New Scientist - 31 May 2014

INDEPENDENCECan science help a new nation find its way in the world?

The trouble with acetaminophen

YOUR INNER TADPOLEUnlocking the power to grow new limbs

WIMPS IN CRISISDark matter hunt comes to a head

ECO RESURRECTIONLost sea came back from the dead – twice

PUSHING YOUR BUTTONS How game designers get you hooked – and keep you hooked

WEEKLY May 31 - June 6, 2014

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31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 3

CONTENTS Volume 222 No 2971

This issue online newscientist.com/issue/2971

News6 UPFRONT Europe swings to the right. Syrian refugees

go home for cancer therapy. RIP UK fracking?16 THIS WEEK

Lost sea came back from the dead – twice. Origins of gut flora in newborns. Hacked brain cells soothe seizures

18 IN BRIEF Dancing bees assess ecosystems. Longer

life for mice that feel less pain. Planet eaters

Coming next week…The memory fixWiring your mind to heal itself

Ahead of the radiation curveThe unexpected benefits of nuclear bomb tests

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38

WIMPs in crisisDark matter hunt comes to a head

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The problem with acetaminophenHas the world’s favorite drug had its day?

Pushing your buttonsHow game designers get you hooked – and keep you hooked

Technology21 App to stop sexual harassment. Saving lives

in prison. Ethical app. Radar spots pirates. Curvy gadgets. Health-tracking dog collar

News

On the cover

Features

Opinion28 A no vote for science Michael Brooks on

how UKIP’s win might prove science’s loss 29 One minute with… Robert Schwartz Older

astronauts are go, says Mars One shortlister30 We can regrow Michael Levin plans to plug

into bioelectric fields to grow new limbs32 LETTERS Quantum quirks. Robot minds

Features34 The problem with acetaminophen

(see above left)38 Pushing your buttons (see left) 42 The secret language The tribe that

doesn’t want to be heard

CultureLab46 Join it up From climate change to economic

busts, our problems need holistic thinking47 On hoverflies Knowledge’s gentle pleasures 48 The world, for free How technology creep

is starting to undermine market certainties

Regulars5 LEADER Don’t let new boundaries

cut off British science 56 FEEDBACK Mammoth politics57 THE LAST WORD Lemon, and on, and on50 JOBS & CAREERS

Aperture26 Twitter user spots galactic coyote

Four futures for Scotland12 Oil investment paradise Offshore riches High-tech hub Rev up the start-ups Green beacon All-renewable by 2020 Sickest state in Europe If the dream fails

38 Pushing your buttons Games you can’t put down

12 Independence Can science help a new nation find its way?

8 WIMPS in crisis Hunt for dark matter

16 Eco resurrection Lost sea came back from the dead – twice

30 Your inner tadpole Power to grow new limbs


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LEADERS

WHEN Louis Pasteur remarked that science knows no country, he clearly wasn’t thinking of research funding. In principle, scientists don’t pay much attention to the nationality of their collaborators: they simply seek out people who can help advance their studies. In practice, the choice of research partners is constrained by migration policies, funding regimes and political will. Today, the potential choices are greater than ever – which is why it is frustrating that the constraints may now be tightened.

Ungainly though it is, the European Union is on balance good for science, and particularly for science in the UK. That is now threatened by the surge in support for Eurosceptic parties in last week’s elections (see page 6). If the UK Independence Party (UKIP) gets its way, and the UK steps away from the European Union, the country’s researchers may find themselves cut off from their former collaborators (see page 28). There is no sign that UKIP is bothered about this: it has failed to respond to New Scientist’s repeated requests for comment.

That is not the only question mark over the future of UK science. In September, the Scots

Science sans frontières

“ Ungainly though it is, the European Union is good for science, and particularly for science in the UK”

Don’t kill the painkiller

Don’t let new boundaries cut off UK science

will vote on whether they want their country to secede from the UK. As we report on pages 12-15, science and technology would play important parts in shaping an independent Scotland’s future, just as they have shaped its history: think of Alexander Graham Bell, James Clerk Maxwell, James Watt and Lord Kelvin, among others.

But today’s Scottish science is rarely done by lone geniuses.

Rather, it is conducted at world-leading research institutes, such as the Roslin Institute, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre and the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, where researchers from around the globe can come together to collaborate. Again, it is unclear how cross-border access to funding and facilities will be arranged if Scotland goes it alone.

This is worth thinking about, particularly because UK leaders have recently been vocal in their support of a resurgence in science and technology in pursuit of a

more balanced economy. Last month, chancellor George Osborne outlined a plan to encourage the development of research clusters – including one stretching across southern Scotland – and pledged to invest £7 billion in science infrastructure over the next parliamentary term.

This avowed enthusiasm for science, from so close to the top of government, is encouraging, even if the details remain to be thrashed out and opinions differ on how big an economic benefit such a strategy might yield. But if UK science is to succeed, Osborne, his colleagues and his successors must address its international dimensions too. So far, science has gone unmentioned in both the Scottish and European debates. That needs to change.

Once, nations guarded the prowess and achievements of their researchers jealously. But forgoing narrow definitions of national interest in favour of collaboration has proved hugely productive. It would be a setback if scientists found themselves facing those barriers again, when their ideas so clearly benefit from being taken up by anyone, anywhere in the world. As Pasteur also said, knowledge belongs to humanity. ■

WHOEVER first described the UK and US as two nations divided by a common language probably wasn’t thinking about a molecule called N-acetyl-p-aminophenol. But there is possibly no better example of the cultural divide. Brits call it paracetamol; Americans call it acetaminophen. And attitudes towards the painkiller are equally divergent.

People in the UK are aware that

a paracetamol overdose can kill. That goes back to 1998, when the government restricted the number of tablets that could be bought in one purchase and ran an information campaign explaining the change. The measures prevent an estimated 1000 deaths a year.

US awareness is much lower. When investigative journalism group Propublica revealed last year that 1500 Americans die

from accidental overdoses annually, it was big news.

The drug is now facing further problems over safety and effectiveness (see page 34), leading some to call for it to be withdrawn from over-the-counter sale.

That would be an overreaction. As the British experience shows, people can understand and act on nuanced messages. Paracetamol doesn’t need to be banned: people simply need to be made aware of its limitations and dangers so that they can make the right call. ■

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6 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

THE UK’s new oil rush may have ended before it even began. There are several billion barrels of shale oil under south-east England, according to a recent report, but it may not be worth drilling for it.

The British Geological Survey (BGS) estimates there are between 2.2 billion and 8.6 billion barrels of oil, but little gas, in the rocks of the Weald basin, south of London.

Energy companies will have to resort to fracking to get the oil, but they may not bother because little of it can be extracted, says Andrew

Aplin of Durham University, UK.“Looking at data from the US,

the exploitable amount of oil from fracking is normally around 5 per cent,” Aplin says. That means only 110 million to 428 million barrels of oil could be extracted.

Even that might be optimistic. The 5 per cent figure comes from areas rich in limestone. In clay

STEP aside, Higgs boson. A US panel has concluded the best way for the nation to contribute to particle physics is to create a world-leading neutrino programme.

Neutrinos are elusive particles that rarely interact with other matter. They come in three flavours, each thought to have a different mass, but our ability to study those masses with current detectors is limited. Precision measurements could help answer big mysteries about the universe,

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UPFRONT

“If only 1 per cent of the shale oil is extractable, that doesn’t seem like a very big prize”

areas, like the Weald, the figure is lower. What’s more, the oil in the Weald comes from similar rocks to North Sea oil, which is heavy and viscous. If Weald oil is the same, extraction will be difficult.

So Aplin estimates only 1 per cent of the Weald reserve – between 22 million and 86 million barrels – can be extracted.

“Britain consumes about half a billion barrels of oil per year, so if only 1 per cent is extractable that would be about two months’ consumption,” says Aplin. “It doesn’t seem like a very big prize.”

Northern England looks more promising. An earlier study by the BGS found evidence of large deposits of shale gas, perhaps 37.7 trillion cubic metres. The south-west also has deposits. In theory, these could meet the UK’s gas needs for 40 years, but US figures suggest that only 10 per cent can be extracted.

“So you’re talking about only a few years of potential UK consumption,” says Aplin. “That’s not to be sniffed at, but it doesn’t change the basic message that we as a country will be continuing to import oil and gas in future.”

such as why there is more matter than antimatter.

Last week, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel issued a report mapping the next 10 to 20 years of US particle physics research. It recommends pursuing greater international collaboration to build a neutrino experiment of exceptional physical length, centred at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

The report also recommends boosting the energy of Fermilab’s existing neutrino beams.

Right-wing Euro winIT WAS called a “black day for Europe”, as far-right parties gained an unprecedented share of the vote in last week’s European elections.

Right-wing swings are sometimes attributed to harsh economic times, but data from 12 European countries showed that right-wing parties in half of them were doing worse after the 2008 economic crisis. This makes the suggestion that economic recovery may counter the lurch seem less likely.

“There’s definitely a role played by the economy in this, but it’s not the full picture by a long way,” says Marley Morris of political research consultancy Counterpoint in London.

Higher voter turnouts in national compared with European elections could help make the political landscape less extreme. Typically in

the UK, for example, only a third of the electorate votes in the European elections. “If you get very low turnouts, it’s much easier for smaller parties to make an impact,” says Ed Fieldhouse of the University of Manchester, UK, who directs the British Election Study.

He says that many voters who backed the UK Independence Party (see page 28) may well return to supporting their usual party when the UK holds its national election next year. However, his latest study showed that 60 per cent of those who said they intended to vote UKIP in last week’s election said they would also vote UKIP in the general election. Before the corresponding European elections in 2009, only 25 per cent said they would do the same.

–French nationalists celebrate–

Space worms on the menuMAYBE there’s a reason we call them mealworms. Three volunteers in China have just spent three months eating beetle larvae as part of a project to test life-support systems for deep-space travel.

Last week, one man and two women emerged from Moon Palace 1, an artificial biosphere at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The volunteers grew and harvested grain, vegetables and fruit, feeding the inedible leftovers

to mealworms. Along with some meat, the mock crew ate dozens of mealworms each day, trying out different seasonings and cooking styles.

Kim Binsted at the University of Hawaii works on HI-SEAS, another project that simulates long trips to space. Her team also considered growing mealworms for food, but ran into problems: “In the end we decided against it, because apparently they’re little escape artists.”


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FROM one crisis to the next. Many refugees from middle-eastern countries like Syria are unable to get treatment for cancer and other non-infectious diseases. So says a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published this week.

In past conflicts, medical care for refugees has focused on infectious diseases and nutrition. However, recent waves of refugees from middle-income countries often

have costlier needs. The UNHCR offers financial help to host countries, but a shortage of funding has caused it to tighten its criteria, capping spending at $2000 per person per year.

Paul Spiegel of the UNHCR and his colleagues assessed applications for Iraqi and Syrian refugees living in Jordan between 2010 and 2012. They found that around a quarter were for help with cancer treatment costs. More than half of these were declined, either because the patient faced a poor prognosis or the costs of treating them were too high (Lancet Oncology, doi.org/f2rzzt).

As a result, many refugees

living with long-term illnesses like cancer are having to forgo treatment or face crippling debts, trying to pay for it themselves. Some are forced to return home.

Given limited funding, Spiegel says that more emphasis needs to be placed on cancer prevention. Health insurance systems have also proved to be effective in other refugee settings.

Refugee care costs

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For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news

Ebola epidemicAN OUTBREAK of deadly Ebola virus in west Africa has so far killed 174 people, and this week more cases were confirmed in Sierra Leone. And deep in the nearby forest many gorillas and chimps

could also be dying of the virus.This strain of Ebola has been

spreading since 1995, killing thousands of gorillas and chimps. There is now hope: on Monday researchers announced that an experimental Ebola vaccine is safe and induces a strong immune response in captive chimps (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1316902111). The vaccine, based on a surface protein from the Ebola virus, had already been shown to protect monkeys.

But there is a new problem, says Peter Walsh of the University of Cambridge, who led the work. We need to test ways to get the vaccine into wild chimps, but such tests may not happen. The US is the only country that permits biomedical research on chimps, but last year, after a campaign by the Humane Society of the US, government agencies proposed ending it. That could stymie research on the Ebola vaccine.

“This will be a conservation catastrophe,” says Walsh.

60 SECONDS

Canada flexes robo-armAstronauts on the International Space Station can now leave routine repairs to a robot. Canadian-made Dextre has replaced two cameras on fellow bot Canadarm2, a job that normally entails a human spacewalk. This time, astronauts chucked the cameras into an airlock and let Dextre get to work.

Speedier gene trialsGene therapy clinical trials in the US no longer need to be reviewed by a special federal advisory board, the National Institutes of Health has announced. The Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee will only review high-risk therapies, with most proposed trials going through existing regulatory channels.

Vape alarmIn a letter to the World Health Organization, 48 scientists have accused the body of either “overlooking or purposefully marginalising” the idea that e-cigarettes could be a low-risk alternative to cigarettes. They say the WHO is treating e-cigarettes in the same way as traditional tobacco products.

Toad invasionMadagascar has been invaded by toads, which could cause havoc to its delicate ecosystem, much as cane toads have in Australia. Biologists collected six Asian common toads (Duttaphrynus melanostictus) in the country in late March and are calling for them to be eradicated (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/509563a).

AtomfallWhat do you get when you throw two clouds of frozen atoms off a tower and grab a stopwatch? A German experiment timing the fall of rubidium and potassium atoms in an extreme quantum state has confirmed Einstein’s prediction that different types of atoms fall at the same rate (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/sxt).

“An experimental Ebola vaccine for chimpanzees is safe and induces a strong immune response”

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–Deep space dine–

–The choice is debt or disease–

CARS are pricey enough, but they take another toll. Smog from road transport drains $0.8 trillion yearly from a group of 34 wealthy nations.

A report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that air pollution costs OECD countries $1.7 trillion a year in healthcare and premature deaths. Road transport accounts for half of this.

The most harmful emissions come from diesel engines, so the OECD wants governments to remove incentives to buy them.

Air pollution also costs $1.4 trillion in China and $0.5 trillion in India. Both have seen deaths due to smog rising faster than the global average.

Many nations are trying to cut smog by making cars more efficient, but any gains have been overwhelmed by the rising number of cars in fast-expanding cities in China and India.

Costly exhaust

“Refugees with cancer and other long-term illnesses have to forego treatment or face crippling debts”


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ROADS may soon diverge in the dark matter wood, and some physicists want to take the ones less travelled.

The most promising candidate for a dark matter particle could be about to show itself at last, as it is running out of places to hide. But should the hunters fail to bag one of these WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, the search for dark matter could be thrown into crisis.

At a meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week, researchers debated the best paths forward into the wilder landscape of less-favoured candidates, from alternate particles to changes to our theory of gravity.

“It’s really refreshing,” says Lisa Randall at Harvard University. “For years I went to conferences where people said, ‘We know what dark matter is and we’re just cutting out the parameter space’. I thought that was strange, because we really don’t know what dark matter is.”

So far we have only sensed dark matter’s presence through its gravitational effects. But theory says that WIMPs should also brush shoulders with normal atoms occasionally, producing signals we can detect. WIMP champions are pinning their hopes on more sensitive underground detectors that are running or under construction.

“This is a golden decade for dark matter because of detector sensitivity,” says Kathryn Zurek at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

The trouble is that background

noise can prevent us noticing the impact of a WIMP. Beyond a certain sensitivity limit, the signal would be swamped by neutrinos, nearly massless particles that are constantly streaming from the sun and from particle collisions in our atmosphere. After just a few more upgrades, WIMP hunters will hit this limit and the desired particles may no longer be detectable.

Indirect methods for spotting WIMPs offer the best chance of a sighting. When WIMPs collide they should annihilate, shattering into other particles. This includes

gamma rays, and an excess of these high-energy photons spotted in the centre of our galaxy seems to fit nicely with the simplest models for WIMPs. But one criticism is that the rays could just as easily come from fast-spinning dead stars called pulsars.

So if not WIMPs then what? Some theories modify the classic particle, changing its properties and offering new places to look. Others focus more on runner-up particles, such as axions or sterile neutrinos. And still others say dark matter might not exist at all, and we just need to modify the laws of gravity (see right).

“It’s always possible WIMPs are just around the corner,” says Avi Loeb at Harvard University. “But when there is no evidence, you have to be careful. We’re looking for a black cat in a dark room.” ■

THIS WEEK

Time to blaze new trails in the search for the dark stuff? Lisa Grossman checks them out

“When there is no evidence, you have to be careful. We’re looking for a black cat in a dark room”

WELCOME TO WIMP CITY

Dark matter hunt at crisis point

There are good reasons to build up a metropolis around WIMPs.

Our best models support the theory that dark matter is the scaffold around which normal matter formed galaxies and clusters. If so, dark matter must have existed since the dawn of the universe.

Early theories hinted that dark matter particles should annihilate themselves, so physicists knew they must have certain properties, in order for enough of the particles to still exist and make up the amount of dark matter we detect today. A particle that interacts via gravity and the weak force but not with photons fits the bill – and that is a WIMP.

“There’s a simplistic beauty to the WIMP model. That’s why it’s so compelling,” says James Bullock at the University of California, Irvine.

Signs of exactly this kind of particle are showing up as an excess of gamma rays coming from

the galactic centre, says Dan Hooper at the Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. But alternative explanations have not been ruled out, and other detection techniques have yet to pan out – like waiting for a WIMP to smack into an underground detector such as LUX in South Dakota (pictured above) or creating one at a particle accelerator, for example.

If WIMPs remain elusive even as we whittle down the places to look, the hypothetical particles become less attractive candidates, says Bullock. “Then you start to worry.”

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In this section■ Four futures for Scotland, page 12■ Lost sea came back from the dead – twice, page 16■ Radar spots pirates, page 23

MOND OFF-ROADING

AXION FARMS

NEUTRINO PARK

WIMPY SUBURBS

It’s still possible that the search for any sort of particle is misguided. Instead, modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND, suggests rewriting one of our most cherished theories: gravity.

The first evidence for dark matter came from the ability of rotating galaxies to hold themselves together, even though they do not have enough mass in their planets, stars and gas to act as the only gravitational glue.

According to MOND, gravity simply works differently on galactic scales than on the scale of solar systems, and we just need to figure out how.

Some observations of mass in dim

galaxies and the motions of dwarf galaxies agree better with MOND than with Newtonian physics, a mystery that convinced Stacy McGaugh at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, that it could be the way to go. But starting afresh with gravity continues to make many physicists uncomfortable – including some of MOND’s grudging supporters.

At the Cambridge conference (see main story), McGaugh made the case for MOND but then left his colleagues with an impassioned plea: “Please detect this stuff! Put me out of the misery of having to give this talk over and over again!”

In the absence of WIMPs, the runners-up are axions, which behave more like an all-encompassing field than single particles. Theoretically speaking, axions are just as likely as WIMPs but are much harder to find.

Classical WIMP detectors, such as the XENON100 project at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy (pictured below), can also hunt for axions. The best limits so far have been set by the ADMX experiment at the University of Washington in Seattle, but it is only sensitive to a small range of possible particles.

Last April, Peter Graham at Stanford University, California, and his colleagues devised another way to hunt them using the same technology as MRI scanners. “There is still a lot of work to be done, but I think they deserve a similar effort.”

Neutrinos seem like natural candidates for dark matter: they have mass, yet they flit through normal matter as if it weren’t there. The three known types of neutrinos don’t add up to enough mass to explain all the dark matter we see in the universe. But what if there is a fourth flavour of the particle?

This sterile neutrino could fit the bill. Hints of it have popped up and vanished again in several experiments, including the Borexino detector at Gran Sasso (pictured below).

A whiff of X-rays from the centre of the galaxy could be yet another sign of them. In February, two teams saw extra X-rays in data from two telescopes, and a sterile neutrino with a mass of 7 kiloelectronvolts could explain the sighting. If confirmed, the next test would be to see if there is enough of these particles to account for dark matter.

With classical WIMPs in a bind, theorists have started expanding their descriptions of the particle, creating a sprawling landscape of WIMP-like alternatives.

One idea is asymmetric dark matter, which would invoke a dark anti-particle. We exist because something in the early universe allowed more matter than antimatter to survive after the big bang. The mechanism for this asymmetry is still unclear, but if something similar happened for dark matter, it should be made of

lightweight particles of about 5 to 10 gigaelectronvolts – just below what WIMP detectors can see.

Other models say that dark matter may be a mix of classic WIMPs and WIMP-like cousins that would interact with each other via a hypothetical dark force. Self-interacting dark matter would be harder to find in detectors, but it would build structures.

Some astronomers are already hunting for signs of this shadow cosmos in the motions of stars and colliding galaxies.


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Rob Edwards, Grangemouth

AS DUSK falls, Grangemouth starts to glow. Cloaked in clouds of steam and lit by flares like giant candles, Scotland’s biggest oil refinery has a strange beauty. Situated roughly halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow on the Firth of Forth, the 700-hectare petrochemical complex is a vital hub of UK oil production. Should Scotland vote for independence, it will be one of the new government’s key assets.

According to the industry, there are between 15 and 24 billion barrels of recoverable oil and gas left under the North Sea. About 42bn barrels have been extracted since production began there in 1967. Because prices have risen, 24bn barrels could be

FOUR FUTURES FOR SCOTLAND

Oil and gas is at heart of Scots’ future wealth

dotcom bubble burst and companies headed east in search of lower costs.

Such scenarios are plausible futures for Scotland, and there is also a fourth future; one that is more troubling. Without a plan or a sense of where to take the nation, it is possible that an independent Scotland may drift into business-as-usual. Or perhaps from an economic point of view, it would be more accurate to call this business-and-financial-services-as-usual – the time-honoured British model of an economy run by bankers, built on debt and managed to the timetable of the quarterly financial results.

As the experience of Iceland and the Republic of Ireland shows, this is a perilous path, especially for a small country. It’s partly about risk: as we have seen, the financial services sector can act as an engine for the economy, but it has a nasty habit of blowing up on the motorway.

There is also something deeper at stake: if Scotland makes the wrong decisions about its own economic future, it risks ending up as a backwater to the rest of the UK, with England – and London in particular – sucking away its brightest and best.

Independence offers a chance for Scotland to shape its destiny, but whatever future it aims for, it must avoid clinging to the old British habit of muddling through. ■

Stian Westlake is executive director of research at Nesta in London. Nesta’s report, When Small is Beautiful: Successful innovation in smaller countries, will be published on 30 June

SMALL nations can shape their own destiny, and this can be both a blessing and a curse. If the Scots opt for independence, they would do well to heed other small nations before them.

Research by the innovation-fostering charity Nesta has looked at small countries that have prospered in the last few decades. Take tiny Estonia, with a population one-quarter the size of Scotland’s. It is the poster child for newly independent states. Estonia’s government took advantage of freedom from the USSR in 1991 to turn the country into a technology superpower in miniature. From the free public Wi-Fi in Tallinn to compulsory coding lessons in schools, Estonia bet big on IT. And it paid off: Estonians built the technology behind Skype and run a host of cool start-ups.

But for every Estonia there’s an Iceland. Around the time the Estonians embarked on their technological adventure, the Icelanders set themselves up as the buccaneers of international capitalism. It ended badly, with the country’s banks collapsing and the country facing years of painful austerity.

So an independent Scotland must choose its path carefully. There are a number of directions it could decide on: oil-investment paradise, renewable-energy Mecca, high-tech playground.

None of these three scenarios is a sure-fire hit. High-tech industries could always go the way of “Silicon Glen”, a region in central Scotland where electronics manufacturers once flocked. In its heyday in the mid-1990s, it was claimed that Silicon Glen produced 35 per cent of PCs in western Europe. But this success vanished almost overnight when the

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In 16 weeks’ time, the people of Scotland will decide whether their country should become independent of the UK. It is not an easy decision: the political, economic and cultural questions have been debated for months. There are other dimensions to consider, too, including science, technology and the environment. These can shape any country’s fate just as much as the social factors – perhaps more so, for a small new nation looking to carve out its place in the world. New Scientist looks at how an independent Scotland might reinvest its oil riches, become a high-tech hub, a green beacon – or the sickest country in Europe

Take the high road?


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£30bn oil fund over a generation.Norway’s equivalent, the

Norwegian Pension Fund Global, has amassed over £500bn from oil and gas revenues since it was set up in 1990. It is the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund and owns 1.3 per cent of all the world’s listed companies.

According to Bjørn Vidar Lerøen, an adviser to Norway’s industry body,

Norwegian Oil and Gas Association, there was political consensus on the fund from the start. “The oil belongs to the people and revenues from oil production shall be used to build a better society,” he says. The Norwegian fund has a wide-ranging ethical policy that forbids investments in more than 60 companies involved in tobacco, arms, environmental or

For more on this, visit newscientist.com/special/scotland

Jessica Griggs, Edinburgh

EDINBURGH, Scotland’s bustling and aspiring capital, has dubbed itself the Athens of the North. If Scotland gets independence, the new government should instead consider looking across the Mediterranean Sea, to Israel, for some high-tech inspiration.

Israel’s nickname is the Start-Up Nation, thanks to a 2009 book of the same name that explored how a small country with 7 million people became a global player in the tech scene. Today, Israel is thought to boast the highest number of start-up companies per person in the world.

So could Scotland follow

human rights abuses. Ironically, it is now reviewing whether to disinvest from fossil fuel companies because of the damage they do to the climate.

But there is one way in which Scotland would probably not be able to copy Norway: the Norwegian government’s 67 per cent ownership of the oil company Statoil. “To try to nationalise companies would not be politically possible either in Scotland or the UK,” says Uisdean Vass, an oil specialist at legal firm Bond Dickinson in Aberdeen.

Perhaps the biggest conundrum, though, is the climate. According to WWF Scotland, burning 24bn barrels of oil and gas could put more then 10bn tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – more than 120 times Scotland’s current annual emissions. “The science is clear,” says the environmental group’s director, Lang Banks. “The planet certainly can’t afford to allow all the oil left in the North Sea to be burned.” ■

Aping Israel: how to build a start-up nation

“Alex Salmond promises to put aside about £1 billion of oil money a year, to create a £30 billion fund”

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worth £1.5 trillion – more than the value of all the oil and gas extracted so far. “That gives us one of the best financial safety nets of any country in the world,” the Scottish government says. If the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine base moves from the river Clyde after independence – as Scottish nationalists say it must – then prospecting off the west coast could begin too. It is currently banned in case it interferes with naval operations there.

There will be a few other tricky issues to resolve, like where the lines are drawn to demarcate which fields belong to an independent Scotland and which to the UK, and how the £35-£50bn cost of decommissioning old oil rigs would be divided up.

Ultimately the plan is to emulate Norway, and invest at least some of the created wealth for the future. Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, has promised to put aside about £1bn a year, with the aim of generating a

–Waving the flag for independence–


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Israel’s example? Scotland has fewer people – about 5.3 million – but it already has the start of a healthy tech scene. In 2006, Edinburgh had just three incubators – offices where start-ups can rent desk space, network and hold workshops. Now there are 17. Glasgow is not far behind. “It’s a pretty vibrant environment,” says Danny Helson of Informatics Ventures, a support network set up to work with start-ups spun out from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics.

The biggest challenge, many involved agree, is scraping together the funding to help companies really take off. What Scotland needs is for a few home-grown firms to make it big. “There is nothing like a couple of exemplar projects to encourage

venture capitalists,” says Tom Ogilvie of Edinburgh Research and Innovation, the commercialisation arm of the university.

In Israel, trendsetters include Waze, the traffic app bought by Google for $1.1 billion last year.

Edinburgh-based Skyscanner, the flight comparison site, is the closest to aping that success. Last year the company’s estimated value was about $800 million.

Letting private investors shoulder the risk seems to work. Government funding kick-started

“ The biggest challenge is scraping together the funding to help companies really take off”

SCOTLAND is arguably one of the greenest countries in Europe. It produces 40 per cent of Scottish electricity demand from renewable sources, and models suggest this could rise to 67 per cent by 2018. That’s closing in on the government’s goal of producing enough green power to supply the equivalent of all of Scottish demand by 2020.

Some fear that independence means this goal will be too expensive for Scotland because offshore wind is expensive. “It’s silly to say it’s going to be expensive,” says David Toke of the University of Aberdeen, “when in fact it can be done pretty cheaply onshore.”

Toke and his colleagues published estimates last year suggesting that independence would ruin Scotland’s chances of hitting its green goal. But later that year the team made a U-turn: they now say that it will be cheaper for Scotland to pursue its 2020 target as an independent nation.

What changed? Newly announced nuclear power stations will need funding in the UK and new financial policies heavily favour nuclear over wind power. So it now makes more

sense for a green Scottish consumer to vote for independence, says Toke. Electricity bills will still go up – by about 7 per cent, he claims – and this will pay for onshore wind power. In the UK, bills would rise by 8 to 10 per cent to pay for new nuclear, Toke says.

An independent Scotland will need a close electrical alliance with England and Wales. A power-sharing market that allows all those involved to navigate the peaks and troughs of supply and demand is a tricky business. This balancing act is particularly tough when fickle renewables are involved, but there is a precedent in Scandinavia. Nord Pool is a power-sharing market on a grid that runs largely on renewables. Accordingly, the incumbent Scottish National Party (SNP) has proposed an “energy partnership” with the UK.

Don’t be fooled by all this green ambition – Scotland won’t be kicking the oil habit. Its target is to produce the equivalent of 100 per cent of Scottish demand with renewables, but the country will remain a big energy exporter. The excess will come largely from its traditional fossil fuel and nuclear power resources.

But the SNP says emphasis will be placed on developing carbon dioxide capture and storage for its fossil fuel power stations. It’s not easy being green, but independence might make it a little easier. Catherine Brahic ■

Wind will power Scotland’s green ambitions

Israel’s tech scene in the early 1990s, but that has since been taken over by private industry, says Naomi Krieger Carmy, director of the UK-Israel Tech Hub at the British embassy in Tel Aviv. “The government was able to assume some of the risk, but to a large degree it left the reward to the entrepreneurs,” she says.

To emulate this, some want an independent Scotland to scrap Scottish Enterprise, the main provider of public-sector money to Scottish firms. Without this investment competition from the public sector, the thinking goes, entrepreneurs might be keener to invest in Scottish start-ups. Israel’s example also highlights the economic importance of aligning research with industry. Nearly 80 per cent of research in Israel is done by businesses; in Scotland the figure is closer to 35 per cent.

In the meantime, there are other things Scotland could do to imitate Israel, such as strengthen connections with the US and Canada, says Jamie Coleman, managing director of Codebase, a tech incubator in Edinburgh. Codebase occupies the top floors of an otherwise empty government building and has plans to extend downwards. By the end of the year, it wants to be the biggest incubator in Europe.

If Scotland can mature into a start-up nation, the benefits could be huge. “If you can get global companies established then that leads to economic development for Scotland,” says Helson. ■

FOUR FUTURES FOR SCOTLAND

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Jacob Aron

IT IS 2062, and the youngest people to vote in Scotland’s referendum, then aged 16, are now approaching retirement age. A perfect storm of shifting demographics, dwindling oil and poor health has left those north of the border worse off than the rest of the UK, leading many to question whether they were right to vote “yes” all those years ago…

Back in the present, it is impossible to confidently predict what will happen should Scotland decide to go it alone. But three factors will come into play.

The first is an unavoidable fact of life: we are all getting older. Developed nations across the world are set to struggle with the effects of an ageing population over the next 50 years, but demographic projections suggest the impact will be felt even harder in Scotland.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), a think-tank in London,

predicts that by 2062 Scotland’s population will have grown by just 4.4 per cent, compared with 22.8 per cent in the UK as a whole. The problem for Scotland is that its under-65 population will shrink while its over-65s increase, putting big pressure on public finances.

The Scottish government says independence will allow the nation to pursue a very different immigration strategy to the rest of the UK. But if working-age

migrants don’t come as hoped, Scotland will find it more difficult to support its ageing population.

Things get worse when North Sea oil and gas are taken into account. “Oil revenues will almost certainly fall over the longer term,” says David Phillips at the IFS. “If it takes decades, that would

Don’t look back in anger from 2062

For more on this, visit newscientist.com/special/scotland

WHAT ABOUT SCIENCE?Where would an independent Scotland fit in with the rest of the science world? Could Scottish researchers lose access to other international facilities, including ones in the rest of the UK? Will researchers south of the border still be able to do science in Scotland?

The Scottish government says it will be business as usual. It plans to reach an agreement with the rest of the UK and will continue funding science through the research councils.

But as with most of the debates over independence, there are claims and counterclaims. Scottish science receives a disproportionately high share of the UK’s research council funds: Scotland is home to 8 per cent of the UK population

but receives over 13 per cent of that cash. In 2012-13, it amounted to £257 million in grants.

The UK government says that an independent Scotland would have to supply its own funding, and that to maintain the status quo would cost 0.23 per cent of Scotland’s 2012 GDP. It also warns that Scots would lose out on other funding from UK government departments, such as the Ministry of Defence.

In truth, nobody knows. In the case of a vote for independence, research funding is one of many details that would need to be hammered out. There would be a negotiation and transition period between the vote on 18 September and the proposed Independence Day of 24 March 2016.

give Scotland time to adjust, although it would still involve some potentially painful choices.”

Addressing the shortfall in revenues will mean higher taxes or a fall in living standards – something Scotland can ill afford: life expectancy is already 2.3 years lower for Scottish men than those in the rest of the UK. The difference is particularly stark in Glasgow, where life expectancy at birth is just 72.6 years for boys and 78.5 for girls, compared with the UK averages of 78.9 and 82.7 years. “Health is Scotland’s Achilles’ heel,” says Gerry McCartney of NHS Scotland. And it’s a relatively recent phenomenon.

The reason for the disparity is not entirely clear, as it is difficult to untangle the interconnected health effects of lifestyle, culture and economics, but inequality in Scotland certainly plays a role. “Quite a large proportion of the higher mortality is explicable simply by poverty and deprivation,” says McCartney.

The Scottish government says a vote for independence will reduce inequality. But a study by David Comerford and David Eiser at the University of Stirling suggests that new Scottish powers to increase taxes or benefits may have little effect. That’s because small nations can find it difficult to implement radically different policies to their larger neighbours: people can simply decide to cross the border in search of lower taxes, for example. This is particularly problematic when it comes to funding pensions, which depend on a thriving workforce. “Raising tax rates to provide pensions could be a self-defeating policy if it leads to an exodus of workers,” says Comerford.

The voting age for the Scottish referendum has been lowered to 16 from the normal UK voting age of 18, to let teenagers have a say in their country’s future. If independence goes wrong, a youthful yes vote could prove a big mistake. ■

“ A large proportion of Scotland’s higher mortality is simply down to poverty and deprivation”

5.3 millionThe population of Scotland

99%Scotland’s share of the UK’s offshore oil production over the next 30 years

14 yearsThe gap in life expectancy for boys born in the most deprived areas compared with the richest areas

25%Scotland’s potential share of the European Union’s wind and tidal energy

£0Fees paid by Scottish students going to university in Scotland

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SCOTLAND IN NUMBERS

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Jeff Hecht

IN LESS than a century, humanity destroyed the Aral Sea. It is one of the emblematic environmental disasters. But now it seems the sea has collapsed at least twice before, and recovered both times.

In 1960, the Aral Sea in central Asia was the world’s fourth largest lake. But massive irrigation programmes begun during the Soviet era diverted water from the rivers that feed it, reducing the lake’s volume to just 10 per cent of what it had been and leaving large areas dry (see map). The ecosystem collapsed, the desiccated lake bed is now laced with pesticides spread by dust storms, and drinking water is polluted.

Now geologists have discovered that the Aral Sea has previously recovered naturally from such severe declines.

“History tells us don’t give up hope,” says Philip Micklin of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, who was not involved in the study. “The sea really has dried in the past and has come back.”

Sergey Krivonogov of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy in Novosibirsk, Russia, and his colleagues have compiled data showing how the Aral Sea has changed over the past 2000 years. Researchers had carbon-dated the shelves etched into the shoreline by past waves, and drilled cores to reveal which layers were once exposed.

It turns out that water levels in the Aral Sea have varied widely,

says Krivonogov. Humans may have played a role, because we have been farming the area for 2500 years.

In 1960, the lake’s surface was 54 metres above sea level. Yet between AD 400 and 600, it was just 10 metres above sea level, and recovered. Then between AD 1000 and 1500 it fell to 29 metres above sea level. The lake grew again after 1600, until Soviet irrigation began (Gondwana Research, doi.org/svs).

The modern collapse is no worse than the older ones. By 1989, the lake was 40 metres above sea level, and a small northern lake split from the rest.

Since then the northern part has rebounded. In 2005, a dam

separated it from the south, cutting water loss from the north. The north Aral Sea is back up to 42 metres above sea level, and native fish have returned from river refuges, says Nikolay Aladin of the Russian Zoological Institute in Saint Petersburg.

“The fish catch is a small fraction of what it was in the mid-1950s, but the rehabilitation of the northern part has been pretty amazing,” says Micklin.

The southern part is still shrinking though. It has split into three salty lakes less than 29 metres above sea level. The eastern one is so salty that only brine shrimp live there. No work is under way to restore this southern region. It has always looked like a lost cause. So it will keep shrinking and getting saltier until only brine shrimp are left, says Aladin.

Using less water to irrigate crops could restore the entire Aral Sea, says Micklin. But it would devastate the farms, which have actually increased the irrigated area since the end of the Soviet era in 1991. Some have shifted from water-hungry rice and cotton to winter wheat, but many farmers need the cotton money. ■

Arid Aral Sea could be resurrected

Shrunken seaSoviet irrigation projects cut off the rivers feeding the Aral Sea, so it has shrunk to one-tenth of what it was in 1960

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“ History tells us don’t give up hope. The sea really has dried in the past and has come back”

–Land ahoy!–

THIS WEEK


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BABIES in the womb are not as sheltered from the outside world as you might think. The placenta harbours a unique ecosystem of bacteria that may have a surprising origin – the mother’s mouth.

Disturbances of the placenta’s bacterial community may explain why some women give birth prematurely. It could also be one of the ways that a woman’s diet affects her offspring’s gut bacteria, and as a result, the child’s disease risk. “Different nutrients [in the mother’s diet] are a huge determinant of which microbes take up residence in the placenta,” says Kjersti Aagaard of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

In the past decade there has been growing awareness of the role that our microbiome – the bacteria, viruses and fungi that live on and in our bodies – plays in our health. Disturbances to the gut microbiome have been linked with conditions ranging from obesity to autism.

Until recently it was generally thought that babies are born with a sterile gut and that they pick up

microbes on their journey through their mother’s vagina, which are the first to colonise the gut. This theory was challenged when bacteria were found in the meconium – a baby’s first stool, passed within hours of birth.

We now have a clue to where these bugs are coming from. Aagaard and her team sequenced the DNA of bacteria in the placenta, which transfers nutrients and oxygen from the mother’s blood to the fetus. They took samples from inside the placentas of 320 women after they had given birth.

The team found a broad range of bacteria, including those necessary for metabolising nutrients needed by the fetus.

But they were surprised to find that the bacterial species were most similar to those normally found in the adult mouth, as opposed to the vagina or gut. “The placenta has its own ecology and these were not the bacteria we were expecting,” says James Kinross, a surgeon at Imperial College London, who researches

gut bacteria and was not involved in the new work. “Most people would have expected it to be a vaginal flora,” he says, because of its proximity.

The fact that it was most similar to the mouth microbiome suggests these bacteria are somehow finding their way through the blood to the placenta. Aagaard suggests that having got that far, they could reach the fetus either by crossing into its blood vessels within the placenta or by passing into the amniotic fluid and being swallowed by the fetus.

The team also found different amounts of some of the bacterial species in women who had given birth prematurely – before 37 weeks of pregnancy – compared with the typical bacterial profile of the women who went to full term (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/sv5).

This tallies with previous studies which found that gum disease raises the risk of premature birth. Aagaard speculates that if oral bacteria do reach the placenta through the blood, it is possible that diseased and bleeding gums could allow harmful bacteria to reach and colonise the placenta, possibly triggering an early birth.

In a separate study in monkeys, Aagaard’s team showed that giving pregnant animals a high-fat diet altered their offspring’s microbiome (Nature Communications, doi.org/sv7).

Many studies have shown that a person’s risk of obesity and heart disease is affected by their mother’s diet, but it was thought this was passed on through epigenetic mechanisms – chemical changes that switch the offspring’s genes on or off. “But layered on top of that are variations in the microbiome,” says Aagaard. Clare Wilson ■

THERE is a new way to hack the brain. A technique that involves genetically engineering brain cells so that they fire in the presence of certain drugs has been used to treat epilepsy in rats, and it could soon be tested in humans.

Chemogenetics builds on optogenetics, which involves genetically engineering brain cells so that they fire in the presence of light. Selected neurons can then be turned on or off with the flick of a switch, but this requires implanting fibre-optic cables in the brain, which is impractical for treating human brain disorders.

In chemogenetics, however, no cables are needed because neurons are altered to fire in the presence of a certain chemical rather than light.

“It’s got more potential in that you can give drugs to people more easily than you can get light into their brains,” says Dimitri Kullmann of University College London.

Kullmann’s team tested the approach by using a harmless virus to deliver a gene into the brains of rats. The gene encoded a protein that stops neurons from firing – but only in the presence of a chemical called clozapine N-oxide (CNO).

Several weeks later they injected the rats with chemicals that trigger brain seizures, to mimic epilepsy. If the rats were then given CNO, the severity of their seizures reduced significantly within 10 minutes. (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4847).

Kullmann sees chemogenetic therapy benefiting people with focal epilepsy, a form of the condition that is triggered in part of the brain and then spreads. People with it can often feel when a seizure is about to come on, so at that point they could take CNO as a tablet, or by injection or nasal spray. The effect would only be temporary, Kullmann says, because the drug has a half-life of around 7 hours in humans. Clare Wilson ■

Surprising origin of the gut flora in newborns

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–Born colonised?–

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

“ The placenta has its own ecology and these were not the bacteria we were expecting to see”

Epilepsy pill to switch brain cells on and off


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HUNGRY suns are unlikely to be good hosts. Sun-like stars sometimes devour their Earth-like planets, and astronomers have figured out how to identify the grizzly leftovers.

Stars are mostly made of hydrogen and helium, but they can also contain a spattering of other elements on their surfaces. Analysing starlight lets scientists see which elements are present.

Keivan Stassun at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and his colleagues used telescopes in Chile to look at the light from a pair of sun-like stars (The Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/sv8). Both stars host relatively large planets, with masses between those of Neptune and Jupiter. The team analysed 15 elements, including known building blocks of rocky worlds.

They found that both stars had much higher levels of Earth-like components than our sun, suggesting that these stars ate rocky planets that once orbited alongside the existing gas giants.

Finding stars that show signs of planet-eating can speed up the hunt for habitable worlds, because systems that are unlikely to host life can be quickly ruled out. “The one that looks like it swallowed its Earth already is probably not the one to start with,” says Stassun.

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Big flightless birds get a shake up of their family tree

HUGE flightless birds like emus and the extinct moa may look alike, but an analysis of ancient DNA reveals they are more distantly related than we expected.

Moas, which lived in New Zealand, and emus belong to a flightless group called ratites. Until now the assumption was that early ratites spread around the world on foot while Africa, New Zealand and Australia were one land mass. When this broke up, the birds were separated and evolved independently, producing everything from Madagascar’s huge extinct elephant birds to the smallest ratite, New Zealand’s kiwis.

But their DNA begs to differ. Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide in Australia sequenced DNA from the bones of Madagascan elephant birds, and compared it with that of other flightless birds. This showed that elephant birds and moas are not evolutionary siblings at all, but evolved separately from small flying birds. And while Madagascar’s elephant birds are indeed closely related to New Zealand’s kiwis, their last common ancestor lived much more recently than 100 million years ago, which is when Madagascar and New Zealand split apart. This implies that they must have descended from a bird capable of flying across the oceans.

Moas were most closely related to South American flying birds called tinamous, which also supports the idea that it evolved from a flying bird (Science, doi.org/swq).

Planet-munching suns are messy eaters

Unique ‘potter’ frog packs eggs in mud

A NEWLY discovered frog is the only amphibian that coats its eggs in mud. Doing so might protect the eggs, but beyond that it may also pay the frogs to be different.

The kumbara night frog lives in south India. Kotambylu Vasudeva Gururaja of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, who found it, saw them pick up mud with their forelimbs and spread it on their eggs (Zootaxa, doi.org/sv6).

They might do it to stop the eggs drying out, says Gururaja, or to hide them from predators. But he thinks the real reason is that the frogs simply need to be different from their neighbours.

Two related species, Jog’s night frog and Rao’s dwarf wrinkled frog, share the area. So each species needs to differentiate itself with distinct behaviours to avoid futile interbreeding. Gururaja found that they all make unique calls, mate differently and care for their young differently.

Fix leaky gut lining to slow HIV’s attack

PLUG the gut to stall HIV. It seems the virus damages the gut, allowing bacteria to leak out and spark an immune response, triggering many lethal diseases.

Ivona Pandrea at the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues gave a drug used to treat kidney disease, called sevelamer, to monkeys newly infected with the simian equivalent of HIV. The drug binds to bacteria, keeping them safely inside the gut. Those given the drug had a dramatically reduced immune response compared with a control group (Journal of Clinical Investigation, doi.org/swc).

Because an increased immune response triggers many lethal diseases in people with HIV, giving the drug to people soon after infection may prolong lives.

IN BRIEF


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Maths reveals the best football team

PUBS around the world echo with the debate: Which is the best football team of all time? Statistics doesn’t have an answer yet – but it can crown the best team in the history of the English league.

Ian McHale and Rose Baker at the University of Salford, UK, created a statistical model of team strengths. They used this to analyse goal data from 200,000 matches in England and Wales that occurred between 1888, when the Football League was founded, and 2012. The games cover the top four English leagues, the FA Cup and the League Cup.

The model assessed teams using three measures: attack ability divided by an opposite team’s defence, a team’s strongest average performance over a 10-year period and the probability of a team winning against the second-best team over a 10-year period.

By the first two measures, the Chelsea team of 2005/06 comes out on top, followed by the Manchester United team of 2007/08. The United team of 1992-2002 had the best odds of beating their next best rival (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, doi.org/swd).

Sanjit Atwal, who runs football stats site Squawka, agrees with the result, but says the stats are just more fuel for the debate. “Fans will take whatever they can out of the data to win an argument,” he says.

Dancing bees report on their habitat

EAVESDROPPING may be rude, but snooping on honeybees could reveal a lot about the environment. Their waggle dance contains clues about the health of their ecosystem.

Honeybees perform the waggle dance to tell hive mates about food sources, so people have wondered whether the dance might identify healthy areas of the landscape and thus evaluate conservation schemes.

To find out, Margaret Couvillon and her colleagues at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, videoed 5484 waggle dances from three British honeybee colonies living near

several conservation schemes.Most bees danced to inform

others about a nature reserve rich in wildflowers. They also praised farms covered by Higher Level Stewardship schemes, which set aside wild land. But they were less keen on Organic Entry Level Stewardship farms, where regular cutting means there are fewer flowers (Current Biology, doi.org/sv9).

But honeybees may not tell us all we need to know, says Lars Chittka of Queen Mary, University of London. “What’s good for the honeybee is not necessarily good for other species.”

NO PAIN, lots of gain? Mice lacking a type of pain receptor live significantly longer than other mice, and have a more youthful metabolism.

Many researchers suspect a link between pain and lifespan. We know that people with chronic pain often die young, and that worms and flies lacking certain sensory neurons live longer than expected. Now Andrew Dillin at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have shown that similar findings apply in mammals too.

He found that mice genetically engineered to lack TRPV1 pain receptors – which are activated in response to high temperatures and hot chilli peppers in food – live almost 14 per cent longer than those with the receptor. Mice lacking the receptors also retain some youthful features into old age, such as efficient oxygen metabolism (Cell, doi.org/swb).

As well as these advantages to lacking TRPV1 there are disadvantages, says Dillin. For example, being able to sense pain helps animals avoid harmful

objects and life-threatening situations. This probably explains why natural selection has retained the pain receptors in mammals.

The lifespan-boosting properties of TRPV1 come as a surprise, says Gerard Ahern at Georgetown University in Washington DC. However, he thinks applying the discovery to human health won’t be easy. Drugs that block TRPV1 have failed safety testing, he says, because the people who took them were prone to burning themselves because of an impaired heat sensation.

Lifespan boost for mice that feel less pain

Watch crystal grow one atom at a time

NANO builders rejoice: for the first time scientists have watched crystals grow atom by atom, offering incredible control over their microscopic structure.

In the nanoscale world, rods, spheres and dots made from the same material have dramatically different chemical and physical properties. But until now, our control over such structures has been limited because they grow too fast for even the best electron microscopes to follow.

Nicolas Barry at the University of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues fired a beam of electrons at a thin film of molecules containing the metal osmium, carbon and other elements. Most molecules broke down to release single osmium atoms, and the remaining film fused into a graphene lattice.

Left-over atoms created impurities of boron and sulphur in the graphene, which slowed the osmium atoms enough to let researchers see a crystal grow (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4851). The method should make it possible to watch different chemical recipes in action and figure out how to make customised crystals for use in diverse fields.

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For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technologyTECHNOLOGY

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Hands offAn app that creates maps of sexual harassment could help women in Bangladesh fight back

Paul Marks

WOMEN walking down the streets of cities in Bangladesh face a daily onslaught of sexual harassment. Euphemistically known as “Eve teasing”, it takes many forms, from women being told by men to adjust their clothing or headgear to suit religious mores, to sexually suggestive remarks, groping – and more serious sexual assaults.

Now a smartphone app has been created to help combat this. While making women feel safer is a major aim of the project, the creators also want to reduce the toll on the political lives of Bangladeshi women. By discouraging access to public space, street harassment silences women’s voices and quashes their participation in public life, the team behind the app told a computing conference in Canada earlier this month.

The app has been developed by

teams at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and North South University – both in Dhaka – alongside Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Ishtiaque Ahmed at Cornell says the app – called Protobadi, meaning “one who protests” in Bengali – allows women to combat public harassment in three ways. First, it has an on-screen button that if pressed turns the phone into a shrill rape alarm. This action also sends text messages to the woman’s emergency contacts saying where she is and that she needs help. Lastly, the incident data from all users is collated to create a heat map showing the areas where harassment is at its worst. In addition, the user can annotate the data with a brief blog post about the type of harassment they experienced.

Last summer, after publicising the app on Facebook and at their respective universities, the team

asked 10 of the 110 people who signed up whether they felt the app helped or hindered them day to day. “They all felt safer having the app installed on their phone. They loved the fact that they had one-touch emergency access to their friends any time they needed help,” says Ahmed. “Most of the

participants considered the map useful in choosing their routes around Dhaka city.”

Some had concerns, however, saying the maps, while useful, could also create no-go areas for women. But the aim, says Ahmed, is quite the opposite: the idea is to bring such areas to the attention of the authorities so action can be taken. “That way no-go areas can never be created.”

That’s easier said than done, however, because the definition of sexual harassment is far from a hard and fast one in the subcontinent’s highly patriarchal societies, says Priya Virmani, a political and economic analyst based in Delhi, India. While she welcomes the app as a “great tool” with which women can begin fighting street harassment, she points out that the perpetrators could also consult the maps. “That could disperse the trouble – they might move to other parts of the city.” What could improve the app, she says, would be linking it to a radio taxi service, which could prioritise the sending of cabs to women in distress – even if they have no cash on them.

The team sees possibilities in expanding the app’s use to other countries where women suffer serious sexual harassment. For example, India, where “Eve teasing” is also common and where the fatal gang rape of a woman on a Delhi bus in December 2012 prompted the Indian government to classify sexual harassment as an offence. “Bottom-up initiatives like our app are also necessary to eradicate problems like sexual harassment,” says Ahmed.

Phone sensors offer other improvement possibilities, says Samuel Johnston of OpenSignal, a London-based company that crowdsources mobile signal strength maps from apps on users’ phones. Getting out a phone and pressing a button in a harassment situation could invite violence. “So enabling them to do this in less obvious ways could be a huge benefit,” Johnston says. Emergency contacts could be triggered by rotating the phone or tapping on the screen in a certain way, he says.

Changing male behaviour could be a far harder task, however: a female Protobadi researcher experienced harassment, abuse and ridicule for posting flyers about the app at a university. The study there was suspended. ■

“ The idea is to bring high-risk areas to the attention of the authorities so action can be taken”

–Don’t touch–


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Information from the insideA device that keeps tabs on inmates’ vital signs could save lives in the slammer

Aviva Rutkin

US PRISONS could soon have their fingers on inmates’ pulses. A new device that can detect a prisoner’s vital signs from a wall or ceiling metres away could be used to tackle steep suicide rates in the penal system.

The sensor, which was funded by the US Department of Justice, monitors inmates’ heartbeat, breathing and movements for signs of self-harm.

Suicide is a big problem among inmates in the US, accounting for 35 per cent of deaths in local jails and 5.5 per cent of deaths in state-run facilities in 2011. Inmates who appear to be at risk can be assigned extra personnel to check on them several times every hour, but this is expensive and invasive. Sensors would be cheaper and intrude less, while still alerting prison officers when they need to intervene.

Developed by General Electric, the devices can be mounted inside prison cells, where they keep track

of inmates’ movements and vital signs using Doppler radar. The company modified standard radar equipment to pick up the delicate movements of the chest caused by breathing and heartbeat. The system can penetrate non-metallic objects such as furniture, which could be useful if an inmate tries to hide under a bed.

The technology was trialled last year at the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. Ten members of the prison staff spent around 90 minutes locked in cells, moving

around, breathing at different rates and holding their breath as if they had stopped breathing.

The device proved to be 86 per cent accurate at determining whether someone in a cell required assistance.

adapted to look after newborn babies or elderly people that require close monitoring, says company spokesman Todd Alhart.

However, Moeness Amin, an electrical engineer at Villanova University, Pennsylvania, says such applications would be difficult because the environment outside prisons is more chaotic and could trip up the system.

“You have many issues in a typical home that do not exist in a cell. An empty room with a person is much easier than a person in a typical bedroom,” says Amin. ■

“Standard radar equipment was modified to pick up the delicate movements of the chest caused by breathing”

–Help in a heartbeat–

The technology could help alleviate what is a major issue for prisons, says Kevin Lockyer, a criminal justice consultant in Lincolnshire, UK. But he says it should be combined with preventative services such as therapy to tackle the underlying causes of suicide.

“It’s got to be part of a holistic response to those individuals and the issues,” he says. “Do you deal with the symptoms or do you deal with the disease?”

General Electric is exploring ways to commercialise the system – not just for prisons. It could be

FACING a moral quandary and want to do the right thing? Well, there’s now an app for that.

Ethical Decision Making, as the iPhone app is helpfully named, doesn’t need the details of your problem or the options you’re considering. It simply asks you to consider each solution and rate it

Let your phone help you tell right from wrong

from five standpoints: utility, virtue, rights, justice and the common good. Each is actually shorthand for a framework developed by moral philosophers over the centuries. After that, you assign a weighting to each of these factors. You could, for example, give justice more emphasis than the rest. The app then scores the solution according to the customised moral framework you have just set up.

Distilling ethics down into an app might be problematic for some philosophers, but not for Miriam Schulman, associate director of the

Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California, where the app was developed.

“How do we use these very ancient traditions to help people who are making these really difficult decisions?” she asks. She says people could use the app for anything from weighing up whether to put their parents in a nursing home to choosing ethical investments.

The app has been tested with a group of school principals and in a communications class focused on ethical issues. One student said the

tool changed her mind about how to handle an issue with her boyfriend.

Apps like these aren’t a one-stop solution but can help initiate discussion, says Evan Selinger, a philosopher at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

“If you come to this hoping it’s going work out your ethics for you, you’re up the creek,” he says. “But if you see this as a tool to be used for conversation with other people, thinking out loud and expanding your mental models, it might make sense.” Aviva Rutkin ■


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Mix real and digital with iPad gameiPad games just got real. Osmo is a new accessory that clips onto the iPad’s camera to track the games children are playing on the table in front of it. Alongside Osmo’s character recognition software, this blend of physical and digital space lets children play games where they place letters on the table to spell out the name of an object shown on screen. Osmo, which can be pre-ordered for $57, also lets children complete shape puzzles guided by the iPad, or draw on paper to control games and puzzles on the tablet’s screen.

233 mThe number of eBay users who have had their personal details stolen by hackers, the site admitted last week. The security breach occurred between late February and early March. eBay has told its customers to change their passwords immediately.

Perfect camouflage from every angleGot something ugly you want to hide? An algorithm can generate a skin that could hide unsightly electrical boxes or cellphone towers from every possible angle. The system, developed by Andrew Owens at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stitches together multiple photos of a scene, taken from different angles, to generate a camouflage pattern that would make an object blend into the background when seen from any direction.

Encrypted email from CERNA team at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, has hit back at the US National Security Agency with ProtonMail, an encrypted email service. The site is free, anonymous and requires two passwords to log in. Its servers are housed in Switzerland, where they are insulated by the country’s strict privacy laws. ProtonMail also features a special self-destruct option: when users send an email, they can add a time limit before the message disappears forever.

–Stop them boarding–

BEFORE dawn on 5 May, two pirates armed with knives boarded a ship in the Sierra Leone port of Freetown. They took the duty cadet hostage, stole some mooring ropes then slipped back into the darkness. No one saw them coming, but a new kind of intelligent radar might have done.

The system, called WatchStander, uses radar mounted on either side of a ship to scan the surrounding water for small objects that look like they are moving to intercept. It can automatically sound an alarm and dispense countermeasures to deter the approaching vessels.

The system is meant to tackle one of the biggest issues with preventing piracy at sea: spotting them coming. “The problem is that pirates use skiffs – small, fast fishing boats with a very low profile on the surface of the ocean,” says Giacomo Persi Paoli, a piracy analyst with the RAND Corporation in Cambridge, UK.

Large ships’ radar systems are designed to pick up large objects that are collision risks and to filter out waves. This means they often miss skiffs. By contrast, WatchStander’s radar uses shorter radio wavelengths, allowing it to see smaller objects.

If WatchStander detects a skiff that’s heading to intercept the ship, it will automatically target the boat it deems most threatening with a

countermeasure. The current system shines a powerful strobe light designed to confuse incoming pirates.

In a test earlier this year, WatchStander was deployed on a ship carrying liquid natural gas through the Strait of Hormuz, south of Iran. The system detected a swarm of Iranian fishing boats crossing the ship’s path long before anyone on board saw them. “These were 12 Iranian skiffs that came bowling past us. You couldn’t see them at first. We were getting ready to run a test on the

system when all of a sudden the alarm went off,” says WatchStander founder David Rigsby. “The ship’s crew said they are smugglers, you see them all the time out in the Strait.”

Paoli likes the idea of the anti-pirate system, but worries that allowing it to automatically activate countermeasures might unfairly target innocent fishing skiffs or other boats. “The wakes of these big commercial ships attract fish to the surface,” he says. “The fishermen wait for ships to pass and then go full speed behind along the wake and catch the fish.” Hal Hodson ■

Pirates incoming! Smart radar stands watch

“ Pirates are hard to spot because they use small, fast fishing boats with a low profile on the ocean”


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TECHNOLOGY

THE future looks curvy. A spate of gadgets sporting concave displays has already been launched, and the big manufacturers will soon be hurling yet more TVs and smartphones with curved screens on to the shelves. Rumours continue to swirl that even Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 6 will bend to the craze later this year.

There’s more to the trend than just a novel shape, though. It may be tapping into a deep-seated desire to get away from the hard corners and rectangles that have defined our appliances for decades. The craze for curves is also fueling a search for materials and manufacturing techniques that will help companies exploit it to the full.

“The first adjective used by people to describe curves is ‘soft’,” says Oshin Vartanian, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, Canada. “The story about curvature is a real story about emotion in the brain.”

Vartanian and colleagues espouse the fledgling field of neuroaesthetics – understanding the neurological basis for our appreciation of beauty. Last year, he used functional magnetic

resonance imaging (fMRI) to test people’s reactions to pictures of household interiors, asking them to rate rooms as “beautiful” or “not beautiful”. A large majority favoured rooms with curved features and furnishings over ones packed with straight lines. The scans revealed that curved contours tended to stimulate the pleasure centres of the brain, whereas angles activated

circuits in areas that detect threats (PNAS, doi.org/swv).

The findings reinforce a similar study conducted in 2010 at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where visitors were shown objects with straight or curved outlines. Here, too, fMRI showed they had a preference for curves.

But electronics has been trapped within a straight paradigm for decades, mostly because of limitations in our manufacturing know-how.

“ Electronics has been trapped in a straight paradigm, mostly owing to manufacturing limitations”

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Bending the rulesSmartphones and TVs with curved screens make our brains light up, says Peter Nowak


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That’s changing. Samsung’s Galaxy Round smartphone, released in South Korea last October, uses a bendable version of Corning’s Gorilla Glass called Willow. Corning has since announced an upgraded version, its 3D Gorilla Glass, which it says can bend up to 75 degrees without breaking. And in an industry where even a small advantage in a product’s looks can translate into billions in extra revenue, some manufacturers are turning to sheets of artificially grown sapphire for their next-generation screens.

Companies selling curved screens say they offer tangible benefits. The concave shape reflects less light at the viewer, allowing screens to be dimmer and thus extending battery life. Adding a curve to a widescreen TV enhances a screen’s central sweet spot, giving the viewer the illusion of being immersed in the action.

Not everyone finds curviness a big deal. “It’s distinct and different and unique. It does create a ‘wow’ factor,” says Paul Gray of industry analysts NPD DisplaySearch. “But the reasons for curvature beyond the styling seem to be extremely tenuous.”

Some industry-watchers believe the fascination will prove to be a fad, but curved screens remain a fast-growing market. Gray’s firm projects that global curved TV shipments will grow from 800,000 units this year to more than six million by 2017 – proof that we like what we see. ■

YOUR dog can’t tell you when it’s sick, but maybe this gadget can. A smart collar studded with wireless sensors can now monitor the vital signs of man’s best friend and alert the owner as soon as it starts feeling under the weather.

The device, developed by PetPace in Burlington, Massachusetts, keeps track of temperature, pulse and respiration, as well as activity patterns and the number of calories burned. While the dog plays, eats and sleeps, software compares this information with other breed-specific data. If an animal’s statistics deviate in a way that indicates a possible problem, an alert is sent to the owner’s smartphone and to the vet.

Many pets instinctively hide their symptoms when they are sick, so the collar could help detect health issues early on, says Asaf Dagan, chief veterinary scientist at PetPace. The smart collar ensures that “your pet’s disease, pain or discomfort will not go unnoticed”, he says.

Because the device works in real time, vets have more information on which to base their diagnoses. They can also keep track of how the animal responds to treatment, Dagan says.

The collar costs $150 plus $15 per month for the monitoring service. Lauren Hitchings ■

Smart collar brings poorly pooches to heal

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APERTURE


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Spot the galactic coyote “CAPTURE & name your own NASA Spitzer space image! It’s easier than you might think.” With this tweet, the operators of the Spitzer Space Telescope invited people to roam around a gigantic mosaic of the Milky Way.

Composed of more than 2 million infrared images taken by the telescope over the last decade, the complete panoramic image can be viewed online using NASA’s GLIMPSE360 tool. Released in March, it allows people to explore more than half of our galaxy’s stars.

Twitter user Kevin Gill (@kevinmgill) discovered the nebula pictured and tweeted it. “I was interested in the awesomeness of the data and the high-resolution views into the depths of space that no one has ever seen before,” says Gill. “I had found two other interesting things, but this one struck me as the funniest, looking like a Minecraft creeper just staring us down.”

The image has been likened to a fish, a raccoon and most notably a “cute coyote’s head”. This has landed the once-unknown region a nickname: the Coyote Head Nebula. It’s like a Rorschach ink-blot test, say the team. What do you see? Lauren Hitchings

Photography JPL-Caltech/NASA


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OPINION

A vote against scienceUKIP’s strong showing in the European elections could be the first step towards disaster for British researchers, warns Michael Brooks

POLITICS has become a strange place. In last week’s European Parliament elections, many right wing parties, some of them extreme, got into their stride. The upshot is that the elected body of the European Union will be stuffed to the gunnels with people who would rather it didn’t exist, but will now spend the next five years representing their constituents there.

Prominent among them is Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Already a member of the European Parliament, Farage’s main aim is to get the UK out of the EU. Its freedom of movement rules have caused an influx of migrant workers, which has served as the backdrop to UKIP’s rise. While the UK remains within the EU, it is impossible to stem this “tide”, Farage says, and withdrawal is the only solution.

While political scientists watch this narrative unfold with fascination, natural scientists in the UK should do so with alarm; Farage could turn out to be a disaster for them.

That’s because they have a lot to lose. In global terms, the UK punches above its weight in science. Although our population makes up just 1 per cent of the global total, scientists here publish 16 per cent of the world’s most-cited research papers. EU policy is to “encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding... on the basis of scientific excellence”. What this means is that British scientists get a disproportionate amount of money from the EU.

For every £1 we contribute to the research pot, we get approximately £1.40 back.

If we were to withdraw in the way UKIP hopes, we would lose access to the source of much of this funding: the European Research Council. British scientists would also lose influence over the research agenda and would be unable to control the distribution of funding across research areas. Just as importantly, they would haemorrhage collaborators.

The days of the lone scientist are largely gone. International collaboration is now vital and near-ubiquitous. More than a third of the papers published in

high quality journals are the result of such links, and EU-funded science projects require the involvement of at least three different member or associate states.

Ousted from Europe, British scientists would be out in the cold. We know this because it has already happened to scientists in Switzerland, a non-EU state that until recently enjoyed access to EU research funding.

At the end of February, Swiss voters rejected a deal that would

allow Croatians free movement across the country’s borders. It was a result of campaigning by the Swiss People’s Party, which is Eurosceptic and wants strict limits on immigration, just like UKIP. Limiting the movement of people from the newest member state didn’t comply with EU principles, so Switzerland was stripped of its “associate member” status.

Associate members enjoy almost full participation in EU programmes, including research projects funded from the EU pot. Switzerland, however, now has “third country” status, on a par with the US and Japan.

The latest set of EU-funded projects is known as Horizon 2020 and has about £65 billion to allocate over the next six years. Swiss researchers are now excluded from receiving any of its grants. Before February, Swiss students could get grants to work in labs anywhere in Europe under the EU’s Erasmus programme – not any more.

Researchers report that, as a result, Switzerland has lost international competitiveness. There is a brain drain as senior researchers head to countries where they can access EU funds. Young researchers are also leaving – many of them rely on the kudos of prestigious EU grants to advance their careers. In other countries, Swiss scientists are being shed as collaborators.

Christian Sengstag, head of research at the University of Basel in Switzerland, warned in April that the top candidates for research jobs “will think twice

“British scientists get a disproportionate amount of money from the EU. They have a lot to lose”


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ONE MINUTE INTERVIEW

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before accepting a position in this country”.

Could the same thing happen in the UK? It is entirely possible.

The UKIP surge in the run up to last week’s vote was widely seen as a protest against traditional politics. Much of UKIP’s support has come from those who usually vote Conservative, a situation that caused UK prime minister David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives, to commit to a referendum on EU membership should he be re-elected in 2015. He wants to halt the drift of his party’s supporters to UKIP.

The Conservatives’ main rival, Labour, has offered no such sop should they win power. However, there is always a danger that politicians will yield in the face of a popular movement; Farage has already said UKIP aims to win enough MPs next year to hold the balance of power in the UK.

And, if UK voters can push UKIP onto the European scene, there is no reason to believe that they would not win a national referendum to quit the EU.

The full process of withdrawal would take years, but the impact on science would be near-immediate. British science would find itself in a similar position to that in Switzerland, assuming a comparable stand over migration. It would have third-country status, and its researchers would be unable to apply for EU grants. We wouldn’t be completely without funds – the UK’s seven research councils invest about £3 billion every year. But on the European stage, British scientists would suddenly find that they count for nothing.

Mainstream parties had little to celebrate after last week’s vote; but for British researchers it could be even gloomier if the outcome proves to be the first step on a path that ends up with UK science as the biggest loser of all. ■

Michael Brooks is a consultant for New Scientist and the author of The Secret Anarchy of Science (Profile)

I’d go ‘laughing and crying’A one-way trip to Mars won’t be too harsh for someone who has already run telescopes at the South Pole, says Robert Schwarz

PROFILERobert Schwarz is an astrophysicist and manages the Keck Array, a collection of telescopes peering back at the early universe from the South Pole. He is one of 705 shortlisted applicants for Mars One, which aims to colonise the Red Planet by 2025

What is your job at the South Pole?I basically man the telescopes and make sure the data is coming in. I’m responsible for everything from electronics to system administration, optics to mechanics – whatever is needed.

How long do you stay there for?Right now I’m doing back-to-back winters, so I’m here for nine-and-a-half months. This is my tenth winter at the South Pole.

Is it hard to adjust when you return home? I’ve done it so many times now it’s like flipping a switch. I remember my first year it was like, “Wow, grass, oh, trees”, and things like that. Now I’m back down here in Antarctica the green world seems far, far away.

Why did you sign up for the Mars One enterprise?Becoming an astronaut was always a big dream. I am from Germany and I applied to the European Space Agency in 2008 when they had their last

selection, but I didn’t make the last two rounds. A lot of things have to happen for Mars One to really take place, but why not give it a shot?

In what ways have the long periods in Antarctica prepared you for living on Mars?I know what it is to live in a remote environment where you can’t just say, “Oh, I forgot that, I’ll just order it or go around the corner and buy it.” Also it’s a harsh environment psychologically because of the extreme cold and dryness, and the fact that it’s six months of darkness, six months of light.

How do you think the South Pole compares to living on the International Space Station?If something happens, people on the ISS can jump into their Soyuz spacecraft and be back on Earth in 3 hours. If we lose electricity and can’t start our backup generators, we’re kind of doomed: it will take weeks to get a plane down here. If the shit hits the fan, weeks are definitely too long.

On Mars it might be years until help arrives. As a colonist, how would you cope?I’m good at fixing electronic and mechanical stuff. Down here you have limited resources, so must come up with solutions with the stuff you have. That will be even harder on Mars.

Does leaving Earth behind scare you?I would leave laughing and crying, as we say in German. If it happens in 10 years’ time I’ll be 54. That would be an age where I would say, yes, okay, I’m ready to leave now. I think the best Mars astronaut would be between 60 and 70, because you’d still be healthy enough to have your wits about you, but you’d had a life on Earth as well.

What about never seeing your family again?I am not married. I still have my parents, a brother and nieces. It’s certainly something you have to consider. Going to Antarctica, you never know what’s going to happen and you can’t just fly home. Going to Mars is a step farther because you’re never coming back.Interview by Jacob Aron


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You are working on ways to regrow body parts. Can many species naturally regenerate limbs? A number of animals can regrow lost limbs. If a predator catches a lizard by the tail, for example, it will often end up with just the tail as the lizard scurries off. To escape, lizards can shed their tails on purpose, and they also have a remarkable ability to regrow them.

Some insects, such as cockroaches, can regenerate their legs, as can salamanders, starfish and lobsters. Zebrafish fins are also a popular model of regeneration, since they regrow after amputation. Interestingly, zebrafish also have a limited capacity to regenerate their hearts. Deer regenerate their antlers – regrowing huge amounts of bone, nerve and skin every year.

When something is regenerated, is it exactly the same as the lost part?Sometimes, but not always. Salamander limbs, for example, can regenerate completely, while tadpole tails are very good structurally but are missing a few nerve types. Perhaps the champions are Planaria flatworms. Their regeneration is perfect; they can regrow every part of their body – including their head. In fact, in a recent study we showed that Planaria flatworms regenerate their heads complete with information they learned prior to decapitation!

You have also triggered the regrowth of legs in young frogs. How did you do it?A few years back my lab investigated the bioelectrical signals – the change in the distribution of cells’ resting potentials within a tissue or organ – that allow young tadpoles to regenerate their tails. We found that two components were required on the surface of

cells in a wound to set up a bioelectric state that allows regeneration: a proton pump, which pumps hydrogen ions out of the cell surface, and a specific sodium channel, which allows sodium ions to flow across the cell membrane. This bioelectric state was crucial for cells to multiply enough to rebuild the structure, for regeneration-specific genes to be turned on, and for nerves to develop in the direction of new growth.

How were you able to recreate this crucial bioelectric state in older tadpoles and frogs?The idea is to trigger a “leg-building module”. Our data over the last decade suggest that such modules are encoded in the pattern of cells’ resting potentials across the tissues of the body – this pattern is what determines which

tissues and organs are made and where.First we used gene therapy to introduce

a proton pump from yeast to induce the regenerative bioelectric state in older tadpoles, which can’t normally regrow their tails. This forced the regeneration of functional tails, complete with spinal cord.

We then created a drug cocktail that induced this same state without gene therapy. When we gave the drug cocktail to froglets it worked, inducing the regeneration of hind legs.

Can we apply what we learn about regrowth in other animals to humans?Humans and simpler animals share most cell biology pathways, including the pattern

formation mechanisms – the basic step-by-step processes – needed to regenerate complex organs. The basic mechanisms of bioelectrical control are likely similar as well.

Since the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond first used a galvanometer to measure currents in human skin and wounds in 1843, they have been studied in hundreds of experiments with animals. These currents have important roles in wound healing.

Our recent work on human adult stem cells, in collaboration with David Kaplan’s bioengineering lab here at Tufts, showed that the resting potentials across the cell surface can control how they differentiate into other types of cells. But the real power of this

PROFILEMichael Levin is director of the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He is investigating bioelectric medicine and its potential for regeneration in animals and humans

“ Our goal is to understand the patterns that encode the ‘make a limb’ signal”

OPINION INTERVIEW

Cracking the code to regrow limbsLizards, tadpoles and zebrafish can all regenerate lost limbs – so why can’t we? Biologist Michael Levin is working to change that. He tells Katia Moskvitch why his approach may be the most effective way to regrow our own organs


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approach isn’t in the control of single cells, but in understanding how bioelectric conversations among large groups of cells direct the growth of complex structures.

So, in principle, one day it will be possible to regrow human limbs. What do we need to accomplish that?We need two things. First, we need to crack the bioelectric code – to figure out how patterns of bioelectrical gradients map to the creation of specific organs. We have recently shown that we can reprogram just about any region in the frog embryo into a complete eye. We have also reprogrammed posterior flatworm tissue into complete heads. But this is just the tip of the

iceberg; we are only beginning to understand which signals indicate the geometric arrangement of organs in the body. Our goal now is to understand which bioelectric patterns encode the “make a limb” signal.

What else do we need?Second, we need a delivery vehicle – a way to impose the correct bioelectric state onto cells in a wound. One example is the BioDome device made by bioengineers in Kaplan’s lab. This is a wearable bioreactor that creates an aqueous environment like amniotic fluid. Within this we can induce appropriate ion currents – and thus the correct voltage states – in the wound and new tissue.

So the road map to eventually being able to regrow human limbs is to first perfect the signalling, then the delivery vehicle. That should someday enable this to be used in serious limb injuries – likely starting with regrowing human hands.

Are many researchers working on this type of regeneration?There are still very few people working in this field. Some very good work has been done on the effects of applied electric fields on cell behaviour, but the key here is to molecularly understand and control the distribution of natural voltage gradients – these are the control knobs that determine the structure

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Photographed for New Scientist by Scott Brauer

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OPINION INTERVIEW

and position of complex organs such as limbs, eyes, the brain and so on.

Most labs are focused on biochemical and mechanical controls of stem cells so they can bioengineer and build organs for transplantation. Of course, even if you could solve all the problems of stem cell biology and turn a stem cell into any desired cell type, you would still have the problem of how to build a complex organ such as a limb.

Micromanaging the direct assembly of complex organs from stem cells will be very, very difficult. Bioelectricity can trigger large-scale reprogramming – not just turn single stem cells into different cell types. That’s why I think focusing on a strategy that harnesses what the host organism already knows about how to build its organs is the way to go.

If we can harness the potential of this technology, how else might it be used?If we had control over pattern formation, we could induce the repair of any organ

damaged by injury, disease, degeneration, cancer or even ageing. For example, Planaria flatworms have no known lifespan limit, as they continuously regenerate tissues that age.

Fundamentally, broad control of regeneration is the solution to most problems in biomedicine. Moreover, it will have an immense impact on the economics of societies. We face the unavoidable spiral of treatments needed to prolong the last years of life becoming increasingly more expensive. As each new advance patches up the sinking ship of the ageing body, it makes it that much more expensive for the next advance to keep the person alive. Regeneration could break this cycle by inducing regrowth of healthy organs throughout the lifespan.

You have a road map – how long do you think it will take us to get there?I can’t make a solid guess about when – it all depends on how the science goes and, of course, how the funding for this expensive research goes. But I think that experiments in animals like frogs will allow us and others to finally crack the bioelectric code and understand how cell groups can store a geometric “memory” or template of the organs they are supposed to become.

Once we learn to speak this bioelectrical language, we will be able to take advantage of it and induce regeneration as needed. And these same signals will be capitalised upon in synthetic bioengineering as we not only repair natural organs, but use bioelectrical shape control to make new hybrid structures – biobots – to desired specifications.

I am not certain when or how we will be able to overcome the challenges to get the technique into medicine. But as to the approach as a whole – I’m very optimistic. ■

Using a technique called “hugging” a researcher collects frog eggs

LETTERS

Quantum quirksFrom Peter StandenI greatly enjoyed Matthew Chalmers’s article on the subjective nature of reality and how “quantum weirdness is all in the mind” (10 May, p 32). The same problem of subjectivity arises in psychology when theorists tie themselves in knots trying to relate abstractions such as intelligence or personality to everyday experience.

Quantum theory cannot “make sense” without a human to make sense of it. What a scientist’s apparatus registers while they are unable to record it is unknowable and therefore scientifically meaningless. Quantum theory comes up with “the right answer” because people have struggled hard to make it that way.

As David Mermin says in the

article, “it really is that simple”, just as long as we remember that theories are human constructions and imperfect for that.Darlington, Western Australia

From Edward WilliamsIf quantum weirdness is all in the mind, what about optical interference?

Set up apparatus that can record the arrival of an individual photon on a screen after passing through one of two slits, and then ask: “Which slit did that particular photon pass through?”

It will never arrive at a point not allowed by the two-slit interference of waves.

Light travels as waves and


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arrives as particles. This is a weird duality that is inescapable.Malvern, Worcestershire, UK

From Edward MillerQuantum Bayesianism, which views quantum states as existing only in our minds, seems a red herring that leads you into a strange maze of inter-subjectivity.

What happens when the scientists communicate with each other and collate their individual observations? They cannot help but arrive at objective laws of physics, such as entanglement, and so we end up coming full circle back to objectivity.Cardiff, UK

From Neil HuntChalmers highlights the way a metaphor may be mistaken for reality. This reminded me of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, which reveals how fundamentally these structure our thinking.

They demonstrate the deeply embedded nature of metaphor within language, and the way this routinely escapes our notice. For me, their ideas also made it easy to view a quantum Bayesianist argument as plausible.Eccles, Kent, UK

Attitude adjustmentFrom Bill PringClare Wilson’s article on how doctors diagnose mental health problems took a tone that was rather sensationalist and negative (10 May, p 10).

It strikes me that those working at the front line of anthropogenic climate change are generally portrayed in your magazine as heroes. Their scientific evidence requires further refinement, but it is considered by most that we should act prudently to prevent climate deterioration.

Psychiatrists treat people more effectively now than 20 or 50 years ago, using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders (DSM) as a rough guide. We understand that it is flawed, and don’t use it as a bible.

There are other areas of medicine in which doctors have fairly generic approaches to treating conditions that require further research to clarify the cause. Prostate cancer, rheumatism and even skin conditions remain somewhat mysterious but do not face the same kind of criticism. Those specialists are not in need of a “reboot”, so why is psychiatry?Burwood, Victoria, Australia

■ The editor replies:The view that psychiatry needs a reboot comes not from our own quarters, but from the practitioners themselves. Last year, Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, announced on his blog (bit.ly/ns-Insel) that the organisation “will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories”.

Mind alteringFrom Kevin JonesIn Anil Ananthaswamy’s piece on why robots will never be conscious, Phil Maguire says that his team’s proof would not hold up if information integration in the brain was reversible (17 May, p 12).

He will be disappointed to learn that memories can indeed be broken down and edited.

Memories are also not lossless; the act of recalling them changes

them. Some things get added during the process of recall, some reinforced, and others subtracted.

In light of this, we can say that memory is not unchanging, like a photograph, but something rather fluid and in flux. Perhaps the brain really is continually haemorrhaging information. Ambergate, Derbyshire, UK

Mars attacks

From Andrew McKenna I am appalled by the proposal from Explore Mars to use a battery of ground-penetrating missiles in the search for life on the Red Planet (10 May, p 14).

Clearly executive director Chris Carberry slept through Ethics 101. If there is life of any sort on Mars, by what right do we rain down bombs on their heads?Buderim, Queensland, Australia

Infinite failureFrom Kate LeeIn discussing the infinitely multiplying multiverse, Lisa Grossman states that given enough time, anything that has a chance of happening will happen (17 May, p 8). This is not the case.

If you start counting in the usual way: “1, 2, 3…” and carry on until infinity, you will never get to -3, 42.5 or Pi.

It is quite possible for the number of things spawned by the multiverse to be infinite, but to exclude infinitely many configurations. Much to my

disappointment, therefore, an infinite multiverse is not guaranteed to contain a perfect replica of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Or indeed, Boltzmann brains.London, UK

A stitch in timeFrom Brian BennettAviva Rutkin’s article about a 3D printer that uses yarn sounds very much like knitting, and in particular a Jacquard machine (17 May, p 21).

This specialised loom uses a device to carry the yarn over a series of programmable knitting needles, allowing various 3D articles to be made.

One could use yarns with different properties to make products more flexible at different points, and it may be possible to incorporate electrically conductive yarns.

The company where I worked 40 years ago produced a safety glove with electronic components, but there was not a lot of interest because of the difficult economic conditions at the time.

No doubt modern sensors and electronics could produce a similar piece of clothing which would save lives and money.Lathom, Lancashire, UK

For the record■ Our logic got fuzzy when considering the likelihood of conscious robots (17 May, p 12). The outputs should be swapped in our description of an XOR logic gate.

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YOU’VE got a terrible headache. Niggling knee pain. An aching back. What do you reach for? Chances are that you’ll

open your medicine cabinet and grab some paracetamol. Half an hour or so later, you’ll feel a lot better. Or will you?

Paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, is the cure-all of our age, used to treat everything from sprained ankles to toothaches and even labour pain. It is on the first rung of the World Health Organization’s “analgesic ladder”, which doctors use to treat cancer pain. We spoon it to our children to fight fever; as adults we pop it to relieve headaches or period cramps, and as we get older we’re prescribed it to soothe arthritis or backache. In the US, 27 billion doses of the drug are sold each year, and it is found in more than 600 products.

Given its ubiquity, you might assume that paracetamol is safe and effective – at least at the recommended dose. That’s why we lean on it more than aspirin or ibuprofen, which can irritate the stomach lining and cause bleeding. But as it turns out, this stalwart of the medicine cabinet is not quite as reliably gentle as you might think.

Paracetamol was discovered in the late 19th century, but it was rejected almost immediately because of a bizarre side effect: it seemed to turn some people blue (see timeline, page 36). That was probably because of contamination with a different drug, but as a result paracetamol was sidelined until the 1940s, when further tests showed it was good at reducing fever. Later studies concluded that it was a pretty effective painkiller too. But it really took off in the 1960s, in response to emerging concerns about the long-term side effects of aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Today in the

US, there are about 16,500 NSAID-related deaths a year in people with arthritis alone.

Paracetamol, on the other hand, we think of as relatively safe. Sure, if you take lots of tablets it could seriously damage your liver, but at the recommended dose, it’s fine, right?

This assumption is now being challenged by research suggesting that, when taken for prolonged periods, it may damage the stomach as much as NSAIDs. That might be an acceptable risk in exchange for pain relief, but in many of those who take it, paracetamol barely works better than a placebo.

Mysterious drugHow could this be? The fact is, despite its ubiquity, we still don’t really understand how paracetamol works. A leading theory is that, in part, it works like aspirin and ibuprofen, by blocking enzymes known as cyclooxygenases. These enzymes are responsible for making hormone-like compounds called prostaglandins, which trigger pain and swelling in the body as well as stimulating production of the mucous that shields our stomachs against digestive acids. NSAIDs halt the swelling process, but leave the stomach vulnerable. The suspicion was that paracetamol inhibited cyclooxygenases, but to a much lesser extent; it doesn’t reduce inflammation as these other drugs do.

Although studies in the past decade have hinted that long-term use of paracetamol might trigger internal bleeding, these findings were widely dismissed by critics who cited shortcomings of the study designs. In 2011, however, Michael Doherty of Nottingham City Hospital, UK, published a study that was harder to ignore. He followed the progress of 892 men and women with the niggling knee

pain that often sets in at middle-age – usually an early symptom of osteoarthritis. Some were given paracetamol, others ibuprofen, while a third and fourth group took either a high or low-dose combination of the two.

Paracetamol is the first drug most doctors turn to for patients with such symptoms, but when Doherty looked at the blood results of those taking it, he was shocked: levels of haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood, were dropping fast. What’s more, their red blood cells were growing smaller and paler. The most logical explanation was that they were losing blood internally, and significant quantities of it. After three months, a fifth of them seemed to have lost the equivalent of an entire unit of blood (about 400 millilitres). That was the same amount as those taking ibuprofen – only the ibuprofen group reported feeling less pain (Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, vol 70, p 1534).

In those combining high doses of both paracetamol and ibuprofen, the haemoglobin loss after three months was even more startling: 7 per cent of the people in that group lost the amount of haemoglobin you would find in two units of blood. The upshot: when taken for long periods, paracetamol may be just as damaging to the stomach lining as NSAID drugs are.

“The horrifying aspect of this is that people look at me and say ‘it’s over the counter, it must be safe’,” says Kay Brune, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. Brune has been campaigning to have paracetamol removed from over-the-counter sale in Germany, but has so far been unsuccessful. “Before, physicians simply said ‘OK, if it doesn’t work, it may not do any harm’. But now we know it can do harm,” he says.

The world’s favourite over-the-counter pain remedy, paracetamol, has a dark side, finds Tiffany O’Callaghan

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Internal bleeding isn’t the only issue that’s keeping drug regulators on their toes. In January, the US Food and Drug Administration asked manufacturers to stop producing prescription drugs containing more than 325 milligrams of paracetamol per tablet because of the risk of accidental overdose. Paracetamol poisoning is responsible for nearly 80,000 visits to the emergency room in the US each year, and a third of these are people who overdosed accidentally.

Although pill packets clearly state that the maximum recommended dose is no more than 3 or 4 grams spread over 24 hours (or six to eight 500 g tablets), because of paracetamol’s reputation for safety, some people take more than this. “They know they’re not supposed to take maybe six or eight tablets at a time, but they have a toothache and they just don’t want to go to the dentist,” says Daniel Budnitz at the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, who has studied overdose cases.

If you regularly exceed 4 g, you can quickly enter dangerous territory. During the breakdown of paracetamol, a toxin is produced that has to be mopped up by a specific enzyme in the liver, and if you take too

much too fast, the supply of that enzyme quickly dwindles.

As little as 5 to 7.5 g per day can cause serious liver complications in otherwise healthy people. For people with compromised liver function due to alcoholism or liver disease, a harmful dose can be lower still. And despite the fact that the recommended maximum dose is no more than 4 g per day, roughly 6 per cent of US adults – about 14 million people – are routinely prescribed more than this, often in prescriptions that combine the drug with opioids to treat severe pain.

Do these risks matter? Because of the huge numbers of people who take paracetamol, and the relative ease with which it is purchased and consumed, even small risks become significant. Even so, paracetamol is valued by medical authorities – not just for treating life’s little hurts, but for persistent and potentially debilitating conditions. The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the body that sets standards for medical practice, recommends paracetamol as the first-choice drug for treating the chronic pain associated with conditions like osteoarthritis and lower back pain. The American College of Rheumatology

also recommends it for arthritis.In the US, an estimated 43 million people

take paracetamol each week, and nearly two-thirds of them take the drug routinely for longer than six months.

If paracetamol was effective against chronic pain, you might consider the trade-off worthwhile, but the drug has been found seriously wanting. A review of research that looked at people taking paracetamol to relieve

chronic joint pain found seven studies that compared the drug with a placebo. Five of these found it to be marginally more effective, but two found no difference.

“Why are we bothering to give a drug to people that’s toxic, that has significant potential problems, when it doesn’t work?” asks Andrew Moore, an anaesthetist and director of pain research at the University of Oxford. “It’s unethical.”

Of course, placebos can themselves make people feel better: another review of placebo-controlled trials for treating joint pain found that many people experienced moderate relief from sham treatment, particularly when it was given as an injection. For ethical reasons, doctors don’t usually prescribe placebos, so the safest active pill is often the next best thing.

“Is paracetamol a safe placebo?” asks John Dickson, a rheumatologist with the Redcar and Cleveland Primary Care Trust in the UK, and a consulting clinician for the 2008 NICE guidelines. “The work Doherty did shows it is not.”

In March, the Osteoarthritis Research Society International changed its paracetamol guidelines to “uncertain” to reflect growing safety concerns. And for a while at least, it looked like these concerns would be similarly heeded in the UK. When NICE issued new draft guidelines for osteoarthritis in August last year, it did away with the recommendation of

How effective is your painkiller?When it comes to relieving acute pain, such as a headache, sprain or post-operative pain, not all drugs are equal

Naproxen 500mg

The rise of paracetamolEarly 1880s: German doctors accidentally

give a patient a recently synthesised

chemical, acetanilide: his fever drops

dramatically

1886 Acetanilide sold under the trade name Antifebrin. Successful, despite turning some people’s lips and skin blue

1893 German physiologist Joseph von Mering discovers the acetanilide derivative, N-acetyl-p-aminophenol (paracetamol) but thinks it is too toxic. It still turns people blue

1947 Paracetamol is rediscovered byphysiologists at Yale University. Reduces pain

and fever, without the side effects of acetanilide. Original observations of toxicity

assumed to be down to contamination

“ Why are we bothering to give a drug to people that’s toxic, when it often doesn’t work?”

Aspirin 600mg

*Codeine 60mg on its own has a poor score (11-48) but combined with paracetamol is more effective

Diclofenac 50mg

Tramadol 150mg

Paracetamol 1000mg

Etoricoxib 120mg (Arcoxia)

Paracetamol 1000mg + Codeine 60mg*

Ibuprofen 400mg

Prescribed drugOver-the-counter drug

SOURCE: THE OXFORD LEAGUE TABLE OF ANALGESIC EFFICACY

Number of people who would have to take a drug for one of them to experience a 50% reduction in pain over 4-6 hours (smaller number = better)

1 2 3 4 n=500

197

5456

784

1296

561

2759

5061

Data sets vary in size


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paracetamol as a first resort, and flagged its potential dangers. “On balance, the risks of paracetamol outweigh the benefits of any gain in symptom control,” the report read.

Yet by the time the final version was published in February, the old advice had been reinstated. This was partly down to objections raised by doctors about having few alternative options, though NICE says it is also awaiting the results of a more comprehensive review of over-the-counter painkillers by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Dickson, like others, was disappointed. “If paracetamol isn’t safe, we shouldn’t be prescribing it,” he says.

Of course, most of us don’t take paracetamol every day; it’s a drug we reach for when we develop a headache or sprain an ankle. And for acute pain of that nature, paracetamol performs reasonably well, if not as spectacularly as its popularity might suggest. Pharmacists measure the effectiveness of painkillers by looking at whether they can reduce your reported sensation of pain by at least 50 per cent, and by counting how many people would need to take it for one person to experience this level of relief compared with placebo. This is known as the number needed to treat (NNT).

Effective reliefFor example, in the case of the moderate pain of a sprained ankle, 3.8 people would need to take a standard 1 g dose of paracetamol (2 tablets) for one of them to get effective relief. For a standard 400-milligram dose of ibuprofen, the NNT is 2.5 (see table, left).

Most people suffering from acute pain are unlikely to take these drugs for more than a few days, so the risk of internal bleeding is less of a concern than in those taking it for prolonged periods. But, given that paracetamol isn’t as effective as some alternatives for short-term pain, it could make more sense to take one of them, or a combination of drugs that work through

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Sfound that when paracetamol is given, one of its break-down products activates a protein on the surface of nerves in the spinal cord and reduces their ability to transmit pain signals. If confirmed, targeting this protein could be a promising starting point.

Pharmaceutical companies are also researching and developing new analgesics. But given the huge regulatory hurdles for over-the-counter drugs, few are focusing on that market. “It is more likely that medicines currently available on prescription would become available over the counter, as they will already have a good amount of safety data,” says Roger Knaggs at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Still, it’s possible that a promising alternative already exists. Just as paracetamol was consigned to a dusty back room for half a century, other analgesics may have been overlooked or condemned for the wrong reasons. Safety hurdles today are much higher than when drugs like paracetamol were first approved. If it were a new drug, says Moore, it probably wouldn’t get approval.

It could also be that some drugs which fail to win approval are doing so because of poor study design, rather than serious flaws with the drugs themselves. Robert Dworkin at the University of Rochester in New York, is the director of an initiative with the FDA that is taking a second look at analgesics that didn’t pass muster in earlier clinical trials. It is currently focused on prescription-strength drugs, but Dworkin says a similar approach could work for over-the-counter remedies too.

In the meantime, what should you do with the paracetamol in your own cupboard? For short-lived aches and pains, the advice hasn’t changed much. “If you follow the instructions and if you don’t take it in too-large doses, paracetamol is very safe,” says Bevan.

But for ongoing pain, it may be time to start looking for alternatives. With any drug, there’s a risk that side effects will outweigh benefits. For paracetamol, we need to decide which risks are still worth taking. ■

Tiffany O’Callaghan is senior opinion editor at New Scientist

different pathways, such as paracetamol plus ibuprofen.

Should we do away with paracetamol entirely? Most experts believe it’s still a useful tool in the arsenal against fevers, headaches and sore muscles because, in the people for whom it does work, it tends to work fairly well. It’s just that, as with many analgesics, the chances are hit-and-miss that it will work for you – possibly because everyone’s body is slightly different.

However, when it comes to chronic pain, it could be time for a rethink. Moore suggests measuring your pain, tracking whether a drug makes a difference, and if it doesn’t, quickly moving on. “Frankly, with paracetamol, if it’s not going to work within a week, it’s never going to work with you,” he says.

Indeed, a spokeswoman for McNeil Consumer Healthcare, which makes Tylenol in the US, points out that the drug’s label clearly states that consumers should stop use and ask a doctor if they have pain that gets worse or lasts more than 10 days.

Of course, the ideal would be to develop a paracetamol variant that worked better and had fewer drawbacks. Stuart Bevan and David Andersson at King’s College London recently

1955/56 Paracetamol sold in the US as Tylenol and in the UK as Panadol

1962 Concerns surface about stomach bleeding and ulcers associated with NSAIDs and aspirin. Paracetamol sales boosted

1982 Discovery that aspirin puts small children at increased risk of Reye’s syndrome 2011 Study suggests

paracetamol causes reductions in haemoglobin similar to ibuprofen

2013 In the UK, draft guidelines from NICE recommend removing

paracetamol as first-line treatment for osteoarthritis

2014 Final NICE guidelines, keep paracetamolas first-line treatmentfor osteoarthritis

1966 Reports of severe liver damage from intentional overdose with paracetamol


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IN APRIL, a landfill in New Mexico disgorged proof of a decades-old rumour.

The story goes back to 1983, when James Heller was given an unusual job. His bosses at video-game maker Atari wanted him to drive out to the desert with 750,000 copies of their latest game, and bury them there. Over decades the story acquired the status of urban legend, an illustration of the quality of the game in question, ET: The Extraterrestrial. Despite a $21 million outlay, Atari’s expected blockbuster was an unmitigated flop, and was later dubbed “The worst game of all time”.

Now consider Flappy Bird, a game that, despite having been created by a single developer in a couple of days, became an accidental global obsession. At its peak earlier this year, Flappy Bird was being played by so

many people on their phones that Dong Nguyen was making $50,000 a day. “Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed,” he said at the time. But things took a dark turn. People became so obsessed with the game that they showered Nguyen with angry abuse online. In the end it was too much for him. Nguyen withdrew Flappy Bird from public circulation.

It has never been possible to know ahead of time whether your painstakingly crafted game will soar to the heights of Flappy Bird or require desert burial. Game designers relied on a combination of intuition, sheer luck and years of toil – and have often been taken by surprise by the runaway success of their own games. But that’s all about to change. Although game science is in its infancy, it is already feeding insights from psychology back into design to produce what looks like very much like a recipe for obsession. It has attracted the attention of interests beyond

the gaming industry. Will they use it to hurt us – or help us?

We have been aware of some basic ingredients of habit-forming games since at least the 1990s. That could explain the similarity of so many popular puzzle games like Tetris, Bejeweled and Puyo Puyo: random shapes appear on a screen that the player must match up with complementary shapes to clear the board and score points. Rearranging these shapes is undeniably, deeply, satisfying.

But why? The psychological underpinnings have only recently begun to be examined in any detail. Many researchers have suggested that a love of matching patterns taps into a basic human compulsion, giving the same fix we get as an infant pushing shaped blocks into their corresponding holes. “It’s hard-wired in our brain to organise things,” says Angelica Ortiz de Gortari at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Perhaps no game has harnessed psychology as deftly as Candy Crush Saga. Its basic construction is familiar: presented with a grid full of colourful “candies”, you line up at least three matching sets in a row to meet different targets and progress to subsequent levels. Unlike some other puzzle games, Candy Crush has become an instant, unstoppable juggernaut and a pop culture phenomenon.

Since its introduction two years ago, the game has become the focus of obsessive analysis and sordid confessions. Journalists have openly declared themselves addicts, with more than a few admitting they have paid extravagant sums to play. They played on the train, at work, at weddings, while driving and during bathroom breaks (according to one anonymous web confessor, when she finally got off the toilet after 4 hours of play, her legs collapsed beneath her).

This is no niche market; no group seems immune to its charms. So what did Candy Crush get so right?

Its designers appear to have hit upon a formula that’s beginning to emerge from the academic discipline of game studies as the “ludic loop”. Ludic loops are tight, pleasurable feedback loops that stimulate repetitive, if not compulsive, behaviour. “It definitely takes us back to behaviourist psychology,” says Natasha Dow Schüll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose research on games anthropology led her to study this phenomenon in popular gaming.

Her formulation has come largely from her studies of slot machines and their allure to addicts. Slot machines perfectly illustrate the concept of the ludic loop. They lure people

As psychologists begin to diagnose what gets us addicted to games, we are zeroing in on a recipe for obsession. Douglas Heaven finds that it could hurt us – or heal us

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into short cycles of repeated actions using tricks familiar to behavioural psychologists: you do something, the machine responds with lights, jingling sounds and occasionally cash rewards. You do it again. And again, and again.

Our affinity for this kind of activity is typically ascribed to dopamine, a brain signalling chemical that has been the source of much confusion about the links between addiction, reward, gambling and gaming. Dopamine was long thought to be a simple reward or pleasure chemical, but the last decade has brought evidence that its action in the brain is in fact much more subtle. It is linked to the compulsion to repeat an activity, whether or not that activity is pleasurable (Behavioral Neuroscience, vol 119, p 5).

That would explain the appeal of slot machines, which beget compulsive behaviour despite offering virtually no chance of a tangible long-term reward. Beneath the obvious blinking lights, Schüll thinks, the real draw of the slot machine – and all ludic loops – is a constant, repetitive switching between certainty and uncertainty. A moment of uncertainty opens up as the symbols whir inexorably toward resolution. When it resolves, “that moment is shut down immediately”, Schüll says. “But then you want it again. It’s open, close, open, close. Uncertainty and then closure.” Pull someone into this pattern and you can keep them repeating small actions over and over, with neither reward nor end in sight. “There’s no goal here, just the pleasure of being in the zone created by this machine,” says Schüll. The ludic loop is its own reward.

Granted, makers of slot machines would never admit to soliciting licensed psychologists to help them make the machines more addictive. Similarly, Candy Crush’s developer,

King Digital Entertainment of Dublin, Ireland, is more likely to have relied on the expert intuition of game designers and the exhaustive testing of prototypes on sample players. “I doubt any of these designers are sitting around reading behaviourist psychology,” says Schüll. “Intentionally or not, “they’ve hit upon this formula.”

So what’s Schüll’s recipe for a ludic loop?

The first ingredient is engineered randomness. Aaron Steed, an independent game developer who has studied Candy Crush closely, thinks that if the algorithm that decides what shapes to drop were truly random we would see more matches than we do. That suggests the game’s “randomness” has been fine-tuned to a sweet spot between pure chance and the illusion of control. “You think surely because it’s random there’ll be something I can solve there. It’s what makes gambling games popular in general.”

Then there’s the jackpot moment. The most satisfying thing that can happen in Candy Crush is when you think you’re matching up a single row of sweets, but trigger an unexpected cascade of further matches. “It makes the game freak out,” says Jamie Madigan, a psychologist based in St Louis, Missouri, who specialises in games.

Candy crush nationLike pattern-matching, our response to unexpected rewards is hard-wired. Psychologists have long understood that random windfalls are better at making us compulsively repeat a certain behaviour than predictable ones. This effect, known as the variable-ratio schedule of reinforcement, was demonstrated in the 1950s by behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner. When his lab rats received unpredictable and occasional rewards for pressing a lever, they would continue pressing that lever long after the rewards stopped coming, says Luke Clark of the University of Cambridge, who specialises in gambling disorders. “Once it’s been set up, the conditioning is incredibly persistent.”

There’s another reason we find variable rewards so compelling: they make us think we are mastering the game. Psychologists have long understood that a sense of mastery at some venture seems to be a powerful motivator, even when we’re not actually getting any better at it. Even a fleeting illusion of control puts us in mind of efforts characterised by setbacks and improvements, like tennis or golf. And, Clark says, the cognitive distortion caused by the fuzzy line between skill and luck in Candy Crush is key to engineering this illusion. “You’re not really sure if you’ve caused it,” he says.

Stitch together what appear to be random rewards with the illusion that we’re somehow earning them, and we’re hooked.

Whether or not this precise winning formula was hit upon by accident, Schüll says, it won’t stay accidental for much longer, now that it’s

clear what’s to be gained from deliberately engaging the psychology of compulsive play.

King has crushed its competition. At least 500 million people – equivalent to two-thirds of the population of Europe – have downloaded Candy Crush, and 7 million of them play every day. Enough of them pay for the privilege that King’s revenue is estimated at about $900,000 per day. But the formula isn’t easily copied. Even King hasn’t been able to replicate Candy Crush’s success.

That could explain why psychologists are at the centre of an industry now springing up to formalise their understanding into design at very early stages of game development. Feeding psychological research back into game development will take the guesswork out of design and yield recipes for making games more compulsive, says Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester, New York. Ryan co-founded Immersyve, a consultancy that advises game studios on how to make their

“ A sense of mastery is a powerful motivator, even when we’re not actually getting any better”


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games more engaging, in 2003. “We have developed a lot of metrics so we can measure whether games are hitting a psychological satisfaction mark in people,” he says.

They’re not the only ones. “You’re going to see games companies of all kinds increasingly adding scientists to their teams,” says Ramin Shokrizade, an economist at games studio Wargaming America in Austin, Texas, who advises game designers.

What happens when this industry matures? Like Candy Crush, it will probably compel an ever wider net of casual gamers to pay for a game that they could play for nothing – something that has until recently been the purview of specialist gambling apps.

Candy Crush is free, but it requires small payments if you want to extend your stay in the ludic loop. For example, you get five free lives, but each lost life takes half an hour to refresh. Lose five lives in quick succession and you have to wait two-and-a-half hours till

you’re back with your full complement of lives. Unless… you’re willing to pay a small fee, or give up some data through social media. “When you’re already immersed, you don’t stop and say ‘Wait, this dollar would be better spent somewhere else,’ ” says Shokrizade. As our understanding of the function and motivation of ludic loops has grown, we are seeing more games work this way to squeeze cash out of us. “When games get more effective – and trust me, they’re going to get much more effective – we won’t be converting just some of the population,” he says. “We could be converting 90 per cent.”

In light of that, it’s not surprising that ludic loops have caught the attention of industries beyond gaming. Bite-size loops can turn dreary tasks into activities many of us will happily snack on whenever we have a spare minute. In 2006 Google hit upon the idea of turning manual image-tagging into a quick-

fire game where your input – a word to describe the content of a given image – was quickly followed by feedback telling you whether it matched the input of a random online collaborator.

Ludic loop mechanisms are also apparent in the success of projects like EyeWire, a collaborative online brain-mapping effort. EyeWire recruits players around the world to do the painstaking work of colour-coding the brain, neuron by neuron. The ludic loop is engaged with frequent feedback. Colour in an area and you immediately learn whether you answered with the majority.

Both EyeWire and Google image-tagging involve tasks that would normally be outsourced to paid workers. But suck your workers into a ludic loop and the labour is free.

That’s also appealing to the makers of healthcare self-tracking apps, who have tried desperately to find ways to make logging food intake or other arduous self-monitoring appealing and compulsive. “Often they point to Candy Crush as something good to imitate,” says Schüll.

She is concerned that too many people are jumping on a bandwagon that nobody fully understands. “Every time I give a talk, I get dozens of people coming up to me afterwards

and asking for these secrets for their particular industry.” She has noticed an slight upturn in the number of people who refer to themselves as “behaviour designers”, which she says feels a little creepy.

If this is all beginning to sound a bit dystopian, it’s not all bad news. Plenty of people are trying to hijack our compulsive tendencies for our own good.

Digital healingEngaging the ludic loop with interactive media, for example, could make it easier for students to learn. Engaging compulsive mechanisms causes information to get encoded on a deeper level, says Berni Good of Cyber Psychologist, a consultancy in Birmingham, UK, specialising in games psychology. “It goes into long-term memory more readily,” she says. The extremely popular game Minecraft – which has also inspired musings about compulsion – has even been used as a teaching aid for subjects as diverse as quantum physics, geology and etiquette.

We might even use the ludic loop to heal, or prevent, psychological damage. Playing Tetris after viewing a traumatic film, for example, was found to reduce the likelihood of flashbacks. The researchers who did the study suggest games that engage compulsive behaviours could be used as a “cognitive vaccine” for post-traumatic stress disorder (PLoS One, vol 5, p e13706).

It’s not just people with PTSD who need soothing, though. Shokrizade thinks we all do. “As society gets more stressful, we need more entertainment, in any place, at any time.”

Schüll thinks smartphone apps designed around ludic loops act as digital pacifiers, damping down stress. “They turn our phones into mood modulators, little self-medicating devices,” she says. She remains unconvinced that turning people into game-addicted zombies is ever justified. When people ask for her help in making their product as compelling as Candy Crush, she tries to encourage them to avoid the baser manipulations of the ludic loop. “Just because these things work doesn’t mean you want to imitate them,” she says.

But her words are likely to fall on deaf ears: game developers would prefer not have to bury the bodies of their failed games in the desert. And if the ludic loop is a bit of a Pandora’s box, it’s full of great tricks. ■

Douglas Heaven is a feature editor at New Scientist

“ When you’re immersed, you don’t stop and say, wait, this dollar would be better spent elsewhere”


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The secret ones

In an inaccesible valley in Mali lives a language that hides as much as it communicates. How did this “anti-language” emerge, asks Matthew Bradley


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WHEN Westerners say “Timbuktu”, it is as if we are talking about the ends of the earth. But the city’s remoteness

is nothing compared to the small village of Bounou, tucked inside a rugged cul-de-sac valley 250 kilometres to the south. No European had ever visited the surrounding Bandiagara region until French colonial officer Louis Desplagnes reached it in 1904 – and even he didn’t get as far as Bounou.

Abbie Hantgan is one of the few Westerners to have reached the village in recent years. She can still recall the last leg of her journey, after an arduous two-day bus trip to the small market town of Konna (see map, page 45). It was the height of the rainy season, meaning that a 5-hour journey by donkey cart was the only way to traverse the canyon where Bounou perches.

“The track was flooded waist-high,” she says. “But the floodwater didn’t keep the cart from finding every rock and rut in the track along the way.” Eventually, they reached a boulder marking the end of the track and she saw Bounou “hanging on the cliff side”. It was, she says, “a scene out of time”.

For Hantgan, Bounou’s remoteness was one of its main attractions. She wanted to document the words spoken by its inhabitants, the Bangande. Although these people share much of their culture with the surrounding Dogon people, their language, called Bangime, is very different and has many unusual characteristics. Understanding its origins could therefore tell us a lot about the history of this little-explored area of Africa, while also offering a way to investigate the birth and evolution of languages.

As Hantgan embarked on her visit to the region, she knew it came with its share of risks. She was taking over research started by the young Dutch linguist Stefan Elders, who passed away while working in Bounou the previous year. He had contracted a stomach ailment and the isolation of the village meant he couldn’t reach a hospital in time.

Elders’s work was part of the US National Science Foundation’s Dogon Project, headed by linguist Jeffrey Heath at the University of Michigan. The project investigates relationships between the various languages spoken by the Dogon peoples living on the Bandiagara Escarpment and the adjacent Seno Plain. Some 80 named Dogon speech varieties exist, which Western linguists categorise as 22 separate languages and many more dialects.

Hantgan’s experience meant she was ideally qualified to take Elders’s place in the project. While volunteering with the US Peace Corps in

Mali, she had learned Fulfulde and a Dogon language called Bondu-so. Both would prove useful in her doctoral research into Bangime. Fulfulde, used as a lingua franca or bridge language in Bounou, provided her with a tool to talk to local people and elicit words in Bangime, while Bondu-so helped illustrate possible connections with the other Dogon languages.

Hantgan began by compiling a list of common words in Bangime – a task that often attracted derision from the locals. “Every day, villagers on the way to their day’s work in the fields would see me seated inside with my notebook and pen, asking a consultant to repeat the difference between ‘moon’ and ‘water’ over and over again,” she remembers. “With their hoes over their shoulders, they would make fun of me for spending another day sitting in the shade instead of going out to tend crops.”

It was a lonely and frustrating time for her, cut off from contact with family and friends and without even a shortwave radio to remind her of home. But she soon found an ally in the village chief – although he had initially been anxious about her research. He said it upset him that visitors from other Dogon villages often asked why the Bangande have different surnames and don’t look like the rest of the Dogon, even though the Bangande consider themselves to be a Dogon people. Despite concerns that the research might emphasise those differences, he could see how much effort Hantgan was putting in. When villagers would chide her within the chief’s earshot, he would say: “She is tending her crops! The pen is her hoe, and the notebook is her field.”

Once Hantgan had compiled a suitable >

A Bangande family relaxes outside their home (left); the village of Bounou perches on the side of a remote canyon (top)

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number of words, her next task was to identify any that were “cognates” with the other Dogon languages. Cognates are words originating from a common root. For instance, the word “luna” in Italian is related to the word “lune” in French, “lluna” in Catalan and “lua” in Portuguese; all come from “luna” in Latin, the mother tongue from which these Romance languages diverged. Identifying cognates can therefore help demonstrate whether two languages have a common origin.

Hantgan and her colleagues found that it was not unusual for at least 50 per cent of the vocabulary of a given Dogon language to be cognate with the vocabulary of another Dogon language – whereas just 10 per cent of Bangime’s vocabulary seemed to share roots with Dogon terms. Rather than reflecting a common mother language, this small shared vocabulary may simply be due to Bangime speakers borrowing a few words from their neighbours, in the same way that cultural ties resulted in English borrowing words like sushi, pergola and pyjamas.

In this way, Hantgan’s research seemed to mark out Bangime as the most recently discovered language isolate – a tongue not related to any other language. That is of interest to historical linguists like Lyle Campbell at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, who points out that scholars tend to classify African languages as belonging to one of four major families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo or Khoisan. The recognition of Bangime as an isolate might suggest that the classification system needs a rethink, he says.

Orphaned tonguesFurther evidence for Bangime’s uniqueness resides in the fact that its grammar is radically different from that of the other languages spoken by Dogon groups. To give an example: although the Dogon languages join words to form compounds, as does English (think football, rainstorm or driveway), Bangime doesn’t. On the other hand, prefixes are found in Bangime, while being notable by their absence in the Dogon languages.

These differences are somewhat surprising, because in other ways, the Bangande and Dogon cultures are very similar. The Bangande wear the same clothing and jewellery as the Dogon people, and both use Tellem architecture – mud brick, coiled clay and stone masonry structures set into the cliff face – for granaries and burial grounds.

Looking at the archaeological record, it is

easy to assume that people who share such material cultures are part of a single language community. This has been the basis for theories about the origins of the Indo-European languages spoken in Europe and Asia, for instance. Yet the unusual relationship between the Dogon and Bangande reminds us that we can’t rely on these assumptions.

What leads to a language becoming an isolate? Campbell notes that isolates may be the orphans of larger linguistic families whose other members have slowly died out – perhaps because the speakers adopted other languages. Many social, political and economic factors probably influence which languages survive, and which perish. Tongues like Bangime could represent a concerted effort to resist shifting to others’ words.

The first hint of this comes from the very name Bangande. Bang translates as secret, hidden, or furtive, and -ande is a plural suffix – like -s in English – so the combination translates as “furtive ones”. The word Bangime is formed in a similar fashion, with the suffix -ime signifying language; thus it translates as “secret language”. Clearly, they were once keen to keep to themselves.

Hantgan discovered further clues as to why that might be when she moved from compiling words and phrases to collecting longer portions of continuous speech. Along the way, she documented oral histories of the Bangande villages as places of refuge for escapees from Fulani slave caravans, which served the internal and transatlantic slave trades. Peoples such as the Bobo, Samo and the Bangande themselves were commonly targeted by slave traders because Islamic law afforded non-Muslims no protection against enslavement.

The oral histories described many of these escapees as children who were seized while they were gathering firewood and water outside their villages. They had sacks placed over their heads for several days to make sure they were unable to orient themselves and attempt escape back to their home village. Some of those who did escape eventually found their way to the Bangande settlements, where they were integrated into the community and learned Bangime.

The integration of individuals from across the Sahel to the north and the Volta river basin to the south may explain the physical distinctiveness of the Bangande people. Being joined by runaways seeking sanctuary from slave raiders may be one reason the Bangande have come to refer to themselves as “the furtive ones” – and might explain why they

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“ The slave trade may explain why the Bangande were determined to keep their own language’”

Abbie Hantgan’s “assigned daughter” (right) and a friend fetch water from the well

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have been determined to keep their own language.

The Bangande’s eagerness to retain their secrecy may even have led Bangime to develop what British linguist Michael Halliday calls an anti-language. That’s a distinct “dialect that serves to mark off a group of speakers from the larger society”, resulting in an “anti-society”. Jargon is one common element of such dialects, but Bangime’s anti-language also uses more elliptical tactics.

Hantgan didn’t become aware of the existence of the anti-language until near the end of her third year of work in Bounou, when she had gained some conversational proficiency in Bangime. She started to see a pattern in which some terms were the polar opposites of the things they described. For example, a particular white-barked tree was referred to as “black-eyed,” and a particular black-barked tree as “white-eyed”.

As her mastery of the language improved even more, Hantgan began to notice that many words she had asked the villagers for didn’t regularly appear in natural speech, where circumlocutions were often preferred. For example, she had previously recorded the term sáàn for fence. Yet one day, she heard a garden fence being referred to as “stick(s) put into the ground so that people may pass next to the rice”. Similarly, cakes were sometimes called “powder which has been sweetened”, while sunglasses were “black things to hide the eyes”.

This sort of linguistic theatricality and

deception are an example of what Mark Pagel at the University of Reading, UK, calls “a powerful social anchor”. He has argued that languages evolve to deceive and exclude others, as much as to ease communication. A roundabout way of describing objects is just one strategy that helps the Bangande set themselves apart from other group – and perhaps helped them to distance themselves from the passing traders who may have begun to pick up their everyday words.

Nuances and exceptionsThe slave trade also seems to have left its mark in the way Bangime distinguishes social class. The “aristocracy”, who claim to descend from the families who harboured the escaped slaves, speak in a high register associated with a more complex tonal system, compared with the speech of the “serf” population, who are thought to be descended from those escapees.

A process known as over-regularisation may account for the distinction. Learners tend to assume regular patterns in a language until a wealth of exposure or being corrected shows them the nuances and exceptions. For instance, non-native speakers of English may say “catched” instead of “caught”.

Such errors can be difficult to overcome, and they sometimes feed back into the native language. Indeed, many linguists now believe this can explain why grammar gets simpler over time for languages that have a lot of contact with outsiders, like English. It is easy to imagine that the escapees learning Bangime as a second language over-regularised its tonal system – leading to patterns that are distinct from those used by people descended from the native inhabitants.

The ongoing conflict in Mali means that fieldwork has been halted for the foreseeable future – yet there is much more to discover.

One of Hantgan’s long-term research goals is to investigate links between the origin of the Bangande people and the Dogon cultures.

Previous researchers had suggested that when the Dogon arrived about 600 years ago, they displaced the existing populations in the region. As evidence, they pointed out that historical Tellem structures and funerary remains don’t seem to correspond to present-day Dogon material cultures.

The Ounjougou research project at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, however, has revealed how pre-Dogon and Dogon material culture and funerary practices subtly influenced each other. It could be that the Bangande were those people who lived in the region before the Dogon arrived and shared some of their cultures with the newcomers, explaining the similarities we see today.

Alternatively, the ancestors of the Bangande may have arrived along with those of today’s Dogon, but speaking an unrelated language. Other groups may have also moved to the area, with only the Bangande resisting the shift to using a Dogon language. Until the security situation in Mali improves, it won’t be possible to gather fresh data related to these hypotheses.

At present, Hantgan is eagerly working as a newly minted postdoctoral fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her position will see her beginning field research soon in rural Senegal, but she also hopes to return to her friends and research in Bounou. Despite the hardships, her enthusiasm is as strong as ever. “Investigating the warp and weft of tone, the rainbow of vowel harmony and the ladder of consonant mutation, these are the intricacies that make human speech so fascinating to me,” she says. ■

Matthew Bradley is a writer based in Massachusetts

Villagers in Bounou are nominally Muslim and celebrate some major Islamic festivals

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Beyond Timbuktu The Bangande people live in one of the remotest parts of Mali: a village called Bounou. The region was first visited by Westerners in 1904 - even then, the explorer didn't reach this particular village. Perhaps because of their remoteness, the Bangande have developed a unique language that is of great interest to linguists

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Today, Bounou is accessible only after a 5-hour donkey-cart ride from the nearest town, Konna

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The Systems View of Life: A unifying vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, Cambridge University Press, £24.99

WHEN I was about 17, I was briefly transfixed by the teachings of Eastern mysticism. I read everything I could about Zen Buddhism and

Taoism, and pored over books by spiritual figures who claimed that ordinary consciousness could be transcended through discipline and meditation. I had tantalising visions of suddenly achieving “enlightenment” or “oneness” with the Godhead (although I had no idea what that was). To me, it all sounded impossibly cool.

As I also loved mathematics and physics, I picked up the bestselling book The Tao of Physics by physicist Fritjof Capra. It introduced me to weird concepts from quantum theory: things like entanglement and non-locality, which Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance”.

Capra convinced me there were surprising parallels between these aspects of modern physics and Eastern mysticism, that what Buddhists had been saying for centuries about the interconnectedness of everything in the universe sat quite well with today’s physics. His wonderful book kindled a fascination with quantum theory which I have never lost (although I gave up on mystic enlightenment long ago).

I think Capra is now ready to inspire a new generation of young readers in much the same

way, only with a focus on systems biology rather than quantum physics.

In The Systems View of Life, Capra and biochemist Pier Luigi Luisi explore how modern biology, in trying to understand the self-organising, adaptive and creative aspects of life in all its forms, has by necessity turned to a holistic, systems view emphasising pattern and organisation.

But the main point of the book isn’t merely that systems biology is fascinating. More importantly, Capra and Luisi argue that many of the most important problems we face today – from financial instability to climate change and ecological degradation – reflect our collective inability to appreciate just how the world operates as a holistic, networked system in which every part depends on every other.

There may be solutions – even simple ones, they suggest – if we could manage to start thinking in this way, and the book is their effort to help this along. It’s partly an enjoyable survey of exciting new developments in systems biology, valuable to any student of biology or science, and partly a bold blueprint for how we might preserve our future on Earth using the systems perspective on life and what sustains it.

You won’t find much by way of dramatic narrative about scientists making discoveries.

Rather, this is a book of ideas and argument. Some of the scientific history is quite familiar, and many readers will be able to skim earlier sections on the rise of classical physics, or revolutions of Darwinian evolution, relativity and quantum theory. That said, Capra and Luisi use this history as a useful lens to examine how human thought has had an on-again, off-again relationship with systems thinking for centuries.

They also bring back to life some of the foundational figures in systems science, now mostly forgotten. For example, I had heard of the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who in the 1930s developed general ideas about the organising principles of living systems. What I didn’t know is that he also introduced the important notions of open and closed systems. An open system is “open” to an outside world, as our planetary biosphere is to the flow of the sun’s energy. Such systems naturally develop complex, dynamic structures reminiscent of life, things absent in closed or isolated systems.

I had also heard the name Bogdanov, but had no idea that Alexander Bogdanov was a Russian polymath who developed similar ideas around the turn of the 20th century; his work is still largely unknown in the West.

It isn’t until chapter 7 that the book really takes off, moving with full force into the more recent systems revolution in biology. Capra and Luisi take an adventurous expedition through topics from genetic regulation to ecology, and from climate science to the origins of life, in every case

emphasising the necessity of taking a holistic perspective if we are to make progress.

They ask: can we understand the dynamics of the human heart in terms of the interactions of its cells? No, because the behaviour of every cell depends on the overall state of the heart itself. Causality works in both directions, bottom-up and top-down, at once. What happens cannot be understood by

CULTURELAB

The Tao of SystemsHolistic thinking is hard work for humans, but we will need to learn to do it if we are to solve Earth’s most pressing problems, finds Mark Buchanan

Causality works bottom-up and top-down, at once

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studying any one level on its own. The book will be a terrific

resource for anyone who wants to learn about cutting-edge research into creating artificial cells or other aspects of synthetic biology, or in areas such as epigenetics, where the old gene-centric point of view has been more or less completely undermined.

These ideas have helped drive complexity science forward over the past few decades. Indeed, Capra and Luisi argue that the 21st-century zeitgeist is changing from one of world-as-machine to

The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjöberg, Particular Books, £14.99

Bob Holmes“LIMITATIONS cheer me up,” writes Fredrik Sjöberg. By that standard, he should be positively radiant. He finds travel

neither pleasant nor instructive, preferring to spend his days on a small island off the Swedish coast near Stockholm, where he is one of just 300 permanent residents.

There, the great passion of his life – and the ostensible subject of The Fly Trap – is collecting and studying hoverflies. No flashy butterflies or beetles here, not even an ambitious attempt at the hoverflies of the world: just the 202 species on his island that he has come to know like old friends.

Of course, as Sjöberg himself admits, “the hoverflies are only props… Here and there, my story is about something else. Exactly

what, I don’t know.” The reader doesn’t either, not at first.

Sjöberg, a translator and literary critic as well as a hoverfly expert, thrives in the indistinct boundary between science and literature. “I used to say that I was a writer,” he tells us, “but all the women on the island felt so sorry for my wife that I started insisting I was a biologist instead.”

The book unfolds like a leisurely after-dinner conversation, as Sjöberg meanders through the pleasures of collecting hoverflies on a summer’s day, the eccentricities of entomologists and the surprising intimacy of conversations between strangers on a ferry (the end of a crossing sets a time limit, focusing the mind).

Along the way, he indulges a fascination for the life of Swedish entomologist René Malaise. Best known today as the inventor of an insect trap – hence the book’s title – he was, in many ways, the anti-Sjöberg, someone who never acknowledged limits. As a young man in the 1920s and 30s, he collected insects and acquired a reputation as an intrepid adventurer and a bit of a ladies’ man: Sjöberg tracks his love life by noting which women he named insects after.

But the real message of the book, published in Swedish a decade ago and now translated into English, is the quiet pleasure to be found in reading the fine print of knowledge. “A world full of highly personal mastery without petty rivalries would be a nice place to live,” he writes. In this subtle book, Sjöberg provides a convincing example. ■

Bob Holmes is a consultant for New Scientist

For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culturelab

In praise of hoverfliesThere is subtle treasure in the indistinct boundary between science and literature

world-as-network, a holistic system in precise interrelation rather than a collection of dissociated parts. That sounds fine in theory, but how can we put it to use?

This is the focus of the third and final broad section of the book: on sustaining the web of life. Here, Capra and Luisi make some fairly routine observations, for example, that our success will require a shift to more sustainable kinds of economic growth, and finding ways to organise our activities in a manner that doesn’t interfere with nature’s inherent ability to support life.

Ideas like these are hardly new, and that could also be said of much of the book, especially its discussion of systems theory, complexity science, ecology and the roots of our global problems.

But this is a broad synthesis, linking many areas of science to make one very important point: that there’s very little we can do without holistic thinking, despite the obvious difficulties involved in doing it well. We are, they suggest, not “ecologically literate” or systems literate, and these are languages we will have to learn.

As in The Tao of Physics, there is some Eastern mysticism in this book, and rightly so. After all, those philosophies have always emphasised the deep dependence of everything human on nature and the environment, and have taught living with nature rather than trying to dominate it.

We should have been listening long ago. I hope that Capra and Luisi will manage to persuade many that we must start listening now – or face the consequences of our own ignorance. ■

Mark Buchanan is a visiting professor at the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy

“ We are not ecologically literate or systems literate: these are languages we will have to learn ”

Studying Swedish hoverflies was a passion for Sjöberg

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CULTURELAB

STEPHEN JAY GOULD called one of Jeremy Rifkin’s early books “anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship”. In the 30 years since, Rifkin has prepared governments, companies and the public for his controversial version of the future. Liz Else talks to him about his latest book.

Your book is called The Zero Marginal Cost Society. Why?Marginal cost is the cost of producing an additional unit of something after the fixed costs have already been absorbed. Sellers look for technologies to increase productivity, and to win over consumers by offering cheaper products. But no one ever imagined marginal costs could approach zero, making goods and services potentially free and therefore beyond market forces.

What is driving this change?Over the past 15 years, millions of consumers have become prosumers, producing and consuming and sharing their own information goods – music, film, videos, entertainment, blogs, knowledge. This shift devastated the music and media industries because their high overheads make it hard for them to compete. You can argue that the more you give away, the more people will be interested in your premium services. But this hasn’t really happened on a major scale.

Where can we see this idea of “free” gaining the most ground?It is affecting the provision of energy at a fantastic rate. There are more than 3 billion sensors operating in the world, embedded in everything from warehouses and assembly lines to domestic TVs and washing machines, and they’re continually feeding data to the “internet of things”. By 2030, US manufacturer Fairchild Industries estimates there will be 100 trillion such sensors globally.

Over that time, the internet of things will evolve into three internets: for communication,

energy and logistics. Take energy. Forty years ago, a watt of solar electricity cost $66. Now it costs 66 cents and the price is falling. You have to install that solar panel, wind turbine or geothermal heat pump and pay for it, but you’re then producing energy at near-zero marginal cost.

How will this affect our wealth?People who produce their own energy and physical goods need less income. There are still going to be a lot of goods and services that aren’t free, so we’ll still need jobs. But there is an institutional mechanism we all use every day to obtain goods and services

provided by neither government nor private enterprise. Economists call it the not-for-profit sector, but it’s bigger than that. It covers everything from producing and sharing things to education, healthcare, day care for children, assisted living for the elderly, cultural events, sport, arts and environmental activities. All these generate a worldwide revenue of $2.2 trillion – and that’s only the small bit we know how to quantify. For the past 20 years, the not-for-profit sector has been growing faster than the private sector. More than 10 per cent of the UK, US and Canadian workforce operates in this sector.

What’s in this future for me?The emerging new economy offers more intense rewards and greater opportunities for self-development. In an economy centred on sustainable abundance rather than scarcity, our grandchildren may look back at mass-market employment with the same disbelief with which we look on slavery and serfdom. The idea that a human’s worth was measured almost exclusively by their productive output of goods, services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric.

What could prevent this utopia?Climate change – and so also food insecurity – and cyberterrorism.

Can we outrun these risks?I’m guardedly hopeful, but not naive. Our world is becoming dysfunctional in terms of the environment we’ve created and the inequalities we’ve contrived. If we don’t embark on this journey, what would be the alternative? ■ Interview by Liz Else

The world, for free Measuring human worth by possessions or productivity looks barbaric in Jeremy Rifkin’s future world

Houses planned in Germany harvest ever-cheaper solar energy

“ No one ever imagined marginal costs could approach zero, making goods and services free”

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PROFILEJeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Bethesda, Maryland. His book The Zero Marginal Cost Society is published by Palgrave Macmillan (£17.99)


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Argonne is a Department of Energy national laboratory with over 1,500 scientists and engineers performing world-class research aimed at solving the nation’s energy, environmental and security challenges. Argonne’s Postdoctoral Program provides early Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) career professionals with the opportunity to conduct meaningful, cutting-edge research in an inspired and resource-rich environment. There are three types of appointments to which candidates may apply.

Argonne Named Fellowships – These are the lab’s most prestigious fellowships and DUH�QDPHG�DIWHU�VFLHQWLÀF�DQG�WHFKQLFDO� OXPLQDULHV��1DPHG�)HOORZV�ZRUN�FORVHO\�ZLWK�DQ�$UJRQQH�VSRQVRU� WR�SXUVXH� WKHLU� UHVHDUFK� LQWHUHVWV��$�1DPHG�)HOORZ�LV�KLUHG�DV�DQ�$UJRQQH� 6FKRODU� ZLWK� IXOO� EHQHÀWV�� D� FRPSHWLWLYH� VDODU\� DQG� D� VWLSHQG� IRU� UHVHDUFK�VXSSRUW��1DPHG�)HOORZV�PD\�UHQHZ�WKHLU�DSSRLQWPHQWV�RQ�DQ�DQQXDO�EDVLV�IRU�XS�WR��years, with the possibility of retention.

Director’s Fellowships�²�'LUHFWRU·V�)HOORZVKLSV�DUH�JUDQWHG�WR�RXWVWDQGLQJ�VFLHQWLVWV�DQG�HQJLQHHUV�ZKR�VKRZ�SRWHQWLDO�IRU�EHLQJ�OHDGHUV�LQ�WKHLU�ÀHOGV��'LUHFWRU·V�)HOORZV�PDNH�VLJQLÀFDQW�FRQWULEXWLRQV�WR�$UJRQQH·V�VWUDWHJLF�PLVVLRQ�WKURXJK�H[LVWLQJ�SURJUDPV�RU�E\�LQLWLDWLQJ�QHZ�UHVHDUFK�DUHDV��$�'LUHFWRU·V�)HOORZ�LV�KLUHG�DV�DQ�$UJRQQH�6FKRODU�ZLWK�IXOO�EHQHÀWV�DQG�D�FRPSHWLWLYH�VDODU\��'LUHFWRU·V�)HOORZVKLSV�FDQ�EH�UHQHZHG�DQQXDOO\�for up to two years.

Divisional Postdoctoral Associates³SHUIRUP�UHVHDUFK�LQ�H[LVWLQJ�VFLHQFH�DQG�WHFKQRORJ\�programs; present and publish research; contribute to the overall research efforts of the /DERUDWRU\�� DGYDQFH� NQRZOHGJH� LQ� EDVLF� DQG� DSSOLHG� UHVHDUFK�� DQG� VWUHQJWKHQ� 8�6��VFLHQWLÀF� DQG� WHFKQLFDO� FDSDELOLWLHV�� &DQGLGDWHV� DUH� VHOHFWHG� EDVHG� RQ� WKHLU� DFDGHPLF�EDFNJURXQG�DQG�SRVVLEOH�LQSXW�WR�WKH�ODE·V�UHVHDUFK��,QLWLDO�SRVWGRFWRUDO�DSSRLQWPHQWV�DUH�IRU�RQH�\HDU�ZLWK�WKH�RSSRUWXQLW\�WR�H[WHQG�XS�WR�WKUHH�\HDUV� )RU� LQIRUPDWLRQ� RQ� DSSOLFDWLRQ� GHDGOLQHV�� FXUUHQW� GLYLVLRQDO� RSHQLQJV�� DSSOLFDWLRQ�LQVWUXFWLRQV� DQG� IUHTXHQWO\� DVNHG� TXHVWLRQV�� SOHDVH� YLVLW� WKH� $UJRQQH� 3RVWGRFWRUDO�Programs web site at http://www.dep.anl.gov/postdocs/ or www.anl.gov/careers

Argonne is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity in our workforce.Argonne is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory

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Conduct your research in

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MS in Bioinformatics

at Boston University2QH�RI�WKH�¿UVW�SURJUDPV�RI�LWV�NLQG��WKH�%LRLQIRUPDWLFV�*UDGXDWH�3URJUDP�RIIHUV�XQLTXH�

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Divisional Postdoctoral Associates / Postdoctoral Program - Argonne, IL - Argonne National Laboratory

Director’s Fellowships / Postdoctoral Program - Argonne, IL - Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne Named Fellowships / Postdoctoral Program - Argonne, IL - Argonne National Laboratory

NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) - Oak Ridge Associated Universities - NASA Postdoctoral Program

Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers - Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

A Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers - Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

Postdoctoral Positions in the Departments of Genetics and Medicine - Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program - Bethesda, MD - National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH)

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Translational & Clinical Research Opportunities in Singapore - Contact Singapore

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Postdoctoral Fellowships - Canadian Blood Services (CBS)

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Grant Programs at Burroughs Wellcome Fund

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POSTDOCTORAL OPPORTUNITIES Find these and many more postdoctoral opportunities on our New Scientist Jobs online jobs board!

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Enter the Job ID# listed below to read about the position. Find more jobs by entering your criteria into the grey search box.


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Courses &Degree Programs

Issue :

14 JuneDeadline:4 June

Don't miss out, reserve your space now!

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GOOD news for South Carolina. Earlier, its House of Representatives opposed creationist references that the state Senate slipped in while enacting 8-year-old Olivia McConnell’s proposal to name the Columbian mammoth as the state fossil (26 April). Then an inter-house “conference committee” backed the House, despite the majority of its members initially voting in favour of the “created on the Sixth Day” language. On 16 May, the bill was approved by governor Nikki Haley. That was wise politics: Olivia had told CBS News she was determined to have the unadulterated bill passed, even if it “might not be until I’m 23 or 40… If it doesn’t pass this year, I’m going to be back next year.”

EDITING this week’s column, we found ourselves writing to a colleague: “next week, Thursday will take place on Wednesday 21 May.” This is a consequence of the UK public holiday that some

readers may have enjoyed not long before reading this, requiring that everything be done early.

In turn, as we draft this on Friday 16 May, the word “today” would mean “Saturday 31 May” – the date on the cover. Meanwhile, we are discussing with a colleague an idea for another publication, in which “today” is “Friday 23 May”. So why was it not a journalist but a patent examiner who realised the relative nature of time?

THERE will now be a short pause while Feedback savours the phrase “Swiss patent-attorney humour”. New Scientist published a letter from Alan Wells about the patent work of Albert Einstein, including the phrase: “back then, the Swiss Patent Office only examined patent applications relating to timing means” (12 April, p 32). Alan now confesses that this sentence was “ein Schnappsidee” – a term that he says is “not easily translatable” but

which we recognise all too easily, knowing that Schnapps is alcoholic and Idee is “idea”.

He looks forward to his letter being cited to support the notion that, as Graham Greene put it in The Third Man, 500 years of Swiss democracy and peace produced “the cuckoo clock”. In patent-attorney terms, that would be a “mechano-avian timing means”. For the record, Alan directs us to the Swiss Patent Office in Bern listing patents examined by Einstein, which include a gravel sorter and an “electrical typewriter with shuttle-type carrier” (bit.ly/AlbertPatents).

DISCUSSING with colleagues the prospects for the climate change talks in Bonn, Germany, next month, we recalled the immortal intent of a diplomat in Geneva “not to move the discussion unnecessarily forward” (8 February). Other favourite diplomatic language includes “I shall have to refer to my capital,” meaning: “I don’t care what you lot say for the rest of the week, I’m not consenting to anything until we next meet.”

In the record of a meeting, the words “one country said…” are a delicate way, in our experience, of recording occasions when the US, specifically, means: “dream on, people, that is so not happening.”

Feedback expects readers have similar favourites. Will you reveal them, strictly between us?

THE Australian firm behind georesonance.com claims to detect metals and minerals. We observed that in 2011 it was promoting “Geo-Resonance Rejuvenation – An Innovation in Holistic Healing”, but skipped the technicalities (17 May).

Now we have found more similar claims. In Ukraine, geonmr.com opens with the wonderfully gnomic “When we have picked up all grain about new, very weak, but very ‘powerful’ signals, we saw a new truth about deep underground vision…” In Spain we find esproenko.org, with subsidiaries in, among other countries, Ukraine.

But how is it supposed to work? The company transcomplex.uk.com

provides a translation of a Ukrainian patent to which all the above refer. This specifies that “a black-and-white negative is used as an aerospace photograph [and packaged with a] test wafer and X-ray film, the formed package is treated with gamma rays.”

The X-ray film is then “chemically processed and placed in an alternating electric field of high pressure”. This method somehow reminds us of “aura-imaging” practices like Kirlian photography. How it enables the detection of underwater or buried metals or oil, Feedback has no idea.

FINALLY, an update on the mapping service of a famous web search engine (FWSE). We reported that if you locate London and zoom out to see all of England, the nearest place shown was Leigh-on-Sea in Essex (10 May). This is still true. But when Viv Brown, Andrew MacGregor and we last

looked, Brussels had reappeared and a place called “TOWN CENTRE” was prominent. Only zooming back in until we can spot the trains in the station revealed that this was Basingstoke.

Feedback has fond memories of wangling a press visit to the secret nuclear bunker under an office block on Alencon Link, by the station. Could this be connected with its anonymity?

For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedbackFEEDBACK

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

Mail from crowdprediction.cfpf.org.uk tells of “a ‘Crowd Prediction’ experiment to see if the date of future catastrophes can be predicted” – but wouldn’t it be nicer to start with lottery numbers?

PAU

L M

CDEV

ITT


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Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastwordTHE LAST WORD

Lemon, and on, and onWhy does nature like the taste of lemons so much? There is lemon-scented thyme, lemongrass and, of course, lemons. I can’t think of any other commonly occurring flavour. Is it the same flavour, or do we just have a very broad definition of “lemon-flavoured”?

■ Your correspondent is probably right that we have a broad definition of “lemon-flavoured”; for instance, the characteristic sourness of lemons is caused by citric acid, but the other plants

mentioned don’t contain this substance. It is more the smell or “essence” of lemon that nature loves. I can add quite a few plants to the list, including lemon balm, lemon myrtle, lemon tea-tree, lemon verbena, lemon eucalyptus and lemon mint.

Chemically, the flavour similarities arise largely thanks to a fragrant compound called citral that is prominent in all lemony plants. Citral is a mixture of chemicals called terpenoids. Two other important bearers of lemon flavour, which appear in varying concentrations in the species listed above, include limonene and citronellal.

So why is lemon such a popular flavour? We can approach this in terms of natural selection, by

which complex mechanisms arise gradually when random genetic mutations are accumulated and passed on. Lemony plants are found all around the world and most are only distantly related. But then again, the synthesis of citral is well-established in plants and may date back millions of years. The process might even be simple enough to have developed independently in different plants.

After an initial lucky accident generated floral citral – a cosmic ray striking and altering a gene, perhaps – it may have acted as a lure for pollinators or a repellent to animals, both of which would have ensured the mutation’s natural selection.

For humans, lemoniness is distinctly attractive rather than repulsive. We are somewhat obsessed with the flavour, employing it extensively in beauty products, cleaning agents and, of course, food.

The only other commonly occurring flavour I can think of is anise, an essence of aniseed, fennel, liquorice, star anise and even a type of mushroom. However, anise doesn’t come close to the prevalence of lemon.Sam BucktonChipperfield, Hertfordshire, UK

Dream onWhy do I have recurring dreams, years after I left university, of being about to sit an exam but knowing nothing of the subject matter? I’m not alone, lots of people I speak to have the same.

■ This question sent me back to the 1930s and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. In this book he provided a brief section about examination dreams, a kind most students have experienced. His interpretation, as I understand it, was that they derive from childhood punishments, although whether in resentment or guilt was not clear.

This is rather over the top, I feel. It seems to me that such dreams are simply an individual’s brain chewing over an occasion when they did not quite meet the standard they hoped they would.

Over the years dreams begin to echo more recent painful encounters: disappointing interviews and the like.John PostgateLewes, East Sussex, UK

■ Recurrent dreams that have the emotional impetus to wake us up – and hence be remembered – are usually exaggerations of situations that bother us in our waking lives. The setting of the dream is often concrete and simplified, in a way that makes the dreamer unlikely to misinterpret the emotions being displayed.

Dreaming of finding oneself totally unprepared for an exam is an exaggeration of a current

anxiety that one is unprepared to cope with. The dream uses an experience in the person’s life where dread of being found wanting is intense.

This is similar to another common recurrent dream of finding oneself outside with little clothing. Here the clear message is that the dreamer is afraid of being exposed in some way, such as not being as knowledgeable about a subject as expected, and facing possible shame or embarrassment. The lack of clothing is a concrete and exaggerated manner of portraying such feelings.Anne GrayPaisley, Renfrewshire, UK

This week’s questionsLIGHT AS AIRWhile on the scales this morning I wondered, would passing gas affect the weight of the human body at sea level and, if so, in which direction?Chris GilfillanSurrey Hills, Victoria, Australia

STRIPED SWEATERYears ago I was told that the black hairs on a zebra heat up while the white hairs stay cooler. This sets up a temperature difference between the stripes, which creates an air flow by convection and helps to keep the zebra cool. Does anyone out there know any more?Rachael O’BrienTamworth South, New South Wales, Australia

The writers of answers published in the magazine will receive a cheque for £25 (or US$ equivalent). Answers should be concise. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. Include a daytime telephone number and email address if you have one. We are pleased to acknowledge financial support from Statoil in producing The Last Word. New Scientist retains total editorial control over the content.

Reed Business Information Ltd reserves all rights to reuse question

and answer material that has been submitted by readers in any medium or in any format.

Send questions and answers to The Last Word, New Scientist, Lacon House, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, UK, by email to [email protected] or visit www.newscientist.com/topic/lastword (please include a postal address in order to receive payment for answers). Unanswered questions can also be found at this URL.

Win £100 by answering our monthly question about energy issues

Fridge magnets must constantly overcome the force of gravity, which suggests they are expending energy. So why don’t they run out of juice and fall off after a few years?

Answers should reach us by 23.59 GMT on 3 June 2014 to [email protected] or visit www.newscientist.com/topic/energy. Terms and conditions are also at this URL.

THE LAST WORD ON ENERGY

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“For humans, lemoniness is distinctly attractive rather than repulsive and we use it extensively”

“Dreams that wake us are usually exaggerations of situations that bother us in our waking lives”


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VISITAUSTRALIA.COM/BUSINESSEVENTS/ASSOCIATIONSFOR EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO PLAN YOUR AUSTRALIAN EVENT.

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Australia is on everyone’s list to visit, and it lured our highest number of delegates yet. There’s no doubt they’ll be talking about this convention for years to come.

Dr Louise Wong, International Board Member

Big landscapes Inspire big thinking


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New Scientist - 31 May 2014

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Transcript of New Scientist - 31 May 2014