as its path through the acoustically inhomogenous fluid is unpredictable. But if the sound is one that has already passed through the water, then a recreation of it can be made to take the same path in –Won’t hurt dolphins– reverse. The effect is to make the

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of 200 metres. The sound converges on an area a few metres across centred on the diver, ensuring that most passing fish are spared the effects (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol 128, p 2336). Sutin has used test data from underwater sensors to show that the system works, in theory. The next step will be to build it. David Hambling n

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News special

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2011

preview first of Nasa’s shuttles to be scheduled for retirement failed to make its final flight. This year we decided to take prediction science a step further, by enlisting the powers of samuel arbesman, who works on computational approaches to the study of science at Harvard Medical school in Boston. He is pioneering ways to employ scientometrics – a field that attempts to measure scientific progress – to make

predictions about when new discoveries will occur. in september, he famously used the properties of known alien worlds to predict that the first life-friendly exoplanet had a 50 per cent chance of being found before May 2011; such a planet showed up a few weeks later. we asked arbesman to apply similar methods to a list of breakthroughs we thought might happen in 2011. He

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whittled this down to four that lent themselves to his methods, and attempted to calculate the probability of each one occurring in the next 12 months. Over the following pages you can gauge these predictions for yourself, along with four more stories that we reckon have a good chance of defining 2011. and in case they have slipped your mind, you’ll also find the important events and breakthroughs of 2010.

review 2010

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 19

De Malglaive eTieNNe/aBaca/pa space x

The discovery of the first earth twin, the rise of robot avatars and major leaps forward for commercial space flight are just some of the developments that will define 2011 – or will they? last year, we used this slot to preview the stories we were most looking forward to in 2010. some happened: the first cells with synthetic genomes were created and there is now a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome. Others… not so much. even the

NEWS SPECIAL

2011 preview

deep, dark periodic table Elements occupying the far depths of the periodic table are so exotic and ephemeral it seems as if they are only barely there. In early 2010, when physicists announced the creation of the superheavy element ununseptium, even the handful of atoms that were made decayed into smaller ones in a fraction of a second. Theory predicts, however, that superheavy isotopes with lifetimes of minutes can be made. These might have novel properties. What’s more, they would confirm the existence of the fabled “island of stability”, an as-yet-hypothetical region of the periodic table where there should be stable superheavy elements. This island is predicted by current

theory, which says that the protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms fall into discrete energy levels or “shells”, each of which can hold a maximum number of particles. When an atom has just the right number of both protons and neutrons to exactly fill its shells, it is called “double magic” and is highly stable. The numbers needed to make a double magic superheavy isotope aren’t known, but theory suggests they should contain 184 neutrons and 114, 120 or 126 protons. Atoms containing 114 protons but not enough neutrons have already been made. To find out whether we can expect the first “double magic” island element in 2011, see below.

prediction: No ‘magic’ element just yet Stable superheavy elements should exist (see above), but where in the periodic table will this “island of stability” lie? And how long will it take to create the first “islander”? As we have already made an element with 114 protons but not enough neutrons, this might seem like the front runner. In fact, boosting element 114’s neutron number to 184 won’t be easy. When atoms of one element are fired at a lump of another, they can fuse to form a larger atom. But making an atom with 114 protons and 184 neutrons would require an intense beam of radioactive atoms,

something that can’t be produced with existing technology, says Michael Thoennessen of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who catalogues new isotopes. By contrast, creating magic isotopes of elements 120 and 126 might be accomplished by fusing atoms, although as yet it has only been done with less-heavy elements. So how close is that feat? We examined the rate of creation of all synthetic isotopes with atomic numbers greater than 100. It was a bumpy ride, with fits and starts as technologies were exhausted and

new ones created. Still, we identified a general pattern in which the number of protons and neutrons grew with time. Extrapolating the results suggested that a magic version of element 120 will be made in 2042 and of 126 in 2052. So making an islander next year is optimistic. Gains in 2011 are more likely to be in getting to grips with the chemistry of existing superheavy atoms, which may offer clues as to where the island lies, says Walter Loveland of Oregon State University in Corvallis. Samuel

Arbesman and Rachel Courtland

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Busted well: 4.9 million

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The number of barrels of crude oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico following the explosion that destroyed BP’s Deepwater Horizon well. Eleven of its crew died. For three mishap-prone months the company tried, and repeatedly failed, to plug its runaway well. Meanwhile, the crude poured forth, wreaking havoc on deep-water fish, migrating baby sea turtles, and BP chief executive Tony Hayward’s career.

7 million To keep oil off coastal marshes and, some allege, out of sight, BP released 7 million litres of chemicals to disperse and break up the oil at the well head 1500 metres down. Environmentalists balked. The Obama administration imposed a moratorium on deep-water drilling. Yet in Gulf coast communities, where fishers and oil workers may be the exact same people, the “drill-baby-drill” cry grew ever shriller.

review

2010

With an average consumption of more than 20 million barrels of oil per day, industry and consumers across the US would have gobbled up the entire spill in just a few hours. Some denizens of the Gulf have almost as great an appetite for the oil: many deep-water microbes thrive on the stuff, and are probably still enjoying the unexpected feast.

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 21

richard perry/new york times/redux/eyevine

20 million

NEWS SPECIAL

2011 preview

the daily exoplanet In 2010, one new exoplanet appeared every four days or so; by the end of the year, the total topped 500. But in September, a truly exceptional find punctuated this steady drumbeat of discovery: the first alien planet that could host life on its surface. Gliese 581 g, spotted by a team led by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, inhabits a “Goldilocks” zone around its host star, a band just warm enough to boast liquid water. At 3.1 to 4.3 times the

mass of Earth, it is also small enough that it should be made mostly of rock. Although a second team of astronomers failed to find signs of Gliese 581 g in their data, if its existence is confirmed, it will be the most habitable exoplanet yet found. An even bigger prize awaits, however: a planet with the size and temperature of our own. We’re unlikely to be exceptional, so such a doppelgänger must be out there. Will it be found in 2011? See below.

prediction: Expect Earth’s twin Lke meeting an estranged twin you didn’t know you had, Earthlings will thrill at finding their planetary double. To predict the timing of this momentous occasion, we turned to a measure of “Earth-like-ness” devised earlier this year by one of us (Arbesman), along with Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz. This “habitability index” is based on estimates of a planet’s average temperature and size. “Hot Jupiters”, searingly hot worlds that orbit their hosts in just days, score close to zero, while one with similar properties to Earth would get a value of 1. In September, plotting the index of each planet against the date of its discovery and extrapolating the resulting curves predicted that an Earth-like planet would be found by May 2011. Two weeks later, such a planet – Gliese 581 g – was spotted although the detection is

awaiting further confirmation. Now we’ve taken the same curves, adapted them to include Gliese 581 g’s habitability index of 0.4, and come up with a fresh prediction. Our figures suggest there is an 82 per cent chance that we will find a true doppelgänger for Earth by the close of 2011. This exciting prediction is subject to uncertainty as the dates of exoplanet discoveries are only known to the year. What’s more, the habitability index does not account for a planet’s atmosphere, which could turn what would otherwise be a hospitable world into a hothouse like Venus. Exoplanet-hunting may get a boost in February, when NASA’s Kepler telescope is set to release a flood of data. Even if Earth’s twin doesn’t emerge then, there are plenty of other exoplanet searches that could spot it too. Samuel Arbesman

and Rachel Courtland

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Ice-free 2035 This is the fated year by which, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Himalayan glaciers could disappear. In January, the head of the IPCC was forced to apologise after it transpired that the panel’s prediction for the fate of this crucial source of south Asia’s water was almost certainly very wrong. It had sourced the erroneous date from non-peer-reviewed sources, highlighting the paucity of research on the regional effects of climate change.

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Green volcano Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that closed Europe’s airspace and stumped Englishspeaking newscasters trying to pronounce its name, is estimated to have emitted between 150,000 and 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a day. That’s less than the grounded flights would have emitted, making it the first carbon-negative volcano.

revIew

2010

Elegant and stealthy, the Stuxnet computer worm slipped undetected into key nuclear facilities in Iran, inflicting substantial damage. No one has claimed responsibility. The sophistication of the code suggests whoever is behind the worm had significant technical resources, leading Iran to point the finger at the Pentagon and Israel. What seems clear is that the first shot has been fired in a new era of cyber-warfare.

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 23

De Malglaive etienne/aBaCa/pa

Cyberwar

NEWS SPECIAL

2011 preview

Million-dollar MatheMatics Vinay Deolalikar made waves in August when his draft solution to a mathematical problem that haunts computer science hit the internet. It’s known as “P versus NP”, and a correct solution is worth $1 million. Sadly for Deolalikar, of HewlettPackard Labs in Palo Alto, California, his work didn’t check out. But the flurry of online activity surrounding the paper demonstrated a new way of doing mathematics – via blogs and wikis – and generated fresh excitement around the problem.

Formulated in 1971, P versus NP deals with the relationship between two classes of problems that are encountered by computers. P problems are relatively easy for computers to solve. But it can take an impracticably long time to solve NP problems, such as finding the shortest route between several cities – though it is easy to show whether a possible solution is correct. If P = NP, computers may eventually be able to solve a host of complex problems, from protein folding to

factorising very large numbers. The ability to solve the latter would spell trouble for algorithms that we rely on for internet security. Most people assume the opposite is true, that P ≠ NP; had Deolalikar’s paper been correct, it would have proved this. The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has promised $1 million to the first person who can prove it one way or the other. To find out how likely this is to happen in 2011, see below.

prediction: Proof unlikely look premature: just 22 per cent of these other problems were solved before they turned 40. By the same logic, in 2024, we should be on the lookout for a solution to P versus NP. That’s when it turns 53, the age by which 50 per cent of the problems we examined were solved. Here’s hoping that solving P versus NP turns out to be faster than proving the Honeycomb conjecture, which states that if you need to divide a surface into tiled shapes of equal size, a hexagon is the shape that requires the smallest length of dividing lines. Proving that took more than 1500 years. We also compared P versus NP to 26 other problems that still haven’t been solved. In 2011, it will be younger than 81 per cent of those.

Samuel Arbesman and Rachel Courtland

Problem solved? We used the time taken to solve 18 mathematical problems to estimate the probability that P versus NP is solved in 2011 POINCARÉ CONJECTURE Formulated 1904, solved 2003

% 100 Percentage solved

Unlike many problems in science, highly theoretical enigmas like P versus NP are rarely solved piecemeal. Instead, they tend to remain unsolved for years and then, apparently out of nowhere, a proof that works pops up. Predicting these breakthroughs might seem impossible, but we devised a way to estimate the likelihood of P versus NP being solved next year. We compared its “age”, or the time since the problem was formulated, to other long-standing mathematical problems. First we compared P versus NP with 18 mathematical problems, from Fermat’s last theorem to the Poincaré conjecture, that were not solved until more than a decade after their “births” (see graph, right). This made arriving at a solution to P versus NP in 2011, when it will turn a sprightly 40,

HONEYCOMB CONJECTURE Formulated ~AD 350, solved 2002

FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM Formulated 1637, solved 1995

After 53 years, 50% of problems are solved

50

In 2011, P≠NP turns 40 years old, the time taken for 22% of mathematical problems to be solved

20 0 0

50

100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 1650 Time to proof (years)

24 | NewScientist | 25 December 2010/1 January 2011

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Those cursed climate emails Thousands of them were hacked off the servers of the University of East Anglia, home to one of the UK’s leading climate research units, in November 2009. In 2010, their content was dissected, re-dissected, and then dissected some more, amid claims that some climate scientists had engaged in fraudulent behaviour. Four independent reviews exonerated them, and data sets were made public that were previously under lock and key. And, finally, the world moved on.

›› review

2010

Make a genome – check. Transplant it into an emptied cell to create the world’s first synthetic life form – check. Frenzied media coverage accusing the researchers concerned of “playing God” – check. So it was in May, when Craig Venter and his colleagues stitched together the genome of a goat pathogen from bits of synthetic DNA and inserted it into the empty cytoplasm of a related bacterium. The implanted genome booted up and divided over and over to make billions more synthetic cells in the image of the original. To confirm that the daughter cells were of the synthetic species, the researchers added coded watermarks to its genome – including a quotation from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life”.

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 25

Tom Deerinck & mark ellisman/ naTional cenTer for microscopy anD imaging research/ UniversiTy of california/ J. craig venTer insTiTUTe

Life from life

NEWS SPECIAL

2011 preview

the internet spreads The internet is already considered so important in Finland, Spain and Estonia that access is a legal right. And the list of online possibilities keeps on growing. In 2010, the launch of Apple’s iPad and other touchscreen computers made surfing more fun and intuitive, while several smartphone operating systems, especially Google’s Android, took off, extending the mobile net’s reach. Despite internet ubiquity in the developed world, right now just 20 per cent of individuals in the

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developing world are online. That low penetration, combined with ever cheaper devices, the ability to access the internet via cellphone networks and increasing broadband reach, will ensure that the fraction of the global population that is online keeps rising – for decades. But sheer number of users isn’t the only interesting internet data point. Below, we use the rate of growth in internet access to make some intriguing near-term predictions about adoption.

prediction: Net slowdown

Arbesman and Rachel Courtland

Hooked-up future Growth in internet access may follow a logistic curve. We use this to predict when the rate of growth will start to slow, known as an inflection point (*) Based on 100% online

100 Projected data

80 60

* 40

Based on maximum of 80% online

*

20 0 1990

2012 2014

2010

26 | NewScientist | 25 December 2010/1 January 2011

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2040

SOURCE: DATA SUPPLIED BY INTERNATIONAL TELECOMS UNION

By assuming that the rate of increase in adoption continues to follow a logistic curve, we were able to estimate when adoption would hit 50 per cent (see graph). In a logistic curve, this always corresponds to the inflection point. Our calculation suggests we will reach this in 2013. So not 2011, but sooner than you might expect given that relatively few people are hooked up at present. The estimate assumes that internet access will eventually reach 100 per cent of the population. If instead, it plateaus at 80 per cent, as it already seems to have done in the US, the world will reach the inflection point in 2012. Samuel

World population online (%)

For some, the internet still feels pretty new. Indeed, the actual number of people online won’t plateau for decades. But the net is still mature enough for the growth in adoption to begin slowing down soon. Known as an inflection point, this milestone occurs in any adoption curve, when the number of new adopters starts growing a bit less each year rather than a bit more. To find out if this might happen in 2011 for the internet, we plotted how the fraction of the world’s online population has grown since 1990. It seemed to be consistent with a logistic curve, a pattern used to model myriad phenomena, from bacterial populations to tumour growth.

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10 trillion °C The highest temperature ever achieved in a scientific experiment, some 1013 degrees, was reached on 7 November inside the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland, when it started blasting lead ions together at near light speed. What remained after the smash-up was a quark-gluon plasma, the stuff thought to have made up the early universe. Quark-gluon plasmas had been made before, but earlier in 2010 physicists working on CERN’s CMS experiment recorded a mysterious, never-beforeseen signal during the LHC’s proton-proton collisions. They are still scratching their heads trying to work out what caused it.

review

2010

Microsoft’s hands-free video controller sold over a million units in the 10 days after its 4 November release in the US. The Kinect makes a great toy for sure, but it is also turning out to be more than that. Its sophisticated depth-sensing camera and infrared scanner have made it a honeypot for hackers, who are using it to manipulate 3D images of themselves and their surroundings in mind-bending software applications. Scientists have gotten a whiff of what the controller can do, too, and are enthralled by its possible applications – which range from controlling robots to 3D mapping and video conferencing.

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Qilai Shen/panoS

Kinect connection

NEWS SPECIAL

2011 preview

charge of the electric car Gentlemen – and women – plug in your engines. This will be the year of the electric car. No, seriously. After seemingly endless testing, technical hiccups and plain reluctance on the part of manufacturers to move electric vehicles from the concept phase to the showroom, it’s finally happening. A fleet of new cars powered by the plug instead of the pump will take to the road in 2011. Leading the charge is the Chevy Volt. With a 16-kilowatt-hour battery and a 110-kilowatt (149-horsepower) electric motor, it can go 60 kilometres on a single charge, plenty for commuting and weekend grocery runs. Critics point out that a 1.4-litre gasoline engine kicks in when the

battery runs down, making the Volt a mere hybrid rather than a fully fledged electric car. And with demand for the Volt forecast to far outstrip supply, some dealers in the US are reportedly slapping steep premiums on top of the already hefty $40,280 price tag. Even if the Volt fizzles, the Nissan Leaf, Ford Focus Electric and Renault Fluence will all be widely available in the next 12 months. Then there’s Mitsubishi’s diminutive i-MiEV, powered by a 47-kilowatt electric motor and boasting a range of 160 kilometres. It has been on the road in Japan since 2009 and is expected to go on sale in both the UK and the US in the new year. Two factors have combined to

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bring electric cars to the mass market at last: the arrival of high-capacity batteries and the near-collapse of the American auto industry, which forced US car makers into building small, efficient vehicles that can compete with foreign offerings. The biggest remaining obstacle is cost. Electric vehicles offer the amenities of a compact car at the price of a luxury sedan. Tax breaks in some countries should help. But if the quiet whoosh of the electric motor is to replace the growl of the internal combustion engine, prices will have to plummet. Competition and yet more innovation in battery and drivetrain technology could allow that to happen. Michael Reilly

crunch time for stem cells Human embryonic stem cells have inspired hope and loathing in almost equal measure. Next year hESCs could prove their worth, thanks to trials of two very different treatments. HESCs are unique in their ability to form all 200 tissues of the human body. In principle, cells derived from them could regenerate almost any tissue or organ. But because they come from embryos that are later destroyed, their use is controversial. To pacify the opposition the stem cells need to live up to expectation. Within weeks, surgeons will inject retinal cells derived from hESCs into the eye of an individual with Stargardt’s macular dystrophy,

in the hope of delaying or preventing blindness, says Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is developing the treatment. Eleven more patients are due to be injected in 2011. Any improvements in vision should be obvious and could take as little as six weeks to emerge. The eye, however, is something of a special case. Insulated from the immune system, cells there are less likely to be rejected than in other parts of the body. To find out whether hESCs have broader therapeutic potential, we need to look to another, more ambitious trial. In October, a paralysed person

received a spinal injection of hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells . Ten more patients are due to receive cells in 2011. The stem cells should repair damaged nerves and prompt the growth of new ones, says Geron of Menlo Park, California, which is developing this treatment. Unlike the ACT trial, the benefits may take longer to show themselves. If the spinal cells do no more than show they are safe, this will be an important milestone. Also in the pipeline are therapies to restore sight in people with age-related macular degeneration and blood cells for use in transfusions. Andy Coghlan

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Homo sapiens neanderthalis The first draft of the Neanderthal genome, extracted from 44,000-yearold bones found in Croatia, revealed that the genome of all non-Africans is 1 to 4 per cent Neanderthal. In other words, humans and Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring. The absence of Neanderthal genetic markers in modern Africans suggests that the interbreeding happened between 100,000 and 45,000 years ago, after the first humans left Africa but before they split into regional populations elsewhere.

Asteroid dust All but given up for dead, the Hayabusa space probe finally made it home in June. After a bumpy landing on the asteroid Itokawa and a beleaguered return mission, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency feared the probe had failed in its mission to bring asteroid dust back to Earth. It took five months for the answer to arrive: Hayabusa had snatched 1500 particles of extraterrestrial dust, which will be scrutinised for clues to how the solar system – and our own planet – formed.

review

2010

Facebook welcomed its 500-millionth user in July, just six years after it was created in a Harvard University dorm room. The Facebook “nation” now stands as the third most populous in the world, ahead of the US.

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stan honda/afp/getty

Global nation of Facebook

NEWS SPECIAL

2011 preview

PrivatE sPacE flight takEs off PRIVATE companies have been promising for years that they can slash the cost of space travel, breaking the government monopoly on space flight and opening up the final frontier to the rest of us. At long last these efforts may be bearing fruit. On 8 December, the Californiabased firm SpaceX launched its Dragon capsule into orbit and safely parachuted it into the ocean – the first time a private company has achieved the feat. Under a contract signed with NASA in 2008, the Dragon capsule will carry cargo to the International Space Station. SpaceX founder Elon Musk hopes it will eventually be permitted to carry astronauts as well. NASA, facing the retirement of the

shuttle fleet in 2011, is actively encouraging the development of private space taxis. In 2010 alone it distributed $50 million to private space firms, including SpaceX, and Congress is considering spending hundreds of millions more in 2011. So what do we have to look forward to in 2011? SpaceX plans two more demonstration flights, the first of which will likely blast off mid-year and is expected to fly within a few kilometres of the ISS. The second would actually dock with the station, marking another first for a nongovernmental spacecraft. Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded by airline mogul Richard Branson, is also set to take some giant leaps forward in 2011.

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In October 2010, the company carried out the first unpowered flights of SpaceShipTwo. The suborbital vehicle was lofted up to an altitude of nearly 14 kilometres by a carrier plane called WhiteKnightTwo, before gliding back down to Earth. SpaceShipTwo, which is modelled on the X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne, will launch into space for the first time during test flights in 2011. If the tests are a success, passenger flights could begin as soon as late 2011. Several other companies, such as Boeing, have long-term plans to offer rides into space. But Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are likely to dominate headlines in the coming year, and may make 2011 the most exciting yet for private space flight. David Shiga

EntEr thE robot sElf Why drag yourself to work through rush-hour traffic when you can stay at home and send a remotecontrolled robot instead? Firms in the US and Japan are already selling robot avatars that allow office workers to be in two places at once. So 2011 could be the year when many of us find ourselves sitting across the desk from an electronic colleague. Californian company Willow Garage is developing a so-called telepresence robot called Texai, while Anybots, also in California, recently launched the QB office bot. The QB, which looks like a small

Segway vehicle with a robot head on top, can travel at 6 kilometres per hour, using a laser scanner to avoid books and other office clutter. It can be controlled via a web browser from anywhere in the world and has camera eyes to allow you to navigate your robot’s surroundings and see who you are talking to. A small LCD screen on the head means your colleagues can see you too. You could argue that if you were planning to talk to people in other offices you could just use a videoconferencing system rather than a $15,000 robot. But logging into a robot body allows people to move

around in a relatively normal way, says Trevor Blackwell of Anybots. “If you have a bunch of people who are all used to talking to each other wherever they want to, it is a bit of an imposition to say, ‘OK, from now on all conversations have to be in the videoconferencing room’.” Talking to a robot colleague might feel strange at first, but people seem to get used to it quite quickly. “Someone recently came to the office asking for me, and a colleague told them they had just seen me,” says Blackwell. “But actually it was the robot they had seen. I was still at home.” Helen Knight

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Oscar’s new face “Oscar”, a farmer who accidentally shot himself in the face, became the first recipient of a full face transplant in March. While all 10 previous transplants had replaced sections of a face only, Oscar was given new facial skin, muscles and nerves, nose, lips, palate, teeth, cheekbones and lower jaw by a surgical team at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain.

The images in my head Hope is dawning for people with “locked in” syndrome. In February, an international team of neuroscientists announced that they had conversed with a 29-year-old man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. By asking him to picture himself doing two distinct activities and monitoring the different patterns in a brain scan as he did so, they created a code for him to answer yes/no questions. Imagining himself playing tennis meant “yes”; moving around his home meant “no”.

review

2010

Long-awaited, but not as coveted as was expected, Apple’s iPad came to market in April. Within 24 hours, Apple claimed it had sold 300,000 units, but then enthusiasm seemed to wane. By September, 4.2 million of the devices had left the mother ship, falling short of Apple’s 5 million projection.

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Spacex

Not just a notepad

OPINION

Strife on Mars A plan to send live microbes to the Red Planet’s largest moon risks wrecking our search for extraterrestrial life, argues Barry E. DiGregorio WE HUMANS have a unique talent for contaminating pristine environments. We put millions of tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. We poison our soils, lakes, rivers and streams with chemical and radioactive waste. We spill oil into our seas. We fill the Pacific and Atlantic oceans with islands of plastic garbage visible from space. Is it any surprise that we are also contaminating pristine celestial bodies with bacterial spores? Spacefaring nations have been sending unsterilised spacecraft to the moon, Mars, Jupiter, comets and asteroids for over 40 years. It has been estimated that about one trillion microbial spores from spacecraft are now scattered around Mars (Advances in Space Research, vol 35, p 1648). Yet the search for life in our solar system has barely begun. It wasn’t always so. At the dawn of the space age, policy-makers had every intention to protect space from contamination. They also set out to protect Earth from material brought in from other celestial bodies that might contain toxins or pathogens. These lofty goals were enshrined in the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967, now signed by all spacefaring nations. It plainly states: “Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter.”

Early spacecraft had to be with these policy changes thoroughly and expensively is that they are premature: sterilised before they could be our knowledge about the sent to the moon or planets. survivability of life on Mars However, over the years this is constantly changing with requirement has been watered each spacecraft mission. down. The Committee on Space Numerous reports have Research (COSPAR) in Paris, debated whether terrestrial France, has been charged with spores might be able to replicate making adjustments based on and spread on Mars. We still don’t new data. COSPAR now allows know the answer, so why risk spacecraft to bypass any contaminating the most Earthsterilisation as long as they like planet in our solar system? are not carrying life-detection Now a mission slated to launch instruments or landing on areas in the second half of 2011 will of Mars designated as “special “Of 38 craft launched regions” – areas where liquid water could exist for short periods towards Mars, only 19 made it. At least three crashthat might support terrestrial landed on the surface” microbial growth. The problem

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effectively tear up the treaty. The Russian Federal Space Agency’s Phobos Sample Return Mission (formerly known as PhobosGrunt) will send not just microbial spores but live bacteria into the solar system for the first time. If this isn’t a direct violation of the Outer Space Treaty then what is? The mission will fly to Mars, study it from orbit and then land on Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons. On board will be two sealed capsules containing live micro-organisms. Some months later the craft will embark on the return journey carrying the stillsealed capsules, plus samples of soil scooped up from the surface of Phobos. All being well it will return to Earth in 2014. The reason for sending live micro-organisms to Phobos is to investigate if any survive the three-year journey. If they do, the researchers say it would support the theory of transpermia, which holds that microbial life can be exchanged between planets via rocks ejected from their surfaces by collisions. That theory is tenuous at best. All of the Martian meteorites found on Earth spent millions of years in space before they arrived. In order to justify their experimental goals, one of the groups involved in the experiment, The Planetary Society of Pasadena, California, argues that rocks larger than 100 grams are transferred from Mars to Earth in only two to three years. No direct evidence exists for this claim. Is the transpermia question really so important that it is worth risking the

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Barry E. DiGregorio is director of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return and author of Mars: The Living Planet (North Atlantic Books)

One minute with…

The Apollo 13 astronauts Forty years after NASA’s ill-fated mission, we listen in on the astronauts before and after the explosion aboard their craft DAY 1 Mission control: It’s time for Fred to start looking for the Earth, should be coming by in about a couple of minutes. Jim Lovell: He’s got his head out there right now. Fred Haise: Yes. You’ve got that pretty well pegged, man. There it be. MC: Doesn’t that give you confidence? FH: Yes. I guess so… I guess the world really does turn. I can see some land masses now. It must be Australia down near the bottom and I guess we haven’t really figured out what’s over the – to the left. It must be some part of Asia. China, probably. MC: Hey, maybe the fact that you verified that the Earth really turns, we can call this Haise’s theory, huh? DAY 2 JL: Hello there, Houston… We’d like to hear what the news is. MC: There’s not a whole lot to it…They had earthquakes in Manila… The Beatles have announced they will no longer perform as a group. The quartet is reported to have made in excess of a half billion dollars. However, rumors that they will use this money to start their own space program are false. JL: Maybe we could borrow some… We’re having lunch right now, and I just made myself a hot dog sandwich with catsup. MC: As I recall the flight plan, you’re supposed to put mustard on the hot dogs and not catsup, but I guess we’ll overlook that. Jack Swigert: We blew it. DAY 3 JL (during filming): Now Fred’s engaged in his favorite pastime… MC: He’s not in the food locker, is he? JL: That’s his second favorite pastime. He’s rigging his hammock for sleep on the lunar surface… FH: It’s kind of difficult here… getting into a hammock in zero g. I’m not sure if I keep floating away from it or it keeps moving away from me… MC: We’re seeing a good picture… looks like the characters shaved before the show this time.

Profile James Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were astronauts on NASA’s Apollo 13 mission in April 1970. Though their craft was severely damaged by an explosion, the crew managed to return safely to Earth. These extracts are from the newly released searchable version of NASA’s Apollo 13 transcripts at spacelog.org

JL: Well, Fred said he had to keep up his TV image. FH: Yes. That may be my first and last time though. JL: It took Fred 1 hour to shave. 12 MINUTES LATER JL: Houston, we’ve had a problem… FH: We had a pretty large bang… JL: It looks to me, looking out the hatch, that we are venting something. We are venting something out into the – into space. FH (4 hours later): I’m looking out the right window and it’s pretty dark out that window but there are about a thousand or so false stars out here from – left over from some of the debris. It’s hard to discern what’s real and not real. JL (7 hours later): Well, I’m afraid this is going to be the last lunar mission for a long time. DAY 6 (return to Earth) JL: I’m looking out the window now… and that Earth is whistling in like a high-speed freight train. (Seven hours later, the spacecraft drifts down to Earth, carried by parachutes) Compiled by Rachel Courtland

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 33

NASA

contamination that would surely happen if the spacecraft malfunctioned and crashed on Mars? This is no small risk. Of 38 craft launched towards Mars, only 19 succeeded. At least three crashlanded on the planet’s surface. The Phobos Sample Return Mission has one of the most complex mission profiles ever flown. Not only will the spacecraft have to perform a series of manoeuvres in Mars orbit to launch a satellite, it will also have to change its orbit to rendezvous with Phobos. The last time the Russians attempted to land on Phobos was in 1988 with the Phobos 1 and 2 spacecraft. Both lost contact en route. To make matters worse, we already know a good deal about microbial survival in space thanks to experiments done with Apollo, the Mir space station, the International Space Station and the space shuttles. Similar experiments have also been done at space environment simulation facilities on Earth. Why not continue to use these and spare Mars potential contamination? For those having any doubts about microbes surviving a fiery re-entry, you need only consider the break-up of the Columbia space shuttle in February 2003. One of the microbial experiments on Columbia survived intact, although slightly charred. After analysis it was determined that a heat-resistant microbe, Microbispora, had survived. The question “Is there life on Mars?” has surely been answered by our own ignorant actions. Yes, there is life on Mars, because we put it there. The only remaining question is, will it survive and grow, confusing future scientific results? Sending live bacteria to Phobos can only increase the risk that it will. n

OPINION LETTERS Letters selection box A limerick for CERN From the Letters editor Every now and then we receive letters that don’t quite belong on the letters page but that we would love to publish anyway. As it’s Christmas we have decided to ignore our own rules and start with a few of them. Thanks to everybody who has written to us this year – and apologies that we couldn’t print everything. With best wishes for the season

Numbers game Graham Clarke of Edinburgh, UK, wrote to tell us about a remarkable three-level coincidence that he noticed when working on one of our Enigma puzzles. The number 113 is prime, as is its mirror, 311. The squares of each, 12769 and 96721, are also mirrors of each other. For the treble, this second pair are respectively the lowest and highest of all fivefigure squares that do not have repeated digits. Can you think of any similarly remarkable coincidences buried in numbers? If so, head to bit.ly/ ibweNH and tell us about them. We will publish our selection of the submissions in early 2011.

The Scientists at CERN fill with pride, As the Protons are set to collide. They’ll crash and they’ll splatter, When they measure the Matter, Will the Higgs be revealed, or still hide? Keith FitzPatrick, The Netherlands

Catechismic chaos

Raised hands From Gwydion Williams Your Instant Expert on the evolution of language says the selection pressures that

Did nature in creation spurt with math as part of One, Or are numbers a religion making all obey to Sum? Whatever be the truth of it I never feel less grave, Than when Nature to The Numbers, refuses to behave. Anna Tambour, Australia

The end of the world When you planned your super collider, we doubted it would work. Now we marvel at the way you hid its magnets underground, energised its vital tubes in secret, threaded complex circuit wires, connected all the parts. Then you flipped the switch, caught me in its gravity.

Enigma Number 1627

A riddle for the sphinx AdRIAN SomERfIELd Those with a classical education will know that the sphinx was a riddlesetting monster associated with the Greek city of Thebes. I took the sum ETA + BETA + THETA = DELTA and replaced letters consistently

You reassured it would not be the end of the old universe, not one last big bang. I realise now if you’re wrong we will never kn Norman Staines, UK

with digits. Even if I told you the value of B, you still could not find all the digits, but if in addition I told you that PSI and PHI were prime, you could. Please send in THEBES.

WIN £15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on Wednesday 2 February 2011. The Editor’s decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1627, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to [email protected] (please include your postal address). Answer to 1621 Times square: the product is 216 The winner Eddie Crouch of Ripon, North Yorkshire, UK

encouraged our heavy reliance on speech rather than sign language remain elusive (4 December). I have never used sign language, but it must be tricky addressing someone who is not already looking at you. I suppose there is no equivalent of shouting or whispering. It would be worth consulting someone who habitually uses both, to learn more about the merits of the two modes. Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK The editor writes: n Good point. The counterargument is that there are certain disadvantages to speaking out loud, such as alerting predators and prey to your presence. It is also precluded in noisy environments.

Gentle robot hands From Francis Frampton Since I used to farm chrysanthemums, growing around 80,000 cuttings a year, I was interested in your report

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on bean-bag “hands” for robots (30 October, p 23). Each of my cuttings was handled five times, which cost money and increased the risk of spreading disease. I followed every avenue searching for methods to mechanise these five processes, but because of handling problems all my efforts failed. Now retired at 84, one glance at the technique illustrated made me think that Eric Brown’s group has a potential solution. Now, chrysanthemums are peripheral to the demands of agriculture and horticulture, but the same problems are faced in the harvesting, grading and packing of fruit, planting trees and perhaps even catching insects for food. Within 15 years low-paid seasonal workers will become a scarce resource. Who or what will carry out these tasks then? Can this technology solve some of these problems in time? Bognor Regis, West Sussex, UK

What culture? From Bruce Denness Kate Douglas’s description of the evolution of human culture (20 November, p 38) reminded me of an analysis I reported in the book Greenhouse Effect, Sea Level and Drought. This used archaeological and historical data to show that the world population growth curve is punctuated by steps of cultural evolution, each represented by a technological revolution. The world population in 1390 (guns and ships revolution) was 312 million, in 1790 (second agricultural revolution) it was 625 million, in 1870 (industrial revolution) it was 1250 million and in 1950 (medical revolution) it reached 2500 million. In 1990, during the information technology revolution, the population was recorded at 5000 million. The population doubled increasingly rapidly perhaps because twice the number of

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people took far less time to conceive the next idea that sparked a new phase of growthenhancing cultural evolution. Following this model, the world population in 2010 should be 10,000 million. Fortunately, we have fallen short of this value, perhaps because the information technology revolution helped in the realisation that growth cannot go on forever. If so, this may lead humankind to invest the rewards of each subsequent stage of evolution in quality, rather than quantity of life. Whitwell, Isle of Wight, UK From Peter Weinrich To refer, as you did, to “culture” as art, architecture, music, language, myth, to say nothing of the stuff we grow bacteria in, and then to extend it to what consenting fish do in their seaweed seclusion, is surely to strip the word of any meaning whatever. It is not good enough to merely imply that culture is behaviour passed down through one or more generations via social learning. If that is what it is supposed to mean, then say so, and let us not

confuse it further with orangutans blowing raspberries at each other in their version of pillow talk. Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

reminded me of a sick goldfish I kept in isolation in a plastic bucket of water one very cold winter. The bucket of water froze solid for several weeks, goldfish and all. When the water eventually thawed, to my amazement the goldfish, which I had assumed was dead, started swimming about, apparently none the worse for wear. Attention all polar cod and Antarctic nematodes – make way for the humble suburban goldfish! Liphook, Hampshire, UK

From Joe Ridge The “Frozen solid” part of your article on life in extreme conditions (13 November, p 36)

Two Gordons

From Syed Reza If tardigrades have managed to survive in space for 10 days, or live without water for 120 years, then surely there must be life somewhere on Earth’s neighbours, such as Mars. Looking at these tough and resilient creatures here on Earth, the question is no longer “does life exist on Mars?” but rather “why haven’t we discovered life on Mars yet?”. Tehran, Iran

Jesse Bering’s The God Instinct, (20 November, p 51). I was lucky enough to have parents who inflicted on me neither religious nor atheistic beliefs, and it didn’t take me long to classify God with fairies, ogres and wizards, in contrast to things that actually exist. So if belief in God is hard-wired, it seems that the wiring must be rather flimsy and easily disconnected. Perhaps in most cases a good dose of childhood, or indeed adult, indoctrination is needed to get it working properly. Howick, Quebec, Canada

Beneficial illusions

Be sensible

From Alan Kelly Visual illusions may be more than a by-product of efforts to “make sense of partial visual details” as you quote Susana MartinezConde saying (18 September, p 38). It may be that our brains actively seek differing interpretations of the same image. It would surely be an advantageous trait for any prey species whose foe had a tendency towards camouflage, or operated in poorly lit conditions. Castlerea, County Roscommon, Ireland

From Collyn Rivers Feedback ought to have checked the dictionary before ridiculing the “sensible section” of Robert Caillau’s barbecue-thermometer (22 May). I refer you to the full definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, Volume XIV: “Sensible heat: heat perceived by the touch and measured by the thermometer”. Broome, Western Australia

Neurology or nurture Extreme living

calculations, but it has a practical advantage. If you are righthanded, the right-hand rubber glove you use for washing up wears out much more frequently than the left. By turning your surplus left-hand gloves inside out you can restore the balance. Bondleigh, Devon, UK

From M. J. Whalley It is apparently becoming more popular to claim that belief in God or gods is hard-wired as a result of evolution, as mentioned in Michael Brooks’s review of

Balancing chirality From Peter Payne I liked Marcus Chown’s analogy of a pair of gloves to explain chirality (15 May, p 28) but you don’t need the mirror he suggests using to turn a left-hand glove into a righthand one: just turn it inside out. It might not help to solve his “fiendishly complex”

From Gordon Brimble Feedback refers to the instance of a paper authored by two different men, both named Alan W. Harris (8 May). I am one of two G. S. Brimbles living in Adelaide, South Australia. On one occasion we both booked the same flight. An amused check-in operator seated us together so we could meet. Adelaide, South Australia

Your feet’s too big From Bryn Glover When reading of the difficulties that may beset cellphone networks, I noticed the size of the feet of the young men in your photograph (30 October, p 44). The women’s feet look normal, but I’d guess the men’s are UK sizes 15 to 20. Is this the camera angle, are they clowns’ shoes, or what? Cracoe, North Yorkshire, UK

For the record n Bob Coecke and Samson Abramsky used a graphical form of category theory in their new approach to allow computers to understand language (11 December, p 10).

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25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 35

OPINION THE BIG IDEA

Dear e-diary, who am I really? For many of us, the start of a new year is the first page of a new diary. But what do you really want to record about yourself? Add technology, says Alun Anderson, and the possibilities are endless

JUDGING by the displays in department stores at the end of each year, the tradition of starting a new year with a new diary is still going strong, whether your diary is covered in luxurious leather, moleskin or card. Curiously, though, the amount of space a diary allows for recording each day remains the same now as it was in the 1820s, when printed diaries first became popular gifts. A few hundred words is all you are likely to fit in, making the decision about what to record difficult and perhaps explaining why so many diaries remain unread – even by their authors. Maybe it’s time to ditch paper and its limitations, not merely for the digital equivalent but for something altogether more exciting and ultimately far more valuable and interesting. Look around and you can see two main directions shaping up. One approach is to think really big, and try recording absolutely everything that ever happens to you. That’s the idea of Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft’s research labs in Redmond, Washington. He thinks there will be no more worrying about what was important in your day once you realise you can store every detail of your life in a few terabytes of ever-cheaper digital memory. If you decide to follow the approach taken by Bell in his book Total Recall: How the Profile Alun Anderson is former editor-in-chief of New Scientist. He is the author of After the Ice: Life, death and politics in the new Arctic, and helps run the innovation news site Xconomy. A family photodiary of more than 60,000 images (from 1875 to 2010) has given him a personal interest in seeking new ways to “mine the past’s lost futures”

e-memory revolution will change everything you will need a discreet camera permanently slung around your neck that can take photos at regular intervals, and a GPS device to record where you are at any time. Your phone calls, conversations and meetings will need to be digitally captured, all your emails stored, and every web page you look at downloaded. Then you will need to scan in any paper documents that head your way and refuse any books unless they are available on an e-reader. With the help of a searchable database, your digital diary will then be able to tell you where you were, what you were doing, what you were looking at, who you were with and what you read at every instant of your life. Like Bell, you will be able to pull off stunning feats of memory, “recalling” what people said in chance meetings many years ago. Tricks apart, doesn’t total recall risk turning into total inertia as the continually accumulating past overwhelms the present? Bell thinks not. The real result is “a tremendous feeling of freedom – and of security. By having everything in e-memory you don’t have to remember any more,” he says. “My view is that my memory really is my e-memory. My biomemory is a URL and provides meta-data into the e-memory for any final record. I’ve got rid of a lot of clutter that I had to remember in biomemory, but I have kept all the things that you can’t record, all the smells, all the experiential things are there. The e-memory gives me exactly where that experience was.” Bell accepts that most of the moments he records are “mind-numbingly dull, trite, predictable, tedious and prosaic”. But the advantage of recording everything is the chance to know yourself in wholly new ways. His vision for the future is of software that

An always-on stream of data about ourselves will revolutionise our personal narratives

will let you sort and sift through your digital memories to uncover patterns you would never have gleaned unaided. Work, leisure and spending habits, the pattern of emotional response in various situations and around certain people, the numerous subtle factors affecting your mental well-being and physical health – just about anything you care to know about yourself can be chronicled, condensed, cross-correlated and plotted out. That dream won’t be fully realised for a long while, but the idea that gathering data

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(DirectLife, for example), as are heart rate and blood pressure monitors. There are also sensors to monitor your sleep and dream patterns (Zeo), stress and mood (Q Sensor), and brainwaves (MindSet). And, of course, you can check the calories of any food using your phone (Tap&Track). There are also keystroke programs to track your most productive moments, programs to analyse the way you use email (ClearContext), and others to record the patterns of your online interactions (Digital Mirror). Then there are tools to build a time line of your life in pictures, words and videos, software to help display moods and mental states graphically (Optimism, Moodscope, Track Your Happiness), and programs to record just about anything else you want as a visualisation (your.flowingdata, mycrocosm, me-trics). Ian Li at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute in Pittsburgh,

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“Gathering data on yourself can lead to insights you couldn’t get any other way”

about yourself can lead to new insights is so powerful it has been taken up by a growing crowd of people who are taking small, practical steps towards achieving it. This “personal informatics” alternative to keeping a conventional diary is being boosted by enthusiasts who meet regularly in a number of cities worldwide – 13 at the last count – to share techniques at “Quantified Self” sessions. “It is such a powerful feeling to watch these people in the meetings,” says Adriana Lukas, who co-founded the London QS meeting. “Personal data is a mine of amazing things about yourself which you are often the last to benefit from. The ability to monitor, collect

and mine your data empowers individuals. Spotting patterns in your own life data is priceless.” She thinks QS is at the same stage as blogging was 10 years ago, with personal informatics set to go mainstream in two to three years. The goal is to transform the diary into a data log that allows you to become an observer of yourself. The idea is simple – anyone who has measured their weight every day understands it well – but the big change is the growing number of sensors available to record your every action. Unsurprisingly, health and work are easy places to start. Sensors that automatically track exercise patterns are already common

Pennsylvania, has a list of 187 of the tools available at personalinformatics.org/tools. For many things you can record about yourself there are already online communities pooling results to look for bigger patterns, such as CureTogether. Studying yourself could be dangerous, as you may find out things you would rather not know. Still, given the number of companies already trying to analyse the digital traces you leave so they can better control your choices, not studying yourself also has its risks. Personal informatics may sound narcissistic but the desire to “collect and reflect” with the help of a digital diary is little different from the traditional diarist’s goal to remember and “know oneself”. Digital data has an overwhelming advantage: old-style diaries rely on you writing them, so they suffer from profound limitations. As Li points out, you can’t directly observe behaviours such as sleep, and you won’t have time to consistently record others, such as your activity pattern. There is another profound source of error: how you “see” your day depends on your mood as you write about it – feel bad and failures and irritations will surface, while if a bad day ends in success, that’s all forgotten. So for the truly objective view of the day – and of you – following Bell’s “total recall” approach or using the burgeoning QS software may be the surer route. Welcome to The Real Me. n

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 37

OPINION PROfIle

Taking the measure of Ray Ray Kurzweil wants to live to 2045, when humans become super-smart immortals by merging with machines, a time he calls The Singularity. So what kind of shape is the futurist in, asks Robert Adler FOR Ray Kurzweil, it’s all about patterns. The IT guru and futurist became famous across the US while still in high school by developing a computer program that extracted the gestalt of a composer’s style and created new music à la Mozart or Brahms. Later, as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he sold his first company, built around a program that best matched a student to a college. Kurzweil went on to pioneer optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, musical synthesizers and speech recognition, and has written best-selling books predicting the shape of things to come. The ultimate pattern that preoccupies him is the human brain. Kurzweil believes the exponential growth of artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nanotechnology means that before 2050 the full intricacy of his brain – and, he hopes, his consciousness and identity – can be copied and uploaded into a non-biological substrate. His goal – obsession, if you will – is to surf the accelerating hightech tsunami long enough to transcend biology and achieve the dream of immortality. All this flows from Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, a generalisation of Moore’s Law, which predicts ongoing exponential growth of key technologies. What this means, Kurzweil writes, is that “…we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate)”. If he’s right, before 2050 all informationbased technologies will be millions of times more advanced and AI will far outshine the power of all human brains combined – development so explosive it is best described as The Singularity, a term he borrowed from other futurists but made his own.

For someone widely described as “the ultimate thinking machine”, in person Kurzweil is remarkably empathic, balanced and, yes, human. He doesn’t back away from his predictions. Rather, he patiently puts them into context. He’s not just arguing a theory, he’s living it, and has thought it all through. Kurzweil famously traces his quest to live long enough to live forever to his father’s death from a heart attack at the age of 58, when Kurzweil was 22. “It was my first direct experience with the tragedy of death,” he says. “It becomes much less of

“Kurzweil claims his regime has erased the biochemical signs of type 2 diabetes” an abstraction, a polite philosophical issue.” That loss left him with the feeling of a cloud darkening his own future. Yet he also inherited a profoundly optimistic belief in the transformative power of ideas. “It was my family’s philosophy, but personalised to ‘You, Ray, can find ideas to overcome any challenge’.” The challenge became even more personal when Kurzweil developed type 2 diabetes at just 35. At first he accepted treatment with insulin, but reading the literature convinced him that the underlying problem was insulin resistance, which the treatment made worse. “You’re bludgeoning your blood sugar levels down. It’s a bad strategy.” Instead, he came up with an alternative: “reprogramming” his biochemistry through nutrition, exercise and aggressive supplementation. Kurzweil claims that the data he provided to New Scientist (see

diagram) shows that this regime has erased the biochemical signs of diabetes, for example, driving his fasting glucose level from 185 milligrams per decilitre in 1985 (well into the diabetic range) down to a healthy 95 today. “I’ve had no indication of diabetes for over 20 years now,” he says, “although if I stopped my programme, my genetic predisposition to insulin resistance would return.” He’s since done the same for his cardiovascular risk factors, he says. Encouraged, Kurzweil went into partnership with Terry Grossman, a medical doctor and homeopath, to implement and continually fine-tune his anti-ageing campaign. But his

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Holding back the years? Ray Kurzweil’s longevity regime doesn’t seem to be doing him any harm. Most of his health markers are well within the healthy range, and all are better at age 62 than at age 37 Kurzweil aged 37

Kurzweil aged 62

UNHEALTHY RANGE

HEALTHY RANGE Body mass index (BMI)

Cholesterol

Cholesterol: HDL ratio

Triglycerides Cardio C reactive protein

Fasting glucose Blood pressure

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Sources for norms: American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, Mayo Clinic, World Health Organization

longevity approach is not for the fainthearted – exercise, meditation, lots of sleep, caloric restriction (1500 calories and less than 80 grams of carbohydrates per day), swallowing 150 supplements daily, plus weekly intravenous infusions. “I spend a lot of time doing procedures that are tedious and repetitive,” he says, “but I’ve well programmed my body to do these things, so I’m free to think creatively while I exercise and so forth.” Just as Kurzweil doesn’t expect today’s technology to vault to The Singularity in one leap, he doesn’t expect to transcend his biological limitations in a single step. Instead, he envisions three “bridges”. He’s currently

traversing Bridge 1, cherry-picking the most promising biomedical findings. Some of the regimen is scientifically uncontroversial: a large body of research supports a low-calorie, low-carb diet, exercise and lots of sleep. Other interventions raise eyebrows, such as 10 glasses of highly alkaline water a day to rid his body of toxins, and weekly intravenous infusions of vitamins, chelating agents and various other pharmaceuticals. Kurzweil is adamant that Bridge 1 is working well. As well as blood tests, he has measured other correlates of ageing such as lung capacity, reaction time, sensory acuteness, memory and decision speed. “On these tests, I haven’t moved much. I’ve maybe gone from age 40 to 42 over the last 20 years – and it matches how I feel.” Bridge 2, Kurzweil foresees, will exploit the accelerating biotech revolution to bring true enhancement at the cellular and genetic levels. He envisions the increasing use of gene therapy, stem cells, therapeutic cloning and replacement cells, tissues and organs. Within a few decades, he says, these will even allow him (and us) to turn back our biological clocks. Most controversial, however, is Kurzweil’s Bridge 3, flowing from merging nanotech and AI. This will allow swarms of specialised, programmable, communicating nanobots to replace old-fashioned neurons and blood cells with more efficient units that can destroy infections, reverse degenerative changes and

rewrite genetic code. Right now this looks fantastical, but he is sure the key technologies will develop on schedule. “The fundamental measures of information technology proceed at predictable and exponential rates and this continues to be the case.” A body vastly enhanced through biotech and nanotech may suffice to extend life spans indefinitely, but the ultimate leap is to transcend biology entirely. Before 2050, Kurzweil predicts that AI and nanotech will have advanced so far that his brain, with its memories, capabilities and characteristics, can be reduced to pure information and rebooted in a non-biological substrate, be it a supercomputer, a bespoke real or virtual body, or a swarm of nanobots. Will the essence of Ray Kurzweil make that transition? “Consciousness and identity are philosophical issues, not scientific ones,” he says, “and people have different leaps of faith when it comes to them. My leap is that identity comes from a continuity of pattern. In the 2040s, the non-biological proportions of our beings will be powerful enough to completely model and simulate the biological part. It will be a continuum, a continuity of pattern.” If he is right and he makes it to 2045, many people reading this will also be alive to recognise the distinctive pattern known as Ray Kurzweil. n Robert Adler is a writer based in california and Mexico 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 39

W

ONDERING what to do with any booze left over from your Christmas party? Most people would be happy to pour the dregs down the sink and keep the untouched stuff for later. But Yoshihiko Takano has another idea: donate it to the search for superconductivity. Takano, a physicist at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, discovered a few months ago that alcoholic drinks can transform fairly ordinary materials into amazing ones. Unlikely as it sounds, booze could help to unlock one of the biggest mysteries in physics: superconductivity. Superconductors are revered because they conduct electricity with zero resistance. That makes them fascinating from a theoretical viewpoint, and also points to brilliant applications. If you could make overhead power lines from superconducting cables they would lose barely any of the electrical energy they carry, saving money and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Superconductors also repel magnetic fields, which means they can levitate anything containing materials with the merest hint of magnetism – including trains. With such remarkable properties, you might expect to find superconductors in use everywhere. The reason you don’t is that they need to be extremely cold to work properly. Most only superconduct at temperatures close to absolute zero. This has been a source of frustration ever since superconductors were discovered, in 1911, when Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes found that he could make mercury lose all electrical resistance by chilling it to 4.2 kelvin (-269 °C) in liquid helium. Many more metallic superconductors have since been discovered, but none works above

If you can’t get your new material to lose all electrical resistance, try mulling it in red wine

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EvgEny KarandaEv/shuttErstocK/gEtty

”Whisky and shochu are stronger than wine but did not work as well at making materials superconduct” work at temperatures that can be reached using liquid nitrogen, which makes them much more practical. “Liquid nitrogen costs half the price of milk, and there is an infinite amount of it,” Forgan explains. Today the world record for the warmest superconductor is held by a blend of mercury, barium and calcium plus the standard copper and oxygen layers. It superconducts at 135 K. Similar materials are being tested in power cables and for levitating trains. However, 135 K is still well below room temperature. To make further progress, researchers would love to know what makes high-temperature superconductors so special. Unfortunately, nobody has much of a clue. Although we understand metallic superconductors, there is no equivalent theory for high-temperature ones. “We’ve spent a quarter of a century and still don’t understand them,” says Forgan. It probably has something to do with the layers of copper and oxygen, which are common to all the high-temperature superconductors. That’s where Takano’s boozy discovery might help. In 2008, another group of researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology stumbled upon an entirely new type of superconductor. Made from iron, arsenic, oxygen and lanthanum, it sent the superconducting world wild (New Scientist, 16 August 2008, p 31). Tests soon showed that these iron-based superconductors had much in common with

high-temperature ones, especially in structure, with layers of iron and arsenic that are similar to those of copper and oxygen. Though they don’t work at especially high temperatures, the hope is that they will lead to new theoretical insights into hightemperature superconductivity. The craze for iron soon reached Takano’s group, which began playing around with a simplest recipe based on iron and tellurium. In one experiment they tried replacing some of the tellurium with sulphur. The resulting material was hopeless, utterly failing to superconduct. And that might have been the end of the story if one of Takano’s students hadn’t been dumped by his girlfriend. As he licked his wounds, the student began neglecting his duties. So when Takano asked him for fresh samples of iron tellurium sulphur to test, he had none to offer. Instead he brought along an old sample that had been left lying around in the open air for weeks. To everyone’s amazement, it showed signs of life (Physical Review B, vol 81, p 214510). Why would a useless compound suddenly start superconducting? Suspecting that exposure to the air had something to do with it, Takano and his colleagues made a fresh batch, then exposed samples to pure nitrogen or pure oxygen. Others they kept in a vacuum, or submersed in water. Only the samples soaked in water turned into superconductors. “We found that the coexistence of water and oxygen is important,” says Takano. That set him wondering what else might have the same effect. Inspiration soon arrived in the form of Yoichi Kamihara, one of the discoverers of iron-based superconductors. He visited the institute in March 2010 to give a lecture. So Takano did what anyone would do under the circumstances: he organised a booze-up.

Soaked in alcohol During the party, Takano had a brainwave. He instructed one of his students to spirit away some of the drinks – not for drinking, but for experiments. “I thought of it because I like alcohol very much,” Takano says. They pilfered wine, beer, whisky, sake and shochu, a Japanese liquor. Later, in the lab, they heated the alcoholic drinks to 70 °C to speed up whatever reactions might be taking place, and soaked their samples in them for 24 hours. Then they tested for superconductivity. The results were striking. All the drinks

the path to least resistance Soaking a useless lump of ceramic in booze can turn it into a superconductor. But which booze is best?

70

Superconducting effectiveness (%)

about 25 K, which is far too cold for anything but the most specialised applications. A big breakthrough came in 1987 when Alex Müller and Georg Bednorz at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland discovered a material that became a superconductor at the positively balmy temperature of 92 K. Their work triggered a frenzy of research into socalled “high-temperature” superconductors. “Everyone went mad,” says Ted Forgan at the University of Birmingham in the UK. “There were lots of reports of ‘unidentified superconducting objects’ as people tried to push to higher temperatures.” Unlike the original superconductors, these new materials are ceramics containing layers of copper and oxygen atoms. Crucially, they

Red wine

60 50 40

White wine Beer Sake

30

Whisky

Shochu 20 10 Ethanol/water mixtures 0 0

20 40 60 80 Ethanol concentration (%)

100

worked, with red wine streets ahead of the rest (see graph above). The results aren’t simply down to the amount of alcohol in the drinks. Whisky and shochu are much stronger than wine but did not work as well. Takano’s team also tried using increasingly alcoholic mixtures of water and ethanol, but none worked as well as the beverages. Takano cannot yet explain why being mulled in red wine should turn iron tellurium sulphur into a superconductor. He suspects it is something to do with antioxidant molecules called polyphenols, which are abundant in red wine. Beyond that he is stumped. His team is now gearing up to study the crystal structure of iron tellurium sulphur before and after it is immersed in red wine. They hope to discover the mechanism that induces superconductivity and perhaps find some clues that could help us finally get to grips with high-temperature superconductors. Like a good claret, Takano’s work is taking time to mature. “People thought it sounded a bit of a joke at first,” says Forgan. “But I think it’s a real effect.” Takano himself has received lots of supportive messages on Twitter. “Please use good red wine” has been a popular reaction. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen to the leftovers… n Valerie Jamieson will be mulling herself in red wine this christmas in an attempt to become a human superconductor 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 41

Once upon a time… …fairies rubbed shoulders with water molecules and gravity was an invisible giant

M

R SLUG’s address was a curious way to begin a scientific meeting by anyone’s standards. Speaking to some of the brightest minds in science and education in 1837, he reported that the following books had been found in the hands of London’s children:

Jack the Giant-killer Ditto and Bean-stalk Ditto and Eleven Brothers Ditto and Jill Total

7943 8621 2845 1998 21,407

The young, he claimed, were learning dangerous things from these tales: one 8-yearold was “found to be firmly impressed with a belief in the existence of dragons”; another “considered Sinbad the Sailor the most enterprising voyager that the world had ever produced”; and none of them had the “slightest conception of the commonest principles of mathematics”. The members of the society were dismayed, and declared the “immense and urgent” need to replace these tales with “nothing but facts and figures”. Science, after all, was superior to stories. Written in jest, this satire by Charles Dickens nevertheless illustrates a serious debate in 19th-century England. Educators believed that fantasies could damage the young mind, while useful, instructive facts were considered the order of the day. What were children’s writers to do? From Dickens’s commentary, we might expect their books to be unpalatable repositories of facts. Open their pages, however, and you will find elegant, witty and inventive story telling that weaves scientific truths into wondrous tales starring dragons, fairies, witches and demons. Chemical bonding, entomology, engineering and evolution all became topics for these John Cargill Brough’s The Fairy-Tales of Science charmed readers by melding fact and fancy

“fairy-tales of science”. The factual information provided the intellectual fodder necessary to make the tales acceptable to educators, while the gripping narratives and characters captured the attention of their young audiences. These writers were often inspired by everyday science; even the humble water droplet provided surprisingly fertile ground for many of these tales. Thanks to increasingly affordable home microscopes, people with no formal scientific background had begun to realise that there was more to this seemingly innocuous substance than met the eye. Indeed, so-called “magic lantern shows” of microscope slides proved a popular form of entertainment throughout the century, amazing audiences with the gigantic creatures seemingly conjured from nowhere. Hans Christian Andersen, the renowned

creator of The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid, drew on this fashion in his littleknown fable The Drop of Water, published in 1848, in which an old man named KribbleKrabble looked through a magnifying glass at a droplet of pond water. Seeing the swarming creatures, he dyed them red with “witch’s blood” to make them more visible, and eventually tricked a visiting magician into believing he had witnessed a teeming and violent city. Journalist Henry Morley was similarly inspired when he wrote The Water Drops: A Fairy Tale in 1850, which explored water pollution through the eyes of the water droplets that make up clouds. The story began by describing the colourful clouds we see at sunset as a fantastical land “far in the West”, usually accounted for “by principles of Meteorology”, but which, according to Nursery Lore, “is a world inhabited by fairies”. Readers met Nebulus, Nubis and Nephelo, who were competing for the hand of Princess Cirrha, daughter of King Cumulus – names that may have been familiar to those who knew the terms for different types of clouds, but which also evoked the exotic language you might find in The Arabian Nights. From this fairyland, the suitors descended to the streets, sewers and kettles of London, following the path along which each drop flowed. Along the way, the readers learned about water cleanliness and hygiene, complete with bracketed references to factual sources mentioned by the travelling fairy-drops. The water drop even proved to be the setting for a romance. In The Diamond Lens by FitzJames O’Brien, a microscopist fell in love with a creature living in a water drop called “Animula” – a clear reference to “animalcule”, a term used to describe water-borne microscopic creatures. Animula came to a tragic end when the drop of water evaporated. Far from being a distracting sideline, the

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”A microscopist once fell in love with a creature living in a water drop called Animula”

scientific facts in these pieces were key to their success. Victorian readers were charmed by the conviction that fanciful fables could impart and explain concrete and true realities and devoured whole collections of these fairy tales, unashamedly laced with facts. John Cargill Brough’s 1859 volume The FairyTales of Science was a miscellany of such stories, including A Flight Through Space, illustrated by a witch riding a telescope broomstick, The Life of an Atom, an autobiographical account of a carbon atom, and a palaeontological tale called The Age of Monsters. “The revelations of science transcend the wildest dreams of the old poets,” Brough wrote. Reviewers hailed his stories as “really patterns of what good, popular articles should be”. They were “concise, intelligible, couched in familiar language”, “full of information” and written “in excellent taste”. Crucially, they were also “correct in every particular”. Children’s author Arabella Buckley took this line of thinking as far as she could, believing that everything in a child’s surrounding environment, including sunbeams, primroses and bees, could be touched with “the fairy wand of imagination” and turned into an introductory lesson. Based around lectures she gave to a young audience in London, her 1879 book The Fairyland of Science wove fantastical beings into household experiments to explain how science worked. Gravity, for example, became a “great invisible giant”, while “crystallisation” and “cohesion” were portrayed as two fairies working together to make snowflakes, and lumps of coal were “gnomes buried down deep in the earth” set free by miners. She also used references to well-known fairy tales to enliven her prose: a dormant seed was compared to Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be awoken by a sunlit kiss. The 19th century was, of course, a time of intense scientific debates: one of the fiercest concerned human origins. Even before >

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 43

Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies referenced evolutionary debates

mARy evAnS piCtURe liBRARy

Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species was published in 1859, early evolutionary theories were a topic of incredible public interest, with texts like Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (published anonymously in 1844) outlining how life progressed from simple to more complex organisms. Some children’s works, like Margaret Gatty’s best-selling Parables from Nature, which first appeared in 1855, explicitly agitated against these new theories. Her satirical Inferior Animals, for example, inverted the usual order of nature, when human origins became the object of discussion for a group of philosophising birds. “I see that men were

”When I want faery tales now, I go to the geologist, the chemist and the astronomer” once rooks!” one of the avian “parliament” observed, subverting the evolutionary progression outlined in scientific books like Vestiges. The more obscure Wonderland of Evolution by Albert and George Gresswell, published in the 1880s, was less successful at conveying its anti-evolutionary message. In an attempt to reveal its absurdities, and advocate an “Almighty Designer”, the book’s narrator recast the process of evolution from protoplasm to human with the aid of “fairy Chance”. For one reviewer it was a thought-provoking exercise in questioning the extant evidence for evolution, but others were more critical. One remarked on its “grotesque” attempt to ape the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with

“a party of molluscs drinking tea and brandy”. Far from being funny, the reviewer continued, the book was merely silly. Most damning of all, it was “not at all evident that the authors understand themselves what is the theory of evolution” and “their attempt to make fun of it” was branded “a distinct failure”. Other tales, however, were more positive about Darwin’s ideas. The Water-Babies: A Fairy-Tale by clergyman and author Charles Kingsley is perhaps the most famous example, telling the story of Tom, a chimney sweep who becomes an amphibious water-baby and eventually a man of science. It included many references to the contemporary scientific world of the early 1860s, citing professors Thomas Henry Huxley (known at the time as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his

ALAddin’S wonderfuL LAmp Aladdin’s lamp was widely referenced in the 19th century to highlight the possibilities and wonder of the sciences. John Cargill Brough, for example, used it as “a poetical image” of the sciences and of Victorian engineering marvels such as the Leviathan steamship. A satirical response to Brough’s attempt to combine fairy lore and modern science, published in Fun magazine the following year, inverted their

relationship to investigate The Science of Fairy-Tales. Supposedly a demonstration of how “sound, practical information” could be learned from fairy tales, the piece presented a rewriting of Aladdin’s adventures as, in fact, the discovery of petroleum. The happily-ever-after for Aladdin and his princess consisted, in this updated version, of “studying botany, mineralogy, and the kindred sciences, all the livelong day”.

fervid support of evolutionary doctrines) and Richard Owen; and alluded to ongoing debates over whether the hippocampus minor (or, as it appeared in the book, the “hippopotamus major”) was found in the brains of apes as well as in humans. Kingsley seemed convinced that science’s new fairy tales were the best source of inspiration, curiosity and wonder, hailing “fairy Science, who is likely to be queen of all the fairies for many a year to come”. By the 20th century, others would agree: “When I want faery tales now, I go to the geologist, the chemist and the astronomer,” wrote one author in 1912. The railway, the telephone – even the electric light – were as marvellous as any creation of a magic genie. Truth, it turns out, can be stranger than fiction. Be careful not to trust everything you read, however, as Kingsley warned at the end of The Water Babies. “Remember always… that this is all a fairy tale, and only fun and pretence,” he cautioned. “You are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true.” n Melanie Keene is a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College, the University of Cambridge, where she works on the history of science for children. She is preparing a book, titled The FairyTales of Science: Fact and Fancy in Victorian Britain. Further reading: Scans of the original 19th-century tales, including Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, Andersen’s The Drop of Water, Brough’s miscellany of stories, and Dickens’s satire Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association, can be found at newscientist.com/article/dn19833

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nature’s fast-action heroes are not animals, but plants

Botanical ballistics W

The bunchberry dogwood flower holds a world speed record

HAT does it take for a plant ecologist to get into the Guinness World Records book? For Joan Edwards it was a borrowed camera and a chance encounter with physicist Dwight Whitaker that led to the discovery of the world’s fastest-opening flower. The blooms of Cornus canadensis, the bunchberry dogwood, open in less than half a millisecond, launching pollen into the air in a third of the time it takes a bullet to leave a rifle barrel. That made it a record-breaker. We tend to think of plants as stationary, yet some move with spectacular speed as they propel their reproductive particles – seeds and spores, pollen and sperm – as far as they can. But while you might hear the pop of an

exploding spore capsule or see a seedpod shooting its contents into the air, how they do it is not obvious. “Because it happens in less than the blink of an eye, the mechanism is invisible to us,” says Edwards. Now, through a pioneering combination of ultrafast digital photography and physics, Edwards and Whitaker are uncovering the secrets of the Usain Bolts of botany. “Plants have evolved some elegant biomechanical solutions for moving their genes to new places,” says Edwards. “It is making us look at them in a different light.” As a self-confessed physics nerd, Whitaker was more at home with Bose-Einstein condensates than botany until, one day in > 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 45

alEJandro aCosta, Joan Edwards, marta laskowski and dwigHt wHitakEr

also allows you to infer motions at the centre of the flower that are obscured in the videos.” By 2007, the pair finally understood what was going on. As flowers mature, the stamens grow faster than the petals, which remain joined at their tips. Confined within the petal “cage”, the stamen filaments bend, eventually protruding from between the petals like four bent knees. Increasing tension within the growing flower causes a build-up of elastic energy in the stamens and petals. When an insect hits a trigger hair on one of the petals,

These flowers are only 2.5 millimetres tall, yet they fire their pollen 10 times that distance, and always vertically. How could they pack such a powerful punch? “Once we had an equation of motion we could see it had a really clever mechanism for throwing its pollen upwards,” says Whitaker. It turns out each stamen is a trebuchet, a miniature version of the catapult Europe’s medieval armies used to increase the range of their missiles. A trebuchet maximises throwing distance by having its payload attached to the throwing arm by a hinge or strap. In the bunchberry, the payload (pollen) is attached to the tip of the throwing arm (the filament) by a thin, flexible strip of filament. “You can sort of see the basic movement in the images, but to get the whole picture you need a combination of images and a model of the motion,” says Whitaker. “That gives better resolution of the timing and

Joan Edwards, Clara Hard and dwigHt wHitakEr

Medieval mechanism

the petals burst apart and the stamens shoot upwards (see photos above). As the stamens fly up, the pollen-filled anthers remain pressed firmly together, maintaining contact by swivelling on their straps. Only when the stamens reach maximum velocity do the anthers finally fly apart and fling their loads skywards (Functional Ecology, vol 21, p 219). “The release is at just the right moment to maximise the upward thrust of pollen,” says Whitaker. In fact, the bunchberry’s trebuchet could

dr. JoHn d. CunningHam/Visuals unlimitEd/CorBis

2002, he passed the lab in Williams College, Massachusetts, where Edwards was filming exploding bunchberry flowers. Could he help, she asked, and trigger the camera while she set off an explosion? “The speed it moved was so impressive, I thought I’d write an equation of motion for it,” says Whitaker, who is now based at Pomona College, California. So they teamed up, and are getting some stunning results with their latest camera, which is able to record up to 500,000 frames per second on a continuous loop, always saving the last few seconds of images. “In the past you had to anticipate an event and synchronise filming to capture it. Now we can wait for something to happen and then hit stop,” he says. The first revelation was the bunchberry’s remarkable speed. Their footage showed that the petals fly back in 0.2 milliseconds and the stamens spring upwards to reach a speed of 22 kilometres an hour in 0.5 milliseconds – an acceleration of 2400 g, or 800 times that of the space shuttle on lift-off.

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Pollen launches from the stamens faster than a bullet leaves a rifle

not be any more efficient. “I fed different combinations of length and stiffness of filament, and size and weight of anthers and so on into the model,” says Whitaker. “But no other combination worked as well.” Bunchberry flowers can only be cross pollinated, and the rapid-fire trebuchet is what makes that possible. Each plant has hundreds of small flowers, so ensuring pollen reaches the flowers of another plant is a challenge. Only larger insects that fly quickly from plant to plant are heavy enough to trigger opening, and when they do the fastflying pollen hits them so hard it sticks among their hairs, staying put long enough to make it to another plant. As a back-up, bunchberry flowers eventually burst unaided, lofting pollen out of the still air close to the woodland floor into more turbulent regions where it can hitch a ride on the breeze. If Edwards and Whitaker were astonished by the bunchberry’s ingenuity, they got an even bigger surprise when they investigated the exploding spore capsules of sphagnum moss. These bog mosses are among the world’s most important plants, forming deep mats over 1 per cent of the world’s land surface and locking away immense amounts of carbon. If you visit a bog in summer, you will find it hard to ignore the sound of popping spore capsules. Ripe capsules are spherical, but as they dry the walls shrink, squeezing the sides to form a long, thin cylinder. The air inside is increasingly compressed, until eventually the capsule’s cap flies off and spores shoot out. The video footage shows the top blows off in less than 0.01 milliseconds. “It’s so fast you can’t really measure it,” says Edwards. The spores blast out with an initial acceleration of 36,000 g, around 10,000 times that of a rocket car, and reach a top speed of 82 kilometres an hour. “It’s hard to put into words how Sphagnum mosses disperse their spores using a vortex ring

powerful that explosion is,” says Whitaker. What was odd was the distance the spores travelled. At such speeds, they should experience immense drag forces and come to a halt in less than half a millisecond, travelling only a few millimetres. Yet somehow they kept on moving – and at speed. Even after 5 milliseconds they were still moving at more than 10 kilometres an hour. Some got as far as 16 centimetres away, with an average journey of 11 centimetres. Something special was happening, but the images were too fuzzy

”With a string of sequels in the pipeline, the next fast-action hero is the sperm-squirting liverwort” to make out what. “Even at 10,000 frames per second you can’t freeze the motion, and everything is blurry,” says Whitaker. So they cut the exposure time to 20 microseconds. “Then we saw beautiful mushroom clouds – the signature of a vortex ring.” Vortex rings have peculiar propulsive properties: the air within the ring rolls round and round, a motion that propels the ring through the surrounding air more or less intact. Vortex rings aren’t hard to make, says Whitaker. “You need a circular opening and a brief puff of air through the hole. But once you’ve created the ring, it keeps moving at almost constant speed.” The explosive blast of compressed air shooting out of the circular opening in the spore capsule creates a vortex ring that powers upwards carrying thousands of spores along with it (Science, vol 329, p 406). “This is the first time vortex rings have been seen in a plant,” says Whitaker. Sphagnum needs its sophisticated dispersal system because many of the 285 species are very exacting about where they grow and must ensure some spores reach the right microhabitat. That is a challenge for plants

with spore capsules scarcely a centimetre above ground, where the air is very still. If they are to travel far, spores must break through that still layer into the moving air around 10 centimetres beyond. Like many movie-makers, Edwards and Whitaker have a string of sequels in the pipeline. Their next fast-action hero is likely to be the sperm-squirting liverwort. Liverworts, the earliest land plants, are generally confined to damp habitats where sperm from male plants can swim short distances to female plants through a surface film of water. However, some discharge sperm explosively into the air. In 2008, Masaki Shimamura and colleagues at Hiroshima University in Japan captured images of a liverwort firing sperm up to 15 centimetres into the air. In the field they found female plants that were fertilised despite growing more than a metre from the nearest male. “We have finished filming but we haven’t worked out all the details of the mechanism yet,” says Edwards. “It is completely different from sphagnum, although you wouldn’t know that without analysing the footage.” What’s clear is that pressure builds inside the male antheridia until they pop open. The sperm blast out not in a puff of air but in a cylinder of water – a sort of high-pressure sperm hose. “There are different ways of optimising the movement of water through air and that’s what we are looking at now,” says Whitaker. Like Hollywood action heroes, there seems to be no shortage of plant stars for Edwards and Whitaker to choose from. Look out for the stinging nettle’s pollen catapult – a completely different device from the bunchberry’s – and the wood sorrel’s flip-action seed cannon “We’ve never seen anything like it,” says Edwards. “What’s exciting is the diversity of mechanisms,” he adds. “It’s quite remarkable. The technology has opened up a whole new window on the lives of plants.” n Stephanie Pain’s top speed is 4 metres per second 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 47

History’s greatest fantastical contraptions are back – with a twist

Steampunk Lego of buying kits from toy stores, and trades parts on the unofficial website bricklink.com. His fascination with Lego-based computation began with the Difference Engine, which was conceived by British mathematician Charles Babbage in the 1820s but never fully assembled in his lifetime. It was designed to calculate mathematical tables using gears and levers. Before digital calculators came along, such tables provided the results of functions such as logarithms, which could help sailors to navigate and astronomers to look up the dates and times of celestial events, for example. Babbage wanted to automate the calculations used to build the tables because human errors were rife. “Babbage was so close to creating a mechanical computer, and doing it 100 years before

anybody built an electronic one,” says Carol. The first complete version of Babbage’s design wasn’t built until the 1990s, when a group at the London Science Museum constructed a full-size Difference Engine in metal. “It really moved me and set me thinking how I could build such a thing in miniature,” recalls Carol. Unfortunately, while he certainly knows his onions when it comes to computer programming – his day job is developing software for Apple – Carol acknowledges that he doesn’t have much of a knack for welding metal. He was inspired to use Lego as his medium when he stumbled on the work of fellow Californian Tim Robinson, who had built a Difference Engine out of Meccano, which lets you build your creations with

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andy carol

A

NDREW CAROL’S computers can calculate the solutions to mathematical equations and tell you the exact time and date of a lunar eclipse several hundred years into the future. Yet these machines compute without a hint of silicon. They crunch numbers without hard drives, wires or batteries. All Carol needs to build his computers are plastic blocks, gears and a hand-operated crank, because his machines are made entirely out of Lego. Carol’s creations are Toys-R-Us meets steampunk, the science-fiction genre in which modern technology is anachronistically re-imagined in pre-20th century materials like brass, wood and leather. One of his machines is a 1000-piece Lego reconstruction of the Difference Engine, a Victorian mechanical calculator designed to crunch the answers to mathematical formulae automatically. His latest creation is a Lego-based Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek machine considered by some historians to be the world’s first computer. With about 2000 parts and 100 gears, it can calculate the position of the sun and moon in the sky centuries ahead of time, something you might expect from a smartphone app but not from a bunch of plastic bricks. To be sure, he operates outside the traditional Legoverse: you won’t find many standard Lego bricks in Carol’s home in California, and you certainly won’t see any of the iconic, tiny yellow men known to fans as “minifigs”. Instead, stacks of large, meticulously labelled containers hold thousands of gears, axles and chains from the Danish company’s Technics range – a more sophisticated line for builders who have exhausted the possibilities of mere bricks. This kind of Lego turns, whirrs and clicks. It forms the guts of Carol’s mechanical computers. “There’s probably $8000 to $10,000 worth of parts in this room,” he says. Like many of Lego hobbyists and artists who build from scratch, Carol scoffs at the notion

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SSPL/Getty

”Carol’s Lego Difference Engine converts smart mathematics into the motion of plastic gears”

Mechanical computing: Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine 2

The Antikythera mechanism: built by ancient Greeks, recreated in Lego

a three-digit read-out on the top row. Carol created three increasingly capable machines. After exhausting the variations on the Difference Engine, he turned to ancient Greece for his next contraption: the Antikythera mechanism, one of the most computationally advanced machines of the ancient world. But he soon realised that building such a thing would necessitate raising his Lego game. “I had to solve the same mathematical problems,” he says. “But my mechanisms are very different.” To mechanically track the relationship between eclipse cycles and the advance of years, the creators of the Antikythera used gears that turned at specific rates relative to each other. They knew that eclipses in their region of Earth occurred every 18 years, 11 days and 8 hours – an interval known as a Saros cycle. So they fashioned bronze gears of different sizes that, when combined, would represent key mathematical ratios: for example, enough of these specialised gears working in tandem would represent the 223 lunar months in a Saros cycle. Yet replicating the gear ratios of the Antikythera design is impossible in Lego – the company only makes certain gear sizes, and no matter how you combine them, they don’t add up to the crucial ratios. After many failed attempts, Carol solved the problem by using a type of gear called a differential. These mechanisms are found in car axles to prevent engine damage as you turn corners. As a car steers left or right, one wheel will turn faster than the other. Differential gears on the axle ensure that the average rotation of both wheels matches the engine transmission. The breakthrough came when Carol realised

Andrew CAroL

drAGon newS/rex

metal girders, gears and bolts. “He does just astounding things,” says Carol. Carol’s Lego Difference Engine converts some smart mathematics into the motion of gears. Underlying Babbage’s original design is a mathematical approach called the “method of finite differences”. This method breaks down relatively complex mathematics into brute-force repetitions of simple addition. In simple terms, if the work has already been done to multiply 5 by 6, simply adding 5 to your previous total gives you the answer to 5 by 7. Carol’s difference engine achieves these sequential additions by passing numerical information between modular clusters of gears (see picture, left). Each module performs a stage of the method of finite differences by rotating its gears a specific amount, and then passing the result to the next module, which uses that result as the basis of its next calculation, and so on. Each gear cluster is linked to a numerical readout on the front of the machine (for which Carol stole the wheel hubs of Lego cars). To get a result from the machine, first you manually programme the rotors with an initial set of numbers. The calculation works upwards from the bottom of the machine, displaying interim results on rows of readouts as it whirrs and turns toward a final answer. Eventually, the solution appears on

that these differentials could help him reach the elusive ratios. Their averaging effect could coax adjacent Lego gears into turning at rates that were otherwise impossible. Luckily, Lego manufactured these parts. Four months later, he had a working machine. It even accounts for leap years. Carol’s next project is perhaps his most ambitious – he wants to build a simple mechanical artificial intelligence. His proto-AI could beat a human at the game noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe). “If you make a mistake, it will always win,” he says. For this undertaking, however, gears won’t be enough; he’ll need to add two different types of Lego chains. Wide links and narrow links could express binary code instructions when fed through a mechanical reader. He has already made a prototype as proof-of-concept. Building a fully operational machine will be something else. “The mechanical sophistication would have to be pretty serious,” he says. A toy-deforce indeed. n Richard Fisher was constructed by Andrew Carol out of 35,000 pieces of Lego 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 49

The droids are trundling into the limelight

Wherefore art thou robot? EATHER,” says the performer, “help me with my stylish scarf.” He regally flings his arms in the air, and waits. The woman he is addressing, Heather Knight, places a black lacy garment around his neck. He brings his arms back down and starts to tell a joke. The performer, whose name is Data, is rehearsing for his stand-up-comedy debut. Yet Data is not just any comedian: he is a halfmetre-tall humanoid robot. He and Knight are doing their thing in Washington Square Park, New York, in front of a crowd of passers-by. Data is not the first robot to take to the stage in the hope of entertaining an audience (see “Performance a bit mechanical”, page 52). But now there is a bigger goal at stake for performers like him: to acquire acting skills that could help the rest of robotkind interact more fluidly with humans. And boy, do robots have a lot to learn. Present-day robots can often be annoying, creepy or just plain rude in their interactions with us. Humans are adept at coping with social nuances and subtle cues in communication, says Knight, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and founder of a New York City-based robotics company called Marilyn Monrobot. “Yet robots today are socially disabled,” she says. For their developers, it’s about more than politeness. Unless robots develop more social awareness, they cannot become more sophisticated, and we will have to wave goodbye to the idea of asking a friendly robot for help with the chores, or any kind of realistic companionship. Seeking inspiration, robotics researchers have begun testing their robots in the theatre. “People are realising that we have a lot to learn from the arts,” says Leila Takayama of Willow Garage, a robotics company based in Menlo Park, California. She co-organised a workshop on robots and the arts at the Human-Robot

Interaction 2010 conference in Osaka, Japan. Theatre directors and actors can often provide insights into human interaction that have eluded roboticists, according to Hiroshi Ishiguro, who leads the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University. Robot programmers often don’t know where to start when recreating the speech and myriad movements of a human. Yet theatre directors often know these cues intuitively: they tease the right responses from actors all the time. The theatre is also a great place to test robots’ skills, because the dialogue is scripted and the characters behave predictably, unlike in the real world. Ishiguro has already staged several robot plays in the hope of distilling the elements that could make robots seem more human. One of the first people to use theatre to polish up robotic social skills was Guy Hoffman. In 2005, he was a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, working on machines with artificial intelligence. In his spare time, he started taking drama lessons. There he discovered that actors were routinely tackling many of the headaches he faced in his day job, such as making sure that every piece of speech and every action was consistent with an overall personality. Hoffman decided to put one of his artificial creatures on stage: a robot called AUR, an expressive desk lamp. By flexing its neck AUR can make “eye contact” using its multicoloured light, and narrow its aperture rather like the iris in the human eye. The result was a performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2007 involving AUR and human actors. Hoffman focused on making AUR’s acting balance timeliness with spontaneity. He programmed AUR to use the play’s script to predict how the human actors might be

”The robot actor was weirdly adorable. I felt surprisingly protective of it”

BRETT RYDER

H

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behaving at any moment. It meant AUR could respond in a relatively flexible fashion as well as promptly, without processing delays. AUR could also carry on acting as the other actors delivered their lines. Previous robot thespians have been able to act in a similarly expressive way, but the performance felt more canned because it had to be totally pre-programmed. Hoffman’s approach seemed to work. The actors and the director said that after a while it felt as if AUR was a character in his own right. “The robot was weirdly adorable. I felt surprisingly protective of it,” reported one actor. Hoffman reckons timely responses from robots are essential for honing their ability to interact fluidly with humans. Offstage, he conducted an experiment in which he asked 33 people to collaborate on a task with AUR. Those that worked with AUR in his “anticipatory” mode subsequently attributed more human characteristics and intelligence to the robot than those who partnered with him while his predictive skills were switched off. And that’s despite the fact that AUR made more response errors when he was anticipating. “People accept robots taking some risk with their decision as long as they are snappy,” says Hoffman, now at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel. “They kind of forgive the robot for being wrong.” He has since used the same principles to design another robot performer – a marimba player called Shimon, who can improvise jazz together with a human pianist.

Audience reaction Both AUR and Shimon bounce off fellow performers to polish their social skills, but the response of an audience is just as handy for social training. When Data the robot comedian performed in December at the TEDWomen conference in Washington DC, he started with material selected in a preprogrammed manner from a database of around 200 jokes, says Knight. But he was also listening for laughter, clapping and chatter via a microphone pointed at the audience. Using software that Knight built with colleagues at CMU, the robot then began to pick gags that were more likely to get a laugh. The jokes were classified according to their theme, degree of interactivity with the audience and other characteristics. If people found risque jokes a turn-off, but liked having Data ask them questions, he would respond to suit their taste, every so often throwing in a random joke to keep the performance fresh. > 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 51

He also picked jokes according to where he was in his routine, saving his best jokes for the finale, for example. Knight already has plans to extend these techniques to robots outside the theatrical setting. She will soon use the same software for a robotic tour guide at her university that will personalise its route around the campus and propose activities that it thinks guests will appreciate. Merely predicting what people will enjoy

won’t give Data a full set of social smarts, though. To communicate with humans convincingly, automatons must also be able to inject a dash of personality into their actions and words. So for the next stage of Knight’s robo-comedian endeavour, she plans to vary many more aspects of its behaviour besides joke selection. The plan is for a robot to perform the same joke, or even the same script, to different audiences. While the words will be the same,

‘PeRFoRMANCe A BIT MeCHANICAl’ aur Role: Desk lamp in a play called The Confessor, performed in 2007 in Cambridge, Massachusetts “It’s interesting how much meaning a change of color can channel. When he turned and switched to red I instantly got the feeling he wanted something.” thinkartificial.org GeminoiD-f (below left) Roles: Appears in the play Sayonara (Goodbye), reading a poem to a dying woman, played by a human actor. It was performed in November 2010 in Tokyo “The android, seated on a chair throughout the performance, resembles a part-Russian, part-Japanese woman. Her voice was calm, but her performance a bit mechanical.” Reuters

Data (above) Roles: stand-up comic in New York, August 2010, and on stage at PopTech in october 2010, and at TeDWomen, December 2010

YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/GeTTY KRIS KRüG

Helicopter fairies Role: Flying fairies with rotors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed at Texas A&M University in 2009 “The robot fairies capture the attention of everyone and don’t let go.” thebatt.com Wakamaru (right) Role: Acts as a male and female robot living with two humans in the play Hatakaru Watashi (I, Worker), staged in 2008 at osaka University, Japan “Soon they may be signing autographs or trying to roll away from paparazzi”. BBC News

all the non-verbal behaviour – gestures, plus the volume and mode of delivery of the robot’s speech – will vary. The idea is to let the software deduce, from the audience reactions, which combinations of non-verbal communication work for which parts of the script. To provide feedback, the audience will wear wristbands that interpret their excitement levels, their gaze will be watched by cameras, and they will be seated in chairs that can detect fidgeting. For example, a robot playing Juliet might learn by trial and error that when it delivers the line “parting is such sweet sorrow”, it is appropriate to look into Romeo’s eyes and pause before sending him away. A robot insensitive to the crowd’s reaction might instead “blithely stare into the audience and brusquely end the scene”, Knight says.

robot personas Knight hopes to use what she learns from this audience feedback to create a range of believable robot personalities. That would allow you to choose a robot persona to suit a given task. “Personality becomes one of the design principles,” she says. “I think it’s a great idea – it makes sense,” says Takayama. She likens Knight’s approach to the way a director can tweak a movie based on focus-group screenings. “It’s pretty cool that you could do that with robots.” She cautions, however, that using theatre in this way has its limitations too: an audience may react differently to somebody interacting oneon-one with the robot. “It might not directly translate,” she says. “Knowing it’s on stage, where you are the fourth wall, is different to having one in front of you in a small room.” Still, Knight points out that this is all part of a rich tradition of placing robots in unexpected settings. For example, making robots play soccer has driven the development of algorithms that can coordinate many robots simultaneously. There was also the DARPA Grand Challenge, a long-distance robot car race that honed the technology of autonomous vehicle navigation. Back in New York, Data has his audience captivated. He begins to tell another joke. “Waiter! Waiter! What’s this robot doing in my soup?” he says. The punchline: “It looks like he’s performing human tasks twice as well, because he knows no fear or pain.” Not surprisingly, that one falls flat. But Data learns his lesson, and launches into another gag. n Celeste Biever wonders if she would be funnier if she were a robot

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Does James Bond’s favourite tipple really taste better when shaken rather than stirred?

of beer you’ll drink more shots, and more quickly, as your self-control will be reduced. What is less clear is whether darker drinks such as bourbon are more likely to give you a hangover than a clear spirit like vodka. The idea that they do appeared to be confirmed by a study at Brown University, Rhode Island. One possible difference is that the dark drinks have a higher concentration of congeners, the by-products of fermentation. However, another study, at Boston University School of Public Health, found no connection between the intensity of the resulting hangover and the type of alcohol drunk. Clearly more research is required. * or, if you prefer: “Drink beer then wine, you’ll feel fine. Drink wine and beer, you’ll feel queer”

Martinis sHoulD be sHaken, not stirreD

should have known were unpleasant. In other words, a shot of caffeine after a binge may simply fool drunk people into thinking they are sober.

true – for most people’s taste. James Bond ordered his vodka martinis “shaken, not stirred”, but is there really any difference? Yes there is, according to a team at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. They studied the ability of the classic martini, made with gin and vermouth, to deactivate hydrogen peroxide, which is a potent source of free radicals. They showed that martinis were more effective at deactivating hydrogen peroxide than their main ingredients alone (BMJ, vol 310, p 1600). For reasons that are not clear, the shaken mix was twice as effective as the stirred mix. But does the resulting cocktail tastes better? One suggestion is that an agitated martini contains more microscopic shards of ice, giving it a more pleasant texture or “mouthfeel”. However, the most likely reason for Bond’s preference seems to be because it helps reduce the taste of residual oil left over when vodka is made from potatoes, the base vegetable used at the time Ian Fleming wrote his books.

beer tHen liQuor, neVer sicker. liQuor tHen beer, neVer fear*

Hanging a spoon in tHe top of an openeD cHaMpagne bottle preserVes its fizz

False. There is no chemical interaction between these drinks that makes you feel particularly bad the next day. It is the total amount of alcohol consumed that matters. Perhaps when you have already had a skinful

False. It’s hard to imagine how a spoon could trap bubbles, but it’s the experimental evidence that counts. So to investigate, New Scientist asked people to blind taste champagne which had been opened and stored either with or >

There’s no shortage of tall tales about alcohol – and a few even turn out to be true

Booze truths Drinking coffee will get you sober faster False. Caffeine might wake you up, but it won’t lower your blood alcohol level. In fact a cup of coffee may make it harder for you to realise you’re drunk, according to Thomas Gould of Temple University, Philadelphia. In experiments on mice, reported in Behavioral Neuroscience (vol 123, p 1271), he found that caffeine – the equivalent of between one and eight cups of coffee for humans – made the rodents more alert but did nothing to reverse the cognitive impairment caused by alcohol, such as their inability to avoid stimuli they

25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 53

without a suspended spoon, and rate the fizz against freshly opened champagne. The result? A spoon has no effect at all. The most likely explanation for the myth is that an opened bottle of champagne keeps its bubbles for much longer than most people expect.

champagne gets you Drunker than wine true. The bubbles in champagne do seem to make a difference. A study in Alcohol and Alcoholism (vol 38, p 381) concluded that it may be more intoxicating than wine. The reason remains a mystery. Perhaps bubbles open the pyloric valve in the stomach, letting the alcohol reach the intestine and hence the bloodstream more quickly. Alternatively fizzy drinks might increase the rate of alcohol absorption by stimulating the lining of the stomach.

elephants get Drunk on marula fruit False. There have been anecdotal reports of drunken elephants for years, and a team from the University of Bristol in the UK recently found that fallen marula fruit naturally ferment to an ethanol content of around 3 per cent. They calculate, however, that this means that to get drunk, an elephant would have to consume “a diet of only marula fruit at a rate of at least 400 per cent normal maximum food intake” (Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, vol 79, p 363). This, as they say, “seems extremely unlikely”. Perhaps another intoxicant is responsible. Elephants also eat marula tree bark, which is home to beetle pupae traditionally used to poison arrow tips.

They asked a team of tasters to sample 38 red wines and 26 white wines while dining on scallops. The wines all contained different amounts of iron, which the researchers say is the result of a variety of factors, including soil type and contamination during harvesting. They found that wines containing high levels of iron left an unpleasant fishy aftertaste. Bottom line: low-iron red wines might be a good match with seafood.

Dmitri menDeleev establisheD the optimum alcoholic strength for voDka False. Vera Grigorieva of the Oval vodka company in Moscow, Russia, laid this myth to rest at a conference last year in Budapest, Hungary. She found that vodka with an alcohol content of around 40 per cent by volume was introduced at the end of the 17th century, long before Mendeleev was born. Yet the man behind the periodic table did study how the volume of ethanol-water solutions varies with concentration. He found a minimum occurs when ethanol and water are mixed in a ratio of 1:3 (Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, vol 395, p 7). His work played no role in formulating regulations for vodka manufacturers, but it is now being

followed up by a team of Russian and American scientists who are searching for a way to measure molecular structure in vodkas, to see if this varies in different brands, and whether it might be linked to perceptible changes in taste (Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, vol 58, p 7394).

wine consumption explains the ‘french paraDox’ False. French people suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease, despite having a diet rich in saturated fats. Some suggest that this phenomenon, known as the French paradox, is linked with drinking red wine, which contains a chemical called resveratrol. In fact the amounts found in red wine are too small to be responsible, says Dirk Lachenmeier of the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Agency in Karlsruhe, Germany. Epidemiological evidence shows that the health effects of alcohol are generally the same, irrespective of the type of drink. It is the amount of alcohol that matters. There is some evidence that moderate alcohol consumption may protect the heart. However, the risks for cancer of the mouth, pharynx, larynx, oesophagus, liver, bowel and breast all rise with the amount of alcohol consumed.

true – up to a point. There are exceptions to the “red wine with red meat, white wine with fish” rule; some red wines go well with seafood. But one reason the saying makes scientific sense has been reported by a team from the Japanese winemaker Mercian Corporation (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, vol 57, p 8550).

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Different wines go with Different types of fooD

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False. After a sip of wine, “legs” of liquid typically form inside the glass. But they are not an indication of quality, rather of alcohol content. Legs or tears arise because wine is, essentially, a solution of ethanol in water, and this mixture has a much lower surface tension than pure water (Journal of Chemical Education, vol 86, p 807). When the solution wets the side of the glass, alcohol rapidly evaporates from the thin layer on the glass surface. With less alcohol, this layer has a higher surface tension so it pulls on liquid from regions of lower surface tension, and higher alcohol. As a result the wine flows up the sides of the glass. When enough liquid gathers at the top, drops form, and when they are heavy enough, they roll down, leaving tracks resembling tears. The phenomenon of liquid flow driven by surface tension gradients, which occurs in many other places than wine glasses, is called the Gibbs-Marangoni effect. The legs might be interesting to watch, but they don’t reveal whether the wine is any good.

absinthe is a hallucinOgen

False. Of the drinks that purportedly

contain chemicals with an extra kick, absinthe is perhaps the most infamous. In 19th-century Europe, it was blamed for causing hallucinations, mental instability and criminal behaviour. The “green fairy” enjoyed by Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde and Vincent van Gogh developed such a reputation that most European countries banned it early in the 1900s. The ingredient of this electric-green spirit that was supposedly responsible is wormwood, an aromatic, bitter shrub that contains a chemical called thujone. But thujone is not a hallucinogen. Nor does it have a cannabis-like action, though it is toxic to nerve cells and causes seizures at high concentrations. According to work published this year by Dirk Lachenmeier of the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Agency in Karlsruhe, Germany, it is not present in significant quantities (The Open Addiction Journal, vol 3, p 33). The consensus today is that absinthism was either simple alcohol poisoning – some absinthes were 70 per cent alcohol, nearly double the strength of most distilled drinks – or caused by methanol and other adulterants found in some cheap liquor.

Fast track to oblivion?

yOu’ll get drunk faster if yOu drink thrOugh a straw False. Unless you suck alcohol through a straw more rapidly than you glug, drinking through a straw does not raise your blood alcohol level faster than other ways of drinking. The myth that it does may have arisen because drinks which come with straws often have a fruity flavour that masks the taste of alcohol, making you more likely to down them faster. Another possibility is that straws are more often used by women, who metabolise alcohol differently from men (New England Journal of Medicine, vol 322, p 95), and who may therefore be more susceptible to its effects.

ale drinkers will develOp a beer belly surprisingly, False. Alcohol is highly calorific. A litre of continental lager contains about 350 kilocalories, and a typical British pint of bitter is about 170 kcal. If anyone is going to notice the belt-busting effects of beer it should be the Czechs, who consume more beer per person than drinkers in any other country. Yet a study of almost 2000 Czechs published in 2003 in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (vol 57, p 1250) failed to find a link between the amount of beer consumed and the size of the drinker’s stomach. A subsequent analysis of data from a different group of drinkers did find a slight but statistically significant increase in their girth, yet this remains unpublished.

drink up – there are plenty Of ways tO defeat a hangOver False. Anyone hoping to neutralise the excesses of a night on the town by turning to hangover cures is going to be disappointed. After reviewing evidence for the curative benefits of bananas, aspirin, Vegemite, fructose, glucose, artichoke, prickly pear and the drugs tropisetron and tolfenamic acid, Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll at Indiana University, Indianapolis, concluded in a paper published two years ago: “No scientific evidence… supports any cure or effective prevention for alcohol hangovers” (BMJ, vol 337, p 2769). The truth is that other factors, including lack of sleep, smoking, overeating, snoring and all those other activities that occur during and after a heavy night also play a part, making a truly effective treatment for hangovers unattainable. As for the hair of the dog, it does not take a toxicologist to point out that a couple of pints at 8 o’clock next morning simply makes a hangover last longer. Your best hope? That you are one of around a quarter of drinkers who are naturally resistant to hangovers. According to a team led by Jonathan Howland at the Boston University School of Public Health, that is probably a result of genetic differences in the way alcohol and acetaldehyde are metabolised (Addiction, vol 103, p 758). n

Roger Highfield will continue his extensive research into hangover cures during the holidays 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 55

Flore-Aël Surun/tendAnce Floue

Only quality wines fOrm ‘legs’ Or ‘tears’ On the side Of the glass

Fire arrows and flame-throwing lances are all in a day’s work

The gunpowder gang A

BLIZZARD of flaming arrows blazes through the air. Upon impact, the arrows send out great jets of fire, setting light to everything nearby. For the inhabitants of Oran, under siege by the Spanish in 1404, it is a terrifying attack, causing immense destruction. “The noise and cries which came from the town were very great by reason of the havoc that was wrought,” wrote one observer in what is now Algeria’s second city. The Middle Ages were a significant time for armourers in the Middle East and Europe. Gunpowder, invented by the Chinese in the first millennium, arrived here in the latter half of the 13th century, and the first gunpowder weapons to hit the battlefield in this part of the world were incendiary devices such as fire arrows. Projectile weapons – guns and cannons – took a little longer to catch on, and were not in common use until the 1350s. That much we know, but in general it is no easy task to trace the development of gunpowder weapons in Europe and the impact they made. That siege of Oran, for instance: were those arrows really so effective, or was the story concocted as a piece of early Spanish PR? Medieval chroniclers, the war reporters of their day, are rarely to be trusted. “They wrote what they were told to,” says Kelly DeVries, a specialist in medieval warfare at Loyola University, Maryland. Even serious accounts may have been distorted by translators. The only way to know for sure is to test the weapons first-hand – just what the Medieval Gunpowder Research Group, of which DeVries is a member, have been doing for the past 10 years. The group carry out much of their work at the Danish Medieval Centre, a folk museum in Nykøbing. Here they recreate and try out each weapon in turn to find out what worked, and how well. For all its destructive potential, gunpowder sounds simple enough to make. It has just three key ingredients – charcoal, saltpetre (potassium nitrate) and sulphur. The team’s first task

Firebombs and cannons would have ended the siege that much quicker

was to get hold of them, medieval-style. Charcoal was easy – it would have been in ready supply throughout Europe. Sulphur was said to have been mined in volcanic areas, so the team braved the Námafjall region of Iceland, with its boiling mud pools and steaming gas vents. By collecting rock samples, melting them in a metal bucket with a small amount of cooking oil and scooping out the impurities, the team obtained sulphur of roughly 50 per cent purity. This suggested that sulphur supplies were not a hurdle for medieval warfare.

Saltpetre proved more problematic. The team’s early attempts at manufacturing it the medieval way, from fermented animal dung, produced results that were only a few per cent potassium nitrate. It turns out the pH of the dung is very important to the process (New Scientist, 5 November 2005, p 33), and it was unclear how anyone would have succeeded in medieval times without equipment to measure the pH. Eventually, the team got a tip-off about a factory in the Agra district of India that was still making saltpetre for fertiliser using the traditional method. Like the medieval manufacturers, it uses animal dung as the raw

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and sawdust down a hollow tube, according to the 16th-century Italian metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio. Unfortunately, he doesn’t say how much of each ingredient to use, so the team had to make some daring guesses. They started cautiously, as anyone playing with fire should – and found their first attempt wouldn’t even burn. A mixture containing 25 per cent sawdust eventually did the trick, shooting a red-hot flame that burned for 30 seconds. Fire arrows were next on the list. As far as the team knew, no one had tried to make this

achieved with modern industrial methods. Having tested and confirmed that traditional methods could produce good gunpowder, the team were ready to recreate weapons with it. A couple of years ago they tried their hand at fire lances, a kind of medieval flame-thrower. Making one involves stuffing an incendiary mixture of saltpetre

weapon for the best part of 400 years. Would they work in the way the records described? Johannes Bengedans, a military engineer in the pay of Christopher III, who ruled Denmark in the 1440s, seemed the most authoritative source. His instructions were straightforward enough: “Take 5 pound good saltpetre and apply 2 pounds of sulphur. Add 1 pound finely crushed coal… Mix it all with alcohol.” You then had to tie a linen bag of the mixture around the arrow, insert a cotton fuse and coat the bag with pitch. In 2009, the group made nine fire arrows in this way and shot them at a timber target. “They lumbered rather than flew through the air,” says Smith.

rex features

material. The workers spray it with water to dissolve out the potassium nitrate, which filters through a porous floor. They then concentrate the solution by boiling it in a pan more than 3 metres across. “It was stunning,” says Robert Smith, an independent researcher based in Leeds, UK, and a member of the gunpowder group. “The process was recognisably the same as those described in the 16th century.” Judging the age and composition of the dung proved to be enough to control the pH and obtain potassium nitrate of high purity – 80 to 90 per cent, which is almost as good as can be

”The aim of sieges in the Middle Ages was capitulation. You’ve got to terrorise people”

“But when they hit the target the effect was dramatic. A very intense flame shot out of the front of the arrow with a whooshing sound, and it burned for 5 to 10 seconds.” This isn’t enough to set a timber building alight, but a more combustible material, such as a thatched roof, hay and animal bedding, would have been easily set on fire. “It would have been terrifying to have been anywhere near one of them,” says Smith. Admittedly the longer-range shots, at 40 metres, were a bit more hit and miss, the arrows wobbling and occasionally veering off course altogether. But they would have been an effective weapon all the same, says DeVries. For one thing, they would have forced besieged cities to use their precious supplies of water to put out the flames. And medieval warmongers were no strangers to the tactic of shock and awe. “What you have to remember about sieges in the Middle Ages is that the aim was capitulation,” says DeVries. “You’ve got to terrorise people. Fire will cause terror.” Fire arrows weren’t decisive in the 1404 siege of Oran, however – the Spanish would not occupy the city for another 100 years. One big question stands out in all of this. Why didn’t guns and cannons – arguably the most effective gunpowder weapons – catch on as soon as they were invented? In the mid13th century the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon wrote about using gunpowder to launch a projectile. Yet it was another 75 years or so before firearms were used in warfare, either in Europe or in China. Some suggest that hitches in saltpetre production caused the delay. As the team discovered for themselves, making saltpetre is a tricky business; perhaps Europeans hadn’t mastered the technique by the 13th century. “If I was a smart scientist in medieval times,” says DeVries, “I would concentrate my efforts on making saltpetre. You could make a bunch of money.” Alternatively, it might have been down to the potentially lethal unreliability of early guns and cannons, given the rudimentary technology of the time. “My guess is that you had to wait for metallurgy to catch up,” says DeVries. “If you tried to make a gun with a barrel made of wood you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it.” If any fiascos did occur when these weapons were tried out, there are no records to tell the tale. It’s one of several areas ripe for investigation as the team enter their second decade of research. n Mick Hamer plans to go out with a bang 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 57

Win big at the office party with game theory as your guide

The Santa strategy

elsa/plainpicture

W

HEN it comes to Christmas presents, do you give as good as you get? Most people think they do. Even President Barack Obama is on record saying he goes one better. “Here’s the general rule: I give nicer stuff than I get,” he told Oprah Winfrey in a hard-hitting pre-Christmas interview last year. That may seem ungrateful, but consider the implications. Most people believe that the gifts they get are not as good as the ones they give. No wonder Christmas is so often a crushing disappointment. There is a better way: abandon the ritual of mutual gift-giving in favour of a much more rational system called secret Santa. The beauty of this is that you only have to buy one present for each social circle you belong to, rather than one for everyone you know. In the original version of secret Santa each member of a group – colleagues, say – is anonymously assigned to buy a gift for another and give it to them at the Christmas party. How sweet. Thankfully, that game has evolved into something more Machiavellian: thieving Santa, also known as dirty Santa or the Grinch game. As its name suggest, this revolves around theft and dirty tricks. In its simplest version, everybody buys a present costing between, say, £10 and £20. They then secretly deposit it, gift-wrapped, into a sack. To start the game, numbers are drawn out of a hat to decide the order of play. Now the horse-trading begins. The first player must take a present from the sack and open it. The second player then has a choice – open a new present, or steal the already opened one. If they choose to steal, player 1 gets to open another present, but they are not allowed to steal their present straight back. Player 3 now enters the fray, either opening a new present or stealing an opened one, whereupon the victim gets to play again, either stealing a different present or opening another new one. And so it goes on until everybody has had a turn and there are no more unopened presents. The system is not without its flaws, however. For example, if the first player

opens a poor present they are likely to be stuck with it, while the player picked to go last has a good chance of getting a really good present, perhaps the best. For that reason there are many variants designed to spread the pain. One is to allow dispossessed players to steal a present back, although this tends to lead to endless rounds of tit-for-tat larceny. Another is to set a limit on how many times an individual present can be stolen. If you have never played thieving Santa, give it a go. It’s fun. Fun, though, can be overrated. What you really want is to win – and that means ending up with the best possible present. So how should you go about getting it? Intuitively it is hard to say. Imagine you are playing a game in which a present can only be stolen once (see diagram, right) and it is your turn. There are three opened presents on the table and four in the sack. One of the opened ones is not bad, and if you steal it you can keep it. But there may be even better ones in the sack, so why not gamble? Then again, if you open a really good present somebody is certain to steal it from you, and you risk ending up with something really terrible. What to do? Here is where a strategy developed by

game theorists Arpita Ghosh and Mohammad Mahdian of Yahoo Research in Santa Clara, California, can help (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6099, p 228). “I heard about this game at a New Year’s party, from somebody who had just been playing it at Christmas,” says Ghosh. “I thought it would be fun to analyse.”

Steal or no steal Ghosh and Mahdian decided to play a simplified version of the game. Assuming certain things – that the players are sober, for example, and that everybody puts the same value on the same presents – they wanted to work out how to “maximise the expected utility”. Or, in English, to work out what you theoretically expect to get out of a transaction before it has happened.

”Fun can be overrated. What you really want is to win and that means ending up with the best present”

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How to play Game theory helps players decide whether to steal an opponent’s present or open a new one

First player chooses an unopened present Second player can steal the first player’s gift or choose an unopened one

They started by thinking about the game’s final round, where all but one of the players has had a turn and there is just one unopened present left in the sack. In this case the strategy is pretty obvious. If all the presents are worth somewhere between £10 and £20, the expected value of the final unopened present is £15. The rational strategy, therefore, is to look around the table and steal any present worth more than that. But remember, if the top present has been unwrapped it is likely to have been stolen already so you won’t be able to have it. So if there isn’t a present worth more than £15 that hasn’t already been stolen, open the one in the sack. This means that the final player has an expected utility of at least £15, which is about as good as it gets. Expected utility, of course, is not the same as what you actually get. You might think that

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

UNOPENED PRESENTS

Subsequent players can either choose an unopened present or steal a previously opened present, as long as it hasn’t already been stolen

the final present is trash, in which case the strategy wasn’t much help. But at least you can console yourself that it was correct in theory. Ghosh and Mahdian then started to work backwards through each player’s turn – a process known as backward induction – to derive a general strategy. Their next stop was the last-but-one player, where there are two unopened presents. This is a bit more complicated than before, as you have to take into account the possibility of opening a really good present which is immediately stolen. This possibility means that the last-but-one player must have a lower steal threshold than the final player. Ghosh and Mahdian’s calculations show that a player in this position should steal any present worth £13.75 or more. If there is no such present available, they should open a new one. This “threshold strategy” turns out to work for all players, except the first, who has no choice but to open an unopened gift. The steal threshold itself rises as each player takes their turn because the fewer people left to pick a present, the fewer opportunities there are for someone to steal yours.

What this means is the steal threshold starts low; in an 8-player game it is approximately £11.56 for the second player. But, surprisingly, it delivers an expected utility of slightly more than £15 for all players – except poor old player 1, of course, who is more or less guaranteed to “take one for the team” and get something pretty lousy. “When your turn arrives, have a look at the gifts that you can possibly steal,” says Ghosh. “If the best of those is good enough, where ‘good enough’ depends on how many unopened gifts remain, steal it. If the best of those is not good enough, open a new gift.” Which is all very well and good, but a theoretical utility in excess of £15 can’t magically transform the contents of the sack. There are still good presents and bad ones, and somebody is going to end up with the dross. Ghosh acknowledges this. “What this is really all about is making sure you get the best of the rubbish.” This should perhaps be known as “minimising your futility”. So what of the first player, who seems doomed to pick the short straw? This is an acknowledged problem in real-world thieving Santa, and is usually solved by giving the first player a chance to steal right at the end. In this case all the players have an expected utility of exactly £15. With all this strategy at her fingertips, you would expect Ghosh to be arranging secret Santa games every year. “Actually no,” she says. “I’ve never played it.” Typical theorist. n Graham Lawton ignored the advice in this feature and won a truly lousy present in the New Scientist secret Santa 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 59

Bitter, expensive and almost undrinkable – why is america’s craft beer getting so extreme?

No accounting for taste

andy smith

I

T IS dawn on a crisp Friday morning in February 2010. On the sidewalk of a suburban street in Santa Rosa, California, a line of hooded young men shuffles towards a lowbuilt blue building. A soup kitchen, you might think, or a drug rehabilitation centre. But the hoodies aren’t harbouring the local down-and-outs. In the queue are hip 20 and 30-something young professionals from as far away as New York and even Europe. They are lining up for the fifth annual release of “Pliny the Younger”, an Indian pale ale (IPA) produced by Santa Rosa’s Russian River microbrewery. Last year’s batch sold out in a week. This year, all 40 kegs were gone within 8 hours, and the beer briefly became the highest-rated brew on the Beer Advocate website, a forum for lovers of craft beer. Each to their own, you might say. What adds intrigue to the mix is that to most palates Pliny the Younger is really rather disagreeable. Its sky-high content of hops, the herb that imparts bitterness and aroma to a beer, is married to a sickly maltiness and an intense punch of alcohol that seem designed to make you turn up your nose at the first sip. This is not an isolated case, either. While the likes of Budweiser, Miller and Coors continue to make their mass-market lagers lighter and blander, America’s craft beer industry is busily going the other way, cramming as much alcohol and hoppy bitterness into its beers as will fit. US brews with names such as Hop Stoopid, Hop Devil, Hopsickle, Hop Wallop, HopSlam and Hop Crisis proudly proclaim the bitter herb, and there are signs that real ale in the UK and elsewhere is also becoming more extreme. What is going on? Humans have some idiosyncratic tastes: crab brains, fish gonads and squeezable cheese are all delicacies in various parts of the world. Our preference for sweet and abhorrence of bitter is universal, however. Evolutionarily,

that makes sense. Many bitter substances are at best nutritionally useless and at worst downright toxic, so we have evolved ways to protect ourselves. Placing a bitter foodstuff on the tongue will trigger a reflex reaction that encourages us to spit it out, or increase saliva flow to wash the taste away. A harmless bitter substance inserted directly into a person’s stomach will generally induce nausea. In that sense, drinking beer at all – or having a coffee, or eating hot chili peppers or facescrunchingly sour citrus fruits – is a perverse activity. We don’t intentionally inhale faeces or stab ourselves in the arm, so why do we accept and even come to enjoy naturally unpleasant tastes? It is a bit of a mystery. In fact, says psychologist Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, it not at all clear how over time we can acquire a taste for anything we didn’t previously like. With beer, it clearly helps that we like to get a little drunk. Hoppier, stronger-tasting beers tend to be backed by a higher alcohol content; Pliny the Younger’s, at 11 per cent by volume, is akin to that of a fine wine. The search for a better buzz may be why we can tolerate intense aromas and flavours we would otherwise find obnoxious. Something similar would account for how the caffeine kick helps us learn to love the bitter taste of coffee or tea – often masked by copious quantities of sugar in the early stages – or how the nicotine hit leads us to accept acrid tobacco smoke. Beer also benefits from its association with another type of molecule we animals crave: carbohydrates. If rodents are fed two flavours, one of which is paired with carbohydrates, they quickly learn to prefer the paired flavour, says Marcia Pelchat of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – even if the carbohydrates are injected directly into the gut during the taste test (Physiology and Behavior, vol 74, p 481 and p 495). Together

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with her colleague Gina Carfagno, Pelchat has recently shown that humans with no previous preference can be made to favour a particular flavour of iced tea if they gulp it with a pill that releases carbohydrates in the stomach. Bitter, hoppy beers often have a higher content of sugar-releasing malts, making for a more intense carbohydrate fix. So the push for ever more bitter beers might just be a case of what psychologists call “mere exposure” – repeated consumption, particularly if associated with pleasurable sensations, being enough to make us cope with unpleasant tastes. Hops are not just about bitterness, either: they impart other aromas that many find enjoyable, and variously describe as floral, piney or citrusy. Some even say the scent is reminiscent of marijuana – which perhaps is not surprising as both herbs are members of the Cannabaceae family. But Rozin thinks there is something more deep-seated going on. He points out that evolution has taught us to approach novel taste sensations with a combination of

”There is a prestige in liking things others don’t – and a machismo if it’s something we’re not made to like” intrigue and fear. An unfamiliar berry, say, is potentially a new source of nutrition, but it could also be deadly. If we discover through eating it that, despite its warning bitterness, it is safe and could therefore potentially provide nourishment, it makes sense for fear to dissolve and intrigue to take over. Rozin developed this idea of “benign masochism” when trying to explain how humans can come to like the burn of chili peppers – particularly, the peculiar fact that when people describe their ideal level of hotness, it is typically just below the one they can’t stand (Motivation and Emotion, vol 4, p 77). “It’s a form of thrill-seeking,” he says. “The more your body is sending the signal of danger, the more pleasure you get out of not actually being in danger.” There is some evidence that such a counterintuitive response is hard-wired in our brains, says Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The brain secretes opiate chemicals in response to painful experiences, including tastes, resulting in a perverse response of pleasure (Science, vol 293, p 311). “There’s some overlap between the pleasure-generating systems > 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 61

and pain-dampening systems,” says Berridge. “And it becomes more and more active with repeated exposure. It’s conceivable that for bitterness the same systems are recruited.” So are those young men queuing in the Santa Rosa dawn for their extreme brew just expressing atavistic biological urges? Perhaps. But the speed with which extreme beers have crowded into the drinks market suggests other, shorter-term pressures are also at work. Vinnie Cilurzo, head brewer at Russian River, knows first-hand how fast things have moved. In the mid-1990s, while brewing at his first microbrewery, he was the first to brew a double IPA, a beer with double the hops of the already hoppy American IPA style and considerably more alcohol. Few customers were impressed. “I’m pretty sure we drank most of it ourselves,” he says. Now, though, the double IPA is one of the fastest-growing styles of beer, says Joe Tucker, founder of RateBeer.com. Beers once considered daringly hoppy, such as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Anchor Steam Liberty Ale, two California stalwarts, are now seen by connoisseurs as easy-drinking “session” beers or “gateway” drinks to ease the uninitiated towards bolder brews. An explanation might lie in those words “connoisseur” and “uninitiated”. Beer is not all about nutrition and chemical pleasure, says Zakary Tormala, associate professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California; as the ultimate social drink, it can be a significant medium for selfexpression and social acceptance. There is a prestige factor in liking something that most people don’t, and perhaps even a machismo if it is something we are not primed to like. The hip, overwhelmingly male crowd outside

Russian River suggests that it is this audience the craft beer industry has learned to play to. It might help that craft beer high in alcohol and hoppiness tends to have a higher price tag, too. Hilke Plassman and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena showed in 2007 that people believed wine from a bottle with a $90 price tag tasted better than the same wine poured from a bottle marked $10 – as measured not just by their rating of the wine, but also their brain activity in an fMRI scan (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 1050). Something similar might go on with beer. “When people purchase and consume extreme beers instead of more mainstream options, they signal to others that they have means and are sophisticated,” says Tormala.

“A friend recommended an infamously sour beer with notes of barnyard, horse blanket and wet dog” It is at this point that sociology and biology might converge, says Pelchat. Buying beer from small craft brewers has a cachet to a certain group of consumers – the type who like to avoid big corporations and support the local store instead. Those who buy locally sourced products such as artisan bread or produce from the farmers’ market are likely to consume less pre-packaged, processed food containing indulgent levels of sugar and sodium, both of which block bitter flavours. That means they become more amenable to bitterness in everything they consume. “Thirty or 40 years ago, salad was a piece of

iceberg lettuce,” says Pelchat. “Now it’s a mixture of radicchio and arugula” – two considerably more bitter leaves. This exclusivity theory would square with the fact that, sudden and steep as the rise of extreme beer has been, it remains a minority taste. Pale, fizzy beers such as Budweiser, Miller Lite and Coors Light still dominate the US market. In the end, most of us stick with tastes we find easy to like, perhaps swayed towards the “drinkability” touted on Bud Light’s immense billboards on which virile football players cavort with buxom women. That makes Michael Lewis, professor emeritus of brewing science at the University of California, Davis, worry that the craft beer industry might be manoeuvring itself into a dead end with its emphasis on ever more extreme minority tastes. “I tell them, don’t just make beer for the weirdos who live their life for beer, wearing T-shirts that proclaim their love for beer and spending all their time writing about beer on websites,” he says. “God bless them, but they’re a very tiny market.” Tiny, perhaps, but infinitely pliable. Amir Bramell has been tending the bar at Russian River’s microbrewery for six years and has seen some fascinating demonstrations of the power of extreme beer. He recalls one man who came into the pub to try one of Cilurzo’s infamous sour beers – a brew variously described as containing notes of barnyard, horse blanket and wet dog in a phone booth – at the strong recommendation of a friend. “He hated it, but he came back every day to have another,” says Bramell. “It took him two weeks to really like it. By then he was hooked.” n Lizzie Buchen indulges in benign masochism in the brewpubs of San Francisco

Leaving a bitter taste In bitterness and in alcohol content, the latest US craft brews go way beyond most conventional beers

US Light lager

Standard lager

Premium European lager

UK best bitter

US pale ale

Stout

US extreme IPA

IBU 100+

IBU 7

IBU 11

IBU 23

Bud Light

Budweiser

Heineken Stella Artois

ABV 4.2%

ABV 5%

ABV 5%

IBU - International bitterness unit ABV - Alcohol by volume

IBU 32 Fuller’s London Pride ABV 4.1%

IBU 38

IBU 40

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Guinness

ABV 5.6%

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ABV 4.2%

Russian River Pliny the Younger ABV 11%

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Horror lizards and vomiting vultures are just the start

Attack me if you dare I

N The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams wrote about the “dish of the day”: an animal that wants to be eaten and can say so loudly and clearly, thus circumventing many of the ethical problems associated with meat. Most creatures do not want to be eaten and many go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it. Some defence strategies are well known: fish and birds gather in shoals for safety, possums play dead, bees sting, and skunks spray a liquid so repulsive that humans caught in the blast are almost always reduced to vomiting. Yet all of these are just the tip of a very big, very ingenious and very dangerous iceberg. There is a host of other even more peculiar tricks that animals use to convince their persecutors to pick on someone else.

raymond mendez/animals animals

Taking the point Stabbing a predator with an offensive weapon is a tried and tested defence strategy: thousands of animals and plants are covered with horns, thorns or spines. Nobody who has tried to eat the fruit of the prickly pear – or a hedgehog for that matter – can be under any illusion that they make an easy meal. But what if you don’t have any obvious means of stabbing? At first glance, the 30-centimetre-long sharp-ribbed newt (Pleurodeles waltl) looks innocuous enough, but it carries a secret weapon. Its ribs have sharp tips like spears, and when it is under attack it arches its back and punches them out through its skin. Hey presto: spines. These spines are doubly dangerous, because

If looks could kill: Texas horned lizards shoot jets of poison blood from their eyes

like many of its relatives the sharp-ribbed newt also releases a toxic milky liquid onto its skin. As the spines break through the skin they become coated with venom. Josef Weisgram at the University of Vienna in Austria has studied the newts for several years, and earlier this year he and his team confirmed that the ribs really do break through the skin afresh every time it performs its horrible routine. There are no pores or holes for the ribs to slide smoothly out of (Journal of Zoology, vol 280, p 156). A similar trick is pulled by the hairy frog (Trichobatrachus robustus), a native of Cameroon. It has retractable claws on its back feet rather like a cat’s. The claws are made of bone and are attached to the tip of the frog’s toes by a small piece of collagen. Under normal circumstances the claws are stashed safely inside the frog’s foot – until it comes under attack, at which point it snaps the claws off the toe and thrusts them out through the skin with a strong muscular contraction. If the predator persists, the frog kicks and struggles violently, slashing at its enemy with its improvised claws.

> 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 63

Kaboom!

Eat my tail If a lion had its jaws clamped around your arm, you might willingly sacrifice the limb to escape with your life. It’s a strategy not uncommon in the natural world. Many animals actively shed limbs or tails to save the rest of their skins, a process called autotomy. In many cases, the animal regrows the lost body part afterwards. Lizards and snakes are the best known autotomists but are by no means the most extreme. For some snakes it is almost routine. Spanish ladder snakes (Rhinechis scalaris) can break off their tails by vigorously thrashing and rotating their bodies. A survey published this year in the Journal of Zoology (vol 113, p 269) found that up to 20 per cent of adult ladder snakes were missing a tail. Some lizards take the idea a stage further. They sport brightly coloured tails which continue to thrash around after they have been detached, presumably to distract a predator. The five-lined skink (Plestiodon

fasciatus) is a good example, with an electric blue tail that contrasts vividly with its yellowand-black striped body. Octopuses, crabs and spiders can also shed limbs. But the true champions of selfamputation are sea cucumbers, marrowshaped relatives of starfish that live on the sea floor. When startled they eviscerate themselves by shooting the tubes that make up their respiratory system out of their rear ends (The Journal of Experimental Biology, vol 204, p 849). They may even go the whole hog and expel their digestive tract as well. The tubes are sticky and entangle any would-be predators. It sounds suicidal but the sea cucumber grows them back within weeks.

Bombardier beetles protect themselves with hot, caustic blasts from their rear ends

Chemical warfare is frowned upon in most human societies, but to animals it’s routine. Many species follow the example set by South America’s poison dart frogs and simply load their bodies with deadly poisons. They advertise their lethality with bright colours – yellow and black being a favourite – so that predators know to steer clear. Better still if you can deter predators from a distance, but for that you need ballistics. Four groups of beetle, known collectively as bombardier beetles, have honed this to an art. The beetles have glands in their abdomens which can shoot rapid-fire pulses of hot caustic liquid (pictured, left). Each gland has two chambers, one containing a mixture of hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide, the other various enzymes. When the two are mixed, a series of explosive reactions occur, including the conversion of hydrogen peroxide into oxygen and water. These reactions heat the mixture to boiling point and blast it out of the beetle’s backside with an audible pop. Among the products of the reaction are quinones, which many species find repellent even when cold. The beetles are good shots. The African bombardier beetle (Stenaptinus insignis) can aim in any direction with great precision. Some species have flanges on their abdomens that act as launch guides. The bombardier beetles’ boiling volleys are fearsome weapons, but they are not the most distasteful. That distinction must surely go to the horned lizards, the only vertebrates that shoot their own blood at predators. The Texas horned lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum) relies for protection mostly on camouflage and its spiny skin, but if push comes to shove it can shoot jets of poison blood out of its eyes (the

SatoShi KuribayaShi/nature production/oxford Scientific

”The true champions of self-amputation are sea cucumbers, which can eviscerate themselves” lizard feeds on poisonous ants and accumulates the prey’s toxins in its bloodstream). Formidable as this sounds, it is not entirely effective: the lizards often get eaten by carnivorous mice. Last but not least, one can only admire the entirely unsubtle Turkey vulture (Cathartes aura), which deals with potential predators by vomiting up semi-digested rotten meat. “It is certainly one of the most horrific smells that I have encountered in nature,” says 64 | NewScientist | 25 December 2010/1 January 2011

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in bits of filter paper that smelled of both snake and squirrel than they were in paper that just smelled of squirrel, suggesting that the squirrels’ behaviour really did protect them. Some chipmunks anoint themselves too, and similar behaviour with predator scents has been observed in rats and mice, Clucas says. Clucas and her colleagues have now gone further, trying to work out how this strange behaviour evolved. She points out that many rodents will bite predators, and also groom themselves when stressed. So it seems plausible that an ancestral rodent might have bitten a predator, picking up its scent in the process, and then inadvertently smeared it all over its fur. This could then have evolved into the anointing behaviour seen today.

Kamikaze tactics

No spines? No problem! Just stick your ribs through your skin – they’ll get your point

ecologist Lawrence Igl of the US Geological Survey in Jamestown, North Dakota, who says the trick might either deter the predator, reduce the vulture’s weight allowing it to fly away, or simply provide the predator with an alternative meal.

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Call in the big boys “I’ll set my big brother on you,” and “My dad’s bigger than your dad.” These playground threats have worked for many of us at some point and are surprisingly common in nature. If you can’t fight off a predator yourself, it’s a good idea to summon something else that can. Plants, seemingly so passive, do it all the time. When herbivores start munching on their leaves, plants can release a cocktail of chemicals called green leaf volatiles (GLVs) into the surrounding air. Tobacco plants are particularly sly. When attacked by tobacco hornworm caterpillars, they release GLVs which attract insects called big-eyed bugs, which fly in and chow down on the unfortunate caterpillars (Science, vol 329, p 1075). Single-celled marine animals called dinoflagellates have a cunning twist on this idea. When predators approach, they often start to glow – a strategy that on the face of

it appears suicidal. In some cases the dinoflagellates flash briefly, startling the predator, but others glow continuously. Either way, the predators often retreat (Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, vol 36, p 217). But why? It turns out that the glow attracts other, larger predators which are likely to attack the original predator rather than the dinoflagellate. In effect they pursue a policy of mutually assured destruction: any predator that tries to make a meal out of the dinoflagellate is likely to be eaten itself.

Smell suit When we think of camouflage, it’s usually intricately patterned big cats, or perhaps insects that look like bird droppings. But a squirrel chewing on the sloughed-off skin of a rattlesnake? Yet that is exactly what female California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) do to disguise themselves from their slithering predators. After a good chew on the snakeskin they lick themselves and their pups, anointing all concerned with the rattlesnake’s odour – and it seems to work. In 2006 Barbara Clucas at the University of Washington, Seattle, showed that rattlesnakes were less interested

If things are really desperate, you could always try blowing yourself up. It will do nothing for your own survival prospects – far from it – but it could help your relatives. Suicidal behaviour is often found in social animals that live in closely related groups. Honeybees are a classic example. They sting intruders to save their hive mates even though this usually results in a fatal loss of their insides. Ants also live in colonies, in which many thousands of sterile workers support a single breeding queen. Several species of social ants go in for explosive suicide, and the carpenter ant (Camponotus cylindricus) is one of the worst. Workers have massively enlarged glands running down the length of their body. When they are attacked these burst open, spraying opponents with sticky goo. The gloopy liquid slows the attackers and sticks their mandibles together. It is also laced with irritating and corrosive chemicals (Journal of Chemical Ecology, vol 30, p 1479). The detonated worker usually dies, but the colony has been protected. Termites have also got in on the act. Globitermes sulphureus lives in south Asia, where its soldiers are known as kamikaze termites. They have large salivary glands which produce a yellow liquid that rapidly congeals and entangles intruders (Insectes Sociaux, vol 44, p 289). If the soldiers are particularly overexcited, they go into violent contractions and burst their body walls, spraying opponents with the fluid. n Michael Marshall protects himself by squirting poison blood from his eyes 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 65

there’s a party going on inside the stiltons and camemberts

Alive, alive o!

The curds undergo various cycles of fermentation, pressing and maturation, or “ripening”. Now the ecology starts to get interesting. Further cultures of bacteria or mould spores may be added, or other microbes floating around the creamery can get in on the act, helping to make the cheese so characteristic — Roquefort, for example, can only be ripened in certain caves in France. Mould-ripened cheeses such as Brie have the spores sprayed on, while washed-rind cheeses are bathed in liquids such as brine or brandy to encourage particular microbes. Cheese-makers today range from artisan craftspeople working out of their kitchens to big businesses. Yet even in large creameries,

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L

OOK, I don’t want to put you off your festive food. But before tucking in, there’s something you should know: it’s not dead. At least, not all of it. Perched amid the tinsel, creatures are busily thriving, eating and reproducing. They are in the cheese. In many houses the family feasts so common at this time of year are accompanied by a spread of the finest fermented dairy products that money can buy. No one who has caught a whiff of an over-ripe Stinking Bishop – once voted the UK’s smelliest cheese – will be surprised to learn that cheeses are home to microbes. But new technologies have allowed us to take a closer look at the startlingly complex lives of the bacteria, yeast and moulds within. “Cheese is a veritable ecosystem,” says Marie-Christine Montel, a microbiologist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Aurillac. So it is no surprise that microbiologists are trying to improve cheese-making. They want to make fermentation more consistent and reliable, to eliminate cases of food poisoning and to help develop ever finer, tastier cheeses. These efforts are not always appreciated by traditional cheese-makers, however. “Dairy scientists have come from the factory culture and they haven’t understood the benefits of the artisan system,” says Randolph Hodgson, who founded the Specialist Cheesemakers Association in the UK. Cheese-making has been practised for thousands of years, perhaps starting when herders stored milk in bags made from animals’ stomachs and found it created a tasty protein-based snack with a longer shelf-life than fresh milk. An enzyme called rennet, from the stomachs of mammals, causes the milk proteins to clump together into curds, leaving behind a watery liquid called whey. The curdling is helped along by bacteria that

turn milk sugars into lactic acid. Traditionally, these bacteria were naturally present in the milk or hanging around the cheese-making equipment. These days most cheese is made from milk that has been heat-treated, or pasteurised, to kill any harmful bacteria, and then mixed with starter cultures of carefully selected “good” bacteria. Raw milk is still used for some artisan cheeses, leading to more complex flavours, according to aficionados.

cheese-making is often as much an art as a science, with results that are inherently variable and occasionally unpredictable. Why so? The milk can vary depending on the cows’ health and their pasture. The wrong microbes might get in, or the right ones fail to, sometimes leading to catastrophe. Occasionally a batch of Stilton, for example, fails to develop its blue veins. According to Eric Spinnler, at INRA’s AgroParisTech

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research institute, cheese-making needs to move “across the border between know-how and science. At the moment, it’s a lot of knowhow still.” In the last decade, however, new techniques usually associated with medical research, such as DNA sequencing and proteomics, have been used to study the cheese ecosystem. Spinnler and his colleagues have just sequenced the genome of Arthrobacter arilaitensis, a bacterium found in nearly every washed-rind cheese. They found the bacterium makes compounds that snatch iron from its environment; as most bacteria need iron, this kills off rival species (PLoS ONE, vol 5, e15489). Other bacteria have developed the

or the least number of genes that can support life – the French team want to know the least number of species that can support a cheese. They chose Livarot, a washed-rind cheese renowned for its strong smell, redolent of a farmyard. The team found it contains 82 strains of bacteria, yeast and mould. Through progressive rounds of testing, they whittled the ecosystem down to 10 strains that still resulted in the same familiar Livarot (Journal of Dairy Science, vol 88, p 1671). After defining the “minimal ecosystem” they could pick it apart by removing strains one at a time. Taking out one of the yeasts, for example, resulted in the loss of some of the bacteria. This is partly because the yeast

The team began by using DNA sequencing to take a census of all the bacteria in a Stilton, before analysing slices of the cheese to see what lived where (Applied and Environmental Microbiology, vol 69, p 3540). They found that different bacteria colonised the veins than did the white core, while one species, Lactobacillus plantarum, lived only under the rind. “We know there’s a flavour difference in each of the sections,” says Dodd. “The different flora must be contributing to that flavour.” Flavour aside, the other main driver is food safety. Cheese can contain bacteria that cause listeriosis (Listeria monocytogenes) and other forms of food poisoning (Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli); one study found

”Dairy scientists come from the factory culture and they don’t understand the artisan system”

A Stilton cheese is seen as an essential component of the Christmas dinner by some in the UK

ability to metabolise fatty acids, which are toxic to many other species. Meanwhile, Spinnler’s colleague Françoise Irlinger and her team have stripped down the ecosystem of a cheese to its bare essentials. In a project reminiscent of the way US geneticist Craig Venter is defining the minimal genome –

reduces the acidity of the cheese’s surface, allowing acid-sensitive bacteria to flourish. Christine Dodd, a food microbiologist at the University of Nottingham in the UK has been dissecting what is sometimes called the “king of cheeses” – the Stilton. This English cheese has a distinct architecture: a rind and a creamy white interior criss-crossed with blue veins produced by the Penicillium roqueforti mould.

that 2 per cent of cheeses sold in the UK have bacterial counts that breach European regulations, often because of poor shop storage (Food Microbiology, vol 25, p 304). The riskiest products are thought to be those made from raw milk. Even if milk is pasteurised, listeria bacteria occasionally set up home if the cheese is one of the less acidic types, mainly the soft, mould-ripened ones such as Brie and Stilton. That is why raw-milk and soft cheeses are off-limits to those with weak immune systems and pregnant women. Despite his reservations about dairy scientists, Hodgson hopes their work will have at least one benefit: improving confidence in the safety of raw-milk cheeses. “This could help us understand why there are so few cases of food poisoning from raw-milk cheese when theory says it should be far more problematic.” Montel’s team, for example, have shown that the traditional French wood barrel, or gerle, used to make AOP Salers cheese, is coated with a biofilm of good bacteria that keeps out harmful ones. Other teams are studying “bacteriocins” – molecules made by bacteria to kill off their competitors. Could further study of artisan cheeses risk the loss of their mystique? Montel thinks not for the time being. “The complexity and magic of our raw-milk cheeses are at the heart of our activities,” she says, “but we are still a long way from revealing all the secrets.” n Claire Ainsworth thinks Stinking Bishop smells quite nice actually 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 67

The roast of Christmas future Fans of traditional festive food, look away now

W

ITH Christmas lunch 2050 just days away, the truly exciting news is that, after an absence of more than 20 years, old-fashioned turkey is back on the table – sort of. Superficially the menu appears remarkably similar to that of 2010. But peek under the foil and it is wildly different in its composition and origin. Our food has been entirely transformed over the past 40 years and, looking back, it has been quite a ride. Perhaps in 2010 we were in denial. We didn’t want to see the trouble brewing as rocketing populations and increasing demand for biofuels put a strain on farmland and water supplies. In retrospect, fast-rising food prices, water wars and bread riots were inevitable. But so, too, was a technological fix. Bioengineers may not have been popular before then, but they certainly got us out of a hole. Within years, genetic modification had increased crop yields by 50 per cent and created plants that were resistant to drought and pests, as well as being high in vitamins and minerals and able to produce their own nitrogen, so that they needed less fertiliser. Inevitably, though, biodiversity suffered. So did consumers, as multinationals gained ever more economic and geopolitical control.

Feast to famine Christmas dinner 2020 marked the arrival of the gargantuan genetically engineered MegaJuicyTurkey™. It was a high-water mark for carnivores and a nadir for animal-lovers. But as the 2020s progressed, meat became increasingly unaffordable as demand outstripped supply and taxes on greenhouse gas emissions turned beef and lamb into luxury items. Kangaroo farming eased the pressure a little, and for a time this lowmethane critter was hopping off supermarket shelves. But Joey didn’t plug the gap for long. As the Earth’s population passed 8 billion 68 | NewScientist | 25 December 2010/1 January 2011

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from an unlikely source: insects. Major food companies began selling grasshopper burgers and mopane-worm mince in place of meat. The idea was a no-brainer. Insects are highly efficient at transforming plant matter into edible protein, with a protein output to energy input ratio of 1:4, compared with a dismal 1:54 for cattle. Westerners were squeamish at first, but when the price of a real beef Big Mac™ hit £100, reconstituted insect protein Bug Macs™ at £10 apiece started tasting a whole lot better. The burden on the world’s land, grain and water resources finally began to ease, with everyone wondering why it had taken so long. Christmas 2040 was a surprisingly healthy affair. The craze for low-fat roasted locusts was at its peak and sugar consumption had been eradicated. Instead, we were all eating desserts

and demand for meat kept growing, the vast amount of grain needed to feed livestock put an intolerable strain on food resources. Change eventually came when western governments ran low on money and revoked farming subsidies, finally allowing the developing world to compete fairly. Unfortunately, food prices at the checkout tripled to reflect real production costs. Pragmatic vegetarianism became widespread and food waste in western countries dropped from around one-third to 10 per cent, yet billions of people still went hungry. The world was in full food crisis. When a solution arrived in 2030, it came

CHRISTMAS DINNER 2050 STARTER Smoked jellyfish and mega-salmon with synbio crème fraiche A provocatively textured brace of seafoods, served with a glow-past-itsuse-by-date creamy dressing MAIN COURSE Cruelty-free Turk-Ish™ with all the trimmings Succulent, bone-free synthetic turkey created using the latest artificial Meatmaker™ and 3D food printer technology, stuffed with insect-based sausage-alike and served with rashers of low-methane kangaroo and vegetable-oil-composite bacon High-flatulence comedy Brussels sprouts Genetically modified to torment grandad by packing more indigestible sugars than usual Potatoes and parsnips Crispy roasted, hydroponically grown

Ben Kirchner

DESSERT Traditional plum pudding Dark and moist, made with genetically modified high-yield wheat, natural monatin for sweetness, anti-allergy nuts and plump Alaskan raisins

and confectioneries made with intensely sweet plant extracts such as monatin, thaumatin and stevia, which offer far more taste per calorie. This was also the year synbio made its first appearance. Products laced with synthetic bacteria that turn bright blue to indicate spoilage hit the shelves, and health foods containing microbes that make nutritional supplements were created. A few years later, living gut sensors finally arrived, allowing consumers to diagnose nutritional deficiencies simply by looking at the colour and brightness of their stools. By the beginning of the 2040s most fish stocks had collapsed. Jellyfish, however, remained cheap and plentiful, and it became increasingly popular as celebrity chefs battled to find ways to make it palatable. Meanwhile, advances in fish farming allowed the production of cloned whale-like mega-salmon, mega-scallops and terrifying mega-lobsters. In addition, artificial meat finally took off. Although lab-grown meat was first produced in 2000, it wasn’t until 2042 that the first pack of Mince-alike™ was sold. It had an

”Preparation is simplicity itself. Just put your insectprotein powder cartridges into the Meatmaker” authentic beefy taste but a slurry-like texture. Nevertheless, “meat” was once again available at an affordable price. The past decade has seen some exciting advances in food technology, culminating in the new-look Turk-Ish™. I’ll be honest: it doesn’t taste quite like the real thing, but it is cheap at £150 for an eight-person serving compared with £800 for a real squawker. And the preparation is simplicity itself. Just put your insect-protein powder cartridges into the Meatmaker™, set the program to “turkey” and leave it overnight. In the morning you will have a ready-denatured protein mass. Take it out of the mould, pop it in a 3D Protein Printer to add the crispy skin and voila! Dinner. So there you have it, a traditional Christmas bird, after a fashion. It comes leathery and overcooked, just like granny used to make it. Which might leave you wondering, as you sit down to watch World President Lady Gaga give her festive address, why you didn’t just stick with roasted locusts. n Stefan Gates has more to say about food at thegastronaut.com 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 69

the shopper inside us all just loves those annoying Christmas tunes, says acoustician Trevor Cox

Jingle hells

investigative deerstalker and find out. On an anecdotal level, there is ample evidence to suggest that manipulating people’s acoustic environment influences their behaviour. Strangely, though, the most widely reported examples are where aural cues are used to discourage people from doing something undesirable. Take the Mosquito, a teenager deterrent. The brainchild of British inventor Howard Stapleton, it exploits the sad yet inescapable truth that as we age, our sensitivity to sound, and particularly highpitched sound, decreases. By emitting a highpitched whine at around 17,400 hertz, it creates an acoustic environment that is acutely uncomfortable for loitering teenagers yet perfectly acceptable to well-behaved adults. That makes it a highly controversial

andy smith

I

T IS dark and drizzly as I trudge around Manchester’s city centre on my annual pilgrimage for Christmas presents. The northern English weather, coupled with a distinct lack of inspiration, is not exactly enhancing my festive spirit. Nor is the music blaring from the shop fronts. Two shop managers seem to be engaged in a competitive restaging of the glam-rock battle for glory at the top of the 1973 UK Christmas charts. To my left, Wizzard with I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day. As if. To my right, Slade with Merry Xmas Everybody. Bah humbug. This Scrooge cuts his losses and heads for home. There I begin to wonder whether I am alone in my aversion to festive background music. Gratifyingly, a brief web search suggests that I have at least one ally in Gottfried Rieser, spokesman for the Austrian trade union GPA-djp. In 2003, he claimed that some of his members felt “terrorised” by the seasonal musical bombardment, singling out Jingle Bells as apt to “arouse aggressive feelings”. Some UK parliamentarians are on side, too. A House of Commons motion which read “This House notes the increasingly offensive playing of Christmas music in shops from October; and calls on all responsible retailers to show some taste and restraint and to limit their playing of such muzak to the month of December only” attracted the signature of 24 MPs in 2003. That did not have much of an effect. Retailers care about their bottom line, so they presumably have good reason to believe that, for most of us, festive tunes will send our spirits soaring, make us linger longer and pile our baskets high with expensive goodies. Or do they? Time to swap my Santa hat for my

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technology, says my colleague Andrew Wootton of the University of Salford’s Design Against Crime Solution Centre. “It is seen as being quite Orwellian, and has been flagged up as infringing human rights,” he says. It is also a rare example where there is a good physiological reason for believing an acoustic conditioning technique is effective. Can background music have a more subtle, psychological effect based not on hearing acuity, but fashion and taste? The use in the UK and Australia of easy-listening music to disperse teenagers – unkindly dubbed the “Manilow method” – is backed by some circumstantial evidence that it does work. In 2007, the Co-op supermarket chain in the UK experimented with playing classical music outside 105 of its stores, and reported a 70 per

cent drop in petty crime. Train stations on the London Underground have played Mozart to discourage loitering by disaffected youth, and the use of classical music as a sonic deterrent now appears in official UK government advice to small businesses. “It is seen as a softer way of dispersing teenagers and more acceptable than the Mosquito,” says Wootton. Hard evidence to back up those claims seems thin on the ground, but never mind – they support my thesis splendidly. Play people music they don’t like, and it’s a sure way to have them scuttling for the exit. As I rifle through the literature, though, things become more complicated. No one seems to have investigated the psychological damage or otherwise wreaked by Christmas schmaltz, but a steady trickle of scientific

studies over the past few decades has shown how certain aspects of music can influence our psyches in all sorts of contexts (see “Sound FX”, page 72). As far as consumer behaviour is concerned, musical tempo seems to have a definite effect. In a classic study in 1982, Ronald Milliman of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green showed that supermarket shoppers stayed longer and spent 38 per cent more money when slow background music was on than when faster tunes were playing (Journal of Marketing, vol 46, p 86). Studies since then have confirmed similar effects in restaurants and bars. Even the number of bites per minute taken by diners in a university cafeteria appears to be influenced by the tempo of the ambient music (Bulletin of the Psychometric Society, vol 23, p 221). Musical genre also seems to have surprising powers of suggestion. Over a two-week period in 1998, Adrian North and his colleagues at the University of Leicester, UK, played French and German music on alternate days in a local supermarket displaying French and German wines. On the days when French accordion music was playing, French wines outsold German wines by a factor of 5 to 1; when German oompah music was playing, German

”Jingle Bells was singled out as apt to ‘arouse aggressive feelings’ among shop workers” wines outsold French wines by 2 to 1 ( Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 84, p 271). Sometimes subconscious associations seem to appeal to a near-synaesthetic sense in all of us. In 2009, for example, Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence of the University of Oxford investigated the mental connections we make between different tastes and sounds of varying pitch. Sweet and sour tastes consistently bring high-pitched notes to our minds, whereas bitter tastes tend to be associated with low-pitched brass and woodwind sounds (Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, vol 72, p 1994). On the strength of that research, the UK division of Starbucks commissioned a special piece of ambient, low-pitched coffee-drinking music to put its customers in a receptive mood. All in all, the evidence seems to indicate that background music has merit from a retailer’s perspective. In 2006, Francine Garlin and Katherine Owen of the University of > 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 71

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Ho ho ho... but is festive music all fun?

Technology in Sydney, Australia, conducted a meta-analysis of 32 studies investigating its effects on consumer behaviour. They concluded that background music had “small-to-moderate, yet quite robust effects… [on] value returns, behaviour duration and affective response” (Journal of Business Research, vol 59, p 755). Humans can be fickle, though, and there is much we do not know about our responses to acoustic conditioning, says North, who is now a psychologist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. “It isn’t as though anyone has

sent someone shopping with an electrode in the brain or similar,” he says. What we can say with reasonable certainty is that shopkeepers should be careful in their choice of music. “If you are trying to make people feel festive, sure, pick Christmas music, but don’t pick music which makes already crowded premises feel even more frantic,” says North. “It is about picking the right music to achieve the right effect.” So does that give shops carte blanche for blanket White Christmas? That might not be a bad tactic, suggests my University of

Salford colleague Bill Davies, who investigates soundscapes. Hearing evolved as an early warning system, alerting us to threats, so as with any new noise we are instantly aware of changes to background music. “While the brain has a powerful ability to get used to constant noise, music has so much information in it that it is harder to habituate to,” he says. To prevent cognitive overload, shopkeepers might be better off limiting themselves to quieter, less frenzied tunes that we can more easily ignore. But they shouldn’t feel they have to. Davies has investigated the soundscape of Oxford Street in London, which has become a byword for pre-Christmas shopping mayhem. “Some participants cited Oxford Street as a positive soundscape because they liked the hustle and bustle while shopping, but they also appreciated being able to control their noise exposure by escaping down the quiet side streets,” he says. Amen to that. And for the ultimate in controlled noise exposure, I’m off to do some internet shopping. But first, a little bit of background music to put me in the mood… n Trevor Cox is hoping for a silent night in the acoustics research centre at the University of Salford, Uk

SoUNd FX Nellie the traiNiNg aid Heart-attack victims in the UK who are revived using cardiopulmonary resuscitation should not be surprised to come round to the hummed tune of Ralph Butler and Peter Hart’s 1956 children’s classic Nellie the Elephant. Its solid rhythm and tempo of around 100 beats a minute have led to its use as an aid in teaching hospitals to regularise the rate of chest compression during CPR. This is a classic example of the phenomenon of “entrainment”, in which oscillations in our brain change to match the rhythm of the music we are listening to and the body is prompted to move in time to the beat. In this case, the results are perhaps not entirely helpful. In 2009, Malcolm Woollard and his colleagues at the University of

Coventry, UK, showed that listening to Nellie the Elephant got significantly more paramedics delivering compressions at the right speed, but it also led them to push more shallowly. They recommended that the use of the song as a learning aid should be discontinued (BMJ, =vol 339, p b4707).

Careless musiC Costs lives What music should accompany you on a long car journey? It might be down to more than just personal taste, says Warren Brodsky at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel. If you want to arrive, you should choose slower-paced tunes. Brodsky put 28 students through their paces on a driving simulator while listening to music of different

tempos. With faster-paced music, he found, the subjects were significantly more likely to take risks by jumping red lights, for example. The reason usually given for such effects is that drivers are distracted by the pumping beat, but that is probably an oversimplification, says Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. For example, drivers feeling drowsy on long drives might turn up the beats to keep awake. “But if you need music to keep you awake, you probably should not be driving in the first place,” he points out.

milkiNg it We might like to think we are uniquely cultured, but evidence from the cattle stall suggests we humans are not the only animals to respond to

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music. Country music – what else? – has been shown to be more effective in encouraging cattle to enter the milking parlour but, once the cows are inside, their milk yields are best improved by playing them soothing classical music. Similarly, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik increased growth and improved carcass and fatty acid composition in common carp, while middle-of-the-road classical music reduced stressinduced behaviour such as pacing and weaving in zoo-housed Asian elephants. Quite what the animals are responding to – whether a masking effect to other extraneous noise, or an enriching neurophysiological effect – remains unclear (Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol 118, p 1).

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Big bird The domestic turkey has come a long way

Dan Saelinger/CorbiS

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TUFFED and trussed and served with gravy and all the trimmings, for many of us turkey is synonymous with the holidays. At Christmas (and Thanksgiving), families across much of the western world consider that all-important question: white meat or brown? Few, however, will have wondered how a bird with an impeccable pedigree has been transformed into the avian monstrosity at the centre of their festive feasts. For hundreds of years, turkeys were revered in their native North America: the Aztecs deified them, the Mayans sacrificed them in petitions for water, and they feature in the origin myths of the Zuni people. This reverence was well deserved. Wild turkeys are majestic creatures with spectacular plumage. They also have keen eyesight and hearing, are fleet of foot and can fly at speeds of over 80 kilometres an hour. It is hard to believe that the Christmasdinner favourite originates from the same stock. A lumbering 20-kilogram gobbler is twice the size of its largest wild relative – too heavy to fly, or even to mate. How did the turkey go from venerated bird to musclebound foodstuff? Today the wild turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, is native to much of the eastern and southwestern US and Mexico, and falls into six distinct subspecies (see map, page 74). Exactly when it was domesticated is a mystery, but we know that the pre-Aztec residents of what is now southern Mexico reared turkeys, and by 250 BC the birds were an important resource for the indigenous people of the south-west of North America. Until recently it had been widely assumed that these Native Americans acquired domestic turkeys from the ancient people of Mesoamerica. Earlier this year, Camilla Speller and colleagues at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, showed otherwise. By analysing DNA from ancient turkey bones and fossilised turkey > 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 73

Commercially bred gobblers can be twice the size of wild turkeys

BETHANY CLARKE/PIN

droppings, they found that the turkeys reared in what is now the US Southwest were genetically distinct from their Mexican counterpart to the south. Clearly the two had separate origins. Where did the more northerly variety come from? We still have little idea, but we do know they weren’t local. A second DNA comparison, this time involving the eastern and Rio Grande wild turkeys, the subspecies that now live in the region, also revealed a high degree of genetic difference (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 107, p 2807). Speller, now at the University of Calgary in Alberta, is still trying to pin down the origin of the more northerly turkeys. What is clear is that they were bred intensively: she found that the domestic birds were inbred, and were probably descended from a small founder population. As local breeding efforts took off, birds from that single stock appear to have been traded among the various Pueblo groups in the region. Meanwhile, the archaeological evidence leaves no doubt that these birds were highly valued. Bone markings left by butchery and cooking indicate that turkey was on the menu by about AD 1000. Before that, however, the bird’s hottest commodity was its feathers. “We know from ethnographic records that feathers

were used to make robes and blankets,” says Speller. “Turkey feathers were also used in rituals and on prayer sticks. Sometimes we even see turkey interred with human burials.” Another new study throws more light on pre-Columbian turkey farming in the region. Archaeologist Brooklynne Fothergill at the University of Leicester, UK, has been looking at old turkey bones – particularly at signs of disease and patterns of injury – to find out about the people who reared the birds.

Where the wild things roam There are six distinct subspecies of North American wild turkey but all domestic birds are descended from the now endangered Southern Mexican turkey

Examining collections of turkey bones dating from after 1150, unearthed in the US Southwest, she found several birds had suffered a fracture in the middle of one of the wing bones, the ulna, something she says is “extremely unlikely to occur” during normal activity. She suspects human keepers inflicted the injuries to prevent their turkeys escaping – a possible early version of the modern poultrykeeping practice of pinioning, in which part of the wing is surgically removed to keep the birds grounded. Fothergill is also intrigued by a leg bone from Utah that dates from around 1250, which was broken mid-shaft and healed without any sign of infection. She notes that the injured bird is unlikely to have survived without human help. “Whether this was a turkey that was destined to provide feathers or to be food, either way, it wasn’t just discarded,” she says. “Somebody cared enough to look after it.” The indigenous people may have lovingly tended their birds, but ultimately this branch of the turkey family tree was doomed. Eventually the Spanish arrived, the local cultures were heavily repressed, and the domestic turkey native to what is now the American Southwest went the way of the dodo.

Discarded bones Southern Mexican turkey Eastern wild turkey Osceola wild turkey Rio Grande wild turkey Merriam’s wild turkey Gould’s wild turkey Hybrid wild turkey

Fortunately for lovers of the big-breasted Christmas entrée, the domestic turkey lived on in southern Mexico. Turkey bones from as early as 800 BC have been unearthed in archaeological digs there, but it is not clear whether the birds had been domesticated by that point. The problem is that the early domestic turkey so closely resembled the local subspecies of wild turkey from which it

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descended that it is difficult to tell whether these ancient turkey bones come from domesticated birds or wild ones. AD 180 or thereabouts is the earliest date that we can place domestic turkeys in southern Mexico, using clear evidence of domestication such as plentiful turkey droppings and eggshells inside human settlements. Still, there is no doubt that the Mexican domestic turkey was the forebear of the modern variety. European explorers arrived in Mesoamerica to find bedraggled birds that were clearly being raised for their feathers. “Spanish records describe these really ragged-looking turkeys that had been recently plucked,” says Fothergill. Despite the birds’ bedraggled appearance, the Spanish found turkey very much to their taste, and by 1520 they had brought the bird home with them. It was a big hit. “The turkey took Europe by storm,” Fothergill says. “It was easier to raise than peacock. It looked very nice on the dinner table. You could impress people with it.” Even so, the European domestic variety maxed out at about 10 kilograms – considerably less meaty than the bird slaughtered for the table today. It was the plumage that breeders were initially more interested in. They busied themselves creating breeds with different colour traits, says Kent Reed at the University of Minnesota in St Paul. The gradual transformation of the domestic turkey continued over the next two centuries, but the birds never reached anything like the huge proportions of today’s 20-kilo-plus broad-breasted whites. It wasn’t until the mid to late 1950s that turkeys “really went commercial”, says Reed, and began to be bred with industrial-scale production in mind. In the half-century since, we have managed to turn M. gallopavo into a feathered monster with shortened legs and a grossly oversized breast. And it doesn’t just grow big – it also grows quickly. In 1960, a typical 6-month-old turkey weighed in at around 11 kilos. Today, a commercially reared turkey of the same age can be double that weight. Some males, or toms, can swell to as much as 30 kilos and, although females are generally quite a bit smaller, they too dwarf their wild relatives. The unnatural girth comes at a cost. Males can no longer mount their mates without crushing them, so commercial turkeys have to be bred by artificial insemination. The birds are also much too heavy to fly.

That is good news for lovers of white meat. The well-exercised breast muscles of wild turkeys are naturally dark. Working muscles need oxygen for fuel, and heavily used muscles contain more of the protein myoglobin, which binds to oxygen. The domestic turkey’s oversized, underused breast contains little myoglobin and is therefore snowy white. It also has a sweet and delicate taste, whereas the wild bird has a strong, gamey flavour.

”The well-exercised breast muscles of wild turkeys are naturally dark with a gamey flavour”

By selecting for characteristics such as size or rapid growth, commercial breeders have tried to steer turkey evolution one trait at a time. A more sophisticated, high-tech approach should become feasible with the publication of the domestic turkey genome earlier this year (PLoS Biology, vol 8, p e1000475). The turkey is only the third bird to have its genome sequenced, after the chicken and the zebra finch. Adding this extra avian to the mix will help scientists better understand bird biology, says Rami Dalloul at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg who, along with Reed, was involved in the project. The turkey was an obvious species to choose, he says: it is an important livestock species, and turkey consumption has tripled in the past 25 years. So far, genetic comparisons indicate that domestic turkeys remain closely related to wild ones. But there seem to be important variations in some genes associated with the functioning of the immune system. “We’re pretty sure there are major differences when it comes to disease resistance,” says Dalloul. Domestic turkeys are very susceptible to aflatoxins, for instance – poisons produced by fungi that grow on corn and other crops, which are deadly at high doses and have been linked to cancer at low doses. With the genome to hand it may now be possible to pinpoint the genes that make wild turkeys more resistant. Such insights would be of great value to turkey producers. So too will the work of Dalloul’s group, which is searching turkey DNA for single base-pair changes linked with particular physical traits or disease susceptibility. By screening for these, breeders could select for birds that have good commercial characteristics such as tender meat or high egg yield, while simultaneously improving disease resistance and health. It is too soon to say how modern genetic techniques will change the turkey, but it is not too late to appreciate this extraordinary bird for what it has already become. Although it may seem to have fallen far since its days as an Aztec god, perhaps the turkey’s makeover has created a truly modern icon. After all, it possesses many of the attributes we most admire in a bird. And even if the modern commercially bred variety lacks some of the allure of its wild cousins, at this time of year, every turkey at least gets its 15 minutes of fame. n Kirsten Weir reveres her turkey when it’s served with plenty of stuffing 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 75

Bambi bites back Something strange is moving in the woods

C

“

EASE fire,” someone shouts. movements that are truly lifelike is to create “Put down your weapon!” decoys which can be controlled remotely. It’s early morning in northern Wolslegel has plans to build animals that even Wisconsin, two weeks before the start of appear to breathe. Yet whatever electronics he the deer hunting season. A white-tailed deer installs, he has to assemble the decoys so that standing at the edge of a misty field has just every component is easy to replace. After all, been struck by a bullet. Two police officers he says, taking a bullet or two is part of the job. emerge from hiding and carefully approach Each year, tens of millions of animals are a pickup truck parked on a track nearby. A rifle shot legally by hunters in the US. Yet for each barrel protruding from the window is replaced one legally hunted, at least one more is poached, by a pair of raised hands. It has been a long according to the Wildlife Land Trust, a wait but the officers’ patience has paid off. conservation charity based in Washington DC. Stings like this are the most reliable way Poachers may be after trophies or meat. Some to catch poachers red-handed. Yet even when plan to profit from the market for animal they are successful, wildlife often pays the parts, such as black bear gall bladders used as ultimate price: police can only pounce when health remedies in Asia. Others simply want to a crime has been committed and an animal save on fees for licences and permits, or crave has been shot. However, here in Wisconsin, the deer is standing calmly in the long grass, ”One hunter was so flicking its tail as if nothing had happened. surprised that he put a This is no normal animal. It is the creation of Brian Wolslegel, a taxidermist and selfbullet through the door taught engineer from Mosinee, Wisconsin. of his own pickup truck” Wolslegel works with conservation organisations and US law enforcement agencies to snare illegal hunters using robotic the excitement of the hunt and the challenge decoys made from real animal parts with of outsmarting game wardens and police. electronics hidden inside. His mechanical Escaping the law isn’t too difficult, and menagerie includes everything from wild in many states illegal hunting is on the rise. turkey to giant elk, all cunningly designed Wildlife agencies have huge areas to monitor: to flick their tails, peck or graze for food, and in California, for example, just 230 wardens even move through the undergrowth. It’s patrol some 4 million hectares, and poaching taxidermy with a touch of Terminator. in the state rose 270 per cent between 2003 Wildlife officers and conservation workers and 2007. According to the Humane Society install these ersatz animals in places known to of the United States, at least 19 out of 20 attract poachers or out-of-season hunters and, poaching crimes are never solved. with video cameras rolling, they sit back and So police and law enforcement agencies wait. When a hunter takes the bait and opens have begun to strike back by tempting hunters fire, the agents pounce. with realistic decoy animals. Some use plastic To fool experienced hunters, these robots models that only fool hunters from a distance. must behave like the real thing. Rather Others deploy more realistic stuffed animals. than relying on pre-programmed motion, According to Tom Stoner of the New York State Wolslegel has found that the best way to make Department of Environmental Conservation,

the most effective way to catch poachers is one of Wolslegel’s half animal-half machine decoys. Wolslegel began making his creatures after a chance meeting in the 1990s. He was busy at his taxidermy bench when a game warden came into the workshop and asked if he could make a stuffed animal move. With no training in engineering, Wolslegel’s first attempt was crude: he tied fishing line to a deer’s ear to make it twitch. Since then he says he has refined his technique “mostly by trial and error”. Wolslegel’s procedure begins like normal taxidermy. He takes a cleaned animal skin – either donated or confiscated – and stitches it onto a hollow polyurethane or fibreglass form. Once the skin has dried, he separates the animal’s head, tail or limbs and reattaches

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them to the body using servo motors like those found in remote-controlled cars. He then mounts other electronics, including controllers, battery packs and receivers, inside the animal in places that are not usually hit by bullets, such as the legs. His robotic zoo includes deer, antelope, elk, wild pigs, turkey, coyote, moose and bears. While some used indoors at nature centres follow pre-programmed routines or include sensors that respond to nearby movements, his outdoor decoys are operated remotely. Wolslegel is also testing a pressurised CO2 cartridge system that he plans to install inside an animal’s head to create regular puffs of vapour, which on cold days will resemble breathing. He even adds artificial eyes designed to reflect light just

like the real things. Poachers often use these reflections to locate their prey at night. Deer are Wolslegel’s most popular robots. Each one weighs about 10 kilograms and can feature a rotating head, legs that lift, and a twitching tail or ears. Wolslegel bases these movements on those of real animals he observes during his own hunting trips. Some are also mounted on rails, so they can be moved back and forth under remote control. This plethora of equipment means the decoys don’t come cheap. A deer costs around $1400, for example, but the investment is worthwhile. A single robot can earn wildlife law enforcement agencies around $30,000 in fines every year. A typical poaching sting takes place outside the hunting season or legal hunting

hours, or with the decoy on private property. At least four officers are involved: one to work the decoy, one to film any incidents, and two or more to apprehend the offender. The officers take pains to stack the odds in their favour. “We try to place it so that no matter who shoots it, it’s illegal,” says Jeff Darrah, an officer for the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks department. The ideal location is also visible from a road, since poaching is often a spur-of-the-moment thing. According to Darrah, a lot of the people he catches don’t leave home thinking they are going to poach an animal. “All they have to do is see that tail move,” he says. Apprehending a lawbreaker can be nerveracking, Darrah admits. Sometimes an offender tries to flee. Stings can also turn to farce. One hapless poacher was so trophyhungry he continued to pump bullets into a robotic deer even after officers told him to stop. Another was so surprised when the officers appeared that he put a bullet through the door of his own pickup. Darrah also recalls using a fake elk to catch a poacher, then having to talk a second overexcited hunter out of blasting the decoy while trying to issue a ticket to the first. “I said, ‘Do you really think that’s a real elk?’” The man even ran back to his truck and put on his orange safety vest. But the most common reaction is humiliation. “People are shocked that they did what they did, and embarrassed that they were duped,” says Darrah. “They don’t want their buddies to find out.” As for the decoys, a lifespan of three to four years is average. The damage they sustain depends on lawbreakers’ marksmanship, of course. Wolslegel tried housing the electronics in protective steel cases, but found that bullets from high-power hunting rifles tend to ricochet off the metal and destroy the entire animal. Without armour, bullets pass straight through and this helps keep repair costs low. According to Darrah, the decoys have proved extremely successful. In some areas even legal hunters have started to think twice before pulling the trigger, he says. Meanwhile, Wolslegel is looking to try his hand at new animal automatons designed to help rare species that are on the edge of extinction. In particular, Wolslegel would dearly love to see his decoys among big game herds on the plains of Africa. Imagine breathing life into a robotic rhino or electric elephant, he says. “Wouldn’t that be amazing?” n Julian Smith has only ever stalked fish 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 77

CULTURELAB

Futures that never happened For our 2010 flash fiction competition, we asked for very short stories set in worlds where long-dismissed scientific theories turned out to be true after all. Best-selling author Neil Gaiman picked the winners

WINNER: atomIc DREamS By Jérôme Cigut, UK NY times, 1937

Tesla Presents Nuclear Engine The famous inventor yesterday unveiled the machine on which he had been working reclusively for the past 10 years: a functioning heat engine, based not on combustion but on recently discovered atomic reactions. “All it took was some plumbing skills,” the inventor said, modestly. Washington Post, 1943

Japan Surrenders! …Oil-starved, the Japanese navy was unable to keep pace with the US’s nuclear ships… Detroit free Press, 1953

Spectacular Advance! Ford Unveils Atom-Fuelled Car! “...With our new model ‘A’, you will never have to go to the gas station again: just drop your car off at one of our garages once a year for a regular service, and our technicians will take care of everything, including replacing the uranium rods!” ...GM is expected to follow shortly with its own model... Wall Street Journal, 1963

Large Oil Companies Filing for Bankruptcy

NY times, 1971

financial times, 2003

Supreme Court Rejects Mechanics’ Complaint “...Let it be clear: there is no evidence that the plaintiffs’ cancer was caused by our products. Nuclear cars are safe and foolproof, they have been thoroughly tested, and they represent all the good things that happen when the smartest scientists and the largest companies team up to offer the best products to the American people...”

Peak uranium? Specialists are concerned that the world’s uranium production might start to decline in coming years, as some of the main mines start to be depleted…

the lancet, 1985

Jérôme Cigut is an economist fascinated by how science transforms the world

Substantial evidence of cancerinducing radioactive leaks in cars

New Scientist, 2005

Fossil future? Abundant, natural and safe for health – could two resources not tapped since the Second World War cure our addiction to uranium? We investigate coal and petroleum.

cNN, 1985

“…Absolutely no proof whatsoever… Well-maintained cars are perfectly safe…” USa today, 1997

Cars Can Cause Cancer, Manufacturers Admit BBc, 1999

1998 coldest year on record: start of a new ice age? Wall Street Journal, 2001

Detroit Car Manufacturers Considering Bankruptcy “…Lawsuits and class actions are threatening our businesses and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that we provide…”

RUNNER-UP: StaRfall By Kevlin Henney, UK “Hold me.” I wrapped my arms around her, her and the bump, the house still shaking from the distant airburst. That had been London. In May our group in Oxford received confirmation from the La Palma observatory. Not only was our working theory a good fit for observations, it was the best fit. The excitement swept through everyone at the centre. Our group’s work was the next and final step in understanding the forces of our

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universe. History would record us following and furthering the steps of Leibniz, Poincaré and others. Leibniz’s calculus and laws of gravity and motion described the epicyclic motion of the planets around the Earth and the simpler movement of the sun and moon. Poincaré’s theory of luminiferous relativity gave space substance, something through which light could wave. His theory of rotational relativity explained the movement of all the worlds. All the worlds, but not the motionless stars. A century after his work, we determined that stars remain fixed by maintaining an equilibrium, not

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RUNNER-UP: GaiUs sEcUNdUs ER

YevGeNY KhAldei/CORBiS

By Shaun Freney, Australia

because they are fixed in some firmament. The force of their light and their attraction to one another balances the pull of Earth. A slight buzz of champagne and talk of future work and Nobels kept me later than usual. I arrived home to be greeted by more good news and, for me at least, another celebratory glass. A day to remember. That was May. A lot can happen in six months. Cosmology rarely graces the headlines. The universe is a simple and ordered place. Where is the news? More detailed work on the observations began to suggest otherwise, with implications both disturbing and newsworthy. Headlines

soon rebranded the Centre for Cosmological Studies as the Chicken Licken Lab. The mocking humour fell silent when the constellations started to drift and fade. Stars have dimmed and fallen before. But, as history tells, these comets are occasional and exceptional. The thousands of other stars remain unperturbed. But stars cannot burn forever. It seems their natural lifetime is around 6000 years. And now they are falling, together. The house shakes. “Hold me.” Kevlin Henney is a software development consultant and writer

“…and so with this new type of treatment we only need a few millilitres of interferon per cancer patient,” said Dr Arist Turtle. “Marvellous!” proclaimed Dr Plinus Elder. “Always something new out of Africa – what is it called?” “Homo… homeapothacary… wait, I wrote it down somewhere…” A gurney burst through the doors, trailing emergency staff. Dr Elder approached and eyed the elderly, bloodied patient. “Situation? Donalds, stop that bleeding. Turtle, duck eggs, stat!” “Horseless chariot accident, sir,” said a paramedic. “Hit-and-gallop. Broken bones, lacerations, some internal damage.” “Right, send him to X-ray. Get his humours cross-matched and perform a bile transfusion.” Dr Turtle hurried forward, proffering three small eggs. “Those are hen’s eggs, you fool! What do you think this is, a touch of gout?” “Sorry sir, it’s all we have. Cutbacks, you see…” “We’re losing him!” The heart monitor changed from an intermittent beep to a long continuous one. Dr Elder pressed forward. “Cardiac arrest. Beginning CPR.” Dr Elder began to push down rhythmically on the patient’s chest, while a nurse applied a breathing mask supplying nutmeg, oxygen and pepper. No change. Again. Still no change. “It’s not working. Get ready to defibrillate.” Dr Elder took a small package made of a vulture’s heart wrapped in the skin of a slaughtered she-dog and washed in the spittle of a male virgin from a nurse. “Clear!” He placed it on the patient’s chest. Nothing. He picked it up and held it out. “Recharging!” Turtle leaned forward, with slight embarrassment, and spat on the package. “Clear!” He placed it on the patient again. Nothing, then the patient convulsed violently. The heart monitor began to beep again. “Steady pulse, doctor.” “Right, get him to surgery immediately. And leech him for a good 20 minutes.” Dr Turtle was inspecting the patient’s head. “This man has a nasty head wound. Shouldn’t we see to this first?” Dr Elder sighed. “If the only long-term injury he sustains is to a blood-cooling organ then he can count himself lucky. Now come, we have some stool samples to diagnose.” Shaun Freney is completing a degree in molecular biotechnology at Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia. You can read all 10 short-listed stories, as well as Neil Gaiman’s comments, at newscientist.com/article/dn19845

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The light in the tunnel In his new book, Kevin Nelson suggests that near-death experiences occur when the brain slips into a strange state of hybrid consciousness. He explains the mystery to Amanda Gefter How common are near-death experiences (NDEs)?

A 1997 survey reported that 18 million Americans had had one. When my team surveyed people who have had them, we found that some occurred during cardiac arrest but the vast majority were during fainting. Thirty-seven per cent of all Americans will have fainted at one point in their life, so I suspect NDEs are common. In your book The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain you talk about borderlands of consciousness. What are they and how do they relate to NDEs?

We have three states of consciousness: awake, non-REM sleep and REM sleep. But there aren’t absolute dividing lines between them – they can blend with one another, most commonly REM and waking. Twenty to 25 per cent of people at some point experience some kind of blending, a borderland of consciousness. What I have discovered is that the switch in the brainstem that regulates these three states functions differently in people who have had NDEs. These people are more likely to get stuck between the REM state and waking. So it looks like some people are prone to having these kinds of experiences. Interestingly, it tends to run in families. Does that mean NDEs are a kind of lucid dream?

Lucid dreams are among the closest things we know of to an NDE. They are very similar. Brainwave measurements show that lucid dreaming is a conscious state between REM and waking.

During REM consciousness, the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex is turned off. As that’s the executive, rational part of the brain, this explains why dreams are so bizarre. But if the dorso-lateral cortex turns on inside a dream, you become aware that you are Profile Kevin Nelson is a neurophysiologist at the University of Kentucky. His book The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain is published in December in the US by Dutton, and will be published in the UK as The God Impulse by Simon and Schuster in March

dreaming. It is like waking up in your dream. When the body is in crisis during an NDE and the brain is slipping from consciousness to unconsciousness, it can get momentarily stuck in a borderland between REM and waking, just like a lucid dream. But unlike dreams, NDEs tend to feature some specific images, such as seeing a tunnel with a light at the end.

The tunnel actually has nothing to do with the NDE – it’s to do with what’s happening to your vision. During fainting, for instance, there’s a blackout because the

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eye isn’t getting enough blood, so the eye begins to shut down even though the brain is still going. As it shuts down first from the sides and then into the centre, it’s like looking through a tunnel. The light that people tend to see has a few sources. To start with, the eye might only be capable of seeing smudges of light because of the tunnelling and lack of blood flow. Then, as the brain enters REM consciousness, the visual system becomes strongly activated – that’s the rapid eye movement that defines REM consciousness. When the visual system is activated, you get light.

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Puzzling realities This sci-fi thriller poses deep questions, says Amanda Gefter

temporoparietal region off, so if you are semi-conscious in a borderland between waking and REM, you can easily have an outof-body experience. These are extremely common during lucid dreams, narcolepsy, fainting and sleep paralysis – all borderland states. I have never had one, though. I wish I could!

mark cornelison

You often hear people claim that these experiences happened during minutes when they were declared clinically dead. How could that be?

Near-death visions of tunnels are due to a lack of blood flowing to the eyes People often report having outof-body experiences during NDEs.

These come about because the temporoparietal region of the brain is turned off, so the brain is no longer able to map the body’s position in space. A Swiss researcher named Olaf Blanke was able to use electrodes to turn the temporoparietal region of a woman’s brain on and off, making her feel like she was floating up out of her body and then returning. It was like flipping a light switch. REM consciousness turns the

This is an incredible misconception that has arisen because people use the term “clinical death” when they really mean cardiac arrest. When your heart stops and you lose blood flow, you don’t lose consciousness for another 10 seconds and brain damage doesn’t occur until 30 minutes after blood flow is reduced by 90 per cent or more. So when experiencing an NDE, you are not dead. People like to say that these experiences are proof that consciousness can exist outside the brain, like a soul that lives after death. I hope that is true, but it is a matter of faith; there is no evidence for that. People who claim otherwise are using false science to engender false hope and I think that is misleading and ultimately cruel. Do your findings undermine religious belief?

There’s no conflict. I’m interested in how the brain works during spiritual experience, I’ll leave the “why” to others. I’m a “big tent” guy. I think a dispassionate, nonjudgemental view is important. n

The Looking Glass Club by Gruff Davies, sencillo, £12.99

IT IS the year 2035 and our narrator, Steel, is on the run somewhere in Manhattan, chased by an unknown pursuer. Meanwhile, back in 2010, Zeke, a physics student at Imperial College London, is in love with a woman named Kate who has a mysterious connection to Tony, another physics student who killed himself by jumping off Queen’s Tower, leaving behind only vague warnings and a cryptic diary. This is how Gruff Davies’s page-turning sci-fi thriller begins. Steel is Zeke, 25 years later. Past and future alternate, creating intertwining storylines that build momentum and suspense. The trouble begins when Zeke joins the clandestine Looking Glass club, a group of students who have discovered a drug that induces shared hallucinations. Are they hallucinations or are they some kind of parallel universe? The answers lie in Tony’s enigmatic diary and in “information relativity”, a theory

devised by Zeke’s professor. Zeke and his future self must figure it out – because the fate of reality hangs in the balance. Scattered throughout the book are 32 puzzles, pages from Tony’s diary. As they are explained to Zeke, “They’re encodings of tiny pictures. Some still frames taken from the possible states of a tiny 2D universe, thirty-two pixels square.” The first reader to solve all the puzzles can win up to £1 million. Davies is allotting money from every book sold to the prize fund, so the longer it takes to solve the puzzles, the bigger the potential reward, so long as no one beats you to it. The first puzzle has been solved – you can see the solution at thelookingglassclub.com, where you can also check your answers. If you solve the first four puzzles before 11 February 2011 you can enter a draw to win an iPad. Be warned, though. You’ll be hard-pressed to stop reading long enough to attempt a puzzle. It’s a gripping and hugely entertaining story that is difficult to solve and even more difficult to put down. n

From the pages of Tony’s diary: Ahexonacatinabox

7ffffffe400000024001000340000f12 58301f824c60178246c04f2343800f0a 4380062246c016024c6086034830004b 4010000340000803c000000240000003 7fffffff0001c23800008f1100010009 8001908980039084800339cc8003109c 8002001c0002010d000383840003e3a4 0003ffc40003c024000380150003000c 25 December 2010/1 January 2011 | NewScientist | 81

CULTURELAB

Rounding out the Earth Gerbert of Aurillac, the “Scientist Pope”, gets his due in this balanced book, says James Hannam

AROUND AD 1000, Gerbert of Aurillac served a brief stint as pope. He was not an especially distinguished pontiff and he didn’t reign for very long, yet he is of perennial interest to both academic and popular historians. Why? The answer can be found in books such as John William Draper’s 1874 History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. In it, Draper characterised the Middle Ages as an era of faith, a time when everyone thought that the Earth was flat. Draper may have been forgotten, but his narrative lives on. And that is what makes Gerbert of Aurillac so fascinating. At a time supposedly devoid of science, here is a medieval pope who was highly proficient in mathematics and astronomy. “At a time supposedly In fact, the scientific advance devoid of science, here of western Europe began is a pope highly proficient even earlier, when Roman in math and astronomy” astronomical textbooks were analysed in the court of Charlemagne in the 9th century. universities in Oxford and Paris. In Gerbert’s time, the fruits of In the 14th century, Europeans Arabic mathematics found their surpassed their ancient way west. Gerbert himself was predecessors by developing part of a circle of correspondents theories of impetus and who excitedly discussed the latest uniform acceleration. developments as they arose. Gerbert played a small but By the 12th century, the trickle important part in the unknown of knowledge from the Muslim story of medieval science and and Byzantine empires had Nancy Marie Brown has rightly become a flood. The works of decided that it is time to highlight Euclid, Aristotle and Averroes his achievements. Luckily for were translated into Latin and her, there is a good amount of intensively studied at the new material for historians to get

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The Abacus and the Cross by Nancy Marie Brown, Basic Books, £18.99/$27.95

their teeth into and she has taken full advantage of it. Brown uses Gerbert’s collected letters carefully, aware that they were compiled by an admiring student to present a positive image. She correctly characterises Gerbert as a transmitter of mathematical knowledge without exaggerating his importance. Arithmetic, astronomy and geometry were a standard part of the curriculum in medieval schools, making Gerbert’s enthusiasm for these subjects unusual, but not unheard of. Brown’s demolition of the myth that medieval people believed in a flat Earth is especially welcome.

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Brown’s Gerbert is neither a saint nor a hero. Like many senior churchmen of his time, he enjoyed the finer things in life and was as much a politician as a scholar. His ability to gain promotion from three different emperors, including Otto III who made him pope, shows that he was adept at the courtly arts. But the political chaos that followed Otto’s early death meant that Gerbert had little chance of fulfilling his ambitions. Brown provides plenty of background information to help readers who may be unfamiliar with the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, she is prone to occasional anachronisms. She describes Gerbert’s geometrical speculations as “experimental” when the modern concept of experiment was alien to the medieval mind. She also believes that scientific progress came to a halt after Gerbert’s death in 1003. Despite debunking many of the legends of the Dark Ages, she can’t quite stop believing in them herself. For her, the worship of relics and intolerant crusaders soon replaced the rationalism championed by Gerbert. But the medieval world was more complicated than that. She is right to deplore the pogroms against Jews and the beginning of the inquisition. Yet Brown seems unaware that within a century of Gerbert’s passing, western philosophy reached such heights that historians call the period the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance”. The Abacus and the Cross is a useful corrective to popular prejudice, but it does not go far enough. n James Hannam is the author of God’s Philosophers (Icon, 2009)

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FEEDBACK

PAul MCDEviTT

with no awareness of the original”. He wonders if other Feedback readers have good examples of this phenomenon. Has it got a name? If not, can someone suggest one?

OUR item about a University of Buffalo press release reporting on the development of a “geological hazards facility” (4 December) prompted an email from reader Nicholas Macy that rather took us by surprise. “Your mention of ‘study of full-scale volcanoes’ took me back to when our daughter was studying geology at her school in Essex, on the outskirts of London,” he says. “Her class tutor addressed a parents’ meeting and proposed a study trip to Iceland with the words ‘they will have the opportunity to experience those earthquakes and volcanoes that are so sadly lacking in Essex’. “As it happened, their most memorable experience on the study trip was biological, as the grey mare being ridden by one of the party on an excursion was successfully sexually assaulted by a passing stallion. “A prize was awarded to the rider for maintaining her seat

during the incident.” Let no one say that Feedback readers and their offspring do not lead interesting lives.

TALKING of which, Alastair Beaven, a captain in the British army, writes to us on a “bluey” – that’s blue army airmail paper – from the Nahr-e Saraj district of Helmand province in Afghanistan. As a medical officer, Alastair provides healthcare to Afghan civilians as well as British soldiers. He is also, evidently, a Feedback reader. He tells us that recently he was treating a local man with the help of an interpreter. He wanted to tell the man he was suffering from a virus, but the interpreter looked bemused. “A virus?” he queried. “You mean like you get in a computer?” This got Alastair thinking about words that people use in some novel sense without knowing their established meaning, “like singing along to a cover version of a song

WHY say something simply when it’s possible to make it longwinded and complicated? This seems to be the philosophy of Kellogg’s marketing department. Kay Bagon notes that the instructions for serving the company’s Hot Oat Krumbly tell us: “1. Place microwaveable cup or jug of milk (125 ml) in the microwave and heat based on guide below. 2. Pour your Hot Oat Krumbly cereal into a breakfast bowl as usual. 3. Carefully remove the milk from the microwave, stir and pour it over the Hot Oat Krumbly cereal and enjoy”. Why don’t they just say: “Serve with hot milk”?

READER Richard Norton sends us a scan of a page from the 10 November issue of Autocar. It includes an item in the magazine’s “New gear” column about a limited edition version of the Leica M9 digital camera that retails for £20,000 – yes, really. “The M9 Titanium’s reworked body is made of solid titanium,” the report tells us, “as is the 35mm lens.” “So it will be a great coffee-table object,” Richard acknowledges. “Shame about the pictures.”

IT CAN be tempting to imagine links between phenomena that are in fact unrelated. Reader

Jack Harrison’s attempt to purchase an item on eBay got this grammatically unusual response: “As Christmas is approaching, the postal service will be very busy recently” 88 | NewScientist | 25 December 2010/1 January 2011

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Lesley Fahey sent us a copy of a letter published in Comment News, a community newsletter in Perth, Western Australia. “Media reports suggest that 60 per cent of Australia’s population is overweight or obese,” Perth resident Dick Percsy notes. “Other reports indicate rising sea levels. Is it possible that these two factors have bearing on each other? In other words, the continent is sinking due to the excess weight of the population…” Full marks to that writer for original thinking.

WHEN Martin Storey started up a program to help him manage data, a “Tip of the day” box popped up. “Did you know…” it told him, “Tips file does not exist in the prescribed directory.” “This tip,” Martin comments, “is so valuable that I expect to be given it again tomorrow.”

EVERY week John Parry makes a journey that takes him past a road sign instructing him to “use both lanes”. “I’d like to comply,” he says, “but while it would apparently be the most natural thing in the world for a photon, my Peugeot 205 just doesn’t seem to manage it.”

FINALLY, in this our end-of-theyear issue, it only remains for us to convey our sincere thanks to the thousands of readers who have written to us during 2010. We never have enough room for all the stories you send us, but we love hearing from you and Feedback would be nothing without you. Compliments of the season to you and all other Feedback readers, and best wishes for 2011.

You can send stories to Feedback by email at [email protected]. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

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GREGORY SAMS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

1) In what way are scientists hoping to enhance the cinematic experience, as we reported on 11 September? a) Installing ejector seats, to be activated if someone starts loudly explaining the film to their companion b) Using brain scans to reveal people’s inner responses to on-screen action, as a way to create more moving movies c) Using noise cancellation technology to mask the sounds of sniffing, wrapper rustling and open-mouthed popcorn eating d) Trying out new red-green-blue glasses that allow you to see in 4D (requires a minimum of three eyes)

a) burn your body in a power station fitted with carbon-capture technology b) bury your body down a deep mine where its carbon will remain locked up c) bury your body in an anoxic swamp where its carbon will remain locked up d) freeze-dry your body, grind it finely and sprinkle the powder onto crop fields

According to researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, what might betray the presence of life on Mars (18 September)? a) Smelly chemicals also present in human flatulence b) Dirty stains on the carbon dioxide ice caps c) Gooey exudations on the sheltered walls of some deep canyons d) City lights

2) While most human senses are concentrated in the head, what rhyming exclave of the main sense organs was discovered this year at the University of Maryland and reported by us on 30 October? a) The Eye in your Thigh: a patch of skin cells on the leg that can distinguish between bright and dark conditions, perhaps to help regulate the body clock b) The Ear in your Rear: nerves in the buttocks attuned to infrasound vibrations of between 10 and 25 hertz, perhaps to warn of approaching predators or thunderstorms c) The Nose in your Toes: scentdetecting sebaceous glands on the feet whose purpose is unclear d) The Tongue in your Lung: taste-

The father of the fractal, Benoit Mandelbrot, died on 14 October 2010. By sheer coincidence, the edition of New Scientist hitting news-stands and doormats on that day featured what contentious theory on its cover? a) Fractal life b) Fractal space c) Fractal time d) Fractal money

bud-like receptors that detect bitter substances and dilate or restrict the airways accordingly 3) Observations of light filtered through a cosmic gas cloud 3 billion light years away revealed what shocking possibility to physicists (5 June)? a) Constant constants of nature b) Inconstant constants of nature c) Incontinent constants of nature d) Unknowable unknowns of nature 4) What unique form of symbiosis did we describe on 13 February? a) African antelope whose hollow horns host colonies of ants that eat pesky skin parasites b) Indonesian monitor lizards that use wasps to clean between their teeth, preventing unsightly gum disease c) European flowers that give sugar to yeast in return for warmth d) Australian crabs that encourage camouflaging plants to gain nutrients from special sections of shell 5) Cremating a human body releases 15 kilograms of carbon dioxide (along with other pollutants, such as mercury from dental fillings), while traditional burial uses up scarce land. As we reported on 12 June, for a more environmentally friendly funeral you might choose to:

6) An anomalous cold spot in the cosmic microwave background could be explained by what freakish phenomenon, according to a news story on 3 July? a) A tangled ball of cosmic string b) A being that appears to be made out of pure energy, captain c) A bubble of space that inflated out of sync with the rest of the universe d) A giant black hole whose gravity red-shifts light from that direction 7) On 28 August, we revealed that the fuzziness of the quantum world, as enshrined in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, is actually due to: a) uncertainty about the initial conditions of the universe in the big bang b) uncertainty about the true depth of the world debt crisis c) uncertainty about which among the infinitely many copies of you within the multiverse that you personally are d) uncertainty about what quantum mechanics actually means 8) And finally, what Frankensteinian fusion of creature and contraption did we describe in a technology news article on 6 November? a) The Mothborg – a machine with the brain of a moth b) The Flyborg – a machine with the brain of a fly c) The Styborg – a machine with the brain of a pig d) The Shyborg – a machine with the brain of a computer scientist e) The Slyborg – a machine with the brain of Sylvester Stallone

Answers: 1 b, 2 d. 3 b; 4 c, 5 d, 6 c, 7 c, 8 a Picture questions: top a, bottom a

THE human brain burns a lot of energy for its size. As much as 35 per cent of your calories are used up by thinking, according to the Big Book of Plausible Quiz Questions, whose reliability is beyond question. So if you have been taking part in some seasonal overconsumption, and a brisk walk seems like too much effort, you might be able to work off some of that lipid load by taking your head for a spin. Start here with New Scientist’s annual end-of-year quiz, where we find out whether you have been paying attention during 2010 or just looking at all the pretty pictures. Performing this exercise will consume the caloric equivalent of at least half a kilogram of Stilton cheese. Maybe. If you need a helping hand, you can look up the answer in the relevant issue.

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QUIZ

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