EDITORIAL
Affairs of the pig-human heart Many people are alive and well thanks to pig parts, so why not a heart or another organ?
Then, recoat the naked pig heart with human cells, preferably the patient’s own so that the rebuilt organ is immunologically compatible. A team in Minnesota first demonstrated the possibilities last year by creating a beating rat heart. It might also be possible to customise compatible human organs this way, providing much wider opportunities for doctors to use organs from cadavers. Grief-stricken families would also have more time to make hard decisions about organ donation. Some stem cell researchers doubt that the refurbished organs will have enough cellular diversity – blood supply and muscle
HOW would you feel if you had a little piece of pig beating inside your chest? That is the remarkable prospect raised by a novel technique to refurbish pig organs with human tissue that could offer a new way “The Minnesota team has made huge to tackle the worldwide shortage of organs progress, even plumbing hearts with for transplant. blood vessels they need to thrive” We certainly need to do something. This week there were 101,969 Americans waiting for a transplant. Many tens of thousands will cells may not be adequate, for example. die before they reach the top of the list. But they will have to overcome similar With the help of stem cell technology, challenges themselves. we are learning to make tissues from scratch. And, a year after their pioneering work Fashioning entire organs is another matter. on rats, the Minnesota team has continued To date, the major triumph has been the to make huge progress, even managing to construction of a bladder, but building a plumb hearts with the blood vessels that they much more complex organ this way looks need to thrive. More groups are now almost unattainable. attempting to create livers, muscles and Growing organs in pigs genetically hearts, with kidneys, pancreas and lungs engineered so that their tissues are compatible further down the line. with those of human recipients has proved Those who feel uneasy about hybrid equally difficult. Now, as we report in this pig-human organs should realise that issue (page 8), there is a halfway house, one millions of people are already walking which combines the skills of stem cell around with much simpler implants made scientists with nature’s handiwork. of pig tissue, such as heart valves. The The idea is simple. Take an animal organ, potential of the new method is breathtaking. say a pig heart. Chemically strip off all the More than enough to make any hybrid heart flesh, leaving behind a collagen “chassis”. skip a beat or two. ■
Just do the swine flu tests, why can’t you GREEK doctors and flu scientists are saying what New Scientist revealed two weeks ago: swine flu could be spreading round Europe undetected because people without known links to flu aren’t being tested (see page 6). Maybe countries worry that if they test, they’ll be forced to use precious antiviral medicines on a mild strain. Maybe they just want this virus to spread quietly, so people will become immune to its successors. Maybe a basic understanding of epidemiology is lacking, though that seems unlikely. But we know one thing: the only item of faith you need in science is that it’s better to know than not to know. If Europe’s leaders want everyone’s trust – trust they will need if this virus really does go global – it should emulate Australia, and do the tests. ■
Stairway to heaven THE space elevator has long promised a cheap, green and leisurely way into orbit, but even its most optimistic proponents know the reality is decades away. Now there’s an alternative: a titanic hybrid between a bouncy castle and a Tinkertoy that can soar 15 kilometres skywards (see page 22). The necessary materials are there, and the inflatable structure might eventually extend to a lofty 200 kilometres. Wayward pilots, woodpeckers, high heels and other hazards aside, this could truly be several thousand springy steps for mankind. ■
What’s hot on NewScientist.com SPACE Repairing a longserving telescope Having celebrated its 19th birthday in April, the Hubble Space Telescope is now at the apex of its capabilities, following a 13-day space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade the ageing observatory
PRIMATE EVOLUTION Laughter is not uniquely human By tickling 25 juvenile apes – including three human infants – and recording the sounds they made, researchers have gathered evidence to support the idea that laughter is shared by all the great apes
BLOG Google Wave aims to reinvent email The internet giant has introduced Google Wave, which one of its developers claims is “what email would look like if it were invented today”. We take a peek
SPACE TRAVEL The science of Battlestar Galactica It was praised to the skies for its handling of the “war on terror”, but BSG was also the story of a dangerous journey through interstellar space. We spoke to space
medicine specialist Kevin Fong about the effect of space travel on human bodies and minds ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR Why cats can’t grasp string theory A new study has found that domestic felines don’t seem to understand cause-andeffect connections CHILD DEVELOPMENT TV-watching tots miss out on vital chat Buying some time to relax by sticking infants in front of the
television may be harming their cognitive development TECH Robots in da house Domestic robots might help with chores, but learning to get along with several different robots could confuse their owners. So roboticists have created a single “personality” that jumps wirelessly from robot to robot as required For breaking news, video and online debate, visit www.NewScientist.com
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 5
GIDEON MENDEL/CORBIS
UPFRONT
Climate cost made clear IT WAS a busy week for climate change campaigners. First, a gathering of Nobel laureates at St James’s Palace, London, on 26 to 28 May declared governments worldwide must take bold, quick action to avert catastrophe. Then the following day former UN secretary general Kofi Annan piled on the pressure, throwing his weight behind the first major report on the effect of climate change on humans. The 20 Nobel-prizewinning scientists, economists and writers called for an agreement at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 and so stop global temperatures from rising by more than 2 °C. The report on human suffering is
published by the Global Humanitarian Forum, led by Annan. It concludes that climate change already kills 300,000 people a year, as many as were killed by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and that this will rise to 500,000 a year by 2030. Most of the deaths are in poor countries and are due not to extreme weather events but gradual environmental degradation, such as flooding, droughts and crop failure leading to malnutrition. Annan called for a fairer deal for poor countries at the Copenhagen summit: “Climate justice means pollution has a cost, and those costs must be borne by the polluter.” Both groups hope to influence the latest round of climate talks, taking place in Bonn, Germany, this week and next in the run-up to Copenhagen.
–Hurricane-stricken and homeless–
No more ISSxcuses DEBATE over the worth of the International Space Station is set to heat up, as its crew prepare to expand scientific research. Some scientists have dismissed the ISS as a waste of money, arguing that it has produced few important advances. Its defenders counter that during the station’s assembly phase there have been too few crew members aboard to do much science. Now the crew has grown to its full capacity of six for the first time, following a Soyuz flight that delivered three new members on 29 May. “It’s a real milestone,” says Howard McCurdy, a space
“If the only thing we’re using people for is to get more people up there, that’s kind of circular” policy analyst at American University in Washington DC. McCurdy hopes that the larger crew might make scientific breakthroughs. Even if they don’t, the ISS is proving useful in other ways, he says, for example in 6 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
testing and improving lifesupport systems that would be needed on long-duration missions to the moon or Mars. However, Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, does not think this justifies the cost. “If the only thing we’re using people for is to get more people up there, that’s kind of circular,” he says. “If I was in charge, we would be gradually winding that part of the space programme down” in favour of robotic space missions like the Hubble Space Telescope, he adds. Park does, however, rate one experiment scheduled for launch next year: a cosmic ray detector that could aid the search for dark matter, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Despite his more optimistic view of the ISS, McCurdy says NASA should have stuck to the smaller, less ambitious version originally proposed in the 1980s, before the outpost became an international project. “If we’d spent 10 years doing the space station as originally anticipated and moved on, we’d be back on the moon by now.”
Flood warning DRASTIC measures such as river barrages and floating buildings may be needed to protect people in New York, Boston and other US cities on the Atlantic coast from flooding. That’s the message of yet another study showing that the north-east coast of North America will bear the brunt of rising seas. Regional currents keep sea levels on the continent’s eastern seaboard lower than elsewhere, but they will probably be disrupted by the melting of the
Greenland ice sheet. If the melting continues at its current rate, seas in the region could rise by half a metre more than the global average by 2100 (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/ 2009gl0379980). East-coast seas could rise by around 1 metre overall. Sea walls 2.5 metres high in Boston, buildings that can float during floods or even a barrage across New York’s Hudson river may now be prudent, says Paul Kirshen of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.
Fighting for a ‘pole of peace’ IT SEEMS unlikely that governments will ever make the resource-rich Arctic a “hands-off” zone by signing an accord akin to the Antarctic treaty. But thanks to a rarely quoted section of international law, a big chunk of the Arctic is already safe from national claims, according to Paul Berkman, head of the Arctic Ocean geopolitics programme at Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute. He hopes the revelation will offer the opportunity to make
the North Pole a “pole of peace”. In London last week, Berkman told the UK’s Royal Society that the Arctic Ocean centres on an area of “high seas” – as defined by the International Law of the Sea – that falls outside all national marine boundaries and so cannot be claimed by any one country. The high seas do not legally include the sea floor – where deposits such as oil and gas may lie – but could be a starting point for agreements on how to use the Arctic peacefully.
For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news
Modified manna THE Vatican seldom approves of scientists meddling with God’s creation. So the decision of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to back oft-demonised genetically
ANDREES LATIF/REUTERS
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“Dissenters fear that genetic modification allows multinationals to control agriculture”
Maths inequality
“Quote to go in here over four lines range left like this Quote to go in her like this xxxxx”
BRYAN AND CHERRY ALEXANDER/ARCTICPHOTO.COM
modified crops as an answer to world hunger and poverty may come as a surprise. GM crops were heartily endorsed at a week-long seminar held by the academy in mid-May. Participants agreed that the crops Behind the curve offer food safety and security, AN ANIMATION that sheds light better health and environmental on why a type of baseball pitch sustainability. That verdict is called a “curve ball” often fools not shared by the International batters has been voted Visual Assessment of Agricultural Illusion of the Year by the US Knowledge, Science and Vision Sciences Society. Technology for Development, One of the weapons in a a global UN-backed think tank pitcher’s armoury is to give that last year rejected GM as a the ball a spin that causes its solution to hunger. Some say the seminar excluded trajectory to curve. The curve is dissenters within the church who smooth, but batters see the ball as if it is going straight and then fear that GM technology allows suddenly changes direction, multinationals to control agriculture at the expense of “The transition from central the poor. But participants deny to peripheral vision may bias: they also concluded that explain why curve balls regulations are too strict, so only appear to change direction” big companies can afford to get GM crops approved, whereas nonmaking it hard to hit. Now profit organisations that want to psychologist Arthur Shapiro of help the poor cannot. Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, has created an animation of a ball that offers clues as to why this is. Like a real baseball, the animated ball is spinning. It is also falling vertically. Viewers who look directly at it perceive it correctly as moving downwards, while those viewing it from the corner of their eye perceive it to be moving at an angle. This suggests that when we use our peripheral vision, the brain uses the internal motion of objects – in this case, spinning – as well as their overall direction –The Arctic is rich in oil and gas– to determine how an object is
The paucity of female mathematicians may be a result of cultural, not innate, factors. Teams entered for the International Mathematics Olympiad had more girls if they were from countries with higher educational, professional and political inequality (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.0901265106).
Ocean volcano surprise
–Spinning an illusion–
moving. In this case, it causes the ball to appear to move to the side. Shapiro notes that curve balls start off in the centre of a batter’s vision but overlap with the peripheral system as they come nearer. This transition may be why such balls appear to change direction suddenly, he says. The animation can be seen at www.tinyurl.com/curveballs.
Test more, Europe EVIDENCE is growing that Europe should test more people for swine flu. Most European countries recommend testing only those who are already sick and have met someone known to be infected or visited a severely affected country. But this cannot detect the virus if it is spreading between people who don’t meet these criteria. Now it looks as if Europe is indeed missing cases. Last week doctors in Greece tested two men who had returned from the UK with flu symptoms, even though they did not meet the testing criteria. The men tested positive. The doctors say Europe’s criteria should change. Testing in North America and Australia already targets a broader range of people. The UK now recommends tests for people with flu symptoms but not the requisite contact or travel histories, if swine flu cases have been reported in their region.
Has a huge underwater volcano appeared in Indonesia? A seamount 4600 metres high was found during a survey of the Indian Ocean. No signs had been seen before, so some doubt the claim. “A volcano cannot possibly emerge all of a sudden,” geologist Iskandar Zulkarnaen told the Antara news agency.
Witches begone Contents of a rare, sealed “witch bottle” unearthed in Greenwich, London, have been analysed. Witch bottles were often buried in the 16th and 17th centuries to ward off spells. This one contained a nailpierced leather “heart”, fingernail clippings, navel fluff, hair and human urine, British Archaeology reports.
Pluripotent pig cells Adult pig cells have been “rewound” to an embryonic state. As it is easier to genetically manipulate embryonic stem cells than adult cells, these cells should ease the creation of genetically modified, disease-free pigs, which could one day provide organs for transplantation into people (Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, DOI: 10.1093/jmcb/mjpoo3).
Penguin poop Penguins are not visible from space, but their faeces are. British Antarctic Survey scientists have used satellite images to locate the reddish-brown guano stains of emperor penguin colonies. The work will allow the team to monitor the penguins’ response to climate change.
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 7
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Hybrid hearts for transplant Could stripped-down pig organs seeded with human stem cells solve the transplant shortage? Andy Coghlan
intricate blood-vessel networks, has proved tricky. Xenotransplants from pigs are another possibility, though fraught with problems. You have to prevent the recipient’s immune system from destroying the organ, and also ensure the transplant is free of pig viruses that could be passed on. Taylor’s organs avoid these problems. For starters, building an intricate scaffold from scratch is unnecessary. “It’s letting nature
“IT’S amazing, absolutely beautiful,” says Doris Taylor, describing the latest addition to an array of tiny thumping hearts that sit in her lab, hooked up to an artificial blood supply. The rat hearts beat just as if there were inside a live animal, but even more remarkable is how each one has been made: by coating the stripped-down “scaffolding” of one rat’s heart with tissue grown from another “The organs don’t provoke rat’s stem cells. the immune response that Taylor, a stem cell scientist at prevents traditional the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, now wants to repeat xenotransplants” the achievement on a much larger to strip away flesh, cells and do most of the work,” she says. scale, by “decellularising” hearts, DNA so that all is left is the What’s more, because the stem livers and other organs taken inner “scaffold” of collagen, an cells that “clothe” the naked either from human cadavers or “immunologically inert” protein. scaffold are taken from the from larger animals such as pigs, patient, the organ stands a higher Add stem cells from the relevant and coating them in stem cells patient to this naked shell of an chance of being accepted by their harvested from people. organ and they will differentiate immune system. This could lead to a virtually into all the cells the organ needs The idea is fairly simple: take limitless supply of organs for to function without inducing an an organ from a human donor or transplantation that are every immune response after animal, and use a mild detergent bit as intricate as those that grow naturally, except that they don’t provoke the catastrophic immune PIG PARTS ALREADY COMMONPLACE response that obstructs the use of IMPLANTING organs made from the newer pig valves, made by the traditional “xenotransplants”. scaffold of a pig organ may sound company AutoTissue in Berlin, which “We’re already working off-putting and even dangerous, but have been thoroughly decellularised. with heart, kidney, liver, lung, millions of patients have already For years, companies have also pancreas, gallbladder and been treated with decellularised been selling decellularised pig gut to muscle,” Taylor says. Rival groups pig parts without being infected by produce patches that help the healing are using similar procedures to stowaway pig viruses or suffering of diabetic ulcers, hernias and create new livers and muscle too. disastrous immunological reactions. strained ligaments. Cook Biotech of Human organs for transplant Pig heart valves are often used to West Lafayette, Indianapolis, sells are scarce. One option is to replace faulty ones in people. In the patches made from pig sub-mucosal engineer organs from scratch in past, patients who got such valves collagen membrane, which provides the lab, using artificial scaffolds. had to take immunosuppressive mechanical strength to the small While bladders and skin can be drugs. But this isn’t necessary with intestine. “Since 1998, we’ve treated grown in the lab, growing more complex organs and their 8 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
transplant, or any new infections. The idea has already worked with simple organs. Last year Claudia Castillo received a transplant made of a strippeddown windpipe from a dead human donor. Researchers cut it to size and seeded the scaffold with her stem cells, which grew into the right tissues and gave her
more than a million patients,” says the company’s Michael Hiles. Meanwhile, Tissue Regenix of Leeds, UK, is about to start testing tissue from pig heart membranes for patching up holes in arteries. Chris Mason, professor of regenerative medicine at University College London, says the work of these companies bodes well for the idea of one day implanting much more complicated decellularised pig organs into people.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
In this section ■ Antarctica’s astronomy hotspots, page 10 ■ Is ADHD caused by a faulty perception of time? page 12 ■ Why we love cocky pundits, page 15
a new windpipe. Anthony Hollander of the University of Bristol, UK, a member of the team, says Castillo no longer needs to take drugs and is back at her job. Taylor’s team is using the same technique to create much more complex organs such as hearts, and extending it to using animal, as well as human, scaffolds. A big challenge with complex organs is ensuring that all their cells are infused with blood. Without blood, cells in the centre of the organ would be starved of oxygen and die after transplantation. Taylor says her method overcomes this problem. A big breakthrough came in January 2008, when her team produced a beating heart by filling a rat heart scaffold with heart cells from newborn rats (Nature Medicine, vol 14, p 213). These hearts kept their 3D shape, including spaces for all the blood vessels. When they were seeded
pressure in each zone which unpublished “proof of concept” helps to determine how cells that liver recellularisation works differentiate there. in rats and mice. A team lead by But chemical, as well as Martin Yarmush at Massachusetts mechanical, cues seem to have General Hospital in Boston has guided differentiation. Taylor has manufactured recellularised evidence that growth factors and rat grafts that provide liver peptides remained anchored to function “in the lab and when the scaffold even after the flesh transplanted”, according to team was washed off. These chemicals member Korkut Uygun. But likely signalled to the stem cells, he stresses that the team’s indicating how many should ultimate goal is to decellularise migrate to which areas and what human, not animal, organs to change into in each zone. “Our for transplantation. mantra is to give nature the tools Not everyone believes that and get out of the way,” she says. turning decellularised tissue into Her team has implanted the a complex, functional organ is as reclothed hearts into the “The next step is to see if abdomens of rats, where they the transplants can replace survived temporarily and were an existing heart and keep not rejected. The next step is to the rat alive and healthy” see if the transplants can replace an existing heart and keep the animal alive and healthy. To do simple as it sounds. “We’re a long this, Taylor says they will need to way from being able to make come up with ways to grow more functional tissues and organs,” muscle tissue on the hearts. says Alan Colman of the Singapore “We’ve built the vasculature but Stem Cell Consortium. “We’ll be we don’t think we’ve built enough able to make structures that look muscle to keep animals alive.” like the organ, but with almost – Spot the missing cells– She is also gearing up to repeat none of the correct functionality.” the rat experiments with pig David Cooper of the University with new cells, some grew into hearts and livers. This could be of Pittsburgh School of Medicine blood vessel lining. easier because pig organs are in Pennsylvania, a leading Since then, Taylor says they larger and easier to handle than developer of xenotransplants, have managed to “pretty much tiny rat hearts. Decellularised says that “naked” pig hearts would repopulate the whole vascular livers could also appear in still carry traces of alpha-Gal, tree” with cells, which includes humans before hearts because it which the human immune veins, arteries and capillaries. may not be necessary to recreate system recognises and will attack. “Because we’ve retained the blood entire livers for them to be useful. But Chris Mason, professor vessels, we can take the plumbing Others are also working on of regenerative medicine at and hook it up to the recipient’s livers. Steven Badylak says he has University College London points natural blood supply,” says Taylor. out that many decellularised pig “That’s the beauty of this.” components have been used in Although Taylor only added people without the need for stem cells to the hearts, these immunosuppressive drugs (see cells differentiated into many “Pig parts”). He says sufficiently different cells, in all the correct rigorous sterilisation destroys places, which is the best part of these residues. Otherwise, says using decellularised scaffolds. Mason, millions of people would The stem cells transformed into already have had adverse endothelial cells in the ventricles reactions to the pig heart valves and atria, for example, and into and tissues they’ve received. vascular and smooth-muscle cells Taylor says people who find in the spaces for blood vessels, the idea of pig parts unacceptable just as in a natural heart. Taylor should consider their current uses thinks this happened because she in humans. “We’re not ready for pumped blood and nutrients prime time yet, but we’re moving – A rat heart reclothed– in the right direction,” she says. ■ through the organ, producing 6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 9
THIS WEEK KEITH VANDERLINDE/NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION/US ANTARCTKC PROGRAM
SOUNDBITES
“It’s a matter of time before resistance to artemisinin is widespread. The concern is that it will spread before we can develop a new drug to replace it.” Biologist Glenn McConkey of the University of Leeds, UK, warns of malaria’s growing resistance to the most effective anti-malarial drug (The Guardian, London, 29 May)
–Who needs Hawaii?–
Clearest window on space is the coldest Anil Ananthaswamy
POSSIBLY the clearest skies on Earth have been found – but to exploit them, astronomers will have to set up a telescope in one of the planet’s harshest climates. Michael Ashley of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues wanted to find the best sites for astronomy on the Antarctic plateau. Combining observations from satellites and ground stations with climate models, they evaluated different factors that affect telescope vision, such as the amount of water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence. The team found that the plateau offers world-beating atmospheric conditions – as long as telescopes are raised above its frozen surface. The ice makes the lowest layers of air on the plateau much colder than those above, forming an “inversion layer” that, together with the strong local winds, can lead to severe turbulence. This would blur a telescope’s images. The team’s analysis showed the inversion layer is only about 10 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
20 metres thick, however. If a telescope was mounted above it, its view would be affected by far less turbulence than at other world-class observatory sites, says Ashley. “It’s drier than Mauna Kea [in Hawaii] by a long way and drier than the Atacama desert [in Chile],” he says. Such conditions would be good for studying star birth. Normally, water vapour in the atmosphere blocks telltale emissions from molecular clouds in star-forming regions of the Milky Way. But the Clear skies Ridge A on the Antarctic plateau may offer the clearest views for telescopes Possible telescope locations Research stations
DOME F DOME A/ RIDGE A SOUTH POLE
DOME B RIDGE B DOME C
1000 km
air above the high area known as Dome A is so dry that a groundbased telescope there could observe stellar nurseries – something that’s impossible anywhere else on Earth. So far as Ashley’s team know, Dome A seems the best site for astronomy (see map). China has already built a summer station there, with a small robotic observatory. Next best is Dome F, the site of a Japanese station. But conditions may prove much better about 150 kilometres south-west of Dome A, at Ridge A (www.arxiv.org/abs/0905.4156). “We won’t know until we make measurements there,” says Ashley. Life on the plateau isn’t easy for telescopes, though. One problem is that ice can form on lenses and mirrors. Marc Sarazin of the European Southern Observatory’s offices in Munich, Germany, says the harsh conditions demand the kind of approach used for space missions: “They will be single-purpose, short-lifetime instruments answering a precise scientific question,” he says. General-purpose telescopes are best built in temperate latitudes like Chile’s, he adds. Ashley thinks the biggest difficulty lies elsewhere. “The main problems in Antarctica aren’t so much the engineering,” he says. “It’s more convincing people that it is not as scary as it sounds.” ■
“However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.” President Barack Obama on the murder of George Tiller, a prominent abortion doctor (BBC online, 1 June)
“It probably was the single most important event as far as media consumption on the internet is concerned. You can argue that everything that happened since has been a reaction to Napster.” Internet media analyst Phil Leigh will be celebrating Napster’s 10th anniversary this month (San Francisco Chronicle, 1 June)
“We are getting a lot of interesting suggestions from the public and we think that’s wonderful. We certainly are canvassing the full range of possibilities to get Spirit unstuck.” NASA’s John Callas on the response to the Mars rover Spirit being stuck in the soil again (Universe Today, 29 May)
“It’s not often you get a chance to bring back a species which has been lost.” Malcolm Ausden of UK charity The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds on plans to reintroduce the short-haired bumblebee to the country (Country Life, London, 1 June)
AFP/GETTY
For daily news stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/news
Hot rocks add steam to Eden power project AN AMBITIOUS project to extract geothermal energy from hot rocks was launched in the UK this week. Can it avoid the same fate as recent high-profile and potentially dangerous failed attempts elsewhere in the world? The plan is to build a 3-megawatt commercial geothermal energy plant to power the Eden Project in Cornwall, and the nearby community. A pilot project will test a technique to extract heat from hot dry rocks at a depth of about 3.5 kilometres. The technology involved has yet to prove itself to be reliable or safe. A Swiss geothermal project in Basel (pictured), was closed down in December 2006 after its construction set off a series of small earthquakes that shook the town. A similar project in the Cooper Basin, South Australia, was suspended last month after the main borehole carrying water from the surface to the deep rocks mysteriously sprang a leak. An investigation is currently under way to find the cause. There is only one commercial hot dry rock project in successful operation, in Landau, Germany. Traditional geothermal energy plants extract water from naturally
heated underground reservoirs. Hot dry rock projects search for geological conditions where the temperature of the rock exceeds about 150 °C. A borehole is drilled and water injected at high pressure, causing any small cracks in the rock to expand, creating a capillary network. Fresh water is then pumped down one hole to the capillary network, where it boils to steam. The steam is extracted via a second hole and used to drive a steam turbine, or for heating. Creating the capillary network is where dangers may lie. Inducing immense pressures on an area of rock that is already under great stress can have unpredictable consequences. In Basel, geologists expected small earthquakes but predicted they would be less than magnitude 2. The biggest quake was magnitude 3.5. “Normally that’s not going to cause any damage,” says Roger Musson of the British Geological Survey, “but when you get that at a shallow depth, it can produce quite strong shaking in the local area.” Nicholas Deichmann of the Swiss Seismological Service, Zurich, who investigated the Basel earthquakes, points out that hot rock geothermal energy is a
Parasite slows reaction times of ‘negative’ people
eating undercooked meat from animals that had contact with cat faeces. The infection lasts for life. It can harm fetuses, but was otherwise thought to be harmless. Recently, however, evidence has emerged that the parasite can affect our brain. People with toxo seem to have slower reactions, while those who have had traffic accidents are more likely to have toxo. Now it seems toxo’s effect on the brain may be limited to people with a certain blood type. Jaroslav Flegr and colleagues at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, had previously discovered that toxo
IF YOU lack a certain protein on your blood cells and are infected with a common parasite, you may be more likely to crash your car. Toxoplasma, or toxo for short, starts its life cycle in rodents. To spread, it manipulates rodents’ brains, making them reckless and more likely to be eaten by cats, which then pass on the parasite through their faeces. People can catch it from
-Basel hole, lots of shaking going on-
fledgling industry. “Tampering with the Earth’s interior always brings with it some risks and some hazards,” he says. “I would caution not to delude ourselves that we are at a stage where we can call these projects commercially viable and routine.” The Basel team made some fundamental errors, claims Roy
Baria, technical director of EGS Energy, the company contracted to dig the Cornwall site: “They stimulated a region that is naturally very seismically active. The site in Basel is under compression stress, whereas the site in Cornwall is under tension. The situation is completely different in the UK.” David Cohen ■
affected reaction times mostly in people whose blood type was rhesus negative. So they monitored 3890 military drivers for 18 months. Those who were Rh-negative and had toxo were 2.5 times as likely to have an accident as uninfected drivers who
a protein on the surface of their blood cells. Flegr says he doesn’t know why toxo’s effect on the brain should be determined by this protein. Flegr says these results suggest that between 400,000 and a million of the world’s annual road deaths might be due to toxo infection. He suggests regularly testing Rh-negative pilots, air traffic controllers and truck drivers for the infection. Joanne Webster of Imperial College London says the work indicates that Toxoplasma does indeed alter human behaviour, but that studies must now be done on a larger number of people. Debora MacKenzie ■
“Up to a million of the world’s annual road deaths might be due to toxoplasmosis infection” were Rh-negative, or any Rh-positive drivers (BMC Infectious Diseases, DOI: 10.1186/1471-2334-9-72). People who are Rh-negative lack
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 11
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Time moves too slowly for hyperactive boys CHILDREN with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder might appear rowdy and indisciplined, but they are actually trying to cope with a faulty perception of time. What to most of us seems like a short stretch of time would drag unbearably for someone with ADHD, says Katya Rubia of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. Her team’s research, reported this week, adds to a growing body of evidence for the importance of time perception in a wide range of psychological disorders. ADHD affects around 5 per cent of children globally, most of them boys. Studies relating to the disorder have focused on patients’ short attention spans and impulsive behaviour. But ADHD is characterised by a shortage of dopamine, which is known to affect time perception, so Rubia and her colleagues wanted to know if this was the source of the kids’ problems. The researchers used MRI scans to show that 12 boys with ADHD had less activity than usual in the frontal lobe, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, all areas of the brain known to be crucial for time
“ADHD children perceive even short periods of inactivity as inordinately long and boring” perception. These boys were also worse than 12 other boys at estimating how long circles appeared on a screen before vanishing. When they were given the drug methylphenidate, aka Ritalin, which boosts dopamine levels and is used to treat ADHD, brain activity in the ADHD group became indistinguishable from that of the healthy boys. “Ritalin enhances brain regions that are important for time perception in ADHD children,” concludes Rubia. The results are published in a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, which is devoted to 12 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
time perception (DOI: 10.1098/ rstb.2009.0014). Rubia believes this is evidence that faulty time perception causes the major symptoms of ADHD, by making children perceive even short periods of inactivity as inordinately long and boring. Because novelty-seeking and risky behaviour increase dopamine levels, children with ADHD may be become hyperactive as a way of “self-medicating” with dopamine. Catalin Buhusi of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston is an author of another paper in the themed issue of the journal (DOI: 10.1098/ rstb.2009.0022). He says the results fit his own research on how intense activity or distraction warps our time perception, so that time appears to fly. Buhusi’s theory is that when we are engaged in an intense task, the working memory required to execute it is too large to allow simultaneous tracking of time, so it appears to pass without us noticing. “We know that disruptions, distractions or plain simple fun have the ability to disrupt tracking of time in normal people,” he says. “I think ADHD children have even more of a problem with it.” Researchers are realising that faulty time perception may be at the root of many more psychiatric disorders. People with depression experience time moving more slowly than usual, for example, while those with mania perceive it as passing much faster. Kwang-Hyuk Lee of the University of Sheffield, UK, showed earlier this year that people with schizophrenia experience varying time perception (Psychiatry Research vol 166, p 174). It is highly disorienting when someone’s internal perception doesn’t match up with cues from the outside world, says Lee. “Most psychiatric disorders are associated with a certain discrepancy between objective worldly time and subjective time,” he says. “At some point, patients would need to meet with reality.” Andy Coghlan ■
MARIAN SCHMIDT/RAPHO/CAMERA PRESS
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Mice get human language gene Ewen Callaway
that make it. It was a long shot – the mice could have been indistinguishable from normal ones, or the gene might not have worked at all – but he struck lucky. When his team compared hundreds of traits in the transgenic and normal mice, they found key differences in the rodents’ brains and behaviour (Cell, DOI: 10.1016/ j.cell.2009.03.041). For example, the mice with human Foxp2 produce neurons that are more readily and lastingly calmed by repeated electrical stimulation.
DUBBED “the language gene”, Foxp2 has been seen as key to the evolution of speech and language since its discovery in 2001. Now transgenic mice have been produced that make the human version of the gene, with dramatic results: their calls sound different from those of normal mice, and certain learning pathways in the brain appear to be enhanced. The work offers tantalising clues to the gene’s importance – but it also highlights the difficulty of using animal models to probe “The mice could have been indistinguishable from a uniquely human trait. normal ones, but the Foxp2 rose to fame when it was researchers struck lucky” found to be mutated in a British family (known as KE) with a history of severe language disorders. This process, known as long-term Wolfgang Enard of the Max depression, is involved in learning Planck Institute for Evolutionary physical movements. Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, In mice which have just one and colleagues homed in on its working copy of Foxp2, as members genetic sequence and discovered of the KE family do, long-term that the human version has two depression was impaired. “Here’s key changes found in no other a process that might cause speech species (Nature, vol 418, p 869). deficits when it goes wrong,” says To probe whether the human Enard. “Maybe it was improved by version of Foxp2 does anything the human version of the gene.” special, Enard bred mice These effects occurred in
–The downside of Foxp2–
the basal ganglia, a brain area implicated in Foxp2’s effects in other species. Humans with one broken copy of Foxp2 have abnormal activity and anatomy here. And zebra finches that don’t make enough Foxp2 in their basal ganglia struggle to imitate the songs of other birds. Faraneh Vargha-Khadem of University College London, who was part of the team that studied the KE family, thinks the gene may help to establish brain circuits that coordinate the complex movements of the lungs, larynx, tongue and lips needed for speech. Language is far more than exquisite muscular choreography, however. “The question is how an idea is translated into an utterance,” she points out.
“I don’t think we’re anywhere near understanding that.” Neuroscientists have made great strides in linking memory to particular neural processes – but they are able to study animals capable of forming memories. Speech, on the other hand, is a uniquely human ability, so results from animal studies must be interpreted with great caution. Intriguingly, Enard found that mice with human Foxp2 issue deeper ultrasonic calls than normal mice. The significance of this is not clear, but he discounts the idea that it could be a step towards human speech. “Mouse vocalisations are at best similar to baby cries,” he says. “We will never be able to fully recreate human evolution in a mouse.” ■
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 13
THIS WEEK
Rescue bid to save frogs from fungus frogs exposed to Bd maintained their weight better if they were first coated with the bacterium Janthinobacterium lividum. Now they have shown the treatment stops frogs dying from the disease, and they know how it works.
A DEADLY fungus thought to be behind declining amphibian populations worldwide is spreading fast – most recently to the Philippines, where it has just been detected. But now researchers are finding ways to fight back. They are pinning some hope on a probiotic skin bacterium that occurs naturally on the skin of several amphibian species. One of the first animals to benefit could be the Panamanian golden frog, a striking yellow toad now extinct in the wild that has become a symbol for amphibian conservationists (see right). Public enemy number one is the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), which causes chytrid disease. Reid Harris of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and colleagues reported last year that
Will summer never end in Titan’s south? UNRELIABLE weather forecasts are not restricted to Earth. On Saturn’s giant moon Titan, the seasons should now be turning, but summer in its southern hemisphere is defying predictions by refusing to end. The Cassini space probe has been monitoring Titan since 2004, but as the moon’s year lasts 30 Earth years, it has only ever seen one season. The equinox marking the end of summer in the south will come this August. “This is our first opportunity to look at seasonal change,” says Bonnie Buratti of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “And it’s not as simple as it might have been.” 14 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
MICHAEL AND PATRICIA FOGDEN/MINDEN
Linda Geddes
The arrival of the equinox should be accompanied by changes in Titan’s cloud cover. Currently the north pole has a thin shroud of cirrus cloud, probably made of fine crystals of frozen ethane, while substantial methane clouds can be seen in the southern hemisphere: a clump around the south pole and a thin temperate band about 40° south. These southern clouds are thought to be caused by convection in Titan’s atmosphere, driven by the heat of the sun. They were expected to disappear as Titan’s southern summer draws to a close, before reappearing in the northern hemisphere soon after. However, the latest analysis of Cassini observations shows that the southern clouds have not budged. “Titan’s meteorology is still active in late summer, which does not agree
presented the results last month at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Later this year, the researchers plan to test the treatment on Panamanian golden frogs which have been bred in captivity. If that works too, they envisage a trial in a more natural setting in Panama – perhaps in large cages next to a stream. Ultimately, they hope it may be possible to protect frogs in the wild by treating both animals and the soil and water in their habitats with the probiotic. “I applaud what they’re doing,” says Trenton Garner of the Institute of Zoology in London. “So many people are talking about chytrid, but very few are actually taking steps to find out if anything can be done to try to mitigate it.” In April, Garner’s team travelled to Majorca, Spain, for the first ever attempt to tackle Bd in the wild. They removed tadpoles of the Majorcan midwife toad from an isolated set of ponds and are now treating them with the antifungal drug, itraconazole. The toadlets will be returned to –No frog rot, for now – the ponds in October. ■
Harris’s team dunked 12 mountain yellow-legged frogs in a bath of J. lividum and then infected six of them with Bd, along with six untreated frogs. Twenty weeks later, five of the untreated frogs had died, while all six treated frogs survived and even gained weight (The ISME Journal, DOI: 10.1038/ ismej.2009.27). The treated frogs’ skin contained high levels of an antibiotic called violacein, which is produced by the bacteria. Harris
with climate model predictions,” says Sebastien Rodriguez of the University of Nantes in France, who led the study (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature08014). Rodriguez suggests that the surface of Titan may be holding on to the heat of summer longer than anticipated, perhaps because
“Titan’s meteorology is still active in late summer, which does not agree with climate model predictions” a porous layer acts as an effective insulating blanket. But he concedes that this remains guesswork until the composition and structure of the surface are better known. The observations also turned up another surprise: the clouds seem to be shaped in part by Saturn’s gravity.
Rodriguez’s team found unexpected gaps in the temperate cloud belt at two points, one on the side of the moon facing towards Saturn and the other facing away. They suspect that atmospheric tides driven by Titan’s parent planet are somehow disturbing the convection at these points, discouraging clouds from forming. “It does look like atmospheric tides are playing some role in cloud formation,” says Henry Roe of Lowell observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Roe believes that the temperate clouds are also feeding off some source of methane on the surface, perhaps a volcano or geyser. “I think the real story here, which we’re only just beginning to acknowledge within the field, is that Titan’s atmosphere is much more complicated than we ever imagined,” he says. Stephen Battersby ■
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Why cocky pundits prosper, and why we love them
MARK LENNIHAN/AP PHOTO
EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It’s a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people’s self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice. The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge. In Moore’s experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for. From the start, the more confident advisers found more buyers for their advice, and this caused the advisers to give answers that were more and more precise as the game progressed. This escalation in precision
disappeared when guessers simply had to choose whether or not to buy the advice of a single adviser. In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence. The findings add weight to the idea that if offering expert opinion is your stock-in-trade, it pays to appear confident. Describing his work at an Association for Psychological Science meeting in San Francisco last month, Moore said that following the advice of the most confident person often makes sense, as there is evidence that precision and expertise do tend to go hand in hand. For example, people give a narrower range of answers when asked about subjects with which they are more familiar (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol 107, p 179). There are times, however, when this link breaks down. With complex but politicised subjects such as global warming, for example, scientific experts who stress uncertainties lose out to activists or lobbyists with a more emphatic message. So if honest advice risks being ignored, what is a responsible scientific adviser to do? “It’s an excellent question, and I’m not sure that I have a great answer,” says Moore. Peter Aldhous ■
Confidence pays Volunteers acting as “advisers” profited by selling their advice to other volunteers – who in turn won cash by guessing a person’s weight ADVISERS CAN SPREAD THEIR ESTIMATES OF A PARTICULAR PERSON’S WEIGHT DEPENDING ON HOW CONFIDENT THEY ARE Estimated weight (lbs)
ADVISER A
ADVISER B
ADVISER C
ADVISER D
5%
120-129 130-139
5%
140-149
20% 20%
50%
150-159 160-169
15%
10%
20%
170-179
70%
5%
40%
180-189
15%
5%
10%
100%
10%
190-199 200-209 210-219
INFORMATION GIVEN TO “GUESSERS” WHO THEN HAD TO BUY ADVICE FROM ONE OF THE ADVISERS ADVISER A
ADVISER B
ADVISER C 20%
15%
20%
70%
50%
20%
15%
10%
40%
ADVISER D 100%
ADVISER D’s OPINION WAS MOST LIKELY TO ATTRACT BUYERS
–No doubts allowed– 6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 15
BETTMANN/CORBIS
IN BRIEF The enormous neutrino puzzle
Broken dwarf planet may have scarred the moon THE shattered remnants of a dwarf planet may have bombarded the inner planets in the early solar system, suggests a new analysis of craters on the moon. Several large impact scars on the moon appear to be around 3.9 billion years old, suggesting that the Earth and other objects of the inner solar system were heavily pounded at that time. Most astronomers believe that the bombardment was caused by shifts in the orbits of the giant planets, which destabilised the asteroid belt, hurling giant rocks our way. But the distribution of small and large lunar craters
does not match the numbers of small and large objects in the asteroid belt today, says a team led by Matija Cuk of Harvard University, who spoke at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Toronto, Canada, last week. Cuk says one possible alternative is that a dwarf planet or single large asteroid “hundreds or maybe 1000 kilometres across” did the damage after being ripped apart by gravity when it came too close to Earth or another inner planet. It then littered the inner solar system with impactors. Bill Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, doubts a shattered 1000-kilometre object can explain all the damage in this period. He thinks the standard picture is closer to the truth but admits: “We still don’t understand the full story.”
Fix genes, then set to mass production ORDINARY cells from people with a genetic disease can be “fixed” by gene therapy and then reprogrammed to be stem cells that will produce a limitless supply of defect-free cells. Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, knew that stem cells are more useful for gene therapy than ordinary cells, because they produce multiple daughter cells 16 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
with the modified genes. However, the body does not have many stem cells for doctors to work with. So Izpisúa Belmonte and his colleagues harvested fibroblasts, which are far more common than stem cells, from the skin of people with the bone marrow disease Fanconi anaemia. The team used viruses to replace the defective genes that cause the anaemia with normal ones, then used a second
virus to insert genes that “reset” the cells to a pluripotent state. The reset cells, known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), gave rise to healthy precursors of bone marrow stem cells (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08129). One drawback is that the resetting can trigger cancer. But if efforts to make this step safer succeed, the technique could provide a limitless supply of healthy, personalised iPS cells, says team member Inder Verma.
TALK about misnomers. It seems the particles that Enrico Fermi dubbed neutrinos, meaning “little neutral ones”, might stretch across billions of light years. The big bang produced huge numbers of “relic” neutrinos, which are quantum-mechanical superpositions of three different mass-energy states. In the early universe, all of these states would have moved at close to the speed of light. But according to calculations by George Fuller and Chad Kishimoto of the University of California, San Diego, as the universe expanded, the most massive of these states slowed down in the relic neutrinos, stretching them across the universe (Physical Review Letters, vol 102, p 201303). This raises the possibility that only one of the neutrino’s states could fall into a black hole. It’s unclear what would happen to the others if this occurred, says Fuller.
No bad thing, a few free radicals GENES that protect yeast DNA from oxidising free radicals could one day lead to drugs that prevent cancer and ageing in people. Produced by the body, free radicals damage DNA, so some people take supplements to mop them up. But this could be a bad idea as small doses of free radicals trigger changes in most cells that stop more from entering. Now Trey Ideker at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues have found genes that control this response in yeast. If similar genes are found in people, drugs that mimic their protective effects could be a better strategy against cancer and ageing than simply mopping up all free radicals (PLoS Genetics, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000488).
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NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES/PNAS
MILLIONS of years before early humans evolved in Africa, their ancestors may have lived in Europe. A 12-million-year-old fossil hominid from Spain provides the strongest evidence yet for this idea. The fossil, named Anoiapithecus brevirostris by Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona, Spain, and his colleagues, dates from a period of our evolution for which the record is very thin. Only the animal’s face, jaw and teeth survive, and their shape places it within the African hominid lineage that gave rise to gorillas, chimps and humans. But it also has features of a related group called kenyapithecins. Moyà-Solà thinks that Anoiapithecus lived in Europe shortly after the afrohominid and kenyapithecin lineages split, and so that the divergence itself may have happened there (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811730106). If he is right, our ancestors lived in Europe and only later migrated to Africa, where modern humans are thought to have evolved. This “into Africa” scenario is likely to be controversial: critics argue that we are more likely to see signs of hominid origins in Europe simply because the fossil record from the time in question is much better there than in Africa.
Face-freezing toxin could stop diseases in their tracks AGEING celebrities’ favourite toxin just got a little more useful. Botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT), sold as Botox, can immobilise face muscles to smooth wrinkles or treat neuromuscular disorders. Now it has been modified so that it could one day be used to treat asthma and possibly even cancer. BoNT works by slicing up proteins known as SNAREs, which allow cells to release various substances. In its natural form, BoNT cleaves only those SNAREs that are specific to neurons. This prevents the release of
neurotransmitters, cutting off neural communication between muscles and the brain. Different SNAREs allow other cells to release substances such as mucus or immune chemicals called cytokines. So Joseph Barbieri and his colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee have modified BoNT so that it slices the SNAREs found in epithelial cells. Barbieri’s team re-engineered the cutting section of BoNT molecules, installing an amino acid that has an affinity for
epithelial SNAREs. When they added the modified toxin to human cells grown in culture, it inhibited the release of cytokines and mucin, which is involved in mucus formation (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0903111106). The modified toxin could treat asthma, in which lung cells secrete too much mucus, and cancers in which cells overproduce cytokines. The next step is to bind the modified toxin to receptors that will ensure it acts only on cells where it is needed. VALERIE TAYLOR/ARDEA
African hominids came from Europe
Continent map gives treasure clue A NEW atlas shows Zimbabwe, Russia’s Kola Peninsula and Quebec, Canada, as next-door neighbours – as they were 2.5 billion years ago. The map could reveal the location of valuable mineral deposits. “We’re completing the plate tectonic revolution,” boasts Richard Ernst, a geology consultant in Toronto, Canada, who heads the mapping project. That revolution started in the 1960s, when it was realised that the continents had broken apart from a 250-million-year-old supercontinent called Pangaea. But there has never been a definitive map of earlier supercontinents that existed more than 500 million years ago. Last week, Ernst told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Toronto that the key to the new map was accurately dating huge lava fields that formed before and during the fracturing of supercontinents. The map will be studied closely by the mining companies backing the project. Magma flows tend to concentrate valuable metals such as platinum, so mapping ancient continents may help miners find lucrative new deposits, Ernst says.
Whales form babysitting circle WHEN sperm whale mothers dive deep for squid their young cannot follow – so who looks after the kids? Shane Gero of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and his colleagues tracked sperm whale populations in the Caribbean and Sargasso seas to see what happened when mothers dived for food. The Sargasso mothers formed a babysitting circle, taking it in turns to watch over and nurse the calves, and to go hunting. The smaller Caribbean population had fewer mothers, so calves were left with a close female relative
instead (Behavioral Ecology, DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arp068). It makes evolutionary sense for females to protect their young relatives, and for a mother to babysit in return for its own calf’s protection. There may be a less obvious reason, too: a group that watches each other’s infants will grow larger, making it safer for all. “Among sperm whales, having extra eyes in a group to look out for killer whales is in everyone’s interest,” says Richard Connor, an expert in cetacean behaviour at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 17
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VIRGIN GALACTIC
TECHNOLOGY
Modified rocket roars into life BLASTING off to the edge of space in SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s commercial spacecraft, may be one step closer after the successful testing last week of a new solid-liquid hybrid rocket motor. The test follows a review of a fatal explosion in 2007. In 2004, the aircraft and rocket maker Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, won the Ansari X prize for SpaceShipOne, the first commercial spacecraft to reach suborbital space. Its motor burned a solid fuel using liquid nitrous oxide as an oxidiser. It was during fuel flow tests with nitrous oxide that an explosion occurred at Scaled Composites’ facility on 26 July 2007. Three engineers were killed and three more badly injured. An enquiry, involving NASA, recommended new safety measures for the motor, including switching the composite fuel tank liners to metal,
using helium to pressurise both the fuel and inert volatile vapours, and eradicating potential contaminants . The new motor is “a scaled-up version of the SpaceShipOne rocket motor”, says Virgin Galactic’s president Will Whitehorn. “There are some changes since the first motor
“There are some changes from SpaceShipOne’s motor, mainly related to new safety features” was designed, mainly related to additional safety features such as a helium tank.” Video footage showing the test firing can be seen at www. tinyurl.com/rocketmotor. However, US arms control restrictions mean that details of the rocket’s performance in the latest tests are likely to remain secret.
–Power for SpaceShipTwo–
Cybersecurity ‘starts at home’
Cellphone disaster alerts travel P2P
HOME computer security should be top of the list of online defences to be shored up by the “cyber-security tsar” the Obama administration is planning to appoint. So says Graham Cluley of the UK security firm Sophos. President Obama’s study into the vulnerability of America’s critical networks to online attacks has concluded that a White House cyber tsar is needed to coordinate Pentagon, intelligence service and private-sector security efforts. This approach will not succeed unless it addresses the viruses and bots on home PCs that are used for most coordinated denial of service attacks, Cluley says. “Obama’s focus is on overseas threats, but the big threat is Aunt Ethel who doesn’t know her PC is part of a botnet. Broad education on firewalls and antivirus software is vital.”
CELLPHONES could sound the alarm in the event of a disaster and pass on the alert from phone to phone – even if most of a cellphone network is down. So says Motorola in a new patent application. In an emergency, such as a hurricane or terrorist attack, the US government can operate the Emergency Alert System (EAS), which harnesses all TV and radio frequencies, to broadcast warning messages to people in their homes. “Unfortunately, a large portion of the intended recipients will not have their TV and radio
20
million: the number of e-book readers that will be bought annually by 2012, according to display manufacturer E-Ink
systems turned on when a disaster occurs,” says Motorola engineer Jerome Vogedes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in a US patent filed on 21 May. His answer is a new generation of cellphones that can rapidly form a peer-to-peer network when an emergency alert is broadcast. A phone on the edge of a disaster area, where a cellphone service still operates, receives the alert. It contacts the nearest phone using Wi-Fi, establishes a P2P network with it, and sends it the alert. That cellphone then does likewise until as many mobiles as possible have received the alert. This way, the warning message gets out with “minimal use of infrastructure”, Vogedes says.
“Unique flight control manoeuvres got the plane down” A US air force spokesman describes how an uncrewed Global Hawk aircraft with a wingspan equal to that of a Boeing 737 was landed on a dry lake bed next to Edwards air force base in California following a control failure (USAF statement, 29 May)
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 19
TECHNOLOGY
The internet makes it easy for pirate radio stations to evade the law and even get on the air again quickly if caught and closed down Paul Marks
YOU are chilling out to your favourite songs on your car radio, only to have them drowned out by an appalling, fuzzy din you didn’t tune into. It happens all too often in cities, where legitimate stations in the FM band lose out to pirate stations playing their own brands of music alongside brash nightlife advertising. And this hijacking of the airwaves won’t change any time soon, thanks to the internet. So says airwave watchdog Ofcom, which manages and protects radio frequencies for the UK government. Ofcom cites two major threats in its annual enforcement report: keeping pirate stations off the air and preventing people buying and using illegal radio-frequency equipment designed to jam cellphones. In both cases, the internet is aiding and abetting “spectrum crime” – hijacking radio frequencies which broadcasters, including legitimate radio stations and cellphone companies, have already paid huge sums to use, says Ofcom. In the past, pirates would have put an unlicensed radio station on the air by fixing an antenna on the roof of a tall apartment block, connected to an FM transmitter close by. Essentially a large amplifier, the transmitter lets the antenna radiate a 200-watt signal covering a radius of a mile or so. About 20 years ago, says Paul Mercer, head of spectrum enforcement at Ofcom, the pirate’s “studio” would be in the 20 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
same building, but to evade arrest and seizure of studio equipment, they began using a radio link from a studio elsewhere, feeding their music across the rooftops to their transmitter, which rebroadcast it in the FM band. In the event of a raid, only the transmitter and antenna would be lost. Ofcom teams had no trouble picking up those studio radio links, in bands at 55 and 180 megahertz, because they were fairly broad and gave their presence away by interfering with
other licensed radio services. So the pirates then switched to studio-to-transmitter links in the harder-to-detect microwave band, around 10 gigahertz. These are more focused and less likely to cause telltale interference. “So we then developed, or procured, equipment that lets us detect those microwaves, too,” says Mercer. In addition, the focused directionality of microwave signals meant a visit to an illegal FM antenna would also reveal the microwave-receiving
UNIVERSAL/EVERETT/REX
Net gives pirate radio the last laugh
antenna. “And it will be pointing straight at the studio supplying the station’s content,” he laughs. Pirate radio is no longer such easy prey, thanks to the internet. “Illegal broadcasters are now seeking to distance their operations from the likelihood of enforcement action by streaming their broadcasts online,” says Ofcom in its report. While people can listen to a legitimate web-based radio station, that same audio stream can also be used to get the signal via modem to a remote transmitter without using a (detectable) radio or microwave link. “Many have now replaced their radio link with the internet,” Mercer says. Pirates aren’t content with web-based radio because they want to reach the all-important street audience too. “Our research shows that most people listen to illegal broadcasters in their cars or on cellphones with FM receivers,”
–You don’t need a boat with the net–
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Illegal broadcasting clampdown
Hybrids stay cool if they know where they’re going
During the course of Operation Crystal in 2005, a total of 44 illegal broadcast stations were put out of operation across London
53
17
50 Number of illegal broadcasters
transmitters siezed
aerials disabled
AS I struggled to drive a hired SUV up a particularly steep dirt track, my passenger offered some sage advice: “Turn the aircon off.” I did – and the car practically took off, showing just how much power it takes to run a car’s air conditioner. And if aircon is a strain even for a standard car, it’s a challenge to the very raison d’être of petrol-electric hybrids, says Tom Robinson of Ricardo, an automotive engineering firm in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, UK. The problem is that when a hybrid is set to “economy” mode – in which the combustion engine turns itself off when the car is creeping along in traffic or stationary – the aircon stops whenever the car does. That can leave the driver and passengers sweltering at every traffic light. As a result, many drivers of hybrids are turning off economy mode in order to keep the aircon working, Ricardo says. So, many of these “green” cars may in fact be running like conventional gas-guzzlers. To prevent this, Robinson and his colleagues have developed a smart, location-sensing solution. Aircons work by compressing a refrigerant gas and then allowing it to expand again, cooling as it does so. But compressors need a lot of power
40 30 20 10
5 r2
r2
“People afraid of cellphone radiation buy jammers, not realising they are sources of energetic microwaves” lived – over the following weeks, pirates crept back on air (see graph) until after a few weeks the number of illegal broadcasters crept back up to the pre-raid level. But Ofcom says those coming back on air are often new radio pirates taking up the frequencies – not those they have prosecuted, seen heavily fined or sentenced to community service. To combat pirates getting onair, Mercer’s team is “upskilling” – learning a new bag of internet and surveillance tricks that, for
No ve m th 20
instance, let them track down the hosts of web radio audio streams that in turn may lead them to pirate broadcasters. Ofcom’s big, probably impossible, dream is that pirates will migrate to the net and eventually ditch FM. The internet may also be responsible for other airwave problems. Ofcom says the “exponential growth” in websites selling illegal cellphone jammers is wrecking services carried on expensively licensed frequencies. Jammers create holes in cellphone coverage that lead to complaints from mobile phone networks which have paid billions for blanket coverage – and Ofcom found, for instance, that last year a Mosque and a theatre had installed them. Ironically, people afraid of cellphone radiation are major buyers of jammers – not realising that they work because they give off higher-energy microwaves than the phone itself. Last year, Ofcom stripped 42 jammer advertisements from 19 websites and is prosecuting three vendors. By writing to those sites’ customers, they have even managed to convince some buyers to surrender their devices. Others clearly love the peace and quiet their jammers give them. “Not everyone answers our letters,” Mercer admits. ■
“Many of these ‘green’ hybrids may in fact be running like conventional gas-guzzlers” in Wokingham, UK, and the car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover. There’s a catch, however. They found the system delivers the best fuel savings at an outside temperature of around 22 °C. So it’s fine for British weather, but won’t save quite so much gas for heavy aircon users in places like Florida.
Duncan Graham-Rowe ■
JUPITER IMAGES
he says. Even if a pirate’s transmitter and antenna are seized, they simply redirect their internet audio stream to another transmitter/antenna on another building and carry on broadcasting. “Effectively, this allows pirate radio stations to be operated remotely,” complains Ofcom. So taking them off-air only works in the short term. As an example, Ofcom cites a series of simultaneous raids on London’s pirate stations in 2005. In that operation, 53 transmitters and 17 antennas were seized and illegal broadcasting was reduced by 57 per cent. Success was short-
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and so have to be driven by a hybrid’s engine, rather than from the battery. Ricardo’s system uses GPS to plot the car’s position on a digital map that includes the location of traffic lights and junctions to anticipate when the engine, and the aircon, is likely to switch itself off. It then produces extra cool air to reduce the cabin temperature by a further 1.5 °C – not enough to make the passengers shiver, but enough to tide the vehicle over while it is stationary. Using the system slashed fuel consumption during typical urban driving by up to 9 per cent in climatecontrolled tests carried out by Ricardo engineers working with the Transport Research Laboratory
–Ready for a long, hot wait– 6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 21
TECHNOLOGY
Explosive radio bullets leave no place to hide A RIFLE capable of firing explosive bullets that can detonate within a metre of a target could let soldiers fire on snipers hiding in trenches, behind walls or inside buildings. The US army has developed the XM25 rifle to give its troops an alternative to calling in artillery fire or air strikes when an enemy has taken cover and can’t be targeted by direct fire. “This is the first leap-ahead technology for troops that we’ve been able to develop and deploy,” says Douglas Tamilio, the army’s project manager for new weapons for soldiers. “This gives them another tool in their kitbag.” The rifle’s gunsight uses a laser rangefinder to calculate the exact distance to the obstruction. The soldier can then add or subtract up to 3 metres from that distance to enable the bullets to clear the barrier and explode above or beside the target (see diagram). As the 25-millimetre round is fired, the gunsight sends a radio signal to a chip inside the bullet, telling it the precise distance to the target. A spiral groove inside the barrel makes the bullet rotate
as it travels, and as it also contains a magnetic transducer, this rotation through the Earth’s magnetic field generates an alternating current. A patent granted to the bullet’s maker, Alliant Techsystems, reveals that the chip uses fluctuations in this current to count each revolution and, as it knows the distance covered in one spin, it can calculate how far it has travelled. The rifle would allow a soldier faced with a sniper firing from a window to take a distance measurement to the window, add
22 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
“This airburst shell gives the close-combat capability of a grenade launcher, combined with the ability of indirect fire weapons to hit stuff on the other side of the wall,” says John Pike, a defence analyst with Washington DC think tank GlobalSecurity.org. Pike says it is just one example of “smart” munitions now possible because of microchip advances. Although the rifle will initially use high-explosive rounds, it might later use versions with smaller explosive charges that aim to stun rather than kill. The US army plans to field-test prototypes of the rifle soon, possibly in Iraq or Afghanistan, and hopes to begin using it by 2012. Kurt Kleiner ■
Trenches aren’t safe any more The XM25 rifle can target an enemy hidden behind a wall, in a room or in a trench
Laser rangefinder determines distance to the obstruction
Soldier can adjust distance by 1 to 3 metres to reach target
ATTACKING SOLDIER
Bullet explodes when it has travelled the set distance
OBSTRUCTING SAND RIDGE
TARGET SOLDIERS
Inflatable tower provides first steps on a stairway into space A GIANT inflatable tower could carry people to the edge of space without the need for a rocket, and could be completed much sooner than a cable-based space elevator, its proponents claim. Inflatable pneumatic modules already used in some spacecraft could be assembled into a 15-kilometre-high tower, say Brendan Quine, Raj Seth and George Zhu at York University in Toronto, Canada, writing in Acta Astronautica (DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2009.02.018). If built from a suitable mountain top
a metre, fire through the window, and have the round detonate 1 metre inside the room. The same method could be used to fire behind a wall or over a trench. As it stands, Tamilio says, soldiers faced with enemies behind cover have the option of using grenade launchers, which have limited range and accuracy, or asking for artillery fire or air strikes. However, both of those options cover a large area and so have a higher risk of killing civilians, especially in urban areas. They are also expensive. “You could shoot a Javelin missile, and it would cost $70,000. These rounds will end up costing $25 apiece. They’re relatively cheap,” Tamilio says.
it could reach an altitude of around 20 kilometres, where it could be used for atmospheric research, tourism, telecoms or launching spacecraft. The team envisages assembling the structure from a series of modules constructed from Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes made rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as helium. To test the idea, they built a 7-metre scale model made up of six modules. Each module was built out of three laminated polyethylene tubes 8 centimetres in diameter, mounted around circular
spacers and inflated with air. To stay upright and withstand winds, full-scale structures would require gyroscopes and active stabilisation systems in each module. The team modelled a 15-kilometre tower made up of 100 modules, each one 150 metres tall and 230 metres in diameter, built from inflatable tubes 2 metres across. Quine
“Pneumatic modules already used in some spacecraft could be assembled into a 15-kilometre-high tower” estimates it would weigh about 800,000 tonnes when pressurised – around twice the weight of the world’s largest supertanker.
“Twenty kilometres up is about as dark as outer space. You can see about 600 kilometres in any direction,” Quine says. Tourists could get a view almost like that from space, but without the difficulties of coping with zero gravity. He calculates the tower could be extended up to low Earth orbit at 200 kilometres. The tower does a similar job to the much-vaunted space elevator. But while the elevator envisages using ribbons woven from superstrong nanotubes – a material that is as yet non-existent – the tower would use materials that are already available. And should something go wrong with the tower, failure of a few modules would not cause the whole structure to collapse. Jeff Hecht, Boston ■
OPINION
Human subjects, human rights Biologist and author Jared Diamond is being sued by people he studied. The case has serious lessons for all field researchers, says Daniel Everett DID Jared Diamond libel Papua New Guineans in a high-profile article? I don’t know. And, most likely, neither do you. Diamond is being sued for $10 million in a New York court over an April 2008 article in The New Yorker magazine concerning violence and revenge in Papua New Guinea, where he has spent many years. Diamond named names, and some of those names say that claims made in his article are false – and may have put the life of one of them at risk.
An allegation that a prosperous first-world scientist has intentionally or carelessly maligned powerless people in the developing world naturally tempts us to stand alongside the underdog, and condemn the researcher. Yet there may equally well be convincing explanations that put matters in a different light. Over the years, many field researchers have faced similarly serious challenges to both reputation and character. Napoleon Chagnon, one of the
Stop this stealth advertising greatest anthropologists to set foot in the Amazon, was later vilified for, among other things, purportedly infecting Yanomami people with measles to test a new vaccine. The charges are now mostly regarded as spurious. Then there is the case of Louis Leakey. In 1933, he was lauded for his discovery of an ancient human species. When he invited geologist Percy Boswell to verify the claim, Boswell could not do so because Leakey had not marked or documented the site of the find carefully enough. Leakey’s reputation never fully recovered. For researchers who spend lonely years slogging it out in difficult circumstances, having to submit their claims to independent testing can seem a heavy burden to bear. But it is a necessary evil. So what does the dispute over Diamond’s article teach us? First, field scientists need to document claims with the utmost care. Others will visit, no matter how remote the site, to check out their assertions. As I write, a team from Germany is evaluating my claims about the language and culture of the Pirahã people. Second, no one should take the word of any one researcher. All claims – yours, mine, Diamond’s, his critics’ – must be tested and retested. And last, the internet makes research globally available: this only serves to underline the need to always get approval from the real names we name before we publish. ■ Daniel Everett is a linguist at Illinois State University. Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes tells of his life in the Amazon
24 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
Can we ever trust what we read about drugs, asks Sheldon Krimsky ACROSS the western world, the influence of pharmaceutical companies on the way their products are perceived is palpable. They pay for and design medical education, control direct-toconsumer marketing, fund research, help finance medical journals through advertising, influence how doctors prescribe and fund speakers to help promote their drugs. Most people won’t be surprised to learn that they also seek to shape what is published in journals through ghost-written essays signed by prestigious doctors, or attempt to influence prescribers’ opinions through widely distributed “throwaways”, a euphemism for journal articles that support their products. But even the most hardened cynics were left open-mouthed last month by the news that the Australian affiliate of the global drug giant Merck had signed up with publisher Excerpta Medica, a division of Elsevier (a sister company of New Scientist) to produce a publication with the look and feel of a peer-reviewed journal, yet which contained only reprints of articles, most of them sympathetic towards Merck products. The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was sent to up to 20,000 doctors between 2003 and 2005. The publication had no website and, unlike normal journals, was not open for
Comment on these stories at www.NewScientist.com/opinion
One-minute interview
The father of Ida Jørn Hurum on what lies ahead for his “missing link” primate fossil following its controversial high-profile introduction
“Only a keen, experienced eye would have recognised that the journal was a marketing aid” similarity to the parent journal, few readers understand that these supplements do not meet comparable editorial standards. This blurring of the boundaries between independently refereed publications and advertorials is unacceptable. Promotional material should be clearly marked and easily identifiable. The production of drugs and the production of reliable knowledge about their safety and use must be kept separate. ■ Sheldon Krimsky is adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Family Medicine at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts
There has been strong criticism of the way this fossil has been publicised. Are people upset because your conclusion – that Ida is probably the ancestor of all apes and monkeys – seemed too set in stone? Yes. That’s why there has been head-banging. The money spent on Ida [the asking price was reported to be $1 million]... was that because it was such a well-preserved primate, or because of its potential evolutionary relationship to humans? No. We started off thinking it was the ancestor of all lemurs. It may still turn out to be a lemur. Do you still have an open mind about that? Of course. This is science. If other people’s arguments are better than what we present in our paper already published in PLoS ONE (vol 4, e5723) or what we are going to do in the next two papers, we will accept it, no problem.
PROFILE Jørn Hurum is a palaeontologist at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the leader of the team that unveiled the 47-million-year-old fossil primate Darwinius masillae last month
Would it be as interesting if Ida turns out to be a lemur? Yes, because you can focus on it being a primate that lived 47 million years ago. I think that message really got through that we have ancestors way, way back in time, not only in Africa. I find it very nice that we have got that message out to people in the street, even if it turns out to be a lemur – which I don’t believe at the moment.
That’s going to make things tough at the next conference you go to. I never go to conferences. It’s extremely boring, and there are so few talks that are interesting enough to listen to. Scientific congresses are a lot of arm-waving and big egos not going anywhere. That’s not my way of doing it.
What about the creationists who are using the reaction against your paper as ammunition against evolutionary biologists? Yes, that’s tricky. We did it this way and of course will be criticised for it. But now it’s done. Were you happy with how the History Channel handled the documentary? Some of the slogans were too much. “The biggest find in 47 million years… this will change everything.” We had some control over the press material but then it evolved. It grew too large to be able to control everything.
In the PLoS paper, you single out the absence of a tooth comb and grooming claw, which are defining features of lemurs. What will be the focus of your next analysis? The foot, the inner ear and the incisor might tell us something, I think. The inner ear and the foot will be the main focus for the systematics and this will be done and published within about a year. A lot of people are going to take a lot of convincing that Ida is a human ancestor. Have you got strong enough evidence? We’ll see with the foot and the inner ear. We just have to try our best. Whatever it is, it’s a fantastic specimen.
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 25
JENNIFER GRAYLOCK/AP
submissions. Neither was there any disclosure that it was funded and controlled by Merck. Elsevier has since revealed that it put out five other industry-sponsored titles between 2000 and 2005 under its Excerpta Medica imprint. Several journal editors have testified that only a keen and experienced eye would have recognised that the journal was a marketing aid. Yet its production is not that far removed from a practice that has been going on for some time without much resistance: the corporate funding of special supplementary issues of journals. These are paid for and often overseen by pharmaceutical companies, which are careful to select articles that promote their products. Because of their stylistic
OPINION LETTERS Healthy vocabulary From Nancy Blake Helen Pilcher highlights the strength of the nocebo effect, in which negative expectations can produce harmful effects (16 May, p 30). A study of the language used in the Milton model of hypnosis could help doctors who wonder how to inform patients of potential side effects without inadvertently suggesting that they acquire them. If I ask you not to think of a purple cow, you first have to visualise it, and the image then stays in your mind as you try not to think of it. If you are subsequently asked to visualise a brown cow in some detail, the image of the purple cow disappears. Similarly, saying to a piano student, “This is the hard part of the piece” will produce negative expectations, raising the student’s anxiety level. Saying instead, “This part isn’t easy, yet” will cause the unconscious, which doesn’t deal well with a negative, to respond to the word “easy”. These quirks of the unconscious mind can be exploited in medical treatment. When prescribing a drug, the doctor could say that in most cases, the patient can expect
it to produce a particular improvement, and that they have every reason to believe the patient will respond in that way. The doctor could then go on to explain that occasionally something different might occur, but in such a case it is just a matter of discontinuing the medication and contacting the doctor so that the situation can be sorted out. The emphasis here should be on the process of “sorting it out”. This sets up an expectation of specific improvements: the placebo effect. It builds in a sense of confidence, as the patient knows the doctor is aware that the situation might change and will be able to handle changes accordingly. This should minimise anxiety even if side effects occur, reassuring the patient that things still can go well. Kingston upon Hull, East Yorkshire, UK
Enigma Number 1548
Easy threes SUSAN DENHAM I started with a list of six odd numbers, all divisible by 3 (and with no leading zeros, of course). Then I coded the numbers by consistently
replacing digits by letters, with different letters used for different digits. The list then became: MAY IMAGINE MAKING EASY ENIGMA EASIER (a) Which letter represents 6? (b) Which digit is represented by N?
WIN £15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct answer opened on Wednesday 8 July. The Editor’s decision is final. Please send entries to Enigma 1548, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to
[email protected] (please include your postal address). Answer to 1542 Recycling points: 27 items were metal The winner Fiona Shen of Harrogate, North Yorkshire, UK
26 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
From Mike Harding The nocebo effect has some intriguing implications for government health warnings. For example, there is little doubt that smoking is unwise, but could its detrimental effects be increased by informing smokers on every cigarette packet that their habit is going to kill them? With an increasing tendency for litigation in areas of scientific dispute (16 May, p 24), might there be a case for tobacco manufacturers to sue the issuer of the relevant warning? London, UK From Mary Midgley Helen Pilcher reports that critics are disturbed by the evidence that people can become ill or die because they believe they are dying, since “it challenges our biomolecular model of the world”. If that model is taken to mean that mental causes cannot have physical effects then it is mistaken, as experience continually shows. Whenever anyone writes down a conclusion they have just worked out, their body is responding only to conscious thoughts that precipitated these actions. Certainly the person needs the right neurons too, but they won’t work without the original thought processes. This obvious truth only began to look suspect in some people’s eyes because of the crude dualism which used to treat “consciousness” as special and distinct. It is much better to see conscious thinking as simply an activity that has its place in the causal sequence, like anything else. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK From Akram Najjar The article on the nocebo effect begins with a story about someone who was hexed and then “cured” when the doctor gave him an emetic and threw a green lizard into the vomit. I remember a similar occurrence that ended rather
differently. A patient complained about a bee in his stomach that stung him repeatedly. His doctor was unable to convince him that a bee cannot live in the stomach and even if it did, at worst it could only sting him once. A young resident suggested they give him an emetic and put a bee in the vomit. After the treatment the patient felt great. However, he came back two weeks later saying, “Doctor, I now have 100 bees in my stomach and they are driving me crazy”. A witch doctor malady should not be given a witch doctor cure. Beirut, Lebanon
Alternative medicine From George Lewith, Complementary and Integrated Medicine Research Unit, University of Southampton David Allen Green suggests that there is an increasing trend towards complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners threatening libel action against those who criticise them (16 May, p 24). I am unaware of anybody prior to the chiropractors he describes taking this course of action in the UK. Furthermore, as a medically qualified researcher of CAM, I have experienced two prominent members of the “anti-CAM brigade” attempting to take legal action against me, which I had to defend. It should be noted that the article you published on this matter is from a prominent member of the anti-CAM brigade. Southampton, UK
How to see yourself Tapas Basu, Indian Statistical Institute Out-of-body experience (OBE) is an intriguing and controversial topic on which there are only a handful of publications. In their letter (11 April, p 22), Eric
For more letters and to join the debate, visit www.NewScientist.com/letters
Altschuler and Vilayanur Ramachandran claim that their 2007 paper ( Perception, vol 36, p 632) was the “first to report a method to perceive being outside of one’s body”. However, as early as 2002, Olaf Blanke and others induced OBEs by focal electrical stimulation of the brain’s right angular gyrus in a patient undergoing treatment for epilepsy (Nature, vol 419, p 269). They suggest that “the angular gyrus could be a crucial node in a larger neural circuit that mediates complex own-body perception”. Kolkata, India The editor writes: ■ The OBE felt by the patient in Blanke’s study was limited to observation of her legs and lower trunk, omitting other body parts.
Power to the people From Larry Curley If a severe climatic or violent event were to take out several large generators, for example the Severn barrage in the UK (18 April, p 32), a considerable number of buildings would cease to function. If every building generated its own electricity, it is likely many of them would still be running after such an event. With the assistance of strategically placed microgenerators, vital equipment could be up and running within hours. For this reason, I ordered a 1-kilowatt wind turbine for my house three years ago. However, I cancelled the order when I discovered that, in keeping with UK law, the turbine is designed to stop working if the National Grid goes down. I am waiting for a change in the law. Sawtry, Cambridgeshire, UK
Antimatter universe From Perry Bebbington Could it be that there is an antiuniverse and that it existed, or exists, before our universe?
It might explain where all the antimatter is (25 April, p 36). Perhaps the big bang created two universes: ours which goes forward in time, and an antiuniverse going backwards in time. Of course, from the perspective of the anti-universe, ours is the one made of antimatter and going backwards in time. Kimberley, Nottinghamshire, UK
Pitch-perfect position From Stephen Taylor Hazel Muir reports that those who speak tonal languages are more likely to have perfect pitch (2 May, p 10). I do not have perfect pitch myself, but as a doctor and an organist I have long been fascinated by its mechanism. It is difficult to imagine the brain having a standard pitch reference, but we do possess a remarkable ability to “remember” joint and muscle position. Over the years, I have asked many musicians with perfect pitch in what way they think they have it. The best explanation I heard is that it stems from the memory of
how muscles of vocalisation feel when producing the relevant note if sung, an explanation that fits very well with the association of perfect pitch and tonal language. Fordham, Cambridgeshire, UK
Yogi boo-boo From Brad Fregger I won’t try to represent Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s quantum physics,
but I take issue with Amanda Gefter’s contention that he didn’t become famous until the Beatles got involved with him (18 April, p 46). In fact, he started touring the world in 1958 and didn’t meet the Beatles until 1967. The Beatles had little impact on his popularity. They quit touring and recording while they were with him and then left disenchanted because of an unfounded accusation that the Maharishi had slept with Mia Farrow. In fact, the biggest increase in transcendental meditators came in 1975, when Merv Griffin got involved and had the Maharishi on his US talk show a number of times. Austin, Texas, US
of a similar construction that appeared in the Australian Journal of Zoology years ago: “The rabbits were observed using binoculars.” The dangling participle strikes again. Cleveland, Ohio, US
Power of love From Dorothy Shaw The feature on ways of encouraging creativity (9 May, p 32) was interesting, but there was one glaring omission – love, especially the unrequited kind. Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK
Dopey regulations From Michael Kellock The recent flurry of letters about smoking regulations in various countries prompted me to comment on the lunacy that can sometimes result from the application of poorly thoughtout rules (18 April, p 24, and 2 May, p 24). In Dutch coffee shops, where marijuana can be purchased without risking legal penalty, new smoking regulations prohibit the use of tobacco in public areas. So while it is still OK to smoke straight dope or to use a bong in a coffee shop, mix one shred of tobacco with it and you could find yourself in trouble with the law. Foster, Victoria, Australia
Problem participles From Hector Casal I found the article “Seeing with sound” by Daniel Kish (11 April, p 31) inspiring. Thank you for including it in New Scientist. I was, however, struck by the sentence “What is it like to ‘see’ the world using sonar?” beneath the headline. It reminded me
Our unique bubble From Jerry Barton There were excellent illustrations in your article on the multiverse (2 May, p 35). Does the choice of bubble wrap illustrate the hills and valleys of the multiverse? I wondered why the bubbles were all deflated – and then asked myself, who had all the fun? Is there perhaps one unique inflated bubble somewhere in the picture? Vienna, Austria
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6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 27
OPINION ESSAY COMPETITION
Your virtual twin
JOHN BROWN/STONE
Before long, we will each have an alter ego to assess the medication we need. That’s the vision of Natalia Alexandrov, winner of the New Scientist/NC3Rs “Beyond animal research” essay competition
A QUIET night in December 2050. Small town anywhere on Earth. In the hospital, little Peter has just made his appearance in the world. As the happy family takes pictures of mother and baby, the thought that his birth is incomplete is far from their minds. And the birth will not be complete for a few hours, until hundreds of miles away his virtual twin is born. While Peter is dreaming his first dreams, samples of his blood and tissue are analysed and the resulting data transmitted to the simulation and modelling department of the regional medical centre. It is expensive and time-consuming to build a virtual human from scratch, so a library of averaged mathematical models of newborns is maintained. The initial models differ by sex, ethnicity, geographic origin, basic genetic make-up and other salient characteristics. When Peter’s data arrive, they are integrated with a model whose attributes most closely resemble Peter’s. The vast resulting computational model is as unique as Peter himself. 28 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
“For now, the action and long-term consequences of most drugs are a mystery” Throughout Peter’s childhood his parents take him for medical check-ups, inoculations and treatment for a broken arm and colds. All this information makes his virtual twin grow. When the boy is 10, flu leaves him with a complication – severe bronchitis. Which antibiotic to prescribe? The family doctor downloads Peter’s virtual twin, updates it with the latest tests, and runs simulations for the range of available antibiotics to anticipate short-term and long-term effects. This identifies both the perfect drug and one that would have had a life-threatening, long-term effect on Peter’s blood-clotting ability, possibly leading to a future stroke. Why an individual twin? The laboratory animals used to develop drugs do not always represent humans adequately, and even well-tested drugs can cause
adverse reactions in some people. How far are we from building useful and practical virtual twins? There are many sophisticated models of individual organs and systems, such as network models of the metabolic, immune, nervous and circulatory systems; computational fluid dynamics models of blood flow; structural models of the heart and other muscles. These models will continue to grow in fidelity, but the behaviour of a complex system is a function of its complexity, and the biggest barrier is, arguably, the integration of subsystem models into one systemic model. As well as the difficulty of modelling every aspect of the organism in terms amenable to computation, the challenges are in combining disparate models and the sheer volume and complexity of the information needed. However, in this writer’s opinion, the situation is by no means hopeless. Moore’s law of growing computational resources will provide the necessary storage and speed. The complex mathematics involved will be more challenging, but by no means prohibitively so. The benefits of a virtual twin that evolves along with the human it represents would be enormous. The action and long-term consequences of most drugs are at present a mystery, despite careful research and animal testing. We cannot quantify the processes actually taking place in our bodies as a result of an illness or in response to a drug. A faithful computational representation of an individual would yield quantifiable, rigorous measurements of the model’s reactions. There would no longer be a need to identify a population for a drug trial, nor would years go by in tests while desperate patients are waiting for a new drug. A set of virtual patients with precisely known characteristics could be selected at any time, and drug research conducted at computational speeds, resulting in safe, effective treatments based on individual patients’ characteristics. This is the future of virtual twins. And no more animal testing. ■ Natalia Alexandrov is a researcher at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. This essay expresses her personal opinion and does not represent NASA’s opinions or views
RUNNERS-UP The runners up were Kristian Funding Andersen from Denmark and Gideon Kersten from the Netherlands. You can read their essays at www. newscientist.com/article/dn16679
OPINION INTERVIEW
For more interviews and to add your comments, visit www.NewScientist.com/opinion
Photography: Catrina Genovese
The inventor’s eye view
Why did you decide to subject the web itself to scientific scrutiny?
Web science is already happening. People are studying the effect of the web within disciplines like social science, economics, psychology and law. Our Web Science Research Initiative aims to bring that research together. There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole – until now. What do you hope to achieve with the Web Science Research Initiative?
The web is now a massive system of connected people and technology and we have to study it as one. It connects people as they make and follow hyperlinks to a degree that results in complex properties no one expected. It has something like 1011 web pages in it and there are a similar number of neurons in the brain. The brain is something very complicated we don’t understand – yet we rely on it. The web is very complicated too and, though we built it, we have no real data about the stability of the emergent systems that have cropped up on it. How does understanding these emergent systems affect society?
Because if you get it right, you can create a new social phenomenon that changes how people operate. Take designing an online market for
WIRE IMAGE/GETTY
World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to put the web under the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour. Paul Marks asked him what he hopes to achieve second-hand goods: if you get the website’s balance of social and technical wrong, or mess up its trust and reputation model, it won’t work. But if you get it right, you create a market for used goods internationally that can affect the price of products around the world because it provides the price of the secondhand alternative. It is a web phenomenon that changed the way society works, and we need a science to understand it. Isn’t this better studied in the well-established field of computer-human interaction?
Some in that field are addressing some of these issues, but it is not just about the way information is presented through an interface. Web science is seeking a broad, systems-level view. We need cross-fertilisation between different disciplines. Will web science improve online security?
There are no one-word answers to security. Security permeates everything, so there are PROFILE Tim Berners-Lee read physics at the University of Oxford. In 1989 at CERN, the particle physics lab in Switzerland, he proposed a global hypertext project which became the World Wide Web. He is a co-director of the Web Science Research Initiative, a joint venture with headquarters at the University of Southampton and MIT (www.webscience.org)
possible attacks on everything. Some security problems are related to complex systems in social networks. For instance, phishing is about an inadequate connection to human trust, making people think they are talking to a bank when it just looks like the bank. Will it help people trust websites?
In some ways, yes, but that’s a bit like asking a cognitive scientist if they can cure warts. Early on there was no encryption but we now have cryptographic protocols to secure communications over the internet. Phishing was an attack few people expected and we are now much better at defending against it with browser bars that warn of certificate errors. Web science will help on issues like security by identifying microscopic problems and linking them to the macroscopic ones. Your invention has allowed anonymous whistleblowing sites like Wikileaks to spring up. Will web science help maintain the anonymity of those who take a stand?
Well, whistleblowing is an example of the web’s collective intelligence and web science needs to study it. But it is very difficult to make a foolproof anonymiser. Frankly, it’s a bit hairy to be in that game. Anonymised data about people is deceptive and is rather dangerous because the more datasets you can compare one set of data with, the more likely you are to be able to identify the people in it. ■ 6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 29
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COVER STORY
The makings of a savant Savants have phenomenal talents in music, art and mathematics, but are their gifts within everyone’s reach? Celeste Biever investigates
MARIA RENDON
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LAD in a dark suit and sunglasses, Derek Paravicini makes a beeline for the sound of my voice and links his arm into mine. “Hello, Celeste. Where have you come from today?” I reply and his response is immediate: “From Holborn?” He repeats the word several times, savouring each syllable. “Hol-born, Hol-born, Hooool-bbooorn. Where’s Hoollllbooorn?” As our conversation continues, the substance of much of what I say doesn’t seem to sink in, but the sounds themselves certainly do, with Paravicini lingering over and repeating particularly delightful syllables. “Meewww-zick. The pi-aan-o.” Such touching and immediate friendliness is not quite what I expected from my first meeting with the 29-year-old, blind musical savant, but his obsession with reproducing sounds certainly makes sense, given his talent. Paravicini can play just about any piece of music you request, entirely from memory, with formidable technical ability, despite having severe learning difficulties that mean he needs constant support in everyday life. And as I find out an hour later, he constantly improvises the pieces he has learned by ear, rather than simply copying as you might expect. Paravicini is a prodigious savant – someone with a dazzling talent in one or two fields, normally music, maths, art or memory, but who also has some kind of a disability, such as autism. Psychologists have puzzled long and hard over savant skills, which confound their traditional understanding of intelligence. “What makes savants so interesting is this jarring juxtaposition of ability and disability in the same person,” says Darold Treffert,
a psychiatrist based in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin who was also a consultant for the film Rain Man. “We are used to seeing skills that are consistent with each other.” But now researchers are beginning to unearth clues as to how savants’ formidable brains work, and that in turn is changing our view of what it means to be a savant. In the past, savants were considered rare, solitary figures capable of mind-boggling skills that appeared as if by magic. “There have almost been suggestions that their skills appear like the birth of Venus in Botticelli – fully formed,” says psychologist Richard Cowan, who studies savants at the Institute of Education, University of London. A flurry of research published earlier this year in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B paints a very different picture. It turns out that these skills are far more common than previously thought. They may even arise from traits found in the general population, implying that savants are not fundamentally different from the rest of us. What’s more, these skills may only blossom after years of obsessive practice,
raising the question of whether many more people might cultivate similar skills, if only they had the motivation. One of the biggest clues to the origins of savant talent lies in the fact that savants are far more common within the autistic population than among people with other mental difficulties. “When you talk about savants, you have to talk about autism,” says Greg Wallace, who studies savants at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “In many ways they are inextricably linked.” Previously, about 1 in 10 people with autism were thought to have a special ability but in April, Patricia Howlin at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London found a much higher figure in the autistic adults she surveyed for savant skills or an exceptional cognitive ability. Those with an exceptional cognitive ability scored higher than the general population on at least one aspect of an intelligence test, which included arithmetic, spatial and motor skills and memory span. Savant skills included more fully developed talents, such as being able to name the elevation of both the sun and the >
”Savants were considered solitary figures, capable of mind-boggling skills. There have almost been suggestions that their talents appear like the birth of Venus in Botticelli – fully formed”
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 31
”An eye for detail gives you a foothold into talent. It may be this one aspect of autism, rather than the whole package, that turns out to be the starting engine for savant abilities”
32 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
small details might have led their developing brains to focus more on the exact notes than the overall melody, leading to perfect pitch and an exceptional musical memory. In art, a focus on small regions of a picture could lead to accurate perspective drawing.
Precocious artists That theory fits with another study of nonautistic children with a talent for drawing that belies their age. Although these “precocious realists” don’t qualify as savants because they don’t have a disability, the ease, speed and accuracy of their drawing are similar to the distinctive qualities found in savant artists. To see if a detail-focused mindset might also explain these childrens’ skills, psychologists Ellen Winner and Jennifer Drake of Boston College gave them the block design test, which assesses your ability to piece together a pattern from its component parts. Most people find this harder when they are shown an unsegmented version of the pattern versus a segmented one, but people with autism don’t have this preference, demonstrating their skill at seeing a whole in terms of its parts even if
Do you have a prodigious talent? In the block design test, subjects must recreate a geometric pattern given 16 individual blocks. Most people find this easier viewing a segmented version of the pattern – but talented artistic minds and people with autism can do it just as quickly with an unsegmented version, since their minds naturally see the whole in terms of its components
SEGMENTED VERSION UNSEGMENTED VERSION SOURCE: BRAIN, VOL 129, P 1789, BY PERMISSION OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
moon at any time of day, on any specified date; being able to name the day of the week for any date in the distant past or future (a talent known as calendrical calculation) and perfect pitch. Importantly, the abilities and the skills had to be exceptional by the standards of the general population, but also well above the individual’s overall level of ability. In total, roughly 30 per cent had some kind of special ability (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364, p 1359). But while highlighting the link between autism and savantism, Howlin’s results didn’t offer any further clues as to why the two are so entwined. To investigate the nature of this link, Francesca Happé, also at the Institute of Psychiatry, and her colleagues decided to test which aspects of autism predispose people to talent, and whether these traits also occur in the general population, albeit less commonly. Her team turned to a questionnaire called the Childhood Asperger Syndrome Test, which assesses social interaction, communication and whether someone has “repetitive and restrictive behaviours and interests” (or RRBIs) associated with autism. The team sent the CAST survey to the parents of more than 6000 autistic and non-autistic 8-year-olds along with a questionnaire assessing the child’s special abilities in maths, musical ability, art and memory. On analysing the results, one RRBI trait in particular emerged as the biggest indicator of talent. Children who “notice details that other people miss”, or “remember details that other people miss” were twice as likely to have a special gift than those without these attributes (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2009.02076.x). Happé has concluded that this one aspect of autism rather than the whole “package”, may turn out to be the “starting engine” for talent in savants. “An eye for detail is a cognitive style that runs through the normal population, and it is that quality that gives you the foothold into talent,” she says. But how could such an unremarkable trait give rise to a gift? For musical savants like Paravicini, Happé suggests that a bias towards
there are no obvious dividing lines (see diagram, below). “It shows they are able to do the segmentation in their minds,” says Winner. The precocious realists did not have this preference either, indicating a talent for realistic drawing may arise from this isolated trait commonly found in autism (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364, p 1449). Although these results help to pinpoint exactly what it is about autism that predisposes people to talent, it’s still not clear why an eye for detail is more common in autistic people in the first place. Clues might lie in the work of Simon Baron-Cohen from the University of Cambridge, which suggests that people with autism are “hypersensitive” to sensory information. He now proposes that such acute sensitivity might predispose people with autism to pick out differences that would escape the rest of us, fostering an unusual focus on detail that leads to the development of savant skills (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364, p 1522). But while a focus on smaller details may well be a necessary ingredient for talent, no one is yet claiming that it alone can explain the appearance of savant abilities. For instance, the ability to “toggle back and forth” between a detail-focused view and a broad view might be important to produce a good work of art. “To draw very well you have to be able to see the gestalt as well,” says Winner. Daniel Tammet, a prodigious savant who has memorised pi to 22,514 digits, believes his own talents have arisen from a special ability to connect different pieces of information
together. “Savant abilities are linked to a highly associative type of thinking, an extreme form of a kind that everyone does – examples would include daydreaming, puns and the use of metaphors,” he says. There’s also the question of how much practice contributes to the savant’s specific talent. Savants practise tirelessly, but is that a big contributing factor, or are they born with major brain differences that predispose them to excel in their particular field? The few studies of savant brains certainly suggest they are physically different from the average brain. For example, when Happé and Wallace studied the brain of a savant gifted at art, calendrical calculation and memory, they found his cortex was thicker in the areas associated with visuospatial processing and calculation and thinner in other regions associated with social cognition, compared with people who were neither savants nor autistic. But whether these differences were innate or grew with lifelong practice was still unclear. The answer to that question may come from an unlikely source – a study of London taxi drivers who have acquired an encyclopedic memory of the streets of London known as “the Knowledge”. Given that taxi drivers must remember the layout of 25,000 streets and the location of thousands of places of interest, and retrieve the information instantaneously, some researchers like Happé believe the Knowledge qualifies as a savant-like skill. Eleanor Maguire and colleagues at the Institute of Neurology at University College London and colleagues found that drivers with the Knowledge have a bigger rear hippocampus than bus drivers and adults who do not drive taxis. In addition, the hippocampus appears to be larger the longer a taxi driver has been working, and shrinks once they retire (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0288). That suggests the drivers were born with typical brains which then adapt with training to accommodate the skill. If that’s true of other talents, it is possible that although savants may have an unusual detail-focused cognition, their brains aren’t fundamentally different at birth but become so with training. Further preliminary evidence that many of us may have the basic brain equipment to develop such skills emerged from a calendrical savant known as GC. By scanning his brain, Cowan found that GC uses the same regions of his brain to process dates as non-savants use for mental arithmetic (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364,
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p 1417). In another experiment Cowan and his colleagues asked GC to learn a new calendrical system. With a limited amount of time to practise, he performed no better than a non-savant. So if the traits that make a savant are found in the general population and practice is a big contributing factor, could we all develop a prodigious talent if we put in the hours? “I do not know any reason why not, though many would lack the motivation,” says Cowan.
Motivation But while the results of the brain scans show that savant brains may not start out with large physical differences, Happé’s study – which considered both identical and fraternal twins – indicates that there is still a strong genetic component to the detail-focused mindset necessary for talent. And it’s doubtful that even those who do inherit the necessary eye for detail could unleash the phenomenal talents of someone like Paravicini through practice alone. “I agree that many people could acquire the least creative types of savant skill, such as calendrical calculation,” says Tammet. “I do not believe however that most people could learn to draw a city landscape in gorgeous detail like Stephen Wiltshire, or compose several albums of original jazz music like the American teenager Matt Savage, or create an original way of visualising numbers and language, like in my case.” In fact, it seems the remaining mystery is not so much how savants achieve their talents, but
Derek Paravicini’s prodigious skills only emerged after years of practice
what drives them in the first place. “Motivation is a big unknown,” says Wallace. “It’s an enormous driving force in giftedness and in savants, but we don’t know a lot about it.” One person who has something of an inside view on what contributes to savant ability is Paravicini’s mentor, Adam Ockelford, a professor of music at Roehampton University in London who has watched Paravicini’s talent blossom since the age of 4. When they first met, Paravicini was entirely self-taught and bashed at his plastic keyboard with his fists and elbows to reproduce the sounds he was hearing. It was only after years of practice that his technical skills developed. But as researchers like Wallace have suggested, Paravicini seemed motivated way beyond the average music student. In fact, he seemed to be playing as if his life depended on it, and Ockelford thinks it’s this that truly sets savants apart from their peers. “The survival instinct gets turned with extraordinary force into something else – in Derek’s case music,” says Ockelford. “When people see Derek, they think it is amazing, almost religious. But to me, it’s mainly just hard work.” ■ Celeste Biever is New Scientist’s biomedical news editor
MORE ONLINE To win tickets to see Derek Paravicini in concert visit www.newscientist.com/article/dn17179
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 33
JULIEN PACAUD
Can science fix economics? We have created a monster. Financial markets have grown so complex that neither intuition nor standard economic models can get to grips with them. So what’s to be done to avoid a repeat of the financial disasters of the past couple of years? In the following pages, Mark Buchanan looks at some of the creative ideas being explored to tame the markets, not just by economists, but by physicists, engineers, biologists and others. What does science have to say – and will anyone listen? 6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 35
1
Bubble math The current financial crisis started with an enormous housing bubble in the US, UK and elsewhere. People borrowed ever more against the value of their homes and lenders sold the risk on, in an impenetrable web of financial transactions. Common sense might have pointed to a brewing catastrophe. Yet amazingly, some financial institutions were assessing their risks with models that ignored the possibility that housing prices might fall. The reason was a mixture of shortsightedness – a decade or more of continuous growth had obscured the longer-term reality of market fluctuations – and rampant greed: if there are megabucks to be made today, why worry too much about tomorrow? That’s why we need objective signs of trouble building, says physicist Didier Sornette of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He heads a new lab at ETH called the Financial Crisis Observatory, which aims to detect developing market bubbles from the mathematical patterns they throw up. His work indicates that can be done by looking for any quantity, such as housing or stock values, that is rising faster than exponentially over a period
of time. That is an indication, he suggests, of potentially dangerous positive feedback, in which confidence engendered by upward moves on a market encourages ever more people to invest – without any objective increase in the worth of what is being traded. That sort of behaviour can be identified by plotting the logarithm of prices in a given market over time. Anything greater than a straight-line increase is a danger signal. Despite its simplicity, this is an approach that hasn’t been applied before – and there is evidence it works. In 2005, Sornette and his colleague Wei-Xing Zhou found the signature of a fast-growing bubble in US housing data over the previous two years, especially in the north-east and the west of the country, and predicted a bursting point of mid-2006 that turned out to be fairly accurate (Physica A, vol 361, p 297). “With the right monitoring, it would have been clear that the last 15 years of excesses were leading to an unsustainable regime that could only blow up,” says Sornette. His group is now developing similar techniques for monitoring, for example, the stock values of the 500 largest US companies.
Estimated global credit write-down 2009-10
4
$ 36 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
trillion
The human factor
2
Network solutions
Bubbles are nothing new (see “The madness of crowds”, page 42). Now, though, a bubble in just one country can cause the whole world’s economy to collapse. Globalisation would be hard to roll back – so how do we contain its dangers? Economists have been worrying about this kind of “systemic risk” since the bank failures of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Regulations introduced soon afterwards required banks to hold adequate reserves, and governments guaranteed many bank deposits. For 70 years, that avoided a repeat. The present crisis owes much to the emergence of a globally interlinked “shadow banking system” – investment banks, hedge funds, mutual funds, insurance companies and the like – not subject to these safeguards. Producing policy prescriptions this time will mean penetrating that complex web to find out how it was woven – and what made it break. The essential tool will be network theory – a branch of applied mathematics used to tease out complex relationships in areas from computing to biology. Last year, for example, economists Domenico Delli Gatti of the Catholic University of Milan, Italy, and his colleagues, including Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University in New York, used the approach to show how a few banks in a network generally emerge as connecting hubs with an outsized share of links. “Financially robust lenders can supply credit at better conditions and therefore tend to increase their market share, attracting a higher number of links,” says Delli Gatti. That’s good in the short term for people looking for money, but it suggests systemic risk grows naturally as a system becomes dependent on a few pivotal institutions. Their failure can trigger avalanches of further trouble.
Global chaos began with home repossessions
skewed as to be scientifically worthless. Case and Shiller’s research, however, suggests that bubbles show up most easily through probes of individual attitudes to economic reality. “The notion of a bubble is really defined in terms of people’s thinking,” says Shiller. Their large-scale surveys show, for instance, that the current crisis came about when people started believing that future rises in property values would largely pay for their other investments, relieving them of any need to save for a rainy day. “If you word questions carefully,” says Shiller, “you can learn what people are thinking and how they’re making their decisions. You need this kind of information to detect a bubble.” Coupled with more mathematical approaches, that might provide just enough warning for politicians and regulators to step in and mitigate the worst of crashes before they happen.
Financial food webs
THEO VOLPATTI/CONTRASTO/EYEVINE
Purely mathematical approaches such as Sornette’s have a big drawback: the irrational behaviour of people. In any bubble, those making big profits will find arguments as to why this time the underlying maths should be different. Before the dotcom bubble burst 10 years ago, the reasoning was that the internet had created a “new economy”; in the build-up to the current crisis, people said that financial engineering had made mortgage risk a thing of the past. That’s why renowned economists Karl Case of Wellesley College in Massachusetts and Robert Shiller of Yale University suggest that if we are to identify bubbles before they burst, their brethren need to get a lot more psychological in their approach. Traditionally, economists rarely ask people about the thinking behind their decisions. Some even argue that one should never do so, as people’s assessments of their own motivations are so
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that conclusion is borne out by research from John Geanakoplos of Yale University and his colleagues. They studied how hedge funds compete to attract investors by seeking high leverage – borrowing heavily to amplify the funds they can invest, as well as their potential profits. In simulations of market activity, the researchers show how this creates enormous credit dependencies between banks and hedge funds that can push markets through an abrupt “phase transition” from stability to instability, much as solid ice abruptly melts into liquid water. So how might we engineer our financial networks more robustly? Some scientists think that answers lie in areas where similar risks emerge. Ecologists, for instance, have spent decades getting to grips > 6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 37
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Macroeconomic failure has human consequences
> with the ability of ecosystems to adapt and thrive in the face of all sorts of challenges, including everyday processes like the movement of species, but also continental drift and climate change. Many stable food webs have a “disassortative” structure that is very different from what seems to emerge in financial networks (Nature, vol 451, p 893). Species with many links to others tend to be linked to species that have very few: an insect may pollinate many different plants, while each of those plants may be pollinated by only one or a few insects. Food webs also tend to be built up out of a number of poorly connected subnetworks, meaning that disruption in one area does not necessarily spread to other parts. Translating insights from stable ecological networks into policy prescriptions in the very different world of finance will need a great deal of further study, however. For a start, more compartmentalisation might increase a system’s robustness, but it might also slow the free flow of cash – something that could actually increase the fragility of a financial network in a crisis.
Predicting the big one According to classical models of economics, financial crises don’t happen. People, firms and other economic “agents” act rationally, in their own selfinterest and with profound insight. They would never be duped into investing in a market that was enormously inflated and about to crash. The result is a stable, self-correcting equilibrium. Prices too high? People stop investing. Too low? People start buying again. Clearly, then, there is a lot wrong with classical economics. “Most economic analysis still takes place within a totally inadequate set of concepts,” says JeanPhillippe Bouchaud, physicist and co-founder of the hedge fund Capital Fund Management in Paris, France. “Theories of finance can learn a lot by connections to the rest of science.” For instance, studies over several decades have shown that market fluctuations have a lot in common with processes such as earthquakes that originate in systems that are very much out of equilibrium and naturally subject to abrupt upheavals (Physica A, vol 387, p 3967). This means price fluctuations on the stock market do not have a
bell-shaped “normal” distribution, with the bulk in the mid-range and a steady decline towards each extreme. In fact, the distribution has a much fatter tail of large price fluctuations, subverting a crucial assumption that underlies much of economic theory. The implication is that extreme market events, such as a one-day crash capable of wiping out millions of investors, occur naturally in financial markets even in the absence of any extraordinary circumstances. By contrast, most economists and financial analysts regard such events as strange and unpredictable outliers. “This is, at least in part, because basic market theories can’t explain these large fluctuations in any natural way,” says physicist Gene Stanley of Boston University, a leader in such analyses. Just as in statistical earthquake prediction, the most sophisticated science-based analysis won’t lead to perfect prediction of future market problems, Stanley says. But for markets, as for seismic quakes, closer attention to the statistics of the past can give us a better idea of what’s likely in the future.
Recession bites All indicators of economic well-being have taken a hit in developed countries over the past year
National debt
UK
US
12
US 30
80 70
10
60 8
Per cent of GDP
Per cent of population
House prices
UK
Per cent change (12 month average)
US
6 4
50 40 30 20
2 0
10 0 2007
2009 (projected)
38 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
2007
2010 (estimated)
UK
25 20 15 10 5 0 -5 -10 -15 -20 1995
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
SOURCE: IMF
Unemployment
5
ASHLEY GILBERTSON/VII NETWORK FOR VANITY FAIR
An economy in a computer
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Can we pack an entire economy, with all its complex human and political interactions, into a computer? Physicist Dirk Helbing of ETH thinks so – as long as we’re bold enough in going about it. He points out that financial systems aren’t the only monsters we’ve let out of the box. How traffic flows in and around huge cities simply cannot be grasped by mathematical analysis, but computer models let millions of virtual vehicles interact on realistic road patterns – and often discover potential problems before they occur in reality. The complexity of today’s economy, Helbing suggests, demands a similar approach. “We’re not currently using the best capabilities of science,” he says. “We need to bring together scientists from different fields and put together tools that can be used as a kind of wind tunnel for testing out social and economic policies.” The approach has already proved its worth on a small scale. Several years ago, when the state of Illinois decided to deregulate its electricity market, it wanted to avoid California’s disastrous experience, when the disgraced firm Enron manipulated prices, created shortages and caused rolling blackouts. The state authorities hired Charles Macal and colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory to build a sophisticated model of Illinois’ power market, incorporating suppliers, consumers and regulators, as well as the full network along which power flows.
The team first interviewed the various market participants to learn their behaviour. Each was represented in the model by virtual agents who could act on those strategies, but also learn on their own. Running the model, the team found that the initial legal framework for deregulation had flaws which made it vulnerable to Enron-like manipulation. The state successfully altered its plans, and the approach has since been used in similar cases in Croatia, Portugal and South Korea. Some stock markets, such as NASDAQ, have used it in planning changes to their trading rules. Groups in the US and Europe are already building similar models of whole economies, including millions of individuals, families, firms and banks, as well as government regulators. Helbing and colleagues have lodged a proposal with a European Union funding body to start building the extensive communities of researchers and collaborations – between economists and other social scientists, physicists, lawyers and computer scientists – that would be needed to simulate whole economies effectively. With growing computing capacity and greater understanding of complex systems, they suggest it should be possible within a decade to have functioning models of the global economy to which policy-makers could look for sound insights with which to penetrate the overwhelming complexity of today’s markets.
6 Out of kilter Borrowing techniques from seismology to calculate the likely frequency of market fluctuations is all very well, but it has the same fundamental limitation as earthquake prediction. It does not tell us what we really want to know: exactly when and where the next cataclysmic event will be. That kind of predictive capability would demand what seems an unobtainable wish – a comprehensive, bottom-up theory of why markets move as they do. At the moment, that ideal is confounded by the sheer number of individual interactions in any real market. The result is a gaping divide between microeconomics (the study of how individual people and companies in a market make decisions to buy and sell) and macroeconomics (the study of movements in economy-wide indicators such as
GDP, inflation and unemployment). Trends in macroeconomics are the sum of microeconomic decisions, but attempts to extrapolate from the one to the other are by necessity grossly oversimplified, says Eric Weinstein, a physicist who works for the Natron Group, a hedge fund in New York City. They often assume, for example, that agents in a market all have an unchanging list of all the things they want, ranked in the order they want them. There’s no room for them to change those preferences, by learning, for example, or becoming interested in new products. That puts all of economic theory out of kilter at the first step. Might physics help in bridging the divide? Physics also deals separately with the microscopic – the individual movements of particles in a gas, say –
US government debt 2010 (est.)
$9.9
trillion
and the macroscopic, for example when the sum of those movements creates a pressure that enables a gas to push a piston. But it also has mathematical frameworks, such as statistical mechanics, capable of bridging the gap between them. Weinstein has been involved in one of the most audacious attempts to meld physics and economics: showing how gauge theory, the mathematical underpinning of the quantum field theories of the standard model of particle physics, might be the key to a rational theory of economics based only on physically observable quantities, rather than hypotheticals akin to the economists’ list of ordered preferences. Impressed by this idea, physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, has recently studied how gauge theory ideas might be incorporated into some basic economic theories about how markets work. It is part of a wider movement towards “agentbased” models that are better equipped to deal with the non-equilibrium behaviour of markets. In these models agents are treated as particles, albeit ones imbued with adaptive behaviour. They make mistakes, try to learn from them, and change their beliefs and expectations about the market on the fly. Because most humans tick in broadly similar ways, all those behaviours can be dealt with statistically. The catch, says economist Blake LeBaron of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, is that the models cannot be wrapped up tidily in directly solvable formulae like those of traditional equilibrium theories. Instead, they have to be explored with computer simulations. Still, they can show how great rallies and crashes emerge as avalanches of buying or selling behaviour among uncertain investors. Some physicists suggest that these models can be used to identify particular moments when >
A global affair
Few countries have escaped a downturn in their economic fortunes
2004
Less than 0%
0 - 3%
3 - 6%
6 - 10%
10% or more
No data
SOURCE: IMF
Annual percentage increase in GDP
2009 (projected)
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 41
Even financial disaster can spawn new markets
The madness of crowds All speculative bubbles have one thing in common: a belief that a particular company or commodity will be worth more in the future than it is today. The objects of desire through the ages have been many and varied.
JOE RAEDIE/GETTY IMAGES
TULIP MANIA 1636–37 The Netherlands
> markets are likely to make big moves. Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Florida has used agent models to show how “windows of predictability” open up when many agents come to hold similar beliefs, meaning that they are likely all to act in a similar way in the near future. In one demonstration, he and his colleagues were able to use this technique to predict the movements of a foreign exchange market with more than 90 per cent accuracy (Physica A, vol 299, p 222). The new ideas pour cold water on some choice morsels of economic orthodoxy – notably, that the complex financial instruments known as derivatives stabilise markets. Derivatives are contracts to buy or sell an asset at a set future time, and conventional economic theory says the additional flexibility of balancing any current losses with the prospect of future gains smooths out market wrinkles. Recent work, notably by economist William Brock
of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and colleagues, incorporates adaptive models of agent behaviour to suggest that classical economics might have got things backwards. People participating in markets will quickly copy investment strategies that seem to be working, creating swings in the future price of assets that are actually fundamentally destabilising. Despite the insights it could give, such nonequilibrium modelling remains at the edges of accepted economic theory. “The old ideas get drilled into economists as they get started,” says LeBaron, “and I think people have a hard time detaching.” Smolin also cautions against assuming that ideas imported from physics can contribute anything substantial to an established field. “But there are good reasons to think that the present is a propitious moment for seeking to improve economic theory,” he says.
Will it be enough? Even if science gave clear insight into the conditions to be avoided, or early warning if a crisis is brewing, responses must take place through government regulation and the political process. Some economists suggest that the most common cause of such crises isn’t just wrong-headed thinking about markets, but subversion of good thinking by the political system. “I think it’s a good place to look for one of the major causes of the latest mess,” says William Brock of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Poor accountability and lax regulation allow firms to go all out for profit at
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society’s expense, and the nexus of lobbyists, regulators and party donors hinders rational policy-making. The irony is that the most vociferous lobby – the one with the most damaging long-term effects on ordinary people – might be ordinary people themselves. It would have taken a brave politician in the US or UK, for example, to put the brakes on a housing market that for many people was fuelling a prolonged period of growing prosperity. In such circumstances we might have to accept that for all science can tell us, we are at the mercy of the markets – and that means ourselves.
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Contracts for the most prized varieties of tulip exchanged hands for exorbitant prices that increased 20-fold in three months – and then collapsed before a single bulb changed hands. The traditional view is that the whole Dutch economy took a huge hit as a result, although some modern research has suggested the effects were more limited.
SOUTH SEA BUBBLE 1720 Great Britain The South Sea Company held exclusive rights to trade principally slaves with the Spanish colonies of South America. In anticipation of huge future profits its share price rose 10-fold between January and June 1720, then collapsed again. Isaac Newton was one of the luminaries who were burned, losing £20,000.
RAILWAY MANIA 1840s UK Following the opening of the world’s first intercity railway, the Liverpool and Manchester, in 1830, new speculative schemes attracted huge amounts of capital. Many of them never materialised and investors’ money disappeared with them.
ROARING TWENTIES 1920s US Post-war prosperity, the rise of mass consumerism and easy credit combined to create the jazz age . By 1929, though, the money was running out. Wall Street crashed, dragging the world into the Great Depression.
THE DOTCOM BUBBLE Late 1990s Global Boundless optimism about the prospects of the internet business model created a generation of aggressive, free-spending, “get big fast” companies. The NASDAQ new technology index doubled in value in 1999-2000 – and rapidly crashed again as the promised profits failed to arrive. ■
Mark Buchanan is a consultant for New Scientist, based in France
A
S ERIN WHITE watched the election results head towards victory for Barack Obama, she felt a burden lifting from her shoulders. “In that one second, it was a validation for my whole race,” she recalls. “I’ve always been an achiever,” says White, who is studying for an MBA at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “But there had always been these things in the back of my mind questioning whether I really can be who I want. It was like a shadow, following me around saying you can only go so far. Now it’s like a barrier has been let down.” White’s experience is what many psychologists had expected – that Obama would prove to be a powerful role model for African Americans. Some hoped his rise to prominence would have a big impact on white Americans, too, challenging those who still harbour racist sentiments. “The traits that characterise him are very contradictory to the racial stereotypes that black people are aggressive and uneducated,” says Ashby Plant of Florida State University. “He’s very intelligent and eloquent.” Plant is one of a number of prescient psychologists who seized on Obama’s candidacy to test hypotheses about the power of role models. Their work is already starting to reveal how the “Obama effect” is changing people’s views and behaviour. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not all good news: there is a sting in the tail of the Obama effect. But first the good news. Barack Obama really is a positive role model for African Americans, and he was making an impact even before he got to the White House. Indeed, the Obama effect can be surprisingly immediate and powerful, as Ray Friedman of Vanderbilt
something she had never done before. If the Obama effect is positive for African Americans, how is it affecting their white compatriots? Is the experience of having a charismatic black president modifying lingering racist attitudes? There is no easy way to measure racism directly; instead psychologists assess what is known as “implicit bias”, using a computer-based test that measures how quickly people associate positive and negative words – such as “love” or “evil” – with photos of black or white faces. A similar test can also measure how quickly subjects associate stereotypical traits – such as athletic prowess or mental ability – with a particular group. In a study that will appear in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Plant’s team tested 229 students during the height of
University and his colleagues discovered. They tested four separate groups at four key stages of Obama’s presidential campaign. Each group consisted of around 120 adults of similar age and education, and the test assessed their language skills. At two of these stages, when Obama’s success was less than certain, the tests showed a clear difference between the scores of the white and black participants – an average of 12.1 out of 20, compared to 8.8, for example. When Obama fever was at its height, however, the black participants performed much better. Those who had watched Obama’s acceptance speech as the Democrats’ presidential candidate performed just as well, on average, as the white subjects. After his election victory, this was true of all the black participants (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.03.012). What can explain this dramatic shift? At the start of the test, the participants had to declare their race and were told their results would be used to assess their strengths and weaknesses. This should have primed the subjects with “stereotype threat” – an anxiety that their results will confirm negative stereotypes, which has been shown to damage the performance of African Americans. Obama’s successes seemed to act as a shield against this. “We suspect they felt inspired and energised by his victory, so the stereotype threat wouldn’t prove a distraction,” says Friedman. That chimes with White’s personal account of how her mental baggage was lifted on election night. “I feel like I can go outside my scope more,” she says, and has demonstrated this by volunteering for a local charity –
The Obama effect 44 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
CALLIE SHELL/AURORA PHOTOS
The election of a black president has changed perceptions – but not entirely for the better, as David Robson discovers
”Those who voted for Obama feel freer to behave in a racist manner” Obama-mania. They found that implicit bias had fallen by as much as 90 per cent compared with the level found in a similar study in 2006 (DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.04.018). “That’s an unusually large drop,” Plant says. While the team can’t be sure their results are due solely to Obama, they also showed that those with the lowest bias were likely to subconsciously associate black skin colour with political words such as “government” or “president”. This suggests that Obama was strongly on their mind, says Plant. Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who runs a website that measures implicit bias using similar tests, has
also observed a small drop in bias in the 700,000 visitors to the site since January 2007, which might be explained by Obama’s rise to popularity. However, his preliminary results suggest that change will be much slower coming than Plant’s results suggest. Other studies have shown that the Obama effect has a downside, as some had feared. Daniel Effron at Stanford University in California asked a group of 99 students of mixed ethnicity to decide whether a white or a black person would be more suitable for a job in a police force characterised by racial tension. The participants also had to express their support for either Obama or John
McCain as president by circling a picture of the candidate. Some performed this before the hiring task, some performed it afterwards. The team found that those who had expressed support for Obama before the task were more likely to prefer a white candidate for the police job than the people who expressed their support for Obama after the task. Effron suggests that expressing support for Obama gave the subjects the “moral credentials” to air a potentially racist view. They may have felt that having proven themselves to be unprejudiced they could let their guard down in the subsequent task. The people who expressed their support for Obama after the task didn’t have these credentials during the activity, so they kept their guard up (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol 45, p 590). “People now have the opportunity of >
Blacks’ performance in verbal tests soared when Obama did well 6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 45
Strongest prejudices On average, those who endorsed Obama first went on to give more money to the white charity, compared with those who endorsed Obama later. The effect was most marked among those with the strongest prejudices; the people who were least prejudiced according to the questionnaire gave more money to the black charity if they had endorsed Obama first. As the team points out, these simple tests reflect real-world situations. Immediately after voting for the presidential candidate, for instance, millions of Americans went on to vote for candidates for other offices and for various propositions. Those who voted for Obama despite having lingering racist views
In some ways, Obama’s success is a setback for racial equality
JASON REED/REUTERS
expressing support for Obama every day,” says Effron. “Our work raises the concern that people may now be more likely to raise negative views of African Americans.” On the other hand, he says, it may just encourage people to talk more honestly about their feelings regarding race issues, which may not be such a bad thing. Another part of the study suggests far more is at stake than the mere expression of views. The team asked 100 students to allocate $100,000 between two charities that serve either white or black communities. They were also told that the black charity had already received some money from another fund – giving those with racist motives for denying it money a plausible explanation for their actions. Once again, the subjects had to endorse Obama or McCain either before or after the task. After the exercise, the team asked them to complete a questionnaire designed to reveal their prejudices.
may well have gone on to favour whites in their subsequent decisions. Yet more evidence (see below) that the Obama effect may have a negative side emerged with a study showing that just one week after Obama was elected president, participants were less ready to support policies designed to address racial inequality than they had been two weeks before the election (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol 45, p 556). That too might be down to the moral kudos acquired by supporting Obama, says team member Cheryl Kaiser of the University of Washington in Seattle. It could, of course, also be that Obama’s success helps people to forget that a disproportionate number of black Americans still live in poverty and face huge obstacles when trying to overcome these circumstances. “Barack Obama’s family is such a salient
Job done? Following Obama’s election, support for policies intended to address racial inequalities fell in a survey of non-African American students
Survey sample = 74 Multi racial/other 12% Native American 3%
White 53%
Latino American 4%
Pre-election
Post-election Asian-American 28%
Anyone can succeed if they work hard There is a need for policies that address racial equality More progress is needed towards racial equality
US has made big strides towards racial equality STRONGLY DISAGREE
46 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
STRONGLY AGREE
image, we generalise it and fail to see the larger picture – that there’s injustice in every aspect of American life,” Kaiser says. “For a lot of people, his tale reinforces the protestant work ethic,” she adds. “But they fail to see that society might stop others from having their talent recognised.” Those trying to address issues of racial inequality need to constantly remind people of the inequalities that still exist to counteract the Obama effect, she says. Though Plant’s findings were more positive, she too warns against thinking that racism and racial inequalities are no longer a problem. “It’s not the time to be complacent – the last thing I want is for people to think everything’s solved.” These findings do not only apply to Obama, or even just to race. They should hold for any role model in any country. “There’s no reason we wouldn’t have seen the same effect on our views of women if Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin had been elected,” says Effron. So the election of a female leader might have a downside for other women. We also don’t yet know how long the Obama effect – both its good side and its bad – will last. Political sentiment is notoriously fickle: what if things begin to go wrong for Obama, and his popularity slumps? And what if Americans become so familiar with having Obama as their president that they stop considering his race altogether. “Over time he might become his own entity,” says Plant. This might seem like the ultimate defeat for racism, but ignoring the race of certain select individuals – a phenomenon that psychologists call subtyping – also has an insidious side. “We think it happens to help people preserve their beliefs, so they can still hold on to the previous stereotypes.” That could turn out to be the cruellest of all the twists to the Obama effect. ■ David Robson is a junior editor at New Scientist
BOOKS & ARTS
Creatures of the flame Was fire the key driver of human evolution? it twigs, how to use fire to thwart predators and how to harness it for heat and light. This familiarity with fire, Burton argues, changed the hormonal cycles that depend on light and darkness: light from nightly bonfires may have caused a change in the nocturnal flow of melatonin. Over time, this changed the rates and patterns of our ancestors’ growth, and the regulation and activation of genes, leading ultimately to us. Primatologist Richard Wrangham, who has been observing chimpanzees in Africa for 40 years, believes it is cooking itself that makes us human. The pre-human species Homo erectus, which evolved in the African savannah roughly 1.8 million
Fire: The spark that ignited human evolution by Frances D. Burton, University of New Mexico Press, $34.95 Catching Fire: How cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham, Basic Books, $26.95
THE inhabitants of the Admiralty Islands say that a divine serpent once asked some children to cook a fish. The children dried it in the sun and ate it raw. Seeing this, the serpent gave them fire and taught them to cook. So it is with every culture: the way that humans acquired fire is enshrined in legend, usually involving either a heroic benefactor or a trickster. In Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was punished for it; according to the Apache, it was a cunning fox who captured it for us. Once acquired, fire became sacred. In ancient Rome, it was guarded in the temple of Vesta, goddess of the hearth, by the Vestal Virgins. In India’s Hindu temples, Agnihotri (literally “fire-guarder”) Brahmans are still keepers of the sacred flame. Legends aside, no other animal controls fire. Most fear it. The use of fire sets humans apart. But what difference has it made? Anthropologist Frances Burton suggests that taming fire led to the evolution of modern humans. Millions of years ago, our ape-like ancestors may have overcome their fear of fire to pick at found delicacies – maybe an animal accidentally cooked in a forest fire. Over time, they learned how to keep a flame going by feeding
HENRIK SORENSEN/GETTY
Reviewed by Saswato Das
raw meat and so our smaller gut years ago, was in many ways must have evolved as a result similar to us: it had an upright of cooking. Just look at today’s body, long legs, large skull and raw-food movement, he says: small gut. As Wrangham puts it, followers of a strict raw-food H. erectus could have worn our diet invariably lose weight, even clothes, unlike the apes that though they do not have to came before it. Scientists usually explain this change in body shape “Followers of a strict by a change in diet, explaining raw-food diet invariably that learning how to make tools lose weight. Our ancestors enabled our ancestors to catch would have starved” more animals. This allowed H. erectus to eat more meat, and expend the energy that would be because meat has more calories required to hunt and gather their than plants in a given volume, food. Our ancestors, who had no a smaller gut sufficed. such choice, would have starved if Wrangham disagrees, arguing they had relied on raw food alone. that humans cannot easily digest Cooking changes the game Sitting around a bonfire every night dramatically. For one thing, it may have made us what we are helps break food down so that we expend less energy chewing and digesting it. Cooking also allows us to absorb more energy from food by denaturing protein and breaking down indigestible carbohydrates such as cellulose into more digestible pieces. Wrangham builds a compelling case, although archaeological proof of his theory has yet to be found. There is evidence, however, that H. erectus may have conquered fire: the oldest known hearths date from about 800,000 years ago, discovered in Israel on the banks of an ancient lake in the Jordan valley, about 600,000 years before modern Homo sapiens emerged. These fascinating books show how the biological evolution of human beings may not have been a matter of biology alone, and why, as Wrangham writes, “we humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame”. ■ Saswato R. Das is a science and technology writer in New York 6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 47
BOOKS & ARTS
Not so many fish in the sea Watch this searching documentary and you may think a little harder before you order your next fish platter
universe. His writing ranges from tiresomely hyperbolic to transcendent, with funny and touching moments in between, but his genuine wonder at the universe and our place in it continually shines through. Although Martin doesn’t always get scientific details right, his philosophising is contagious, and he beautifully captures all that is narcissistic and endearingly human, both in his own journey and in the efforts of cosmologists; he describes them as wranglers of invisible cows, ever dreaming of “transcending the human condition”. For one man’s wacky and profound take on the nature of reality, surf’s up.
THE END OF THE LINE
Squandered bounties Paradise Found: Nature in America at the time of discovery by Steve Nicholls, University of Chicago Press, $30/£20.50 The End of the Line, directed by Rupert Murray, on release from 8 June Reviewed by Linda Geddes
“BEAUTIFUL” and “vast” are words that come to mind when thinking of the world’s oceans. “Inexhaustible” is another, which might explain why we think it is fine to plunder them for our dinner plates. The End of the Line is a powerful wake-up call for anyone who heads straight to the menu’s fish section. It documents how overfishing is decimating the oceans, and makes alarming predictions about how fish stocks might look in 30 years’ time. Adapted from the book by Charles Clover, the film opens with stunning footage of our reefs and oceans. Unusual camera angles explore fishing nets from the inside out. The film follows Clover as he asks top restaurants why they still serve critically endangered species like bluefin 48 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
tuna, and speaks to industry whistleblowers about how our love of fish is driving some species to the brink of extinction. This is investigative journalism at its best. More importantly, it is an engaging film that provokes anger and sadness in equal measure. Anger at the greed of multinational companies who seem intent on catching as many tuna as they can before stocks run out, and at the politicians who do little to stop them by setting their fishing quotas well above what scientists recommend. Sadness, too, at the loss of species, and the wasted by-catch casually tossed back into the sea. It is only when you witness the might of industrial fishing fleets with their giant trawlers and high-tech sonar that you realise the oceans aren’t vast and inexhaustible after all. Even if you don’t much care for the plight of fish, the film also rams home the human cost, as it explores the hardship industrial overfishing inflicts on communities in Senegal, who rely on fishing
for income and nutrition. Depressing viewing? Not entirely: the prevailing feeling at the end of the film is hope. Its great achievement is in giving you the sense that there’s something you can do, and making you want to buy sustainable fish. It hasn’t stopped me eating fish, but it has made me think twice about having tuna mayo on my baked potato.
The universe and me Beware Invisible Cows: My search for the source of the universe by Andy Martin, Simon & Schuster, £12.99 Reviewed by Amanda Gefter
PART cosmology, part memoir, this book is a strange cross-breed. Writer and surfer Andy Martin visits the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the LIGO gravitational wave observatory in Washington, and Mount Wilson in California in his quest to understand the origin of the
Reviewed by Adrian Barnett
IMAGINE a land where forests are so rich in game they resemble zoo enclosures, and where, in season, rivers have more fish than water. Precise ecological and historical sleuthing by Steve Nicholls shows that such reports from colonists in North America, long dismissed as fantasy, were true: in the 16th century, the continent really was like this. Modern disbelief that nature was far more abundant in the past, says Nicholls, comes not from ecological impossibility but from a mindset that insists that only today’s abundances are possible, while refusing to admit that we inhabit an ecologically impoverished landscape. Finely written and elegantly researched, Paradise Found is a chilling portent of how even today’s richnesses will seem a cornucopia to biologically bereft future generations.
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Suddenly I see How one neuroscientist remodelled her own brain to see in 3D
my car and the steering wheel floated in front of the dashboard. I closed one eye and it seemed to sink back again. I thought I was too old for my vision to change.
Cross-eyed since early infancy, neurobiologist Susan Barry saw the world in a very different way. Although she had three childhood operations, the pathways in her brain that allow for binocular vision did not develop normally; instead, she saw a flat, 2D world. Over 40 years later, she defied expectation by teaching herself to see in 3D. As Barry publishes her memoir, Fixing My Gaze, Helen Thomson found out how her world took shape
Describe suddenly seeing in 3D
It was an incredibly joyful experience, a whole new world. I had the hardest time listening to my students because I was fascinated by the way their hands looked while gesturing. Leaves on trees, house plants, door knobs! Everything looked so beautiful. It was hard to describe to people: they looked at me like I was nuts.
When did you realise that you saw the world differently?
My parents told me that my depth perception might be a little weak, but I didn’t know I was missing stereo vision until I was at college, age 20. I distinctly remember sitting in class, learning about some cats whose eyes were misaligned, and whose binocular neurons hadn’t developed in their brain so they didn’t see in 3D. After that I tried all sorts of 3D experiments and failed them all.
How did you remodel your brain?
It’s conjecture, but to see comfortably as a child I had to use only one eye at a time, to suppress the input from one eye, or I would have had double vision, so there
What was it like to see in 2D?
If I looked at a tree I didn’t have any idea of how round the canopy was. It was like a child’s drawing. The concept that the branches commanded a volume of space just wasn’t there.
a reward or by a novel experience: those areas release neuromodulators like dopamine and serotonin which help to facilitate and stimulate synaptic changes and make those changes last
“After one session I sat in my car and the steering Almost always. But one time, I wheel floated in front of took an eye alignment test when I the dashboard” Do you consistently see in 3D now?
was tired and thinking about my father who was ill, and my eyes turned in like they used to. It was an indication to me that if I was very depressed I’d revert to my old way of seeing. It made me realise that the effectiveness of my therapy or any rehabilitation has a lot to do with mental state. What can that teach us?
There are areas in the brain that are activated by anticipation of
longer. In my opinion, it was the positive feedback from my experiences that snowballed and facilitated changes in my brain. It was thought binocular vision could only be learned during a critical period at a young age. Have you proved this to be untrue?
Definitely. So often you’re told you’re too old to change – it’s not true. It’s about small improvements. It’s not about turning cross-eyed kids into professional baseball players, but allowing them to drive with confidence so that their day-today functioning is better. Is there a downside to 3D vision?
Now, I’m not happy about being way up high or overlooking a cliff! And the biggest gain?
Realising how much we can rehabilitate ourselves with the proper tools and encouragement from others. ■
ROSALIE WINARD
How did things change?
When I failed the 3D tests, I went to see my doctor, who said, ‘it’s no big deal’. People don’t realise how important stereo vision is. But in my forties my sight became jittery so I went to a development optometrist. She taught me how to point two eyes at the same place at the same time, for example, by looking down a Brock string (right). After one session I sat in
are probably inhibitory circuits in my brain. When one eye pathway is dominant, it inhibits the other. Once I could point two eyes at the same point I could reduce the effectiveness of those inhibitory synapses.
PROFILE Susan Barry is a professor of neurobiology at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Fixing My Gaze: A scientist’s journey into seeing in three dimensions is published by Basic Books on 4 June
6 June 2009 | NewScientist | 49
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around the internet. It asks for help in recovering some of the loot that her husband Bernie had stashed for a rainy day. “Federal investigators in the USA are working around the clock to freeze all my assets,” the letter says. It doesn’t look like they have done a very good job, though. Press reports estimate that Bernie Madoff stole $65 billion, but the letter says: “My husband deposited the sum of USD$17.000.000.00 Million in a Finance Firm in Europe some years ago in my name.” That’s more than enough to pay off the US and UK national debts combined. Was Madoff an even more successful swindler than everyone believes?
IT IS now 30 years since Sony launched the Walkman personal stereo cassette player, changed the way we listen to music and put a new word in the dictionary. Sony’s subsequent transition from analogue tape to digital memory player was a lot less successful, mainly because the company’s various digital incarnations of the Walkman lost out to Apple’s stylish and user-friendly iPods. Now Sony is trying to regain the initiative with its new X-series Walkman. To put some buzz into the worldwide launch, Sony hired a disused platform – normally used for railway staff training and as a movie set – at Charing Cross, on one of London Underground’s deep tube lines. A train was shunted in with some fancy furnishings and X-series Walkman units were installed for the press and public to try. One of the main selling points
of the new player is “Wi-Fi connectivity for easy YouTube streaming, podcast direct downloading and internet browsing”. It also receives FM radio – a feature that Sony hopes will claw back some of the market share from Apple. Oh dear. Did no one at Sony remember that there is no Wi-Fi or FM radio signal to be had in a tunnel deep underground? When Feedback visited, embarrassed demonstrators were spending their time explaining why those special features wouldn’t work.
HOW do you respond to the news that a fraudster has conned people out of their money to the tune of billions of dollars? One way is to use the news as an opportunity to con more people out of their money. It took a while to get going, but a 419-style email plea from “Ruth Madoff” has started spreading
Who would have thought it? Martin Gardiner points us to a headline on the Optimum Population Trust website that reveals: “Sex is main cause of population growth” 68 | NewScientist | 6 June 2009
MEANWHILE, other 419 scammers have turned their attention to palaeontologists. A researcher at the Indiana Geological Survey in Bloomington recently received an email claiming to be from “a retired Washington DC science teacher” staying in Iran. It began: “I have discovered a unique dinosaur sight [sic] which contains many different kind and many different size, and from different periods of dinosaurs. some of them very huge and some of them still intact, by any standard it is a great discovery.” The email then warned that “the matter is not in the hand of educated people”, so people “are braking them by slug hammer and loading them into trucks” to use for building blocks. The fractured English was an immediate giveaway, and so was the fact that the sender did not realise that the fossils in a real dinosaur site would all be from the same period. Even so, the note intrigued the recipient enough to pass it along to colleagues with an enquiry whether it was “a scam of some kind”.
HERE is one of those trivia “facts” that are supposed to brighten up your day but are actually more likely to leave you feeling depressed. On the
wrapper of a Harvest Cheweee bar, Max Sharp was informed: “A broken clock is right at least twice a day”. Max concedes that if the display has frozen on a 12-hour digital clock, or if the hands have stopped on a 12-hour analogue clock, then yes, these clocks will be right twice a day. However, he points out that a frozen 24-hour clock, of which there are many these days, will be right only once a day. But that’s not the depressing part. The depressing part is the “at least”. The use of these words leads Max to believe that Honey Monster Foods, maker of Harvest Cheweee bars, “has some sort of broken clock that can be right more than twice a day”. Such a clock must be neither a 12-hour one nor a 24-hour one. What kind of clock can it be? Worrying about questions like this can ruin your day.
FINALLY, Humphrey Evans has joined the UK-based Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, which ensures writers are compensated for work of
PAUL MCDEVITT
FEEDBACK
theirs that has been copied, broadcast and the like. He reports that each member receives a computergenerated online password backed up by what the society calls a “memorable” word. His memorable word? It’s “0AFB13BA”. Unforgettable.
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THE LAST WORD Monkey business My son has a game in which you hang small plastic monkeys and gorillas from a plastic network of tree branches. The branch network is attached to an overhanging trunk by a magnet. As more monkeys are hooked on, the network becomes more unsteady until the magnet can hold it up no more. The player who breaks the bond is declared the loser. The game depends on a magnet of a clearly defined strength. But how is this strength determined so accurately during manufacture that it can hold almost all the monkeys (but not quite)?
■ The strength of a magnet depends on its material, shape and preparation. When magnets are made these properties are fairly well standardised to within a few per cent of the strength required. For the purposes of this game, that is precise enough. You only need the game to last beyond the first few monkeys and end before you run out of monkeys. Secondly, there is far greater variation in how the game is played than in how magnets are made. Magnets are exquisitely sensitive to how well they fit together. When polished to fit very closely they can cling to each other amazingly strongly, whereas the merest roughness, dent or sprinkling of dust can weaken their attraction by a large factor. Details of their orientation also affect their strength. Players of the game are unlikely
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to pay much attention to such finicky details, so the strength of any set-up is likely to vary more in other ways than in the innate strength of the magnet. Then again, a really thoughtful player, with steady hands and a good eye for which plastic monkey to select and where to hang it, might survive several rounds longer than a slapdash player. Jon Richfield Somerset West, South Africa ■ Manufacturers are more likely to make a magnet and then test the number of monkeys it can hold before the network of branches will fall, than manufacture the magnet to a specific strength. This way they can supply a number of monkeys in the game box in excess of the magnet’s strength. Supplying a few extra monkeys is a lot cheaper than going through weeks of R&D to create the perfect magnet. Sohil Patel London, UK
Taste tribulation I find the taste of certain common spices quite horrible. The nasty flavour I get from all of them seems, to me, quite similar. The spices that taste like this are aniseed, caraway, cumin, fennel and coriander. Tarragon, cardamom and capers also taste awful in the same way. I wonder if there is a food scientist who knows what they have in common, or what my aversion might be. I should add that I am not a fussy eater in general.
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■ The substance that your correspondent finds foul-tasting is probably a terpenoid called carvone. This chemical provides the principal flavour of caraway seed and, by itself, has a typical caraway flavour. All the spices she mentions are members of the Umbelliferae family, and all of them contain this substance. Carvone is also found in tarragon, cardamon and capers. Ralph Hancock London, UK ■ I heard once, but have not verified myself, that there is a cistrans isomerism (the orientation of groups of atoms and the positions they occupy within molecules) in the taste buds of some people which binds to at least one of the flavour components of cilantro, the leaf part of coriander. For most people, the taste is pleasant. For those with the other isomeric version of the taste bud’s active site, however, the taste is more like soap. If this theory is correct it could extend to the flavour experience of the other spices such as aniseed and caraway. Karen Nyhus San Francisco, US ■ One explanation for the perverted taste sensations with some spices is that your correspondent suffers from mild zinc deficiency. This gives rise to hypogeusia, or altered taste, usually for the worse. It would be
Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? A brand new collection ight serious enquiry, brilliant insight cted and the hilariously unexpected Available from booksellers m/ and at www.newscientist.com/ polarbears
interesting to find out if taking zinc sulphate tablets, under the direction of a doctor, for four weeks would make a difference. Tim Healey Barnsley, South Yorkshire, UK
THIS WEEK’S QUESTION LIFE ON ULURU
Some decades ago I was travelling around Australia and was lucky enough to climb Uluru. Pools on top of the rock had been produced by recent rain and, curiously, in many of them strange aquatic
invertebrates were present (see photo). This specimen is sitting in my camera lens cap, which has a diameter of 62 millimetres. It looks like an ancient trilobite. Why and how was it on top of the famous, massive rock, and what is it? What happens to the creatures when the short-lived puddles dry up? Gavin Chester Dwellingup, Western Australia
