Ne
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EINSTEIN’S GENIUS
KILLER FLU
HUMAN ORIGINS
DISCOVERTHE yEAR IN ScIENcE
Science, Technology, and The Future
ASTRONOMY Alien Super-Earths, Dawn of the Galaxies
EVOLUTION Dino-Mummy, First Animal on Land
MEDICINE Vaccine Phobia, Gene Therapy Triumphant
BRAIN Depression Cure, Reading the Mind
PHYSICS Black Holes in the Lab, Fixing Traffic with Math
PLUS The biggest news in energy, environment, technology, and more.
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JANUARY/FebRUARY 2010
DiSplAY UNTil Feb 8, 2010
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YEAR INSCIENCE2 0 0 9
J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 0
THE TOP TEN STORIES Vaccine phobia becomes a
public-health threat 18, NASA braces for course
correction 20, Meet your new ancestor 22, Stem
cell science takes off 23, Interview: astronomer
Alan Dressler 24, Swine � u outbreak sweeps the
globe 26, The graphene revolution 27, Earth-like
worlds come into view 28, Experimental power
plant takes the CO2 out 30, Interview: economist
George Loewenstein 32.
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A special report on 100 astonishing discoveries from the past year—the ideas and breakthroughs that are reshaping our understanding of the world.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
Mail 6
Contributors 7
Editor’s Note 8
Vital Signs 10
An elderly couple visit
their doctor to � nd out
which one of them has
Alzheimer’s.
By H. Lee Kagan
The Brain 14
Neuroscientists begin
to � gure out how we
experience fear.
By Carl Zimmer
20 Things
You Didn’t Know About
Dwarf Planets 96
By Andrew Moseman
AND AMONG THE REST BIOLOGY Cut calories and extend your life 39,
The smell of fear 66, Chimps plan ahead 70 SPACE Water on the moon
35, A space-junk collision 54, Venus’s secret past 66 EVOLUTION The
next stage in Darwin’s revolution 50, An ancient croc-eating super-
snake 62, The world’s oldest octopuses 77 ASTRONOMY Twin black
holes 53, Titan: cloudy with a chance of storms 57, Jupiter takes a hit 72
ENVIRONMENT Arctic scientist Mark Serreze 60, Species relocation 80
MEDICINE Hope for HIV vaccine 34, Craig Venter’s synthetic biology 40,
Cancer genes go to court 55 ENERGY Smart grid powers up 48,
Building the sun in the lab 68, Microbial batteries 82 MIND Brain shock
therapy 38, Decoding the Jefferson cipher 64 ANTHROPOLOGY Ancient
� utes 54, Lake Huron hides Ancient civilization 82 PHYSICS Black hole
in a lab 70 TECHNOLOGY Theory-generating computer 39 EARTH Origins
of oxygen 77 OBITUARIES 86 . . . and a complete index on page 88.
On the Cover
Corot-7b, a rocky
exoplanet, suggests
that Earth-like worlds
may be common around
other stars. Insets, from
left: Einstein cogitating,
humans evolving, a
swine fl u virus lurking.
The space shuttle
Endeavor, docked with
the International Space
Station, crosses the face
of the sun.
DISCOVER ON THE
WEB Videos, breaking
news, and more
—the latest is online at
discovermagazine.com
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A towering pillar of gas and dust enshrouds newborn stars in the Carina nebula,
captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s new Wide Field Camera in July.
From our home on Earth, we look out into the distances and strive to imagine the sort of world
into which we were born…. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfi ed
and it will not be suppressed.
‘‘—Edwin P. Hubble
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BLOGS.DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
RECENTLY ON
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Solar Cars
Race Across
the Australian
Outback
Eliza Strickland brings you
a remarkable slide show
of solar-powered vehicles
competing on a 1,860-mile
course.
Weirdest Science Stories of the Yeardiscovermagazine.com/web/disco2k9
Niftiest New Robotsdiscovermagazine.com/web/robo2k9
RECENTLY ON
THE
INTERSECTION
Evangelicals
and Scientists
Team Up to
Save the Planet
Chris Mooney discusses
the new book A Climate
for Change: Global Warm-
ing Facts for Faith-Based
Decisions.
RECENTLY ON
THE LOOM
I Am Shiva,
Destroyer of
Proteins
Carl Zimmer sheds light
on the science of autophagy,
or how our cells destroy
themselves to live again.
RECENTLY ON
BAD
ASTRONOMY
NASA
Launches an
iPhone App
Phil Plait examines NASA’s
of� cial app, which contains
information on missions,
pictures, videos, and more.
BAD ASTRONOMY’S Top Astronomy Pictures of 2009
discovermagazine.com/web/astro2k9
C H E C K O U T
WEB EXCLUSIVE The German Village That Went Off the GridA small town in Saxony has � gured out how to run entirely on biomass—creating an energy surplus.
discovermagazine.com/web/germanvillage
Humans vs. Animals: Our Fiercest Battles With Invasive SpeciesFrom Burmese pythons to Galápagos goats, these animals are threatening a hostile takeover of the
planet unless we can � nd ways to stop them.
discovermagazine.com/web/invasivesmackdown
PHOTO GALLERY
Treating Disease With Nature’s Deadliest ToxinsDrug companies and scientists are
turning biology’s weapons into lifesaving treatments.
discovermagazine.com/web/deadliestmedicines
WEB EXCLUSIVE Will Nanoparticle Drugs Change the Way We Take Medicine?Researchers are now using tiny, drug-carrying balls of sugar to deliver medication
in novel—and highly useful—ways.
discovermagazine.com/web/nanoparticlemeds
PHOTO GALLERY The NASA School of ArtFor 50 years, artists have had up-close, insider access to the
space program. Here are the results.
discovermagazine.com/web/NASAartschool
THE YEAR IN SCIENCESPECIAL YEAR-END FEATURES ON DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 0
Hints: 1. These plates cover a shy, high-maintenance creature. 2. It hails from the Amazon, but you won’t have much trouble fi nding it elsewhere. 3. It is fl at and round—hence its name. For the answer, see the March issue or visit discovermagazine.com/web/whatisthis. Last month’s answer: page 91.
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Darwin and His Discontents
I have enjoyed the straightforward, clearly
written articles in DISCOVER for years, but
never before have I laughed out loud while
being informed on an important scienti� c
topic. Bruno Maddox’s “Deconstructing
Darwin” [November, page 38] was fascinat-
ing in its attempt to show Charles Darwin
as a scientist of incredible vision and forti-
tude but also as a man with human foibles.
Informative writing is always welcome, but
to be able to enjoy some of the nimblest
prose I’ve read in a long time in the process
was an unexpected treat. It’s as if Dave
Barry suddenly jumped over to serious sci-
ence. What a blast! Cathy Anderson
Tampa, FL
Maddox’s article substantially reduces the
quality of your magazine. Portions of the
article were demeaning to Darwin, spe-
ci� cally the comments about his “dumb
beard” and “dumb theories.” I would also
like to know who keeps calling the theory
“Darwinism” instead of evolution. As an
anthropologist, I never used the term in
my college classes. Maddox gets his his-
tory wrong too. The concept of evolution
was in the air for some time prior to the
publication of On the Origin of Species;
Darwin never “created” it. Maddox has
constructed a straw man that glori� es his
writing and so-called wit at the expense of
a great scientist. John L. Mori
Morton, IL
In “Deconstructing Darwin,” Charles
Darwin is brought “back down to earth”
in hopes of elevating his theory. However,
Darwin was a man, and as such one can-
not expect perfection. Attempting to make
him more human just seems to degrade
his theory. Instead of focusing on the man,
we should be focusing more on educating
those who have yet to accept evolution.
If the proper facts were brought to the
people, it wouldn’t matter whether Darwin
was cast as a simple person or the great
bearded man. Philip Hlasny
Mississauga, Ontario
Human-Neanderthal Relations
“Brothers in Arms” [November, page 46]
suggests that humans cannibalized Nean-
derthals because Neanderthal remains
show scars made by human tools. But
there may be other explanations. A Nean-
derthal could have gotten the short end of
the stick in a � ght over territory or a kill, or
a trade meeting between nomadic groups
could have gone bad. Brandon C. Nuttall
Frankfort, KY
Given humans’ well-known propensity
to view other, different-looking humans
with hatred and disgust, it would be
utterly surprising if early humans reacted
to Neanderthals with anything other
than fear and loathing. I think it’s highly
probable that our ancestors exterminated
them, or at the very least outcompeted
them for resources, and felt no remorse at
their disappearance. Steve Weston
Cottonwood, MN
History tells us that when cultures meet,
they both murder and marry each other,
so probably the few Neanderthals got
blended with the many humans. If they
could mate, though, doesn’t that mean
they were really the same species? Were
Neanderthals really just a race, a biological
variety of humans? Jim Heldberg
Paci� ca, CA
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that
the lack of Neanderthal DNA in the current
gene pool implies only that there were no
fertile offspring from any human/Neander-
thal mating? Given our present-day sexual
habits, I would think it highly likely that
such mating occurred whenever the two
populations met. John Phoenix
Fredericksburg, VA
The editors respond:
Whether or not Neanderthals and humans
were of the same species—a question that
hinges partly on the defi nition of “species”
—closely related organisms, such as
wolves, coyotes, and dogs, can often
produce fertile offspring. Differences in the
number of chromosomes can lead to infer-
tile progeny (like mules, the product of don-
keys and horses), but scientists are unsure
whether Neanderthals had 23 chromosome
pairs like us or 24 like the great apes.
Give W Some Stem Cell Credit
In “The Super Cell” [November, page
30], the author suggests that the Bush
administration’s barring of federal funds for
embryonic stem cell research negatively
impacted progress. Yet in the very next
paragraph she expounds on break-
throughs for obtaining stem cells without
human embryos involved—“even with the
restrictions in place.” A fair article would
have acknowledged that the removal of
federal funds for human embryonic stem
cell research might have spurred these
valuable advances. Scott Anderson
Centennial, CO
Send e-mail to [email protected].
Address letters to DISCOVER, 90 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10011. Include your full name,
address, and daytime phone number.
ERRATA
On page 33 of “The Super Cell” in
the November issue, we misstated
President Bush’s funding restrictions
for embryonic stem cell research.
Funding was permitted, but only for
studying existing cell lines.
On page 59 of “Seeing the Forest
for the Lichens” in the November
issue, we misstated the location
of the Ozark Plateau. It stretches into
the eastern edge of Oklahoma,
not the western edge.
6 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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contributors THE TOP 100 SCIENCE STORIES OF 2009
MICHAEL ABRAMS, a freelance writer in New York, is the author of Birdmen, Batmen and Skyfl yers.
MARCIA BARTUSIAK is a professor of science writing at MIT and author of � ve books. Her latest is The Day We Found the Universe.
ALLISON BOND, a science and medical writer living in New York, has also written for Scientifi c Ameri-can Mind and Popular Science.
JANE BOSVELD, a contributing editor to DISCOVER, is studying for a certi� cate in botany from the New York Botanical Garden.
DARLENE F. CAVALIER is the founder of ScienceCheerleader.com and an advocate for public engagement in science.
JANET FANG is a DISCOVER intern who studies natural history and uses marine geochemistry to research the paleoclimate of Africa.
DOUGLAS FOX is a freelance writer whose work has also appeared in New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, and the 2009 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology.
FRED GUTERL, former deputy editor of Newsweek International, recently joined DISCOVER as a senior editor.
ADAM HADHAZY is a science writer whose work has also appeared in Popular Mechanics and on Scientifi c American’s Web site.
MONICA HEGER is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has also appeared in IEEE Spectrum and USA Today’s Science Fair blog.
JEREMY JACQUOT, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, also writes for Popular Mechanics and The Huffi ngton Post.
SAM KISSINGER is a former DISCOVER intern who is now � ghting childhood illiteracy in Central Arizona.
LINDSEY KONKEL is a freelance journalist who has also written for Popular Science, Natural History, and OnEarth.
JEREMY LABRECQUE is a freelance science writer based in Montreal who also studies spatial patterns in rheumatic diseases.
MICHAEL D. LEMONICK, who was a science writer at Time for more than 20 years, recently joined the staff of Climate Central.
JEANNE LENZER is a frequent contributor to the British Medical Journal who also writes for The Atlantic, Slate, and The Scientist.
HEATHER MAYER is a DISCOVER intern who has reported on health, science, and other topics for CNN.com, Health.com, and the Associated Press.
KATHLEEN MCGOWAN is a former senior editor at Psychology Today and is a contributing editor to DISCOVER.
CYRUS MOULTON has also written for the Island Journal and The Huffi ngton Post.
JILL NEIMARK, who covers science and medicine, received the Autism Society of America award in 2007.
STEPHEN ORNES is a Nashville-based writer who also writes for CR Magazine, Technology Review, and Science News for Kids.
ALINE REYNOLDS is a DISCOVER intern who also writes for Manhattan Media newspapers and Dan’s Papers.
JOCELYN RICE is a science writer in Kansas whose work also appears in Technology Review, CR Magazine, and Popular Mechanics.
JESSICA RUVINSKY is a former editor at DISCOVER who has also written for Science, The Economist, and U.S. News & World Report.
NAYANAH SIVA is a freelance journalist based in London whose work also appears in The Lancet, Nature Medicine, and Science.
ELIZABETH SVOBODA is a Popular Science contributing editor based in San Jose, California.
MEGAN TALKINGTON recently began her career in science journalism after working as a researcher studying ribosomes and viruses.
CARL ZIMMER, a contributing editor to DISCOVER, also writes for The New York Times. His latest book is The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution.
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Editor’s Note
force is causing the expansion of the universe to acceler-
ate, controlling the fate of the entire cosmos. By current
reckoning, dark energy outweighs conventional matter (the
stuff that you and I are made of) by about 15 to 1. At the
other end of the scale, biologists had not yet sequenced
the human genome. Efforts to treat disease with gene
therapy had barely begun; the idea of creating synthetic life,
as Craig Venter is now preparing to do, back then seemed
more like something from the imagination of Mary Shelley.
All of this calls to mind Shakespeare’s oft-quoted words,
in which Hamlet addresses his friend Horatio: “There
are more things in heaven and earth,” he says, “than are
dreamt of in your philosophy.” Time and again we think we
have reached a near-� nal understanding of the world, but
then along comes an out-of-the-blue result that shakes
up our intellectual order all over again. Time and again we
think we have � nally hit an unanswerable question, but then
along comes a clever new experiment that exposes the
hubris of thinking we are the ones who have � nally reached
science’s outermost limits.
But there is also another kind of humility I feel looking
back through the old pages of DISCOVER. For every story
that makes me shake my head in amusement at how little
we knew in 1998, there are others—many others—that
highlight just how slow and incremental the discovery
process is. Efforts to � nd a cure for AIDS. Debates about
the shape and signi� cance of the human evolutionary tree.
The quest to understand the deeper meaning of quantum
physics. The hunt for life on Mars.
As I kept reading I thought of another, very different
Shakespeare quote, this one from A Midsummer Night’s
Dream: “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains/
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend/More than cool
reason ever comprehends.” In the popular stereotype, sci-
entists land solidly, solely on the side of cool reason. Their
actions say otherwise. Anthropologists spend lifetimes
chipping away at African outcrops in hopes of gleaning
a little more information about the origin of our species.
Medical researchers invest years developing vaccines, and
then years more proving that they are safe. The engineers
who labored on Apollo will most likely never live to see
humans set foot on Mars, yet many of them continue to
work tirelessly toward that goal.
These are not acts of cool reason alone. They embody
love and, in truth, more than a bit of madness. And we are all
the better off for it. Read on and I hope you will marvel—as
I constantly do—at what is possible when the world’s great
rational minds embrace a little of their fantastical side.
Corey S. Powell
In the 12 years I
have been at DISCOVER, the scientifi c understanding of
the world has undergone staggering transformations.
A look back through our annual top 100 lists richly illus-
trates those changes. In January 1998 human embry-
onic stem cells had not yet been isolated. There are no
stories about brain-scan studies in that issue, since the
key technology—functional magnetic resonance imag-
ing, or fMRI—was still in its infancy. Also absent: news
about planets orbiting other stars, since only a handful
of them were known at the time.
More sobering are the truly fundamental discoveries that
have taken place in the intervening dozen years. Just
days after the 1998 issue hit newsstands, astronomers
announced the � rst evidence of dark energy. This invisible
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In October DISCOVER teamed up with Shell
and the Stevens Institute of Technology to
explore the future of energy. The resulting
panel discussion, titled “Fossil Fuels in the
Year 2050,” was moderated by DISCOVER’s
editor in chief, Corey S. Powell, and
held on the Stevens campus in Hoboken,
New Jersey.
MIT visiting scientist Richard Sears,
formerly a geophysicist with Shell, out-
lined the challenge ahead. “In the hour
that we’re sitting here tonight, the world
will go through about 150 million gallons
of crude oil, 14 billion cubic feet of natural
gas, and almost 2 billion pounds of coal,”
he said. “Anything that we talk about
moving to in 2050 is going to have to
replace energy use at that scale.”
The panel went on to discuss emerging
technologies such as carbon sequestra-
tion and an interactive, “smart” energy
distribution system. “The smart grid
and some related considerations—
perhaps the o� -peak powering of electric
vehicles—give us an opportunity to
stabilize our power plants, how they
interact with the demand side, and
achieve higher e� ciencies in power pro-
duction,” said Anthony Cugini, director
of the O� ce of Research and Devel-
opment at the National Energy and
Technology Laboratory. “It will have a
signi� cant impact.”
Renewable energy sources will be
important, but “revolutionary devel-
opments do not happen overnight,”
cautioned Turgay Ertekin, a professor
of petroleum and natural gas engi-
neering at Penn State. “We have to look
at all of the possibilities—from nuclear
energy to hydroelectric power to solar
energy —and then make sure that they
take their proper places in the world’s
overall energy budget.”
And Paul Winstanley, director of
energy initiatives at Stevens, empha-
sized that the challenge ahead is not just
one of � nding the right technology. “How
do we sustain the availability of fuel while
we continue to search for credible alter-
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and training and preparing the workforce
for the energy transition we’ve got to
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Vital Signs by H. Lee Kagan
It was near the end of a routine of� ce visit when my patient, Sam,
told me he needed to talk to me about his wife. I closed his chart
and gave him my full attention. “Ruth’s just not the same,” he said.
“She tells me the same thing three times. She forgets when we have
plans to go somewhere. I don’t know, but I think she might have that
Alzheimer’s disease.” Concern and frustration were evident in his
voice. “Can you check her out the next time she’s in here?” I shook
his hand and promised I would.
I had known Sam and Ruth, both in their late seventies, for more
than two decades, and apart from the usual in� rmities of the golden
years, they had managed to dodge serious illness. I saw them both
regularly, and neither one had struck me as having suffered a signi� -
cant decline in intellectual functioning. But it wouldn’t be unusual for
early dementia to sneak in under the radar. Its � rst symptoms may
be subtle and impossible to distinguish from the normal decline in
memory that occurs with aging.
If you ask people over 60 what they dread most, dementia is almost
always in the top three on their list of health concerns. After all, it is
memory that makes us who we are; without it we are forever trapped
in the moment, with no window on the past or the future.
There is some discussion among experts over what exactly consti-
tutes early dementia, but they generally agree that it includes both a
decline in memory (learning and recalling new information like “Where
did I put those keys?” or “What did we do yesterday?”) and a decline
in at least one other area of intellectual functioning. Among those
areas are language (breadth of vocabulary, complexity of sentences),
calculation (balancing a checkbook, � guring a tip), judgment (Is this a
legitimate bill or a mail scam?), and visual-spatial orientation (becom-
ing disoriented while walking or driving). Faulty memory alone is not
enough to diagnose dementia, and the cognitive impairment must be
a decline from a previously higher level of functioning.
Two weeks later as I entered the exam room and opened Ruth’s
chart, I found the note I had written to remind myself to check
her memory. Mindful of her husband’s concerns, I asked her
how things were going.
“Dr. Kagan,” she said, “I’m worried about Sam.”
I waited for more and watched as she frowned.
“I think he might have Alzheimer’s.”
I couldn’t help smiling to myself. After 50 years, is this where
marital bickering had brought them? “What makes you think
that?” I asked.
“Well, I say things and he keeps correcting me. And then he
gets angry. He’s so short-tempered lately. It’s not like him.”
I told her I would look into it the next time I saw her husband.
After reviewing her vital signs and performing a basic physical
exam, I proceeded to test her. Extensive formal testing tools exist
to evaluate memory, but most clinicians rely on the Mini-Mental
Status Exam (MMSE) in their of� ces to screen for dementia. The
test takes just a few minutes and is commonly used for detect-
ing cognitive impairment. It includes a series of questions that
test orientation to place and time, recall, calculation, reading,
and executive function—carrying out a complex task, such as
copying a drawing of two overlapping pentagons.
Amused through much of the testing, Ruth offered an excuse
or a dismissive laugh whenever she failed on some component
of the exam. She was unable to recall any of three named objects
after three minutes. She struggled with simple math and was unable
to spell the word world backward. When we were done, her score was
well below normal, placing her in the early dementia range. Depres-
sion in some cases may mimic dementia, especially when patients
become withdrawn and disengaged, but Ruth showed no evidence of
that melancholic state. A careful neurological examination disclosed
no abnormalities to suggest prior strokes or other disorders, such as
Parkinson’s disease, that may be associated with dementia.
I sent Ruth to have blood drawn and then walked over to my secre-
tary, Carina. I asked her to schedule Ruth for an MRI of the brain.
“What’s the indication?” Carina asked. The radiologists would want
to know what I was looking for.
“Put ‘Evaluate dementia’ on the request.”
She nodded and mumbled, “Oh, that explains her cookies.”
“Her cookies? What about her cookies?” I began to wonder if one
of us was in need of a dementia workup, too.
Carina reminded me that for years Ruth, a kindhearted woman, had
been bringing home-baked cookies to every appointment. Known
After 50 years together, it should be easy to recognize signs that your spouse has Alzheimer’s. But sometimes dementia expresses itself in truly confounding ways.
MIL
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10 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
DV0110VITAL2A_WC 10 11/13/09 1:31:10 PM
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DV21004.indd 1 11/11/09 11:22:48 AM
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DISCOVER & THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
DISCOVERNational Science Foundation
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Moderated by editor in chief Corey S. Powell
E-mail [email protected] for more information
Watch for full coverage online at discovermagazine.com
Carnegie Mellon University
January 28, 2010, at 7
A roundtable discussion of the future of the machine: How will robots transform industry, health care, and warfare? And will they ever be our equals?
Robotics
among my staff as the Cookie Lady, she always made sure everyone
got his or her own little bag. But for the past year, whenever Ruth
came in the staff would politely wait for her to leave and then deposit
the cookies in the trash. “They’re terrible,” she said, “but no one wants
to say anything to her. Too bad. They used to be good.”
After Ruth left I tried one of her dry, tasteless cookies and agreed
that they would not have earned anyone the affectionate nickname
Cookie Lady. I saw it as one more example of how she had changed.
I made sure that her MRI got scheduled.
Within a week I had all of Ruth’s results back. Her scan showed mild
brain atrophy, or shrinkage, a common but very nonspeci� c � nding in
older people. There was no tumor, no evidence of a past stroke, and
no � uid accumulation. Her lab tests showed no metabolic derange-
ments or any de� ciencies, such as inadequate amounts of thyroid
hormone or vitamin B12, that can cause symptoms of dementia.
Based on her impaired cognitive functions and the absence of any
other explanation, I concluded that, unfortunately, Sam was right.
His wife had early Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnosis is a clinical
one, meaning there is no speci� c test, either analyzing the blood or
imaging the brain, that can identify the disease. Indeed, the only way
to con� rm Alzheimer’s conclusively is to biopsy the brain. But this
invasive and risky test is seldom done because the diagnosis can be
reliably established on clinical grounds alone.
That same week I saw Sam in my of� ce and, as I had promised
Ruth, evaluated him. He had no problem with the MMSE, and there
were no neurological abnormalities. What he did have, however, was
a wife of more than half a century who had begun to slip away from
him mentally. It frightened him and left him feeling frustrated and help-
less. He had responded by becoming short-tempered and demand-
ing. But being short-tempered and demanding is not dementia.
Ruth had correctly observed a distinct change in her spouse, and
with her limited capacities she had decided that the problem lay with
him, speculating that he might have early dementia. “He keeps cor-
recting me,” she had complained, demonstrating no insight into her
own diminished mental faculties. Sam, in turn, was showing how
Alzheimer’s disease affects more than the person who has it.
In fact, Ruth’s marked lack of insight into her de� cits is character-
istic of true dementia. Patients forget what they don’t know and so
gain no self-awareness. The corollary is that patients who come to
me worried that they might have Alzheimer’s generally do not. (There
are exceptions, of course.) Alzheimer’s is the illness that is most often
brought to a doctor’s attention by family members and friends rather
than by the patients themselves.
There is currently no way to reverse Alzheimer’s disease. There are,
however, drugs that can treat its symptoms. I prescribed these medi-
cations for Ruth after having a lengthy discussion with her and her
husband about the nature of the illness and what they could expect
down the road. I also suggested an Alzheimer’s support group for
Sam to help him gain some understanding of how his wife’s disease
was affecting him. There was no way to predict the tempo of Ruth’s ill-
ness, but her general health was good, and I told them that a program
of physical activity and mental engagement would work in her favor.
They left my of� ce hand in hand. I was con� dent that after 50 years
they would � nd a way through this, too.
Vital Signs
H. Lee Kagan is an internist in Los Angeles. The cases described in Vital
Signs are real, but patients’ names and other details have been changed.
DV0110VITAL2A_WC 12 11/13/09 1:31:13 PM
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The Brain by Carl ZimmerAre you a man or a mouse? No matter how you answer, you experience fear the same way in your brain.
Fear: See also dread, panic, terror, fright, trepidation, anxiety,
worry, phobia, disquietude, angst, foreboding, the creeps, the
jitters, the heebie-jeebies, freaking out.
Any halfway decent thesaurus will provide a long list of syn-
onyms for fear, and yet they are not very good substitutes. No
one would confuse having the creeps with being terri� ed. It is
strange that we have so many words for fear, when fear is such
a unitary, primal feeling. Perhaps all those synonyms are just lin-
guistic inventions. Perhaps, if we looked inside our brains, we
would just � nd plain old fear.
That is certainly how things seemed in the early 1900s, when
scientists began studying how we come to be scared of things.
They built on Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments on dogs, in which
Pavlov would ring a bell before giving his dogs food. Eventually
they learned to associate the bell with food and began to salivate in
anticipation. Psychologists set up experiments to see if the same
kind of learning could instill fear as well. The implicit assumption
was that fear, like hunger, was a simple provoked response.
In one of the most famous (and infamous) of these experiments,
American psychologist John Watson decided to see if he could
teach an 11-month-old baby named Albert to become scared of
arbitrary things. He presented Albert with a rat, and every time the
baby reached out to touch it, Watson hit a steel bar with a ham-
mer, producing a horrendous clang. After several rounds with the
rat and the bar, Watson then brought out the rat on its own. “The
instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry,” Watson wrote
in a 1920 report. “Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell
over on his left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl
away so rapidly that he was caught with dif� culty before reaching
the edge of the table.”
The “little Albert” study, besides being cruel, was badly
designed. Watson did not control it carefully to rule out a wide
range of possible interpretations. In later decades, other scientists
got much more rigorous in their study of fear, in many cases turn-
ing to rats rather than people as their test subjects. In a typical
experiment, a rat was placed in a cage with a light. At � rst the light
came on a few times so the animal could get accustomed to it.
Later the scientists would turn on the light and then give the rats
a little electric shock. After a few rounds, the rats would respond
fearfully to the light, even if no shock came.
Further research revealed that the amygdala—an almond-shaped
cluster of neurons deep within the brain—plays a pivotal role in the
fear-association response in rats. Brain researchers discovered that
the amygdala orchestrates human fear as well. The sight of a loaded
gun, for example, triggers activity in this part of the brain. People
with an injured amygdala have dampened emotional responses and
so do not learn to fear new things through association. Science had
identi� ed a nexus of fear, it seemed.
Although this line of research yielded some major insights, it had
an obvious shortcoming. In the real world, rats don’t spend their
lives in cages waiting for lights to turn on; these experiments don’t
capture the complex role that fear plays in a wild rat’s life.
In the 1980s Caroline and Robert Blanchard, working together
DIM
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at the University of Hawaii, carried out a pioneering study on
the natural history of fear. They put wild rats in cages and then
brought cats gradually closer to them. At each stage, they care-
fully observed how the rats reacted. The Blanchards found
that the rats responded to each kind of threat with a distinct
set of behaviors.
The � rst kind of behavior is a reaction to a potential threat, in
which a predator isn’t visible but there is good reason to worry
that it might be nearby. A rat might walk into a meadow that looks
free of predators, for example, but that reeks of fresh cat urine. In
such a case, a rat will generally explore the meadow cautiously,
assessing the risk of staying there. A second, more concrete type
of threat arises if a rat spots a cat at the other side of the meadow.
The rat will freeze and then make a choice about what to do next.
It may slink away, or it may remain immobile in hopes that the cat
will eventually wander away without noticing it. Finally, the most
active threat: The cat glances over, notices something, and walks
toward the rat to investigate. At this point, the rat will � ee if it has
an escape route. If the cat gets close, the rat will choose either to
� ght or to run for its life.
Dean Mobbs, a neuroscientist
at the Medical Research Council in
Cambridge, England, wondered if
humans have similarly layered fear
responses. He and his colleagues
were not about to send people into
tiger-infested meadows, so they
designed a clever alternative: They
programmed a survival-themed video game that subjects could
play while lying in an fMRI scanner. The game is similar to Pac-
man. You see yourself as a triangle in a maze and press keys to
maneuver through it. At some point a circle appears. This is a
virtual predator being guided by an arti� cial intelligence program
to seek you out. If the predator captures you, you receive a small
electric shock on the back of your hand.
This deceptively minimalist predator-prey game triggers some
remarkably intense feelings. Mobbs measured the skin conduc-
tance of his players by rigging them up to a device similar to a lie
detector. He found that when the predator was bearing down on
players, they often experienced the same changes to their skin
as those seen in people having panic attacks. Mobbs unleashed
two kinds of predators on his players, a less adept one that was
easy to escape, and a smarter one that was more likely to capture
its victim. When people were chased by the better predator, they
showed a stronger panic response in their skin, and they also
crashed into the walls of the maze more often.
Meanwhile, striking changes were happening inside the brains
of the players. The predators would � rst appear on the far side
of the maze. While they remained at a distance, the same brain
regions tended to become active in the players, a network that
included parts of the amygdala as well as some other structures in
the front of the brain. But when the predator was closing in, those
brain regions shut down and a network of previously quiet regions
farther back in the midbrain became active.
Mobbs’s results mesh nicely not only with the work of the
Blanchards but also with some other, more recent studies of rat
neurology. For example, one of the midbrain regions that Mobbs
and his colleagues observed becoming active in humans when
a “predator” was close is an area called the periaqueductal gray
region. This area showed higher activity in the people who
crashed into the walls more often, providing further evidence that
it plays an important role in panic. Researchers have explored the
anatomy of fear more directly in rats; by manipulating different
areas of the rat brain, they are able to alter parts of the stan-
dard fear-driven sequence of behavior. When neuroscientists put
electrodes into the periaqueductal gray region of rat brains and
stimulated the neurons there, the creatures immediately started
to run and jump uncontrollably.
Fear, the new results suggest, is not a single thing after all. Rath-
er, it is a complex, ever-changing strategy mammal brains deploy
in order to cope with danger. When a predator is off in the distance,
its prey—whether rat or human—powers up a forebrain network.
The network primes the body, raising the heartbeat and preparing
it for fast action. At the same time, the forebrain network sharpens
the brain’s attention to the outside world, evaluating threats, moni-
toring subtle changes, and running through possible responses.
Another important job it performs is keeping the midbrain network
shut down so that, instead of � eeing at top speed, a prey ani-
mal keeps very still at � rst. As the predator gets closer, however,
the forebrain’s grip on the midbrain loosens. Now the midbrain
becomes active, orchestrating a powerful, quick response: � ght or
� ight. At the same time it shuts down the slower, more deliberative
forebrain. This is no time for thinking.
It may be unsettling to � nd that our brains work so much like a
rat’s. But the amygdala and the periaqueductal gray are ancient
parts of the brain, dating back hundreds of millions of years. Our
small hominid ancestors probably faced the same kinds of threats
that baboons do today from leopards, eagles, and other predators.
Even after we evolved the ability to use weapons and became
predators ourselves, this ancient brain circuit still offered a useful
defense against members of our own species.
Unfortunately, our exquisitely sophisticated brains may make
this predator-defense circuit vulnerable to mis� ring. Instead of
monitoring just the threats right in front of us, we can also imagine
threats that do not exist. Feeding this imagination into the early-
warning system may lead to crippling chronic anxiety. In other
cases, people may not be able to keep their periaqueductal gray
and other midbrain regions under control. As we perceive preda-
tors getting closer, our brains normally make the switch from the
forebrain to the midbrain regions. People who suffer panic dis-
orders may misjudge threats, seeing them as far more imminent
than they really are.
To test these possibilities, Mobbs and his colleagues are begin-
ning to study people who suffer from fear-related disorders as they
play the predator game. Such work may not uncover a biological
distinction between angst and the heebie-jeebies, but it may show
how much better we can understand ourselves—and tame our inner
demons—once we appreciate the many dimensions of fear.
Fear, the new results suggest, is not a single thing after all. It is a complex, ever-changing strategy
mammal brains deploy in order to cope with danger.
The Brain by Carl Zimmer
16 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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1The question will not go away:
Do vaccines cause autism?
Some 1 million to 1.5 million
adults and children in the
United States have received
autism diagnoses, and there is
no clear insight into its causes.
What surprises many scientists
is that their � ndings against a
vaccine connection keep fail-
ing to quell the debate, giving
the antivaccine movement the
potential to become a genuine
public-health problem.
In February the U.S. Court
of Federal Claims attempted
to provide some clarity, ruling
that a widely used vaccine
and a vaccine preservative,
both targets of concern over
the past decade, do not cause
autism spectrum disorders.
That decision put a stamp
of approval on what multiple
peer-reviewed studies have
concluded for years: The MMR
(measles-mumps-rubella)
vaccine and the mercury
additive thimerosal (which
was removed from nearly all
vaccines by 2001) are not
responsible for the rise in
autism diagnoses. “I think
the tide clearly turned this
year, and the court decision,
more than anything else, was
responsible,” says Paul Of� t,
a pediatrician at the Children’s
Hospital of Philadelphia and
a vocal vaccine advocate. “It
showed that good science
does win in the end.”
Environmental attor-
ney Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
responded to the ruling by
Y E A R I N S C I E N C E 2 0 0 9
THE
DISCOVERIESTHAT ARECHANGING
THE WORLD
1OO
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NIC
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T E X T B Y A N D R E W G R A N T
VACCINE PHOBIA BECOMES A PUBLIC-HEALTH THREAT
comparing government-spon-
sored vaccine safety studies to
cigarette research conducted
by Big Tobacco. In the ruling’s
wake, conspiracy theories
and false claims continued to
dominate some autism Internet
forums, while television shows
featured lengthy interviews
with antivaccine stalwarts.
Fueling all this confusion
is the complicated nature
of autism, which encom-
passes a range of neurologi-
cal disorders characterized
by “social impairments,
communication dif� culties,
and restricted, repetitive,
and stereotyped patterns of
behavior,” according to the
National Institutes of Health
(NIH). Those symptoms
usually appear at around
18 months of age, precisely
when children receive many
of their vaccinations.
In October Michael D. Kogan
of the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Ser-
vices (HHS) and colleagues
announced that about 1 of
every 91 American children
has a disorder on the autism
spectrum. A 2008 study
by the California Depart-
ment of Public Health found
that the number of chil-
dren receiving services for
autism in the state has risen
steadily, despite a decrease
to trace levels of mercury
in their inoculations. Many
experts attribute the growing
prevalence to new diagnosis
guidelines and increased
awareness among doctors.
Meanwhile, the reluctance
of some parents to immunize
their children can lead to the
return of vaccine-preventable
diseases such as a measles,
which broke out this past
summer in Brooklyn, New
York. According to Christo-
pher Zimmerman, medical
director of the New York
City Health Department’s
Bureau of Immunization, the
virus spread quickly among
children who were not fully
vaccinated, including those
whose parents put off the
shots because of concern
about the autism-vaccine link.
“Measles can be a serious
and life-threatening disease,”
he says. “Parents are putting
their children at risk by not
vaccinating on time.” Across
the United States, reported
measles cases shot up from
43 in 2007 to 140 in 2008,
and more than 90 percent of
those reported in 2008 were
among children who were
unvaccinated or had unknown
vaccination status.
In the midst of the ongoing
controversy, scientists have
made notable progress in
understanding autism. A May
study in Nature found that 65
percent of autistic children
M E D I C I N E·
share a set of mutations that
may regulate genes known
to in� uence communication
among brain cells. Many sci-
entists say that environmental
exposures, perhaps even in
the womb, may activate such
genetic vulnerabilities. Over the
past three years the NIH has
spent about $100 million annu-
ally on autism research. One
possible trigger it has studied
exhaustively and dismissed:
vaccines. “Exploring the broad
question of vaccines and
autism is not fruitful. The ques-
tions have been answered,”
says University of Utah pedia-
trician Andrew Pavia, chairman
of the vaccine-safety working
group at HHS.
Pavia nevertheless believes
it would be worth further
investigating a link between
vaccines and autism once
speci� c biological pathways
are identi� ed. To that end,
his committee recommends
researching whether some
children, including those who
may be genetically predis-
posed to autism, are at higher
risk following certain vaccina-
tions but in numbers too small
to have shown up in previously.
“There are some who sug-
gest that scientists shouldn’t
bring up vaccines and autism
in the same breath, but I think
we should keep an open mind
until we understand the biol-
ogy better,” Pavia says. Of� t
disagrees. The evidence has
spoken, he argues, and pur-
suing additional research only
For years some families of
autistic adults and children have
blamed a mercury preservative
in vaccines for the disorder.
wastes resources and gives
false hope. “Parents are being
horribly misled by leaving the
door open,” he says.
One positive side effect of
the media frenzy is that autism
science is � nally getting its
due. In September the NIH
committed nearly $100 million
in additional funding from the
stimulus package to study-
ing autism. Scientists also
hope to gain crucial insights
into autism’s risk factors from
several large new studies,
including the federally funded
Early Autism Risk Longitudinal
Investigation, which will enroll
1,200 mothers of autistic
children at the start of a sub-
sequent pregnancy and then
track the newborn child’s � rst
three years of development.
“This issue will not go
away until there is a clear
cause,” Of� t says. “But the
important story you never
hear is that the research is
evolving very quickly.”
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 19
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AT
K. IN
SE
T: N
AS
A/M
SF
C
2S P A C EÚ
T E X T B Y F R E D G U T E R L
Norman Augustine is a
well-known critic of wasteful
government programs. As for-
mer CEO of Lockheed Martin,
he is also a grizzled veteran
of the aerospace industry.
That explains why the Obama
administration chose Augus-
tine to head a commission on
the future of NASA’s human
space� ight program—and
why the space agency was so
shaken by his conclusion.
NASA “appears to be on
an unsustainable trajectory,”
Augustine and company
began their report. Its plan to
return to the moon by 2020 is
out of the question. To keep
the International Space Station
aloft past 2016 (the program’s
premature end date) and
maintain a viable human space
exploration program, NASA
will have to scrape up another
$3 billion per year—hard to
imagine in a time of trillion-
dollar de� cits. “The choice is
to lower aspirations or increase
the budget,” says John Logs-
don, a space policy expert at
George Washington University.
One way to cut costs,
cautiously endorsed by
Augustine’s commission, is to
give private � rms a bigger role
in providing launch services.
Contractors like Lockheed
Martin and Boeing have
always built the hardware, but
NASA has kept close watch
on each step in design and
construction. That method
worked for the Apollo program,
but it has been a disaster ever
since. For instance, the space
shuttle, originally intended to
provide cheap and reliable
transport to low Earth orbit,
has turned out to be roughly
1,000 times more dangerous
and 100 times more costly to
launch than � rst promised.
In classic bureaucratic style,
NASA diluted the original idea
by trying to make the shuttle
all things to all people: a satel-
lite launcher for the military
as well as a pickup truck to
space for the civilian program.
Private companies, the
panel’s reasoning goes, would
be better at reining in costs
and keeping their eye on the
ball. In addition, NASA would
not have to pay the huge
up-front costs of development
and construction. Instead, it
would give seed money to
private � rms and guarantee
a market for their services.
NASA has already begun to
work this way in the develop-
ment of a cargo vessel for the
space station. (When the shut-
tle is mothballed, currently set
for the end of 2010, NASA will
have to rely on Russia’s Soyuz
spaceship to get astronauts to
the station.) The agency has
given small grants to SpaceX,
the aerospace � rm founded
by PayPal mogul Elon Musk,
and Orbital Sciences, a � rm
that builds missile-defense
systems; each company is
developing its own launchers
and capsules.
Pursuing this path would
mark a huge change in NASA’s
way of doing business. It
would mean entrusting the
safety of its crew to third
parties. In terms of hardware,
though, it would be a cinch.
SpaceX and Orbital rockets
could accommodate astro-
nauts with minor modi� ca-
tions. And scrapping NASA’s
new Ares I booster program
could save billions of dollars
over the next few years. “We
think this is the time to create
a market for commercial � rms
to transport both cargo and
humans between the Earth
and low Earth orbit,” Augustine
said at a press conference
accompanying the report’s
release. “NASA would be bet-
ter served to spend its money
on going beyond Earth orbit
rather than running a trucking
service to low Earth orbit.”
That would free the agency
to focus resources on the Ares
V rocket—now on the drawing
board—or another heavy-lift
rocket that could carry crews
into deep space. Mars is “the
NASA BRACES FOR COURSE CORRECTION
Ground test and
artist’s mock-up
(inset) of NASA’s
Ares I rocket,
which is fi ve
years behind
schedule. It may
be replaced with
private rockets.
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ultimate destination” for
human exploration, but the
commission recommends
� rst tackling more attain-
able yet exciting intermedi-
ate goals, such as visiting
asteroids and the two small
Martian moons.
If NASA cannot � nd a
way to squeeze more out
of its budget, it will have to
deep-six some programs.
A big question mark is the
fate of the space station.
Terminating the program
early in 2016, as currently
scheduled, would help
release NASA from its
� scal straitjacket, but it
would “signi� cantly impair
U.S. ability to develop and
lead future international
space� ight partnerships”
while wasting 25 years of
investment, Augustine’s
group warns. Europe, in
particular, would not take a
cancellation kindly, having
already committed billions
of euros for the Columbus
space-station module. And
the robotic exploration pro-
gram is already providing a
big bang for NASA’s buck,
discovering hidden water
on the moon, possible signs
of life on Mars, and tropical
storms on Titan just in the
past year (see pages 35,
38, and 57, respectively).
Cutting future unmanned
missions would cause
uproar among the scienti� c
community while freeing up
only modest funds.
NASA is in a tough spot.
But from necessity, it is
poised to reinvent itself.
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CR
ED
IT
A N T H R O P O L O G YL
T E X T B Y J I L L N E I M A R K
Anthropologists are suddenly
tearing up their long-held origin
tale—that modern humans
evolved from hunched, proto-
human apes roaming the
wide-open savannas of old.
The discovery of a 4.4-mil-
lion-year-old hominid named
Ardipithecus ramidus (fondly
shortened to “Ardi”) suggests
that for a stretch during the
early Pliocene, our ancestors
instead lived in lush wood-
lands and walked on two feet.
In fact, Ardi’s unexpected traits
put to rest the whole idea of a
chimplike missing link at the
root of the human family tree.
Ardi and fossil bones from
at least 35 other children and
adults were uncovered in the
Afar desert in Ethiopia by
the Middle Awash research
group. Toiling in volcanic ash,
the group collected fossil-
ized remains of more than
6,000 creatures ranging from
antelopes to bats, as well as
seeds and geologic samples.
“This gave us a series of
fantastic, high-resolution
snapshots across an ancient
landscape—a true picture of
what Ardi’s habitat was like,”
says University of California
at Berkeley paleoanthropolo-
gist Tim White, a codirector of
the team. “It tells us that long
before hominids developed
tools or big brains or ranged
3MEET YOUR NEW ANCESTOR
the open savanna, they were
walking upright.” The evi-
dence suggests Ardipithecus
is ancestral to the early homi-
nid Australopithecus, widely
considered a forerunner of our
own genus, Homo.
White’s � ndings, published
alongside related articles from
more than 40 researchers,
appeared in a special issue of
Science in October. Together
they present the picture of a
fantastical, mosaic hominid
—one with pelvis and feet
adapted for walking but with a
divergent big toe splayed out
like those of modern apes for
climbing and grasping. She
had a small brain, about the
size of a chimp’s but posi-
tioned more like a human’s.
Most striking, Ardi’s upper
canine teeth were close in size
to those of modern humans.
Analysis of tooth enamel sug-
gests Ardi ate nuts, fruits, and
tubers, supplemented by small
mammals and bird eggs.
“How does one account
for this strange creature?”
White asks. In one of the
other Science papers, noted
biological anthropologist C.
Owen Lovejoy of Kent State
University speculates that
pair-bonding may have been
the trigger. Perhaps females
began to prefer males who
could walk, gather food, and
carry it home, he suggests.
Of course, given the conten-
tious nature of the � eld, some
experts insist the jury is still
out on Ardi’s evolutionary role.
But to White, the evidence
overwhelmingly places her
at “the � rst phase of human
evolution.” Move over, Lucy.
Ardi may just be the hominid
� nd of this century.
Ardi weighed
about 110
pounds and
stood four
feet high. Her
hand was
longer than
a human’s,
but her gait
probably
resembled
our own.
T. W
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B I O L O G Y q
4
T E X T B Y M O N I C A H E G E R
For eight years, stem
cell researchers chafed at
restrictions limiting govern-
ment funding to a handful of
preexisting cell lines. Then
on March 9, 2009, President
Obama signed an executive
order freeing federal funds for
work on any type of stem cell,
including cells derived from
unused embryos at in vitro
fertilization clinics. Stem cell
research, already in high gear,
has taken off since then.
The � rst clinical trial using
embryonic stem cells to treat
paralysis was approved by
the Food and Drug Admin-
istration even before the
new order. At the same
time, other researchers have
found ways to bypass the
embryo, spurred in part by
the earlier restrictions. Recent
studies have shown how to
reprogram adult cells into
non-embryonic stem cell
lines called induced pluripo-
tent stem cells—“pluri potent”
meaning that they could
give rise to almost any cat-
egory of cell.
• In January, the FDA gave
the biotech company Geron a
green light for the � rst human
clinical trial of a paralysis
treatment using embryonic
stem cells. The trial is based
on work from University of
California at Irvine neuro-
scientist Hans Keirstead,
who enabled paralyzed rats
to walk again by coaxing
embryonic stem cells to dif-
ferentiate into the spinal cord
cells that the rats had lost
during injury.
• In March, a University of
Wisconsin team repro-
grammed skin � broblasts
into embryonic stem cells
without incorporating the viral
or other foreign DNA that can
lead to complications like
cancer. Instead of manipulat-
ing the cells with a virus, as
other researchers had done,
the Wisconsin team used so-
called circular DNA, loops of
DNA that exist outside of the
primary genome. “When the
cells proliferate, they lose the
circular DNA naturally because
it’s not very stable,” says Jun-
ying Yu of Cellular Dynamics,
coauthor of the study.
• This summer, three separate
teams of researchers—two
in China, one in California—
reported the birth of healthy
mice generated solely from
induced pluripotent cells. The
most proli� c cell line, made at
the Scripps Research Institute
in La Jolla, produced live baby
mice 13 percent of the time.
• Combining stem cells with
gene therapy, an international
collaboration announced the
success of a pilot study to
treat X-linked adrenoleuko-
dystrophy (ALD), a fatal brain
disease caused by a mutation
of the gene coding for the
ALD protein. As reported
in Science in November,
the researchers removed
patients’ bone marrow (which
contained stem cells with the
damaged gene) and repaired
the cells with healthy genes
delivered by a retrovirus. After
bone marrow containing the
STEM CELL SCIENCE TAKES OFF
defective gene was eradi-
cated with chemotherapy,
stem cells with the healthy
gene were transplanted back
into the patients, and the
progression of the disease
was stopped.
The ultimate goal is to
produce pluripotent cells
by purely chemical means
within the body to regenerate
damaged parts and to treat
disease.
A colony of
induced pluripotent
stem cells used
to treat Fanconi
anemia.
PH
OT
O C
OU
RT
ES
Y O
F J
UA
N C
AR
LO
S IZ
PIS
UA
BE
LM
ON
TE
, S
ALK
IN
ST
ITU
TE
FO
R B
IOLO
GIC
AL S
TU
DIE
S A
ND
CE
NT
ER
OF
RE
GE
NE
RAT
IVE
ME
DIC
INE
, B
AR
CE
LO
NA
DV0110SECI11A6B11_WC 23 11/13/09 8:48:35 PM
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What’s so interesting about
the Lyman-alpha blobs?
I would call them building
blocks of galaxies, mostly gas
and stars. That’s where the
Lyman-alpha radiation comes
from: the glowing hydrogen
gas that’s being lit up by the
young stars that are in these
building blocks. The question
we are trying to get at is, as
you go fainter, how many more
of them are there? It turns out
that the number of objects
goes up steeply: When you go
a factor of 10 fainter, you see
100 times as many objects.
When we study these early
objects, what do we learn?
We know a lot about our
galaxy today—chemical abun-
dance, how it has been built
up over time. There’s a “fossil
record” in our galaxy of what
happened. But it would be
great to see a movie of what
was going on deep in the past.
In astronomy, we can do that.
We can look back and observe
the universe at that time.
How much do we know
about conditions in the very
early universe?
At the beginning there was so
much energy that electrons
and protons went their own
way. Then, 400,000 years after
the Big Bang, the universe
cooled to the point where
hydrogen gas could exist.
From that point it was electri-
cally neutral, until something
came along to light it up.
People used to think, well,
maybe quasars did it, but there
just weren’t enough of them
around. Then they said maybe
it was young galaxies.
So now you think the fi rst
galaxies sculpted the
cosmos, paving the way for
more galaxies to evolve?
We’ve now found about 50 of
these very, very faint building
blocks of galaxies. We have a
big enough sample to say we
know how common they are.
Astronomer ALAN DRESSLER
Sets Off on the Trail of the
First Galaxies in the Universe
text by FRED GUTERL photograph by SPENCER LOWELL
Why are you interested in
what happened 12 billion
years ago?
Our research program started
with galaxies: Why are there
so many different types, what
are their histories, and how
did we get the structures we
see today—spiral, elliptical,
and so forth? Why are they
so different? We have a very
tentative grasp on that.
How did your Carnegie col-
league fi nd Himiko?
The technique by which we’re
seeing this is Lyman-alpha
emission. The light comes out
in the ultraviolet, then there’s
this big redshift [as the light
is stretched by the expan-
sion of the universe], which
puts it in the more detectable,
far-red part of the spectrum.
Himiko came out of a survey of
What did the universe look like in its toddler years? To fi nd out,
astronomer Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Institution of Wash-
ington and his team are training some of the world’s largest
telescopes on a small swath of sky in the constellation Sextans.
Their aim is to detect “Lyman-alpha emitters,” distant gas clouds
enclosing primordial stars. The blobs hail from a crucial moment
when those fi rst stars fl ooded the cosmos with energy, setting
off a chain of events that led to the formation of modern galaxies.
Last year Dressler’s colleague Masami Ouchi found the king of
the blobs: Nicknamed Himiko, it is 55,000 light-years in diameter,
making it the largest object ever seen so early in the universe.
Dressler spoke with DISCOVER about what it all means.
Lyman-alpha objects. Out of all
those things that Masami was
doing, this rather extraordinary
object stood out.
What is Himiko?
I don’t know. I don’t think we
have a good explanation for
it—and that was what was
interesting about it. It is a
unique object in terms of size
and output, which is not the
way my scienti� c inclinations
tend to go. What we’ve really
been trying to do is to � nd the
more typical galaxies from the
era about a billion years after
the Big Bang. To do that, we
have to tune up an instrument
and expose it for 20 hours
under extraordinary conditions.
My colleague Crystal Martin
and I are trying to push a factor
of 10 times fainter than what
people had been doing.
I N T E R V I E W±
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It looks like there are enough
of them to explain why the uni-
verse went from being neutral
to being full of ionized gas.
What are you trying to
understand now about these
galactic building blocks?
We’re trying to � gure out how
massive they are, how they
spin, what their structures and
compositions are, so we’ll
know how the � rst heavy ele-
ments started to come about.
And then we’ll start to under-
stand the crazy diversity of
modern galaxies?
Yes. The interaction among
these building blocks deter-
mines what shape a galaxy
takes. The universe started off
smooth, and then it began to
get lumpy. Our best bet is that
in the places where the density
of the blobs is highest, they
merge together very early and
form stars more rapidly, creat-
ing elliptical galaxies. In the
places that are less dense the
building blocks take longer to
develop; those come together
later and make spirals.
What’s next—will you look
even further back in time?
No. You don’t really want to
look further. You want a more
complete picture of the aver-
age time, rather than always
going for the big, “Oh, I’ve
got the most distant object in
the universe.” That’s kind of
meaningless, actually.
Because not much was hap-
pening that early?
If you’ve got a picture of your
child at 6 months, you’re
not going to learn a lot from
another one from when she
was 5 months and 13 days.
What you want to see is when
things are changing. Astrono-
mers are always selling the idea
that we’ve pushed further than
ever before, but it’s a bit of a
fraud. We’ve seen something,
but it’s very sketchy. What
we’re mostly aiming toward is
to get a picture of how ordinary
galaxies come about.
What’s next?
We have pushed Magellan
[the 6.5-meter telescope in
Chile] as much as we could.
I am working toward using
the James Webb Space
Telescope—the Hubble
replacement that should be
up by 2014—to look at the
formation of galaxies in much
greater detail. We’ll get a � rst
look at galaxies forming in the
� rst billion years.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 25
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When swine fl u emerged
in Mexico last April, it was
dubbed a “killer virus”
because of its apparent high
mortality rate. By mid-June
the � u had spread to 73 other
countries, infecting 30,000
people and prompting the
World Health Organization to
issue its highest warning, a
Phase 6 pandemic alert. In
the United States, concern
took off in late August, when
the President’s Council of
Advisors on Science and
Technology said the virus
could infect up to 150
million Americans and kill
30,000 to 90,000. And then,
on October 23, President
Obama declared swine � u a
national emergency, noting
that “the potential exists for
the pandemic to overburden
health-care resources in
some localities.”
The current strain of swine
� u, formally known as the
2009 H1N1 � u, is a mutated
cousin of the 1918 Span-
ish � u, which affected both
humans and pigs. That virus
took 50 million to 100 million
lives worldwide, according
to Jeffery Taubenberger, the
pathologist who sequenced
its entire genome.
Fears that this year’s virus
would behave like its 1918
relative were heightened
when two characteristics of
the new � u were noted as
similar to the earlier pan-
6SWINE FLU OUTBREAKSWEEPS THE GLOBE
demic. First, cases of swine
� u broke out before the usual
� u season; and second, a
disproportionate number of
young people were reported
to be sickened by it.
By September � ve pharma-
ceutical companies had prom-
ised to produce 250 million
doses of 2009 H1N1 vaccines,
and experts assured the public
that these inoculations were
safe. But as of the � rst week
of November, only 26 million
doses had been distributed to
hospitals and doctors’ of� ces.
Nancy Cox, head of the
� u division at the Centers
T E X T B Y J E A N N E L E N Z E R
for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), says that
her group is preparing for the
worst. “In certain situations
such as 1918, there was a
rather mild spring season of
disease followed by a much
more severe fall wave,” she
says. “There’s a seasonality
component that caused the
virus to spread more rapidly
and more deeply into the
population.”
An estimated 22 mil-
lion American citizens were
infected with the new H1N1
virus in the months before
Obama declared the national
emergency, according to the
CDC, and about 4,000 of
those people died. Each year
seasonal � u kills approxi-
mately 35,000 people in the
United States alone. Without
extensive immunization,
the H1N1 � u is on track to
surpass that toll, says Dean
Blumberg, associate profes-
sor of pediatric infectious
disease at the University of
California at Davis Children’s
Hospital. Because this virus
is so novel, few people
are protected by preexist-
ing immunity. “Pretty much
everyone is going to get it,”
Blumberg says, “so we’re
expecting more deaths and
complications.”
A Mexico City subway
in the midst of the H1N1
outbreak last May.
M E D I C I N E·
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7THE GRAPHENEREVOLUTION
Under a transmission electron microscope it looks deceptively
simple: a grid of hexa gons resembling a volleyball net or a section of
chicken wire. But graphene, a form of carbon that can be produced
in sheets only one atom thick, seems poised to shake up the world
of electronics. Within � ve years, it could begin powering faster and
better transistors, computer chips, and LCD screens, according to
researchers who are smitten with this new supermaterial.
Graphene’s standout trait is its uncanny facility with electrons,
which can travel much more quickly through it than they can
through silicon. As a result, graphene-based computer chips
could be thousands of times as ef� cient as existing ones. “What
limits conductivity in a normal material is that electrons will scat-
ter,” says Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at MIT. “But with
graphene the electrons can travel very long distances without
scattering. It’s like the thinnest, most stable electrical conducting
framework you can think of.”
In 2009 another MIT researcher, Tomas Palacios, devised a
graphene chip that doubles the frequency of an electromagnetic
signal. Using multiple chips could make the outgoing signal many
times higher in frequency than the original. Because frequency
determines the clock speed of the chip, boosting it enables faster T E X T B Y E L I Z A B E T H S V O B O D A
transfer of data through the chip. Graphene’s extreme thinness
means that it is also practically transparent, making it ideal for
transmitting signals in devices containing solar cells or LEDs.
The big limitation of graphene is that it is not a true semicon-
ductor. Unlike silicon, it cannot be switched on and off to create
circuits, which will limit its use in electronics. “In mainstream
digital applications, you will not see graphene displace silicon,”
Columbia University electrical engineer Ken Shepard insists. But
other researchers are already expanding graphene’s capabilities.
In June materials scientist Feng Wang of the University of Califor-
nia at Berkeley announced a method to tune the material electri-
cally to give it switching properties. That would enable graphene
to form extremely small, fast transistors.
Even without switching, Strano thinks graphene will � nd many
uses—as a � exible conductor in thin-� lm batteries or roll-up LCD
screens, for instance. “I’m most excited about the applications
we have yet to discover,” he says. “Graphene is an out-of-the-box
material, so we shouldn’t try to hammer it into existing boxes.”
T E C H N O L O G YÔ
Graphene’s atom-thin sheets,
shown here in an artist’s
rendering, let electrons pass
through rapidly.
JA
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EARTH-LIKE WORLDS
COME INTO VIEWIn the race to fi nd planets around other stars, the grand
prize would be to � nd a world like Earth orbiting a star like
the sun—and astronomers closed in on that trophy in 2009.
The � rst known exoplanets were huge and gassy. Then in
February a European group led by Alain Léger of the Institut
d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Paris and Daniel Rouan of the
Paris Observatory used the Corot space observatory to � nd
a planet less than twice the diameter of Earth, the smallest
con� rmed exoplanet ever seen.
Actually, “seen” is misleading. What Corot detected was the
subtle, repeated dimming of the star Corot-7, 500 light-years
away in the constellation Monoceros. This dimming, the team
concluded, was caused by a planet orbiting so that it passed
directly between the parent star and Earth, a so-called transit.
“They’ve gone to great lengths to rule out any other explana-
tions,” says David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics, a friendly rival of the Corot scientists.
The amount of dimming—less than one-thirtieth of a percent
—tells the astronomers that their new world, provisionally
named Corot-7b, is about 15,000 miles wide. Its “year” is just
20.4 hours long because it orbits so close to its star, with day-
time temperatures nearing 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. By Sep-
tember, Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory had weighed
Corot-7b. Using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet
Searcher, or HARPS, at the European Southern Observatory
in Chile, his team measured the planet’s gravitational in� uence
on its parent star. The verdict: The planet is � ve times the mass
of Earth and has about the same density, suggesting it is made
of rock. In raw form, the new planet resembles our own world.
Other enticing discoveries soon followed. Planet hunter
Michel Mayor of Geneva University trained HARPS on the near-
by star Gliese 581, 20 light-years away, and in April reported
that it, too, has a little planet, possibly smaller than Corot-7b.
The same set of observations indicated that another of Gliese
581’s planets—this one seven times the mass of Earth—orbits
at the right distance for liquid water, making it the � rst alien
world that could plausibly support life. In October the HARPS
scientists announced that about 40 percent of the sunlike stars
they have examined have small, potentially Earth-like com-
panions. Also that month, Queloz’s team described a second
super-Earth circling Corot-7. “Low-mass planets are every-
where, basically,” Mayor’s coworker Stephane Udry declared.
And the real jackpot may not be far off. In March NASA’s
Kepler satellite went into an unusual, Earth-trailing orbit looking
for transiting planets. Its telescope is bigger than Corot’s, its orbit
is more stable, and it is slated to scan 100,000 stars, while Corot
is limited to 12,000. “If other Earths are out there,” says Kepler
team member Charbonneau, “we’re going to � nd them.”
T E X T B Y M I C H A E L D . L E M O N I C K
An artist’s vision of a
boiling lava sea covering
the rocky planet Corot-7b. ES
O/L
. C
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9
Coal is a dirty business, one
of the leading sources of car-
bon emissions in the United
States. But coal is also a big
business, generating 51 per-
cent of the nation’s electricity.
With that in mind, in June the
Obama administration revived
FutureGen, an advanced-tech-
nology coal-� red power plant
axed by the previous adminis-
tration in 2008. By burying
60 percent of its carbon diox-
ide emissions deep under-
ground, the 275-megawatt
FutureGen plant, to be built in
Mattoon, Illinois, seeks to show
that coal can be, if not exactly
clean, then at least cleaner.
Once FutureGen is up and
running—now scheduled to
happen in 2014—the carbon
dioxide gas it produces will
be siphoned off, compressed
T E X T B Y E L I Z A S T R I C K L A N D
into a near-liquid state, and
piped at least a mile down into
porous sandstone capped by
a layer of impermeable shale.
Engineers will essentially be
trying to duplicate the geologic
circumstances that trapped
natural gas deposits under-
ground for millions of years.
Energy Secretary Steven
Chu has called FutureGen “a
� agship facility” that will dem-
onstrate how to capture and
store carbon on a commercial
scale; that technology would
allow us to rein in greenhouse-
gas emissions while still burn-
ing coal. The project could
also help spur other proposals
E N E R G Yp
for sequestering human-
generated carbon (see above).
But FutureGen has drawn
criticism from left and right.
Some environmentalists say
America should shift from coal-
generated electricity entirely;
others believe the goal of cap-
turing 60 percent of emissions
is too modest. Meanwhile,
some � scal conservatives
disapprove of spending so
much money (the Department
of Energy has committed
$1 billion) on an unproven
technology for an established
industry. Their nickname for
the behind-schedule and over-
budget project: NeverGen.
EXPERIMENTAL POWER PLANT TAKES THE CO2 OUT
H o w t o S ta s h t h e C a r b o n
1. CAPTURE IT AT THE SOURCE
A coal-fi red power plant in Spremberg, Germany, is using the
same carbon capture and storage method planned for Future-
Gen. Engineers are having no trouble capturing the carbon diox-
ide, but efforts to store it in underground rock formations in
eastern Germany have run into local opposition.
2. GRAB IT WITH ARTIFICIAL TREES
To corral widely dispersed CO2 emissions from cars, “artifi cial
trees”—towers fi lled with carbon-absorbing materials—could line
roadways, pulling the gas from the air and compressing it into
a storable form. Several companies, including Global Research
Technologies in Tucson, are testing prototypes.
3. BURY IT UNDER THE SEA
Some research groups have tried fertilizing the ocean with
iron to encourage massive plankton blooms that suck carbon
dioxide from the air. When the plankton dies and sinks to the
seafl oor, it should bury the carbon, but early results have not
been impressive. Proposals to pump CO2 directly to the ocean
bottom also seem unlikely to move forward, as the piped-in
carbon could have nasty environmental consequences.
4. TURN IT INTO CHARCOAL
Wood or other biomass heated slowly in a chamber without
oxygen will transform into charcoal that does not decompose
for thousands of years. In addition to locking away carbon, this
“biochar” makes a good fertilizer. Carbonscape in New Zealand
and a few other companies are now working on economical
biochar-producing ovens.
5. TURN IT INTO ROCK
Certain types of minerals naturally combine with carbon diox-
ide. In the right locations, CO2 injected into the ground at high
pressure would react with those minerals to form stable car-
bonate rock. This approach is currently being tested in Oman
and at other sites around the world.
FR
AN
S L
AN
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G/C
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deal with immediate threats.
It’s not very good at deal-
ing with gradually unfolding
threats, like in� ating market
bubbles or global climate
change. The smiling Bernie
Madoff doesn’t seem scary,
even though he should. He’s
giving impossible returns year
after year, but it’s not the kind
of thing that triggers fear.
Why are some people far
more likely than others to
buy into a bubble?
Pessimists take longer to get
persuaded that there really is
a boom. Some sit out the
whole boom-and-bust cycle
and feel relieved at the end,
but others capitulate at a late
stage, with results that rein-
force their pessimism. Another
part of the answer lies in differ-
ences in tastes for taking risks.
Some people can’t sleep at
night if they take on too much
real estate debt. Others seem
utterly undisturbed by � nancial
risk or even thrive on it.
Why do people charge things
they can’t pay off?
Credit cards have pernicious
psychological properties. It
doesn’t feel like you’re spend-
ing money. You’re just swiping
the card; you’re not giving
anything up. In research with
Stanford psychologist Brian
Knutson; Scott Rick, now at
the University of Michigan
business school; and oth-
ers, we scanned people’s
brains and saw that regions
responsible for feeling pain
activate when people confront
prices they feel are too high.
When we use a credit card, it
anesthetizes the pain of pay-
ing because it doesn’t feel like
we’re spending money. Anoth-
er nasty feature of credit cards
is that it doesn’t feel like you
are taking on debt, because
there’s always the possibility
of paying it off at the end of
the month. How many people
who end the year with $1,000
of revolving debt on their card
would have agreed to take out
a $1,000 loan to fund miscel-
laneous purchases? Very few.
Some say high executive pay
is needed to stimulate top
performance, but you found
something very different.
Our belief was that very high
levels of executive compensa-
tion couldn’t be justi� ed on a
motivational basis. We gave
subjects seven different tasks,
some of which were simple
but effort-dependent, like
adding strings of numbers. For
mundane tasks, high incen-
tives motivate people in an
almost unlimited fashion. But
with tasks that require creative
solutions, as well as with ath-
letic endeavors, people actu-
ally started to do badly when
compensation was increased.
When stakes are high, the
brain tends to narrow its focus.
This impairs performance on
Economist GEORGE LOEWENSTEINexplains the psychology behind the current fi nancial meltdown—and how we can overcome our dark side.
text by KATHLEEN MCGOWAN photograph by ETHAN HILL
Is the central insight of
behavioral economics that
people don’t always act in
their own best interest?
Absolutely. Behavioral eco-
nomics provides a framework
for explaining why people
behave in a self-destructive
fashion. It’s more realistic
about human behavior.
The economic collapse
was in part precipitated by
people taking on mortgages
they couldn’t afford. They
stood to lose a lot of money.
What makes people do that?
It points to a very important
property of the human brain:
We are not dispassionate infor-
mation processors. If we want
to believe something, we’re
amazingly adept at persuading
ourselves that what we want to
believe is true. People thought
Classical economics is based on the premise that people act
rationally, making logical decisions about how and why they
spend their money. But a year that brought economic panic and
the worst downturn since the Great Depression showed how
wrong that assumption can be. Often we are self-defeating, irra-
tional, and just plain foolish. More complete explanations of why
people act the way they do are provided by behavioral econom-
ics, an emerging fi eld that incorporates insights from cognitive
and social psychology and neuroscience. George Loewenstein,
Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology at
Carnegie Mellon University and a leader in this fi eld, spoke to
DISCOVER about why smart people sometimes act so dumb.
housing prices would always
rise. That’s particularly amaz-
ing because in the 1990s we
had a stock market bubble and
bust, and during the bubble,
commentators had been say-
ing that the old rules of stock
valuation don’t apply. Less
than 10 years later, people
became convinced again
that an asset—in this case,
housing—would inde� nitely go
up in value, and commenta-
tors were again saying the old
rules don’t apply. That tells you
about the failure to generalize.
Another part of the explana-
tion has to do with a kind of
herd mentality. There is an
instinctual feeling of safety in
numbers.
Why don’t we perceive these
kinds of looming problems?
Our fear system evolved to
I N T E R V I E W±
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the types of creative tasks that
involve expansive thinking,
such as drawing novel con-
nections between disparate
things. People can also
become too focused on how
much money they stand to
gain or lose, to the detriment of
focusing on the task itself.
But shouldn’t we reward
ambition—the “greed is
good” argument?
We view greed as a form of
desperation. Hypermotivation,
we call it. Greed is actually
the antithesis of self-interest,
because you’re so motivated
to achieve some goal that you
do it at the expense of other
things that might be more
important to you: values you
cherish or your own long-term
self-interest.
We think that the reason
is a phenomenon called loss
aversion. In a lot of competi-
tive situations, people look at
others whom they perceive
to be at a higher level, which
forms their reference. They
feel themselves to be in the
domain of losses, and they are
desperate to get out. Much
cheating, it seems, occurs
not because people just want
more but because they feel “in
a hole” that they can get out
of only by cheating.
How can we outwit our own
self-destructive tendencies?
In the last several years,
behavioral economics has
started to offer solutions for
a wide range of problems:
obesity, addiction, failure to
take medications, even global
climate change. People are
very shortsighted; they have
what behavioral economists
call “present bias prefer-
ence.” Nowadays there are
a lot of wellness programs in
which people are incentivized
to engage in exercise and
other healthy behaviors. Small
incentives can have a large
impact on behavior if they are
immediate, because they play
on present bias preferences.
Or take what is called the
default effect: People tend
to be lazy decision makers,
taking the path of least resis-
tance. And defaults are often
unhealthy: At McDonald’s, for
example, if you order a combo
meal, the default includes a
soda. We did � eld research at
a fast-food restaurant showing
that if you make the healthy
options just slightly more
convenient—for example, with
an “express menu” that has
healthy options but requires
turning the page to see the full
menu—you can get people
to eat more healthily. You can
use laziness to help people.
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11 The Age of Genetic Medicine BeginsIn 2009 gene therapy rebounded from years of high-
pro� le failures—including unexpected deaths and
cancers—to produce startling triumphs. By fixing
defects written into patients’ DNA, medical researchers
treated two serious genetic disorders. “At last we are
on the brink of ful� lling the promises that gene therapy
made two decades ago,” says geneticist Fabio Can-
dotti of the National Institutes of Health.
In February molecular biologist Alessandro Aiuti of
the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy
in Milan reported that his team had cured nine of ten
infants born with bubble baby disease, a devastating
disorder caused by a single defective gene. Newborns
with the condition, also known as severe combined
immunode� ciency disease, lack a functioning immune
system. Aiuti and his team harvested stem cells from the
infants and then infected those cells with an engineered
virus carrying healthy copies of the missing gene. When
the modified stem cells were injected back into the
newborns, they spawned a normal immune system.
Candotti has reported similar success establishing a
functioning immune system in two bubble babies.
Just months earlier, molecular geneticist and physi-
cian Jean Bennett and her husband, retinal surgeon
Albert Maguire of the University of Pennsylvania School
of Medicine, reported that gene therapy had improved
vision in a teenage boy with Leber congenital amau-
rosis (LCA). A mutation in any of 13 genes causes this
rare condition, which progressively leads to blindness.
Bennett and her team injected a benign virus carrying a
corrected copy of the gene into the boy’s retina, where
it helped the eye make rods and cones. Even receiv-
ing only modest doses, other young patients given a
working version of the gene in one eye were also able
to see better. In a phase 1 clinical trial, published in The
Lancet, all the children involved gained enough vision
to walk independently. “The results are better than any-
thing I could have dreamed of,” Bennett says.
The remarkable turnaround in gene therapy is largely
due to scientists’ increasingly re� ned ability to engineer
the viruses used to deliver healthy genes to the cells
that need them. Using new viruses and better tech-
niques, gene therapists have begun tackling cancer and
HIV. Clinical trials are under way on both. JILL NEIMARK
12 Oldest Animal Fossils UncoveredThe origin of animals has long perplexed scientists.
DNA studies of creatures living today suggest that
their common ancestor appeared nearly 800 million
years ago, yet the fossil record contains no clear
evidence of animals more than 555 million years
old. Two new discoveries are starting to resolve
that apparent con� ict. Together they push the fossil
record of animals back another 300 million years.
In a study published in Nature in February,
researchers reported � nding a steroid compound
(called 24-isopropylcholestane) in 675-million-year-
old stone cores, drilled from former seabeds up to
three miles beneath the deserts of Oman. Sponges
are the only organisms known to produce appre-
ciable amounts of this steroid, and geochemist Gor-
don Love of the University of California at Riverside
interprets the chemical signature as evidence that
spongelike animals had evolved by then.
Another team reported in Geology in May that
they had found meshlike patterns suggestive of
sponges in 850-million-year-old rocks. They turned
up in an ancient reef built by cyanobacteria, says
Fritz Neuweiler of Laval University in Quebec. The
earth’s early oceans initially contained little oxygen,
but cyanobacteria produce it as a by-product of
photosynthesis. “Here we have a local oxygenated
environment,” Neuweiler says, “and this would have
supported these early animals.” DOUGLAS FOX
13 Hope for HIV VaccineAn international team of
researchers announced in Sep-
tember that for the � rst time, an
AIDS vaccine has demonstrat-
ed some real ability to prevent
HIV infections in a large clinical
trial, reducing the odds of infec-
tion by about 31 percent.
The trial followed more than
16,000 people (who initially
tested HIV-free) for three and a
half years. They received either
a combination of two potential
vaccines or placebo shots. By
the end, 74 placebo recipients
had acquired HIV infections,
compared with 51 vaccinated
individuals. The trial report,
published in October, included
alternative analyses that put the
vaccine’s effectiveness slightly
lower, at around 26 percent,
leading some to question the
reliability of the results. The
researchers reply that all of the
analyses consistently support a
modest protective effect.
AIDS researcher Jay Levy at
the University of California at
San Francisco � nds the results
encouraging, but notes that the
vaccines seemed to have no
effect on the amount of virus in
the bloodstream of people who
contracted HIV during the study.
Nelson Michael of the U.S.
Military HIV Research Program,
which helped run the trial, is
more optimistic: “We’ve shown
that this 26-year global effort
has not been in vain.” NAYANAH SIVA
Top: LCA eye prior to therapy. Bottom: Healthy eye.
CLO
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WIS
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RO
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: D
R. JE
AN
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NN
ET
T; N
AS
A/J
PL/U
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; D
. H
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ST
/ALA
MY; S
INC
LA
IR S
TA
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S/P
HO
TO
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AR
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ER
S
These sponges from the Eocene may
resemble the earth’s fi rst animals.
MEDICINE || EVOLUTION || MIND || SPACE
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It is our closest neighbor
in space, yet the moon con-
tinues to surprise us as new
lunar missions overturn old
ideas about Earth’s satellite.
In October NASA inten-
tionally crashed the 2.8-ton
upper stage of a Centaur
rocket into a crater near the
lunar south pole. Four minutes
later, the Lunar Crater Observa-
tion and Sensing Spacecraft
(LCROSS) followed, analyzing the
dust kicked up by the impact. NASA
anticipated a debris plume 30 miles
high, which should have been visible
from Earth with a 10-inch telescope. The
smashup proved more whimper than bang for
amateur observers, but LCROSS team members
were thrilled. “We got wonderful measurements from
all phases of the impact: the fl ash, the ejecta plume, and the
resulting crater formed by Centaur,” says LCROSS principal
investigator Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research
Center. He and colleagues are still analyzing the data
from ultraviolet, visual, and infrared spectroscopy
to measure the chemical composition of the lunar
material. “We’re looking for water vapor or ice, as
well as hydrocarbons and other volatiles,” he says.
The LCROSS results will fl esh out the surprise
announcements in September that three other
spacecraft—India’s Chandrayaan-1 and NASA’s
Deep Impact and Cassini—detected traces
of water on the moon’s surface by studying
refl ected infrared light from the sun. The water’s
origins are unclear. One possibility is that hydro-
gen ions from the solar wind bond with oxygen
in the lunar soil, says University of Maryland
astronomer Jessica Sunshine, deputy principal
investigator on Deep Impact. Results like these belie
the moon’s image as an inert rock, Colaprete says. “It
is an active, breathing body.”
The moon might have more water deposited by icy
comets landing in cold, permanently shadowed craters
at the south pole. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO),
circling the moon at an altitude of 31 miles, recently sent back
the fi rst global temperature maps of the surface (at right). Some
of those craters dip to around –400 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest
places ever measured in the solar system. LRO’s neutron detector
suggests the presence of water in deep freeze there. The orbiter is also
measuring radiation, looking for good spots for future exploration, and
mapping the moon’s topography to 100-meter resolution. JENNIFER BARONE
The Moon: Cold, Wet, and Breathing
15 Model Solves Fundamental Packing ProblemThe county-fair challenge of guessing how many gum balls are
in a jar is far more than just a game for kids; understanding how
objects pack into a particular volume is a fundamental problem
of physics and engineering. A team of physicists at New York
University recently loosened the problem a bit, producing a simple
model that predicts the arrangement of randomly packed spherical
particles, even when the objects are of different sizes.
Theorists had previously calculated that each particle touches
an average of six neighbors, and that packed spheres of uniform
size � ll about 64 percent of the total available space. Jasna Brujic
and colleagues experimentally veri� ed both of those claims using a
three-dimensional microscope—which examines many horizontal
layers of a sample and then stacks those images to create a 3-D
image—to analyze oil droplets tightly packed in water. The
physicists also studied how changing the mix of droplet
sizes affects their arrangement.
“If you give us the distribution of particle sizes, we
can tell you about their geometry,” Brujic says. The
research, published in Nature in July, could inspire bet-
ter ways to stock vending machines, prepare products
for shipping, grind drugs for pills, and extract petro-
leum from porous rocks. But so far Brujic has modeled
only spheres; contestants dealing with gumdrops or
M&M’s will have to wait for future studies. STEPHEN ORNES
14 Intact Tissue Found in DinosaurWhen scientists uncovered a
68-million-year-old Tyranno-
saurus rex fossil in Montana
sandstone in 2000, they never
expected to � nd traces of
tissue. So when paleontolo-
gist Mary Schweitzer’s initial
analysis of the fossil showed
delicately preserved collagen
protein, skepticism reigned.
But in May, Schweitzer, of
North Carolina State Univer-
sity, replicated the results
and also announced a bigger
� nd: a collection of even
larger protein fragments
from an 80-million-year-old
duck-billed dinosaur called
Brachylophosaurus canaden-
sis. The fragments revealed
more evidence of collagen
and suggested the presence
of two proteins—laminin and
elastin—found in the blood
vessels of animals.
“This type of preservation
isn’t supposed to be pos-
sible,” Schweitzer says, “but
here it is.” Her new discovery
addressed many issues raised
by critics of the T. rex work.
For instance, her team adopt-
ed painstaking tactics to avoid
contamination. In the lab, they
used sterilized tools to sample
the sandstone-encrusted
thighbone, and specimens
were quickly sealed in jars.
“Obtaining amino acid
sequence data can show
where extinct animals � t in the
tree of life,” she says. “It’s a
work in progress, but molecu-
lar paleontology might show
us how dinosaurs are related
to each other and even provide
some physiological insights if
we’re really lucky.” AMY BARTH
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MEDICINE || MIND || TECHNOLOGY
1817 The Common Cold IsDecodedIf knowing your enemy
is half the battle, we may
yet defeat the common
cold. A paper published
last April in Science
detailed how geneticists
sequenced the RNA
from 100 strains of
rhinovirus—all the known
types of the leading
cause of the cold.
Pulmonologist
Stephen Liggett of the
University of Maryland
School of Medicine
says his team found
regions of the genome
that are similar across
all strains. Those
sequences, presumably
essential to survival, are
prime targets for new
drugs. Equally notable
are the bits of RNA
that differ, which may
explain why some bugs
are nastier than others.
Rhinoviruses can
instigate asthma or
trigger severe wheezing
episodes in asthmatics,
but it is unclear whether
only certain strains of the
virus are to blame. Look-
ing at large numbers of
rhinovirus genomes may
provide answers. “Just
saying it’s rhinovirus is
not suf� cient, because
there is so much diver-
sity,” Liggett says.
And don’t throw out
your tissues just yet: No
one knows how to defeat
any of the strains, and
Liggett’s group believes
there are many more to
be identi� ed. The team
is now sequencing 3,000
samples collected from
patients at the University
of Wisconsin at Madison.
MEGAN TALKINGTON
Magnetic resonance imaging, or
MRI, has become a powerful tool
for evaluating brain anatomy, but a
newer incarnation of the technol-
ogy called fMRI (the f stands for
functional ) can probe even more
deeply. In studies published over
the past year, neuroscientists
have shown that fMRI can peel
away the secrets of emotion and
thought; in fact, some of their fi nd-
ings are almost like mind reading.
w Using fMRI, New York Uni-
versity neuroscientist Elizabeth
Phelps has identifi ed two brain
regions—the amygdala and the
posterior cingulate cortex, asso-
ciated with emotional learning
and decision making—that are
crucial in forming fi rst impres-
sions. “Even when we only briefl y
encounter others, these regions
are activated,” Phelps says.
w At Georgetown University
Medical Center, a team used fMRI
to study how we mentally encode
music. When we hear a sequence
of familiar songs, our brains show
high levels of activity during the
silence between tracks, indicat-
ing anticipation. When we hear
music we do not know, our brains
are relatively inactive because
we cannot anticipate the song.
The prefrontal cortex, premotor
cortex, and basal ganglia, which
signal the body to act and move,
seem to direct this response.
w Other fMRI studies show how
the brain discerns true state-
ments from false ones . According
to researchers at the University
of Lisbon and at Vita-Salute in
Milan, false statements activate a
section of the brain’s frontal polar
cortex, which is related to prob-
lem solving. True statements trig-
ger the left inferior parietal cortex
and the caudate nucleus, areas of
the brain related to memory.
w The work closest to mind
reading comes from Demis Has-
sabis and Eleanor Maguire at
University College London, who
scanned subjects who were navi-
gating a virtual reality simulation.
Just from the pattern of activity in
the hippocampus—a part of the
brain instrumental to our ability to
navigate—the researchers could
determine where each subject
was located within the simula-
tion. “Different spatial positions
are associated with different pat-
terns of activity in the hippocam-
pus,” Maguire says. JANE BOSVELD
Rise of the Mind Readers
19 New Battery Tech Could Transform the CarLast year the car battery turned glamorous: Hybrid
hysteria invigorated the faltering auto industry, and
General Motors touted its upcoming plug-in hybrid,
the Chevy Volt, at every opportunity. For decades
researchers have labored to make batteries smaller,
cheaper, and more ef� cient. At last some of those proj-
ects are yielding encouraging results.
The latest electric vehicles use lithium-ion batter-
ies, in which lithium ions move from anode to cathode
(negative to positive), transforming chemical energy
into electric current. These batteries are smaller, light-
er, and more robust than their nickel-based or lead-
acid predecessors. IBM announced in June that it is
pursuing a new kind of lithium battery that uses the
surrounding air as a cathode, making it even lighter
and more compact than existing designs.
Traditional lead-acid batteries (like the one that starts
your car) produce energy for as little as one-tenth the
cost of lithium batteries, but they wear out more quickly
and are heavy . Blended battery packs, pioneered this
year by Indy Power Systems of Noblesville, Indiana,
strike a balance. Software switches between lead-acid
and lithium-ion batteries, offering a transitional technol-
ogy until lithium energy storage gets cheaper.
Engineers are also � nding ways to shorten recharg-
ing times. In March an MIT team unveiled technol-
ogy that could theoretically charge an electric car in
� ve minutes rather than the eight hours that is typi-
cal today. MIT’s battery contains a vast number of
microscopic particles that have a lithium center and a
glassy phosphate coating. The coating allows lithium
ions, which travel quickly in the core of the battery
but slowly at the surface, to maintain their speed and
to be shed quickly. “The coating allows the lithium to
get to the right place on the phosphate very fast,”
says Gerbrand Ceder of the MIT team. “We � xed the
bottleneck at the surface.” One company has already
licensed the technology. JOCELYN RICE
3D
4M
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How Has Christianity Changed over 2,000 Years?
1-800-TEACH-12www.TEACH12.com/6disc
ACT NOW!
1. The Diversity of Early Christianity 2. Christians Who Would Be Jews 3. Christians Who Refuse To Be Jews 4. Early Gnostic Christianity— Our Sources 5. Early Christian Gnosticism— An Overview 6. The Gnostic Gospel of Truth7. Gnostics Explain Themselves 8. The Coptic Gospel of Thomas 9. Thomas’ Gnostic Teachings 10. Infancy Gospels 11. The Gospel of Peter 12. The Secret Gospel of Mark
13. The Acts of John 14. The Acts of Thomas 15. The Acts of Paul and Thecla 16. Forgeries in the Name of Paul 17. The Epistle of Barnabas 18. The Apocalypse of Peter 19. The Rise of Early Christian Orthodoxy 20. Beginnings of the Canon 21. Formation of the New Testament Canon 22. Interpretation of Scripture 23. Orthodox Corruption of Scripture 24. Early Christian Creeds
Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over AuthenticationTaught by Professor Bart D. Ehrman, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lecture Titles
Order Today! Offer Expires Friday, February 12, 2010
Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over AuthenticationCourse No. 659324 lectures (30 minutes/lecture)
DVDs $254.95 NOW $69.95+ $10 Shipping, Processing, and Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee
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Priority Code: 38563
In the first centuries after Christ, there was no “official” New Tes-tament. Instead, early Christians read and fervently followed a wide variety of scriptures—many more than we have today.
Relying on these writings, Christians held beliefs that today would be considered bizarre. Some believed that there were 2, 12, or as many as 30 gods. Some thought that a malicious deity, rather than the true God, created the world. Some maintained that Christ’s death and resurrection had nothing to do with salvation while oth-ers insisted that Christ never really died at all.
What did these “other” scriptures say? Do they exist today? How could such outlandish ideas ever be considered Christian? If such beliefs were once common, why do they no longer exist? These are just a few of the many provocative questions that arise from Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication, an insightful 24-lecture course taught by Pro-fessor Bart D. Ehrman, the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author and editor of 17 books, including The New York Times best-seller Misquoting Jesus.
This course is one of The Great Courses®, a noncredit, recorded college lecture series from The Teaching Company®. Award-win-ning professors of a wide array of subjects in the sciences and the liberal arts have made more than 300 college-level courses that are available now on our website.
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21
MIND || ASTRONOMY || ENVIRONMENT || TECHNOLOGY || ANTHROPOLOGY || BIOLOGY
20 Can a Shock to the Brain Cure Depression?For years, deep-brain stimulation—
in which a neurosurgeon drills a hole
in the skull and inserts an electrode
far into a patient’s brain tissue—was
considered a radical treatment,
reserved for the most severe cases
of Parkinson’s disease. Now neurol-
ogists are exploring the treatment for
disorders ranging from depression to
Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2009 two clinical trials began
testing deep-brain stimulation
(DBS) to ease intractable depres-
sion. The process was given a green
light by the Food and Drug Admin-
istration to treat the worst cases of
obsessive-compulsive disorder after
a small pilot study showed promis-
ing results. Mount Sinai School of
Medicine neurologist Giulio Pasinetti
is in the early stages of testing DBS
for Alzheimer’s disease, and neuro-
surgeon Bomin Sun of the Center of
Functional Neurosurgery at Shanghai
Jiao Tong University is harnessing it
to treat anorexia.
Across a range of disorders,
deep-brain stimulation works much
the same way: A pacemaker-like
device in the chest transmits a signal
to the implanted electrode via wires
that run underneath the scalp. The
device is thought to modulate elec-
trical activity in the circuitry of the
dysfunctional brain, explains Oxford
University neurosurgeon Tipu Aziz,
who is exploring DBS as a treatment
for cluster headaches.
The new studies build on work by
Emory University neurologist Helen
Mayberg. In 2005 she showed
that direct modulation of specific
brain circuits could help severely
depressed patients who had not
responded to other treatments. “The
concept of tuning brain circuits is a
new strategy,” she says. Neuroimag-
ing can pinpoint regions of dysfunc-
tional brain activity, making it pos-
sible to understand the underlying
biology of a disorder and correct
abnormal rhythms of the brain.
KATHLEEN MCGOWAN
22 Clear-Cutting Has a High CostFor people living in poverty
in the Amazon, cutting down
the rain forest often appears
to be the only way to thrive
economically—� rst by selling
the lumber, later by farming and
ranching on the land. A study
published in Science in June
indicates otherwise. Despite
gaining some temporary bene-
� ts, communities that clear-cut
their forests end up no better
off than those who do not.
Ana Rodrigues of the
Centre for Functional and
Evolutionary Ecology in
France and her colleagues
found that Amazonian towns
in the midst of a deforestation
Fresh Hints of Life on Mars For scientists hunting for life on Mars, the new buzzword is
methane. In 2003 a group studying the Red Planet saw the spec-
tral signal of methane gas, often a sign of biological activity on
Earth. Since then, Michael Mumma, director of NASA’s God-
dard Center for Astrobiology, has monitored Mars closely.
In January he announced his results: Broad plumes of
methane emanate from the planet’s surface, “funda-
mentally changing our understanding of Mars.”
To track the methane, Mumma dispatched
observers to NASA’s InfraRed Telescope Facility
and the W. M. Keck Observatory, both in Hawaii.
The astronomers expected to fi nd the gas spread
uniformly. Instead they detected localized clouds
that appeared only at certain times—once in
2003 and again in 2005, during the Martian
northern summer and southern spring. “We have
found plumes that exist only in warmer periods,
when methane is released along with water,”
says physicist Robert Novak of Iona College in New
Rochelle, New York. The variability of the methane
suggests that the gas may be spewed by an ongoing
geologic process like volcanism, or possibly through the
metabolic activity of microbes. If underground life is the
source, methane might be released during the warmer months
as the ice melts. “If life existed on Mars, it would break down
chemically and methane would be a product,” Novak says.
Mumma remains cautious: “We wouldn’t dare say we’ve detected biol-
ogy.” But the search is on. In 2011 NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory will touch
down to sniff out evidence for methane, other organics, and life. HEATHER MAYER
binge initially see higher life
expectancies, literacy rates,
and incomes. But once the
local forest is gone, income
from timber typically dries up,
the researchers believe; many
farms and cattle ranches are
abandoned after a few years
because the nutrient-poor soil
rapidly becomes depleted.
“The current development
strategy results in a lose-lose-
lose situation,” Rodrigues
says. It destroys the rain forest
habitat, fails to alleviate pov-
erty, and contributes to global
warming by eliminating trees
that would absorb and store
carbon dioxide. “The challenge
now is to create a development
path that is win-win-win.” One
possibility, Rodrigues suggests,
could be to create a provision in
the next international climate-
change treaty requiring wealthy
countries with high carbon
emissions to pay Brazilians for
the environmental bene� ts of
keeping their forests standing.
ELIZA STRICKLAND
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To stave off aging, Americans spend billions of dollars every
year on supplements, gyms, even therapists. But a report
released in July suggests that the secret to a longer life may
simply involve a new twist on an old adage: Watch what you eat.
A study of adult rhesus macaques showed that the mon-
keys were one-third as likely to die from age-related diseases
if they consumed 30 percent fewer calories than they did
in their regular diet. Previous, well-publicized research had
shown that restricting calories can increase the life span of
creatures ranging from fruit fl ies to dogs, for reasons still
unclear. But the latest trial, led by geriatrics expert Richard
Weindruch at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Cen-
ter and published in Science, is the fi rst to show that caloric
restriction can improve survival in primates.
This kind of research takes enormous patience. Weindruch
has spent 20 years studying his monkeys. In that time, the dieting
ones have shown reductions in diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular
disease, and even brain atrophy. They are also visibly fl uffi er and
sturdier compared with their fully fed counterparts. “Slowing the
aging process through calorie restriction spills over to primates
and probably people,” Weindruch says.
Pharmaceutical companies are
now seeking a drug that mim-
ics the benefi ts of a restrictive
diet without the sacrifi ce. In
July an independent team
reported in Nature that rapa-
mycin, an immune-suppress-
ing drug, increases longevity
in elderly mice by up to 38
percent. At the Jackson Labo-
ratory in Maine, gerontologist
David Harrison and his team
chose to test rapamycin,
which is already approved
for use in procedures such
as kidney transplants,
because previous
research showed that the
drug increases the life span of
fl ies and may reduce cancer in
mammals. “We’re not claiming
to achieve immortality,” Har-
rison says, “but rapamycin is a
step toward expanding healthy
life span by about 10 years.”
AMY BARTH
24 World’s First Grain Silos Discovered in JordanIn June archaeologist Ian Kuijt at the
University of Notre Dame and colleagues
reported that they had uncovered the
world’s earliest known granaries, locat-
ed at the Dhra archaeological site on the
shore of the Dead Sea in Jordan. In a
paper published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, the team
describes food storage structures dating
back 11,000 years, a millennium before
humans were thought to have domesti-
cated crops. Analysis of grains from the
2523 Computer Learns to Reason Like Isaac NewtonDescribing the basic laws of physics occupied Sir Isaac Newton for decades.
In April scientists unveiled a computer program that can analyze data and
independently derive those fundamental physical laws within a matter of hours.
This program could relieve major logjams in scienti� c research. Modern instru-
ments like space observatories, particle colliders, and gene chips produce vast
amounts of data, and mining that data is a slow, laborious process. Smart soft-
ware—a synthetic scientist, in essence—could greatly speed it up.
Cornell University roboticist Hod Lipson and his Ph.D. student Michael
Schmidt developed their system to analyze data from the kinds of mechanics
experiments that college students encounter in introductory physics courses:
observing the motion of a swinging pendulum or of two weights bouncing on
connected springs, for instance. An automatic camera fed data directly to
their computer program, which then tried millions of mathematical expres-
sions to identify which ones held true from one experiment to the next. Using
an evolutionary algorithm, the program randomly varied the winning equations
to match the data more closely. In this way it “discovered” a handful of natural
laws, including conservation of energy and momentum. Complex experiments
required as much as 40 hours, simple ones as little as 10 minutes.
The Cornell program “won’t replace scientists anytime soon,” Schmidt says.
“But it will let them look in a more ef� cient way at what might be interesting.” Gene
chips, for instance, can measure the expression of thousands of genes at a time,
but the important question is how one gene regulates others within that incred-
ibly complex web of relationships. Smart software could rapidly � ag interesting
patterns—such as the way that levels of one protein depend on six others—so that
researchers could then follow up with targeted experiments. DOUGLAS FOX
CLO
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Skip a Meal, Extend Your Life?
site suggests that settlers there stored a
mix of wild and cultivated barley, along
with an early variety of wheat.
“The surprise is not only that they were
storing food but that they were storing it
in such a sophisticated way,” Kuijt says.
The granary � oors at Dhra were elevated,
most likely to keep out mice and to pre-
vent spoilage from dampness; they were
also slightly sloped, perhaps for drain-
age. By providing a buffer against famine
and allowing larger groups of people to
settle together, these storehouses may
have fostered the cultural transition from
bands of hunter-gatherers to complex,
cohesive societies.
“Stored food can be used as a form
of social currency,” Kuijt notes. “It liter-
ally changes everything.” LINDSEY KONKEL
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used, so we have de� ned
a separate � eld that we call
synthetic genomics—the
digitization of biology using
only DNA and RNA. You start
by sequencing genomes and
putting their digital code into
a computer. Then you use
the computer to take that
information and design new
life-forms.
How do you build a life-
form? Throw in some mito-
chondria here and some
ribosomes there, surround
it all with a membrane—
and voilà?
We started down that road,
but now we are coming from
the other end. We’re starting
with the accomplishments of
three and a half billion years
of evolution by using what
we call the software of life:
DNA. Our software builds
its own hardware. By writing
new software, we can come
up with totally new species.
It would be as if once you
put new software in your
computer, somehow a whole
new machine would material-
ize. We’re software engineers
rather than construction
workers.
But the DNA software works
only if you can use it to piece
together an actual genome
outside the machine, right?
The initial challenge there
was straightforward: Could
we construct pieces of DNA
large enough to make up
a chromosome? When we
looked in the literature, the
answer was no. DNA syn-
thesizers, which have been
around for 30 years, made
only short pieces. That was
the basis of all the work we’d
done in DNA sequencing.
When you get beyond 20 or
30 nucleotides [the “letters”
of DNA—each gene is made
of hundreds or thousands of
nucleotides], the error rate
gets larger and larger.
So making larger sections
of DNA required a different
approach?
Right. In 2003 we made our
� rst synthetic virus, and it
was 100 percent accurate.
We did it by taking viral DNA
and putting it in a cell, in
this case E. coli. The E. coli
was able to read the genetic
code and make proteins that
self-assembled to form the
virus. At that point we knew
we could accurately make
DNA pieces of 5,000 base
pairs, the size of the small
viruses. The goal was to make
a 600,000-base-pair bacterial
chromosome. We thought
we could do that by putting
serial pieces together, but
solving the chemistry was a
huge challenge. We exhaust-
ed the genetics of E. coli and
found we could grow these text by PAMELA WEINTRAUB photography by MACKENZIE STROH
2J. CRAIG VENTER on biology’s next leap: digitally designed life-forms that could produce novel drugs, renewable fuels, and plentiful food for tomorrow’s world.
Here you are talking about
constructing life, but you
started out in deconstruc-
tion: charting the human
genome, piece by piece.
Actually, I started out smaller,
studying the adrenaline
receptor. I was looking at one
protein and its single gene for
a decade. Then, in the late
1980s, I was drawn to the
idea of the whole genome,
and I stopped everything
and switched my lab over. I
had the � rst automatic DNA
sequencer. It was the ultimate
J. Craig Venter keeps riding the cusp of each new wave in biol-
ogy. When researchers started analyzing genes, he launched
the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), decoding the
genome of a bacterium for the fi rst time in 1992. When the
government announced its plan to map the human genome,
he claimed he would do it fi rst—and then he delivered results
in 2001, years ahead of schedule. Armed with a deep under-
standing of how DNA works, Venter is now moving on to an
even more extraordinary project. Starting with the stunning
genetic diversity that exists in the wild, he is aiming to build
custom-designed organisms that could produce clean ener-
gy, help feed the planet, and treat cancer. Venter has already
transferred the genome of one species into the cell body of
another. This past year he reached a major milestone, using
the machinery of yeast to manufacture a genome from scratch.
When he combines the steps—perhaps next year—he will
have crafted a truly synthetic organism. Senior editor Pamela
Weintraub discussed the implications of these efforts with
Venter in DISCOVER’s editorial offi ces.
in reductionist biology—
getting down to the genetic
code, interpreting what it
meant, including all 6 billion
letters of my own genome.
Only by understanding things
at that level can we turn
around and go the other way.
In your latest work you are
trying to create “synthetic
life.” What is that?
It’s a catchy phrase that
people have begun using to
replace “molecular biology.”
The term has been over-
6
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large pieces of synthetic DNA
only by harnessing yeast.
What made you realize that
yeast could help you?
We’d been studying Deinococ-
cus radiodurans, the Conan
the Barbarian of bacteria. You
can expose it to more than
3 million rads of radiation and
it won’t be killed. Its chromo-
somes get blown apart into
hundreds of small pieces, but
then over 12 or 24 hours it
reassembles its DNA exactly
as it was before. We were
trying to capture that system
when we discovered that yeast
does the same thing, only not
with radiation: Yeast can take
the pieces of DNA that we
make and do the assembly
work for us.
Last August you reported
cloning the entire genome
of a bacterium, Mycoplasma
mycoides. What’s next?
Now we add the yeast centro-
mere [the section of yeast DNA
involved in reconstruction]
to the DNA of the organisms
we are synthesizing. It’s like a
jigsaw puzzle. We throw in the
pieces and the yeast compo-
nent automatically assembles
them the right way. It thinks it’s
just assembling and repairing
one of its own chromosomes.
Then you have to boot up
the genome in a living cell to
generate the hardware, the
life-form itself. How will you
do that?
In one of our most important
experiments, we took the DNA
from one bacterial cell and
treated it with harsh enzymes
to destroy any proteins. We
found that if we transplanted
that naked DNA into another
bacterial species, along with
associated restriction enzymes
[molecular scissors that cut
DNA in speci� c places], the
cell’s original DNA would be
destroyed. The transplanted
DNA would take over instead.
So now we had the cell of one
species containing the DNA
of another species. In a short
time, all the original proteins
disappeared, and we ended
up with a cell that had totally
transformed from one species
into another.
So you have transplanted
a natural genome, and you
have created a synthetic
one. How close are you
to combining these steps,
transferring a synthetic
genome so it takes over a
foreign cell?
I now joke that I predict it’s
going to happen this year,
but I’ve done that for the last
two years. It’s a technicality
in one respect because what
we’re showing is that DNA
is DNA. But truly being able
to make a working synthetic
genome—I think it’s a proof
that’s important.
Once we have the power to
create new life-forms, how
will we benefi t?
We could synthesize cells that
use carbon dioxide and make
other things from it. If this desk
and that plastic chair protector
were made from CO2, it would
solve the problem of how to
sequester CO2 from the atmo-
sphere and would totally solve
the question of paper versus
plastic. You’d absolutely want
plastic bags if they could be
made from carbon dioxide and
not from oil.
What else could we do?
We could solve the problem of
fuel production. In theory, we
could replace fuel that comes
out of the ground with things
made from carbon dioxide on
a new scale. We could make
small-scale microbial fuel cells
that use human waste to make
drinking water, electricity, or
both. Could algae be used for
food? Imagine using algae to
make arti� cial steaks. Look at
all the bacteria in the oceans;
they have far more sophisticat-
ed chemicals than our chem-
istry industry can produce. A
lot of these are antibacterial or
antiviral compounds, because
that’s how bacteria protect
themselves in the environment.
If we’re ever going to have a
chance of using these com-
pounds, we’re going to have to
make them synthetically.
What about safeguards and
risks? As with computer
hacking, some people are
itching to do these “bio-
logical hacking” experiments
with synthetic life in their
basements and backyards.
You can buy a DNA synthe-
sizer off eBay, and an enter-
prising person could build a
DNA synthesizer from plans
they can get off the Internet.
We don’t try to downplay the
risk. Because these tools are
so powerful, somebody could,
just by ordering a handful of
chemicals, pretty cheaply
make viruses that could cause
a lot of damage or death to a
large number of people. We
don’t want kids trying to be the
� rst one on their block to build
a virus, so I think there should
be laws for simple screening.
The synthetic DNA companies
that make these products
should be required to screen
them against a list of infectious
agents. It would be easy to
screen someone trying to copy
Ebola, for example. A lot of
the companies do it voluntarily
now, but they don’t all do it,
and on a global basis they
defi nitely don’t all do it. Maybe
we can’t prevent somebody
really dedicated to doing harm,
but we can prevent the frivo-
lous uses of this technology.
Could synthetic biol-
ogy extend all the way to
humans? Could we use the
technology to make better
versions of ourselves?
We have no clue of how to do
it now. We’re still struggling
with the smallest bacterial
cell, in which we don’t know
what even one-� fth of the
genes do. We do not have
the computing power on the
planet to make a synthetic
human genome. We don’t
have any way of collecting the
data to do it right now. So the
notion of trying to change our
genome, I � nd at this stage
of our knowledge almost an
immoral discussion. It would
have to be blind human
experimentation, not caring
what the outcome would be.
But one day we’ll know
more—what then?
History will view these � rst
synthetic genomes as a bright
dividing line, just like the line
before and after the reading
of the genetic code. Through
these experiments we have
been able to write the genetic
code while we’re continuing to
read it more and more quickly.
Advances in biology should
continue at a phenomenal,
exponential pace. We could
learn more next year than we
learned in the entire prior his-
tory of science. Twenty years
from now, the things we’re
doing now will look frighten-
ingly primitive. My view of
humanity is that we will � nd
it irresistible to try to use
these technologies to change
ourselves. I confess, I think
we’ll do it, but perhaps not we
ourselves.
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BIOLOGY || SPACE || MIND || ENVIRONMENT || MEDICINE
29 Another Baby Boom Hits Rich NationsPopulation dynamics are
more complex than we
thought. Fertility rates generally
decline as development rises,
and this has indeed been hap-
pening in most industrialized
nations. Birthrates in Italy, Ger-
many, and Japan, for instance,
have dipped to 1.3 children
or fewer per woman. But
recently a team of sociologists
in the United States and Italy
revealed a twist in this pattern.
When development—mea-
sured by income, education,
and life span—improves past
a certain point, they � nd, fer-
tility picks up again. The study
was published in August in the
journal Nature.
The anticipated boost in fer-
tility rates is not large enough
to alter projections that the
global population will level
off by midcentury, says study
coauthor Hans-Peter Kohler,
a sociologist at the University
of Pennsylvania. In fact, birth-
rates in most highly developed
countries are still too low to
maintain the national popula-
tion. (The United States is an
exception, with fertility rates
near the replacement level of
2.1 births per woman.) But
the new analysis may provide
some relief for nations that
fear they soon will not have
enough middle-aged workers
to support their growing elderly
population.
The researchers are now
investigating why a wide
range of developed coun-
tries, despite their differing
social structures, appear to
be experiencing a similar and
unexpected uptick in birth-
rates. “There is clearly not a
one-size-� ts-all set of institu-
tions and policies that facili-
tate higher fertility,” Kohler
says. MEGAN TALKINGTON
Three preliminary fl ybys of Mercury by NASA’s Mes-
senger spacecraft have given scientists a vast amount
of new information about the solar system’s small-
est, hottest planet. The only other spacecraft to visit
Mercury—Mariner 10, which swung past in 1974 and
1975—left nearly half of the surface unseen. Messenger’s
new maps � ll in most of the gaps and show that about 40
percent of the landscape has been shaped by volcanism,
indicating widespread geologic activity in Mercury’s past.
Peering down into impact craters, the probe’s cameras
have seen evidence that the planet was shaped by sev-
eral massive � oods of lava billions of years ago.
The most recent flyby, this past September, also
clari� ed why Mercury still has a slight atmosphere even
though its gravity is too weak to maintain one for long.
Powerful solar winds press through Mercury’s magnetic
� eld to blast away material from the planet’s surface.
That material replenishes the atmosphere as it continu-
ously drifts away into space. Sodium is prominent in
the atmosphere at the poles (where the solar wind pen-
etrates most easily), suggesting that the surface there
contains sodium-rich rocks. Nearer the equator calcium
predominates, and magnesium is everywhere.
All of this is just a preview of the full Messenger mis-
sion that begins in March 2011, when the spacecraft
will settle into orbit for at least a year of continuous,
close-up observations. At that point, the trickle of data
on Mercury will become a � ood. “It has been wonder-
ful,” says principal investigator Sean Solomon of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington, “but this is just
the beginning.” MICHAEL D. LEMONICK
28Probe Shows Mercury’s Hidden Face
27 Genetic Disease Cured With Two MomsMitochondria are the powerhouses
that provide our bodies’ cells with
the energy they need to function.
So when mitochondrial genes go
awry, the result is hereditary disor-
ders that wreak havoc on organs
with high energy requirements, like
the brain and the heart. In Septem-
ber, researchers announced that
they had demonstrated a way to
replace defective mitochondria with
healthy ones. Moreover, they were
able to perform the repair before an
egg cell was even fertilized.
Geneticist Shoukhrat Mitalipov of
Oregon Health and Science Univer-
sity and his team took the nucleus
out of an egg from a macaque
monkey, removing almost all of the
genetic material but leaving the mi-
tochondria and their DNA. The re-
searchers then injected the nucleus
of an egg from a second macaque,
fertilized the cell with sperm, and
implanted it in the second monkey’s
womb. The technique has yielded
four healthy babies. The same
procedure could be used to trans-
plant DNA from a human egg with
mitochondrial disorders into one
with healthy mitochondria.
“This offers real treatment for
many diseases,” Mitalipov says.
“And not in 20 years. It can be
used now to prevent thousands of
birth defects.” The process would
yield a baby with two biological
mothers, raising prickly legal and
ethical questions. But Mitalipov
points out that only 37 mitochon-
drial genes would be replaced; the
25,000 nuclear genes that make
up an embryo’s DNA and de� ne all
of a person’s external traits would
remain unchanged. AMY BARTH
TH
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OR
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Sunbaked Mercury, captured by Messenger during the spacecraft’s September fl yby, reveals previously unseen craters and lava fl ows.
A mitochondrion
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30 Hunters Accelerate the Pace of EvolutionHumans are powerful agents of evolu-
tionary change: Wild animals and plants
that are hunted or harvested evolve three
times as quickly as they would naturally,
according to a study from the University
of California at Santa Cruz. In our quest
to bag the biggest and the best, we intro-
duce selective pressures that favor less
desirable creatures, such as those with
smaller bodies or less majestic horns.
Hunting also gives a competitive advan-
tage to animals that have babies when
they are younger, before they become
tempting targets for humans.
A team led by biologist Chris Dari-
mont combed through data on dozens
of species—predominantly � sh but also
bighorn sheep, caribou, marine inver-
tebrates, and two plants. (“Hunters
also want the biggest ginseng,” Dari-
mont says.) Animals that are routinely
subject to pursuit are, on average, 20
percent smaller and reproduce at a
25 percent younger age than what would
be expected without human in� uence,
the researchers determined. Predation
is not the only way that people affect
populations. Creatures that are exposed
to environmental in� uences like pollution
also experience accelerated evolution,
although the effect is less dramatic.
The resulting changes have ripple
effects, Darimont notes. Smaller and
earlier breeders often produce fewer
offspring, for instance. “Size really
matters,” he says. “If a harvested ani-
mal keeps shrinking, it may no longer
be prey to its predator. The whole food
web can be altered.” AMY BARTH
32 Fake DNA Fools Crime LabDNA evidence has become a stan-
dard forensic tool because it can
pinpoint one individual out of mil-
lions. But the Israeli company
Nucleix has shown that it is
distressingly simple to make a
phony DNA � ngerprint.
In Nucleix’s experiment,
researchers took a small
bit of DNA (which can be
collected from an object like
a cigarette butt) from a test
subject, replicated it millions
of times over, and used it to
build an arti� cial DNA sequence.
They then added the built-up DNA
to blood that had been processed to
remove the original, DNA-containing white
blood cells. When analyzed by a leading foren-
sics lab, the mixture was indistinguishable from
real blood and natural genetic material. Going a
step further, the researchers fabricated arti� cial
DNA using only sequence data and added it to a
saliva sample. This fake also passed inspection.
Although the experiment was done entirely
with commercial technology, DNA expert Larry
Kobilinsky of John Jay College of Criminal
Justice in New York doubts that most criminals
would have the skills to pull it off. Just in case,
though, Nucleix has developed a test that can
screen for fake DNA. BOONSRI DICKINSON
31 Sun’s Changes Have Surprise Effects on Earth’s WeatherScientists have long suspected that the sun affects climate on Earth, but that
connection has proved hard to pin down. Researchers recently demonstrated that
the 11-year cycle of solar activity in� uences weather in the tropical Paci� c Ocean.
Even then the exact cause remained obscure, since the sun’s brightness varies by
just one-tenth of a percent. Two studies from 2009 are � lling in the gaps.
In August an international team led by Gerald Meehl, a climatologist with the
National Center for Atmospheric Research, announced that the sun’s outsize
in� uence results from its combined effects on our atmosphere and oceans. When
the sun is at its most intense, ozone in the stratosphere absorbs more ultraviolet
energy, making areas near the equator warmer than usual. The added heat changes
wind patterns, bringing more rain to the western tropics. At the same time, the
extra sunlight causes more evaporation off the ocean, which adds to downpours
in the western tropics. Simulations that modeled just one of these effects failed to
match the real world. Meehl saw that the two mechanisms “feed off each other,
producing a stronger response than either can alone.” His results should help
climatologists predict monsoons in Asia and overall climate in North America and
might someday allow them to estimate seasonal rainfall years in advance.
Meanwhile, Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark and his
colleagues are exploring a broader climate impact of solar activity. He believes
that cosmic rays—energetic subatomic particles from outer space—help seed
cloud-forming water droplets in the lower atmosphere. During peak solar activ-
ity, eruptions from the sun spew out huge clouds of plasma that shield Earth from
those cosmic rays. After examining cloud cover and cosmic ray � uxes, Svensmark
concluded that declines in cosmic rays lead to fewer clouds, implying that an
active sun could lead to warmer surface temperatures. Following the strong est
solar eruptions, he found that the sky lost 7 percent of its cloud water. Many sci-
entists doubt the signi� cance of these cosmic ray effects, but Svensmark sees the
question as ripe for investigation. “The sun is doing natural experiments on Earth’s
atmosphere, giving us the opportunity to test these ideas,” he says. JANET FANG
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EVOLUTION || TECHNOLOGY || MEDICINE
It might seem that biologists
have already canvassed every
bit of our planet. In reality, by
tapping the latest genetic and
molecular techniques they are
identifying new species at an
unprecedented pace. To draw
attention to this fast-growing
catalog of biodiversity, the Arizo-
na State University International
Institute for Species Exploration
created a top 10 list of the most
amazing species discovered in
2009, including:
Tahina spectabilis: A palm
native to northwest Madagascar,
the species is so huge that single
trees can be spotted via Google
Earth. The plant’s trunk grows
to 60 feet high and its leaves to
more than 15 feet across. After
30 to 50 years, the palm pro-
duces hundreds of fl owers that
drain its nutrients completely,
causing it to die in a few months.
Fewer than 100 specimens have
been found, but the plant is now
being cultivated.
Phobaeticus chani: The world’s
longest stick insect, measuring
two feet from antennae to tail,
was discovered in Borneo, Malay-
sia. This creature resembles a
small branch with six twiggy legs.
Hippocampus satomiae: This
pygmy sea horse, which lives off
the coast of Derawan Island in
Borneo, is the smallest of its kind,
about half an inch long.
Leptotyphlops carlae: Also
among the incredibly small is the
world’s most minuscule snake:
Found in Barbados, it measures
only four inches long.
Coffea charrieriana: Producing
the fi rst known coffee bean that
is naturally caffeine free, this
plant from Cameroon could lead
Blast of Biodiversityin the last 15 years are yoked to
local ecosystems and likely to
become extinct. One capuchin
monkey inhabits only a single
200-hectare slice of forest ringed
by sugar plantations.
People rely on biodiversity, too.
The earth’s dazzling biological
cornucopia helps regulate carbon
dioxide levels, protects crops and
humans from pests and disease,
recycles nutrients, and holds a
still largely unfathomable genetic
bounty. “The human economy is
a wholly owned subsidiary of the
economy of nature,” Ehrlich says.
JILL NEIMARK
3 to commercial coffee trees that
produce their own decaf.
The exaggerated nature of the
newfound species illustrates the
rich and complicated ways in
which organisms adapt to their
unique environments.
Many plants, insects, and
vertebrate animals are com-
pletely dependent on endangered
ecosystems. A March 2009
study by biologist Paul Ehrlich of
Stanford University and biologist
Gerardo Ceballos of the National
Autonomous University of Mexico
found that 81 percent of the 408
new mammal species discovered
Clockwise from top left: Leaf and
fl owers of the giant palm Tahina
spectabilis, and the tiny snake
Leptotyphlops carlae. Both species
were discovered in 2009.
TH
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34 Computers Go QuantumAtomic-scale computers that
exploit the bizarre rules of quan-
tum physics have the potential
to process enormous quanti-
ties of data far more quickly
than today’s devices. In June,
researchers at Yale University
announced progress toward
this goal, creating the � rst quan-
tum processor that is built into a
conventional silicon chip.
Quantum computers pro-
cess information using bits that
behave like atoms, so even the
slightest disturbance would ruin
the process. Previous experi-
ments had required complicat-
ed lasers or magnets to keep
the system stable, but the Yale
team’s processor was designed
into computer chips. With one
calculation, the device solved a
math problem that would take
an ordinary computer as many
as four steps. The key difference
is that quantum bits can take on
fuzzy values: not just 1 or 0, but
in some sense everything in
between at the same time.
While the Yale research
focuses on hardware, a team
from MIT and the University
of Bristol in England is � nding
better ways to use quantum
computations. In October the
group described a new algo-
rithm that could rapidly solve
the complex linear equations at
the heart of many key process-
es, including image processing
and gene analysis.
Turning the Yale experi-
ment into a useful computer
will require adding many more
quantum bits and managing
how those bits interact. “It just
seems so difficult to make a
large-scale quantum comput-
er,” says Steven Girvin, a Yale
physicist who coauthored the
� ndings. “But � ve years ago I
never thought we’d be where
we are now.” ANDREW GRANT
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36 Diarrhea Vaccine Could Save MillionsNearly 1.5 million children,
the vast majority of them in
the developing world, die of
diarrheal diseases each year.
In April, Mahdi Saeed, an epi-
demiologist at Michigan State
University, announced a new
vaccine that could substan-
tially reduce that number.
Although vaccines already
exist for some causes of diar-
rhea, � nding a � x for entero-
toxigenic E. coli, the leading
bacterial cause of diarrhea
in children in the developing
world, has proved to be dif� -
cult. The toxin produced by E.
coli is too small to be recog-
nized effectively by the human
immune system, meaning that
one round of infection does
not provide immunity against
future exposure.
As a result, a person can
experience multiple bouts
of diarrhea, which can lead
to dehydration, malnutrition,
and even death. Children are
especially vulnerable because
they have a higher density of
chemical receptors susceptible
to the E. coli toxin than adults
do. That toxin is also a leading
cause of traveler’s diarrhea,
which annually affects millions
of visitors to developing coun-
tries around the world.
In order to alert the
immune system to the pres-
ence of the tiny toxin mol-
ecule, Saeed attached it to a
larger molecule that did not
alter its properties. Trials in
mice showed that this piggy-
back approach increased the
ability of the immune system
to recognize the toxin.
A separate set of trials in
rabbits, which concluded
in April, demonstrated that
the doubled-up molecule
provoked the animals’
immune system to produce
antibodies. And when these
antibodies were tested in
mice, researchers found that
they made the mice immune
to the effects of E. coli.
The new vaccine, 25 years
in the making, could proceed
to human clinical trials by the
beginning of 2010, accord-
ing to Saeed, who has been
studying E. coli toxin since he
was in graduate school. A vac-
cine could also reduce E. coli
deaths among farm animals.
“E. coli is a killer,” Saeed
says. “A vaccine would be a
true lifesaver for children in
the developing world.”
LINDSEY KONKEL
Micrograph
of E. coli,
a leading
cause of
diarrhea.
Pääbo and a
Nean derthal
skeleton.
35 Neanderthals Get PersonalDid humans and Neanderthals
ever lie under the moon, mak-
ing love? Could Neanderthals
talk? Do we have any of their
genes? We diverged from our
hominid cousins as long as
400,000 years ago, and by
30,000 years ago they were
gone, leaving the particulars of
any intertwined history seem-
ingly lost forever.
We are beginning to revisit
those ancient days, however,
due to a draft of the Nean-
derthal genome created by
Svante Pääbo and colleagues
at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig, Germany. The draft,
announced in February, covers
about 63 percent of the roughly
3.2 billion base pairs in the
Neanderthal genome. Pääbo
created it by sequencing DNA
from fragments of bone (most
of it from the Vindija cave in
Croatia) to get 3 billion Nean-
derthal base pairs essentially
uncontaminated by human
DNA or by microbes.
To perform this stunning feat,
Pääbo and his team used new,
high-throughput DNA technolo-
gies—developed in part by the
companies 454 Life Sciences
and Illumina—to analyze hun-
dreds of thousands and even
millions of DNA fragments at
the same time.
With the ability to sequence
DNA at warp speed, the re -
searchers could � nally decon-
struct the genomic relationship
between Neanderthals and
modern humans. Although
our DNA sequences are more
than 99.5 percent identical,
our genetic cousins did not
contribute any mitochondrial
DNA to us, and probably little
genetic material overall. (It is
still possible that we donated
genes to them, however.) “We
are now analyzing whether
there was any interbreeding”
at all, Pääbo says.
In studying the reconstructed
genome, he learned that, like
modern humans, Neander-
thals may have used the spo-
ken word. Indeed, they have
two mutations in a language-
associated gene called FOXP2,
mutations that are not found in
chimpanzees. Such changes
seem to be associated with
vocalization. “From the data we
have so far, there is no reason
to assume that Neanderthals
could not speak like we do,”
Pääbo concludes.
What lies ahead? Pääbo
will continue sequencing Nean-
derthal DNA until he has a
genome that is similar in com-
pletion and quality to the exist-
ing map of the chimpanzee
genome. Ultimately, comparing
Neanderthals, humans, and
chimpanzees will help us find
“those few genetic changes that
are crucial for modern human
behavior and ability,” he says,
and that reveal what makes us
uniquely human. JILL NEIMARK
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ENERGY || MEDICINE
TO
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39 Math Could Fix Traffi c JamsDuring rush hour, maddening traf� c jams can
arise without an obvious cause. In May mechani-
cal engineer Morris Flynn of the University of
Alberta produced a model that shows how these
“jamitons,” or phantom jams, develop.
Traf� c jams have been represented mathemat-
ically as waves of alternating heavy and light car
density. When Flynn analyzed these equations,
he noted striking similarities to the detonation
waves that radiate outward from an explosion. As
in a detonation, jamitons divide the surrounding
space into upstream and downstream regions.
Downstream drivers are the ones caught in the
congestion; upstream drivers are the ones who
are unaware of the jam they are about to hit.
Improving data flow could provide an easy
37Algae Make Clean, Renewable Diesel FuelWhen researchers conceived of
turning algae into diesel fuel three
decades ago, the idea sounded
like something out of the old
sci-� movie Soylent Green. But in
July, ExxonMobil teamed up with
biologist Craig Venter’s Synthetic
Genomics to take algae biofuel to
the marketplace. ExxonMobil has
invested $600 million to design bet-
ter strains of algae and to convert
them into fuel. Meanwhile, several
start-up companies—including
Aurora Biofuels and Solix Biofuels
—have built pilot plants that prove
it is possible to brew algae-derived
diesel fuel in large quantities. “At
the beginning we’d tell people, ‘I
know this sounds crazy,’ ” says
Bryan Willson, a Colorado State
University engineer and cofounder
of Solix Biofuels. “But with the
ExxonMobil investment, algae is
entering the mainstream.”
Traditional biofuel crops such
as soybeans yield 50 to 150
gallons of fuel per planted acre
per year, but Solix’s facility near
Durango, Colorado, is producing
more than 2,000. The centerpiece
is a sealed growth chamber, or
photo-bioreactor, made from
a clear polymer to let sunlight
through; inside is a strain of algae
selected for its high rate of oil
production. (Closed reactors are
less susceptible to contamination
by outside algae than are open-
pond systems.) After the algae are
harvested, their oils are extracted
and re� ned into renewable diesel.
Besides sunlight, the algae require
little more than carbon dioxide
from nearby power plants, so
operating expenses should be low.
Willson predicts his company’s
algae fuel (and its coproducts,
which are to be sold for animal
feed) will be cost-competitive with
petroleum diesel within � ve years.
“It represents a large-scale solu-
tion to a global problem,” he says.
ELIZABETH SVOBODA
This may go down as the year when all the
talk about creating a next-generation “smart
grid” turned into action. The basic technology
that transports electricity around the United
States is more than a century old. So in Octo-
ber, spurred by concern over the cost and
reliability of the present system, President
Obama announced $3.4 billion of economic
stimulus funds for smart grid projects and
almost $5 billion more in private investment.
“We’ve paid attention to individual compo-
nents of the power system for so long, but
now we have to look at the system itself,”
says Dan Kammen, director of the Renew-
able and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at
the University of California at Berkeley.
These smart grid proposals would create
a flexible, interactive relationship between
energy producers and consumers. “The grid
needs to evolve from one-way wires and
cables to something where each power line
would send power in either direction—to or
from homes, businesses, or industry,” Kam-
men says. “We need the marriage of energy
technology and information technology.”
The stimulus package will fund 100 proj-
ects nationwide, ranging from the installation
of smart meters in homes so that customers
can manage their energy use to the improve-
ment of power substations and transformers.
Utilities could monitor demand in real time
and adjust supply accordingly. Customers
could track their consumption and opt to buy
more energy during off-peak hours, when it
is cheaper and more plentiful. A grid that can
store and redirect large quantities of power
will also be crucial if the United States gener-
ates more than about one-� fth of its power
from renewables such as wind or solar, which
deliver an intermittent supply of electricity.
Ford announced in August that its planned
plug-in hybrid vehicles would be able to
communicate with a smart grid. The batter-
ies in these vehicles could serve as backup
storage, soaking up excess energy at night
and giving it back when demand surges.
“If we can monitor and understand what’s
going on at all times, then we can reap the
reward we want,” Kammen says. “And that
is reliable, green power.” ANDREW GRANT
A Smart Makeover for the Electrical Grid
38
fix. “Since many cars are outfitted with GPS,
you could interactively convey this information
to drivers,” Flynn says. Drivers approaching
a forming jam could then slow down well in
advance, lowering traf� c density: “It reduces
the severity of a jam, and it reduces the likeli-
hood of accidents in the jam.” STEPHEN ORNES
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The barreleye fi sh has eyes that gaze upward right through a transparent shield
covering its head. This year ecologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
studied the fi rst-ever underwater video of the strange fi sh. They also managed to recover
one alive and get a good look at that shield, which may protect its eyes as it steals
prey from stinging jellyfi sh. JANET FANG
40 Quantum Freakiness Leaks Into the Big WorldIf the rules of the tiny quantum world applied to
ordinary objects, all sorts of strange things could
happen: An object like a car or a person might be in
two places at once, or two clocks could “entangle,”
moving in synchrony as if they were physically con-
joined even when miles apart. In June researchers at
the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) reported on their effort to see how far quantum
behavior can be extended into the everyday realm.
First they coaxed a pair of beryllium ions to
entangle, such that their physical properties remained
bound together even when they were far apart. To
do this, the scientists � ashed lasers at a frequency
that encouraged the ions to adopt complementary
spin. Next the team split up the beryllium duo so that
each was now matched with a magnesium ion, and
those new pairs were moved to separate areas. The
heavier magnesium ions helped cool and slow down
42 Infection as It HappensOne of the challenges
in � ghting infectious
disease is that re-
searchers cannot watch
individual pathogens
inside living animals.
Did the drug kill the mi-
crobes? Did pathogens
escape to the brain?
Now imaging tech-
niques are providing
answers by following
microbes on the move.
An approach de-
scribed in PLoS Patho-
gens in July allowed
British researchers
to peer inside fruit � y
embryos to track � uo-
rescent versions of the
bacterium Photorhab-
dus asymbiotica. Using
high-resolution confocal
microscopy, the scien-
tists discovered that the
microorganism thwarts
the immune system by
emitting a toxin and im-
mobilizing hemocytes,
cells that would nor-
mally kill it. Meanwhile,
at the Scripps Research
Institute and New York
University, researchers
looked inside mouse
skulls to learn how viral
meningitis can cause
seizure. By recording
moving images of
the cells using two-
photon microscopy,
they discovered an
unexpected class
of immune cells
that damage ves-
sels in the brain. Also
at NYU, researchers
are capturing images
of � uorescent Lyme
disease spirochetes
moving into the brain,
hoping to chart infec-
tion and document the
moment of cure.
MEGAN TALKINGTON
Strange Gaze of the See-through Fish
the beryllium ions. Now the researchers could use
lasers to transfer the entangled state of the beryllium
ions to the motion of the new beryllium-magnesium
pairs. Those pairs began to form two separate oscil-
lating systems, analogous to a swinging pendulum or
a vibrating weight on a spring. “We were motivated
by pure curiosity to look at mechanical oscillators;
no one had ever entangled them before,” says David
Hanneke, a member of the NIST team.
The experiment will help scientists explore why
small objects follow the weird rules of quantum
mechanics but large ones do not—one of the great-
est enigmas in physics. In this case, sets of oscillat-
ing ions can be made to act as if they are connected,
even though equivalent human-scale objects, like
pendulums and springs, “certainly don’t behave in
this entangled way,” Hanneke says. “So where does
the breakdown happen? It’s somewhere between
four ions and a pendulum clock.” ELIZABETH SVOBODA
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EVOLUTION
Charles Darwin would have
turned 200 in 2009, the same
year his book On the Origin of
Species celebrated its 150th
anniversary. Today, with the
perspective of time, Darwin’s
theory of evolution by natural
selection looks as impressive
as ever. In fact, the double
anniversary year saw progress
on fronts that Darwin could
never have anticipated, bring-
ing new insights into the origin
of life—a topic that contrib-
uted to his panic attacks,
heart palpitations, and, as he
wrote, “for 25 years extreme
spasmodic daily and nightly
� atulence.” One can only
dream of what riches await in
the biology textbooks of 2159.
1. Evolution happens on the
inside, too. The battle for sur-
vival is waged not just between
the big dogs but within the
dog itself, as individual genes
jockey for prominence. From
the moment of conception, a
father’s genes favor offspring
that are large, strong, and
aggressive (the better to court
the ladies), while the mother’s
genes incline toward smaller
progeny that will be less of a
burden, making it easier for
her to live on and procreate.
Darwin’s NexGenome-versus-genome
warfare produces kids that are
somewhere in between.
Not all genetic con� icts are
resolved so neatly. In � our bee-
tles, babies that do not inherit
the sel� sh genetic element
known as Medea succumb to
a toxin while developing in the
egg. Some unborn mice suffer
the same fate. Such spiteful
genes have become wide-
spread not by helping � our
beetles and mice survive but
by eliminating individuals that
do not carry the killer’s code.
“There are two ways of winning
a race,” says Caltech biologist
Bruce Hay. “Either you can be
better than everyone else, or
you can whack the other guys
on the legs.”
Hay is trying to harness the
power of such genetic cheat-
ers, enlisting them in the � ght
against malaria. He created a
Medea-like DNA element that
spreads through experimental
fruit � ies like wild� re, permeat-
ing an entire population within
10 generations. This year
he and his team have been
working on encoding immune-
system boosters into those
Medea genes, which could
then be inserted into male
mosquitoes. If it works, the
modi� ed mosquitoes should
quickly replace competitors
who do not carry the new
genes; the enhanced immune
systems of the new mosqui-
toes, in turn, would resist the
spread of the malaria parasite.
2. Identity is not written just
in the genes. According to
modern evolutionary theory,
there is no way that what we
eat, do, and encounter can
override the basic rules of
inheritance: What is in the
genes stays in the genes. That
single rule secured Darwin’s
place in the science books.
But now biologists are � nding
that nature can break those
rules. This year Eva Jablonka,
a theoretical biologist at Tel
Aviv University, published a
compendium of more than
100 hereditary changes that
are not carried in the DNA
sequence. This “epigenetic”
inheritance spans bacteria,
fungi, plants, and animals.
For example, rats exposed
to certain fungicides during
pregnancy give birth to male
progeny with lower sperm
counts and an increased
chance of developing diabetes
and cancer. In each gen-
eration that follows, none
of which were exposed to
fungicides directly, the male
offspring continue to suffer the
same fate. Jablonka argues
that environmental expo-
sures—toxic substances, diet,
and even stress—can affect
the genome (see page 62). In
extremely high-stress cases,
they could possibly rearrange
it enough to create new spe-
cies. Eventually, she says,
“evolution will have to yield.”
3. Mutations reveal surpris-
ing branches on the tree of
life. Darwin would have been
dumbfounded to � nd that
our genes are littered with
changes that have no effect on
our form or function. Mutations
give rise to new genes, but
only some of those produce
discernible changes that
improve (or reduce) � tness.
Many of them do nothing
much at all. Those do-nothing
mutations are a major force for
discovery today, because they
accumulate at a measurable
rate. Generally, the more silent
mutations two species have
in common, the more closely
related they are. If you could
just sequence all the genes in
all the organisms in the world,
in principle you could uncover
the complete tree of life.
That is what evolutionary
biologist Casey Dunn of Brown
University is trying to do, and
his initial � ndings are con-
founding expectations. Dunn
compared the genomes of
71 animal species and found
that the common ances-
tor of all the animals on the
planet may not have been as
simple as a sponge, as previ-
ously thought. Instead, Dunn
identi� ed the more complex
comb jelly� sh—a carnivorous
ocean drifter—as the earliest
to diverge from the animal
family tree. The idea that the
simplest organism may not
have come � rst upends the
popular notion of an evolution-
ary march toward complexity.
This past year Dunn has been
busy expanding his revamped
family tree, starting with Acoe-
lomorpha, a � atworm that was
long considered one of the
most dif� cult animals to put
in its evolutionary place. With
the help of a supercomputer,
Dunn’s team showed that the
worm is a product of the � rst
split among bilateral animals
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Revolution
Transmission
electron micrograph
of infl uenza virus.
more than half a billion years
ago—a discovery that will
help biologists understand the
origins of the digestive and
nervous systems.
4. The “missing link” is not
missing. In October paleon-
tologists unveiled the earliest
known skeleton of a potential
human ancestor, the 4.4-
million-year-old Ardipithecus
ramidus, known as Ardi, and
it was not what anyone was
expecting (see page 22).
Behaving more like modern
monkeys than like chimps,
Ardi walked on two feet with
opposable toes and scam-
pered through the branches
on all fours. This � nd suggests
that what made us human
was the social switch
from aggressive
male to attentive
mate, says C. Owen
Lovejoy, an anato-
mist at Kent State
University. By the
time Ardi appeared,
our ancestors had
stopped � ghting over
mates—as sug-
gested by the small
canines and wood-
land diet of the male
Ardipithecus—and
started providing for
their females and
offspring instead.
Walking upright,
according to Lovejoy,
is an adaptation to
carrying food through
the forest as gifts for
potential mates.
Not everyone
agrees. “The whole
profession of
paleoanthropology
is undergoing a big
bout of indigestion
right now because
they’ve had a lot of
material dropped
on them,” says
Ian Tattersall, an
anthropologist at the
American Museum
of Natural History.
5. We are closing in on how
life began. Gerald Joyce is not
saying that he reproduced the
origin of life, but by some de� -
nitions that is exactly what he
has done. In 2009 he and his
graduate student Tracey Lin-
coln at the Scripps Research
Institute in La Jolla, Califor-
nia, engineered a system of
molecules that can sustain-
ably replicate themselves and
undergo Darwinian evolution in
a test tube. Now Joyce wants
to see “if we can get the mol-
ecules to invent novel function
for themselves,” he says.
So where would the � rst life
on earth have picked up RNA,
the simple hereditary molecule
that is notoriously hard to syn-
thesize? Two papers published
in 2009 propose plausible
chemical routes. In Science a
July report discusses a “helper
molecule” to RNA, which the
author was able to construct
in his lab, that shows the
basic properties necessary
for evolution (see page 83).
And a separate experiment,
published in Nature in May,
showed that it is possible for
the building blocks of RNA to
emerge spontaneously from
simple molecules thought to
have been present on the early
earth. John Sutherland and his
colleagues at the University
of Manchester in England
argue that the precursors
came together in a warm-
water solution, reminiscent of
Charles Darwin’s notion that
life began in some “warm little
pond.” In the meantime, 2009
Nobel laureate Jack Szostak
of Harvard Medical School
has been packaging prebiotic
chemistry into simple mem-
branes to see how protocells
could have self-assembled
out of fatty acids.
The huge strides from the
past year signi� cantly clarify
how life could arise from the
laws of chemistry. “If Darwin
were around now,” Sutherland
says, “maybe he would have
been an organic chemist.”
JESSICA RUVINSKY
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44 Spaceport Breaks Ground in New MexicoDrive an hour northeast of
Las Cruces, New Mexico,
then another 25 miles along a
dirt road, and you can watch
the construction of Spaceport
America—the nation’s � rst
commercial hub built speci� -
cally for spaceships. Right
45 Eye Drops Could Cure GlaucomaScientists in Italy have discovered a simple eye drop that
may reverse glaucoma, the disease caused when pres-
sure builds in the eye, injuring nerve cells and ultimately
leading to blindness. Ophthalmologist Stefano Bonini at
the University of Rome Campus Bio-Medico and his col-
laborators applied drops containing nerve growth factor (a
protein involved in neural development) to the eyes of rats
with induced glaucoma. The drops protected the animals’
retinal ganglion cells and optic nerves, both of which are
generally damaged by the disease. The team’s report
appeared in the August 11 issue of PNAS.
In the study Bonini also had success applying nerve
growth factor to humans with advanced glaucoma.
Two of three patients given the eye drops exhibited a
remarkable improvement in visual acuity and sensitivity
to contrast after three months. “I cannot say that we
have found a cure for glaucoma,” Bonini says carefully,
“but we have something that worked in a few patients.
It will be interesting to test more.” LINDSEY KONKEL
Reconstruction of Dakota shows the dinosaur’s heavily muscled haunches.
now the facility’s 10,000-foot
runway is being formed out
of a mountain of gravel, but
by 2011 it is expected to host
the takeoffs and landings of
space-tourism � ights oper-
ated by its anchor tenant,
Virgin Galactic.
The $200 million project,
underwritten by the state of
New Mexico, broke ground in
June not far from the restricted
airspace of the White Sands
Missile Range. The location
was chosen carefully. It is
unhampered by commercial
jet traf� c and bene� ts from the
same advantages that drew
the U.S. Army there: abundant
clear weather and a 4,700-foot
elevation, which drops the
cost of reaching Earth orbit by
up to $90 million, compared
with launching at sea level.
“Space tourism isn’t the
spaceport’s only purpose,”
says Steven Landeene, its
executive director. Private
companies like Lockheed
Martin are already sending
up rockets from the facility’s
vertical launchpads, located
several miles from the runway.
Other sites around the United
States also support commer-
cial launches, but these are
mostly carved out of existing
government facilities.
“Dreams are becoming a
reality,” Landeene says. He
envisions a day when Virgin
Galactic’s $200,000 � ights will
come down in price and start
to change the way we � y on
Earth, with business travelers
reaching Asia or Europe in less
than two hours.
BOONSRI DICKINSON
47
El Niño’s Cousin Spurs Hurricanes
Dawn at Spaceport America—an artist’s preview.
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In 1999, while fossil hunting in the Badlands of North
Dakota, 16-year-old Tyler Lyson stumbled upon a mummi-
fi ed dinosaur: not just a skeleton, but a fossil that turned
out to include naturally preserved soft-tissue structures.
This year a group of scientists published the fi rst in-depth
analysis of this rare fi nd from 67 million years ago.
The dinosaur—a hadrosaur, or duck-billed plant-eater
—apparently died in a soggy spot. Minerals precipitated
rapidly in its skin, forming a replacement framework
before the soft organic tissues decomposed. “We actually
have a three-dimensional organism preserved,” says study
coauthor Roy Wogelius of the University of Manchester
in England. Scales are visible to the naked eye; more
remarkable, electron microscopy reveals double-layered
skin similar to that of modern animals, and possibly even
the outlines of cells. Wogelius, a geochemist who analyzes
mineral surfaces, was asked to apply his expertise in
infrared imaging to the fossil, nicknamed Dakota. He found
that its mummifi ed remains appear to include some of
the creature’s original amino acids, although there are no
traces of whole proteins or DNA. The results were pub-
lished online in July in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The generous surface area of Dakota’s skin suggests
that there was a lot more muscle packed into the animal’s
tail than previously believed. On the basis of the new infor-
mation, researchers now estimate that this hadrosaur could
have run roughly 27 miles per hour. That is “a lot faster than
a T. rex,” Wogelius’s colleague Phil Manning says.
Manning suspects that skin and soft tissue may have
been overlooked in other fossils and that they could yield
startling new insights about ancient creatures. “I think there
are specimens in museums today that are time capsules,”
he says. “We could go back to these specimens and breathe
new life into those old bones.” MEGAN TALKINGTON
48 Twin Black Holes Found Black holes are weird
enough, but in March
astronomers found
signs of something even
stranger: twin massive
black holes orbiting
tightly around each other.
Such objects have been
long predicted but
never veri� ed.
Todd Boroson and Tod
Lauer at the National Opti-
cal Astronomy Observa-
tory in Tucson found what
they think is a dual black
hole while examining more
than 17,000 quasars in the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey,
which obtained data,
images, and spectra of
more than one-fourth of
the sky. The two objects (a
20-million-solar-mass hole
and a billion-solar-mass
partner) seem to be sepa-
rated by just one-third of
a light-year, less than one-
tenth the distance from the
sun to the closest star.
In theory the universe
should be littered with
black hole multiples. All
sizable galaxies are thought
to be born with black
holes at their centers, and
each time galaxies collide
and merge the expanded
galaxy should collect a new
one. But binary black holes
are dif� cult to � nd. Astrono-
mers have found dozens of
quasars with similar double
lines of emission, but the
signatures are usually
attributed either to a single
black hole or to two galax-
ies passing close together.
Boroson and Lauer are
optimistic that they have
the real deal this time.
“We’re convinced it is
different from every other
object we’ve studied,”
Boroson says. STEPHEN ORNES
Dino Mummy Spills Its Secrets
To forecasters trying to anticipate extreme
weather and avert disasters, the 2004 hur-
ricane season looked like nature thumbing
her nose at us. That year, 15 major storms
developed in the North Atlantic—including
Hurricane Ivan, which caused $14 billion in
damage in the United States. And yet the
best models had called for a quiet season
because it was a year of El Niño, a recurring
pattern of warm water in the eastern Pacifi c
Ocean. That pattern is associated with
lower-than-average tropical storm activity
in the North Atlantic. Atmospheric scientist
Peter Webster at the Georgia Institute of
Technology set out to determine what went
wrong, and now he has some answers.
Last spring, Webster discovered that
his colleagues had lumped together two
distinct weather patterns under the name
of El Niño. Those patterns “have a very, very
different impact on the tropical climate and,
most important, on hurricane formation,”
he says. The divergence appears to be a
recent phenomenon, which explains why
researchers were unaware of its effects.
During a typical El Niño, the Pacifi c Ocean
warms up in a long band that extends
from the coast of South America toward
Polynesia. The second, less familiar pattern
involves a more isolated, extensive patch of
warmer water in the central Pacifi c.
After examining more than six decades’
worth of ocean surface temperatures
and tropical storm data, Webster and
his collaborators realized that the
newly identifi ed warming in the central
Pacifi c produces more hurricanes than a
traditional El Niño. It did not show up in
the data until three decades ago, leaving
Webster unsure whether the new weather
pattern is part of a long-term oscillation
or a result of climate change. Regardless
of the root cause, though, the discovery
of the central Pacifi c hot spot should lead
to better hurricane predictions and fewer
surprises. ELIZA STRICKLAND
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50 Magnetic Mysteries of SunspotsDecodedIn July the � rst complete 3-D
sunspot simulation illuminated
long-standing questions about
these disturbances on the
solar surface. Sunspots are
strong magnetic regions that
disrupt the outward � ow of
heat from the sun’s interior. As
a result they are comparatively
49 Space Trash Causes Orbital CrashIn February, about 500 miles above
Siberia, a U.S. communications
satellite smashed into a defunct
Russian orbiter at 25,000 miles per
hour, annihilating them both. It was
the � rst wreck of its kind—two intact
spacecraft accidentally plowing into
each other at hypervelocity—in the
half-century that humans have been
launching objects into space.
Initially the crash left behind some
1,500 pieces of wreckage bigger than
four inches in diameter, along with
hundreds of thousands of smaller
fragments, estimates Nicholas John-
son, chief scientist of the Orbital
Debris Program Office at NASA’s
Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The debris clouds, initially distrib-
uted along the orbital paths of the
satellites, are spreading to enshroud
the entire planet, joining the roughly
19,000 large chunks of orbiting space
junk (below) already tracked by the
Department of Defense.
Even if we stop launching objects
into space, the amount of trash will
continue to grow. “Things will keep
running into each other at a faster
rate than debris will fall out of orbit,”
Johnson says. Another major colli-
sion is certain to happen eventually,
he adds. In March, a 5-inch fragment
from a spent rocket engine whizzed
closely past the International Space
Station. Scientists and policymakers
are exploring ways to prevent future
accidents by removing large, defunct
objects from orbit. JOCELYN RICEfrom the bone of a griffon vulture—might be
capable of expressing greater harmonic variety
than the modern-day � ute, he says.
Conard’s group discovered fragments
of three ivory � utes in their 2008 digs. Four
other bone and ivory � utes were previously
found in the same area. Collectively, these
are regarded as the oldest known musical
instruments. The researchers conjecture
that music was important in the geographic
expansion and cultural development of humans
during the Upper Paleolithic era. “We can now
state that our ancestors had a developed
culture,” Tarasov says. “Not only were they
surviving, but they had time to do something
that required superior skill.” ALINE REYNOLDS
51 Oldest Musical Instrument FoundMore than 35,000 years ago, our ancestors
living in present-day southwestern Germany
were playing sophisticated music, according to
University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas
Conard. In June he announced that he and his
colleagues had unearthed an ancient bone � ute
in Hohle Fels, a cave in the Swabian mountains.
The sound produced by the � ute “is almost
identical to tones of the major scale played on
today’s � ute,” says Nikolaj Tarasov, a recorder
specialist at the Music University of Karlsruhe
in Germany. The � ve-holed instrument—carved
cool and so look dark against
the 10,000-degree Fahren-
heit solar surface. (They still
blaze at temperatures near
7,500°F, however.)
Scientists at the National
Center for Atmospheric
Research in Boulder, Colo-
rado, simulated a typical pair
of sunspots, which usually
appear in tandem with oppo-
site polarity. Mimicking the
twisted magnetic � elds and
fast-moving plasma in these
20,000-mile-wide maelstroms
required a month of work on
a supercomputer capable
of 76 trillion calculations per
second. The result closely
matched observations of
how plasma � ows from a
sunspot’s central dark region
into the surrounding turbulent
zone, according to lead
researcher Matthias Rempel.
This model exposes new
details of stellar physics and
could make it easier to predict
violent “space weather” before
it affects Earth. Sunspots
often spawn solar � ares that
can knock out radio communi-
cation, damage satellites, and
zap power grids. ADAM HADHAZY
Computer simulation of sunspot structure; vertical magnetic fi elds appear dark.
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52 Fight Rages Over Cancer GenesWhen Lisbeth Ceriani, a
43-year-old Massachusetts
woman, was diagnosed
with breast cancer last year,
her doctors recommended
that she undergo genetic
testing to see if she carried
mutations in the BRCA1 and
BRCA2 genes that increase
risk of breast and ovarian
cancers. She had several risk
factors for inherited cancer,
including relatives who had
died from breast and ovarian
cancer. “My dad’s mother
wasn’t diagnosed with ovar-
Illustration of
cancer in glandular
breast tissue and
lymph nodes. Inset:
Breast cancer cells.
ian cancer, but we feel sure
she had it after reviewing her
symptoms,” Ceriani says.
When Ceriani’s doctors
submitted her blood to Myr-
iad Genetics—the only com-
pany that offers a sequencing
test for BRCA mutations—the
company refused to process
it, saying that Myriad did not
accept Ceriani’s health insur-
ance. She could not afford
to pay for the test herself
(it costs nearly $4,000), so
she did not have it done. If
there had been a cheaper test
or a company that took her
insurance, she would have
known quickly what her best
treatment options were.
There is only one test for
BRCA mutations because
Myriad controls the BRCA
genes. The U.S. Patent and
Trademark Of� ce awarded
the company its � rst patent
in 1997; by 2000 the patent
of� ce had awarded it eight
more, in effect giving Myriad
ownership of the genes.
Accordingly, the company is
allowed to decide who may
study the genes and has
written cease-and-desist let-
ters to university geneticists
working on alternative BRCA
sequencing tests.
This year Myriad’s patent
was challenged in court by
the American Civil Liberties
Union on behalf of 20 plain-
tiffs, including the American
College of Medical
Genetics, the Asso-
ciation for Molecular
Pathology, and various
individuals, including
the genes related to breast
cancer and knew where the
genes were likely to be,” says
Arupa Ganguly, a geneticist at
the Hospital of the University
of Pennsylvania and one of
the plaintiffs in the ACLU
suit. “Essentially the work
was done for Myriad already.
Everyone knew where the
gene was.” Myriad has refused
to comment and in July � led a
motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
That motion was denied by a
New York federal district court
in November.
Robert Cook-Deegan,
director of the Institute for
Genome Sciences and Policy
at Duke University, does credit
Myriad with discovering spe-
ci� c mutation sequences and
building a public database
of genetic variations—both
valuable contributions. But
he says that many scientists
believe Myriad’s control has
slowed or blocked research,
and it “certainly has made
researchers more cautious in
how they report relevant � nd-
ings.” At the least, geneticists
in the United States do not
have the option of making
a more accurate screening
test because doing so would
infringe on Myriad’s patent.
The ACLU argues that gene
patents as a whole inhibit the
free � ow of ideas and should
not be awarded. “Gene
patents defy common sense,”
says Chris Hansen, one of the
ACLU lawyers handling the
case. “If you’re at a cocktail
party and you tell people
human genes are patented,
almost everyone will say that
can’t be right.”
Right or not, about 20
percent of all human genes
already have been included in
patent claims. Whether that
number will stand or even
grow will depend on how
the ACLU suit is decided.
JANE BOSVELD
Ceriani. The lawsuit
charges that the BRCA
patents—and gene pat-
ents in general—violate
established laws that
prohibit the patenting
of products and laws of
nature. According to the
ACLU, “Human genes,
even when removed
from the body, are still
products of nature.”
Critics also argue
that the process of
locating speci� c genes
does not warrant the
awarding of patents. “A
number of researchers
had been looking for
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MEDICINE || EARTH
55 Virus Linked to Chronic FatigueChronic fatigue syndrome, which affects 17 million people worldwide, has � nally
been linked to a speci� c pathogen: XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia-related
virus). XMRV is one of only three known human retroviruses, infectious agents that
slip into our genome and become a permanent part of our DNA. Cancer biologist
Robert Silverman of the Cleveland Clinic isolated XMRV three years ago in men
suffering from prostate cancer. The men had an immune defect that allowed the
virus to proliferate, much like a defect documented in patients with chronic fatigue.
Seizing upon that clue, cell biologist Judy Mikovits of the Whittemore Peterson
Institute in Reno, Nevada, tested 101 chronic fatigue patients. In October she
reported that 67 percent of them had the virus, as opposed to only 3.7 percent of
healthy people. Tests on another 200 patients revealed that more than 95 percent
of people with chronic fatigue carry antibody to the virus, Mikovits says.
For Mikovits these statistics raise new questions. Is XMRV the cause of chronic
fatigue, or just an opportunistic infection? More ominously, does XMRV increase
the risk of cancers, as HIV—another retrovirus—does? A blood test to detect
XMRV antibodies is now available through VIP Dx Labs in collaboration with
Whittemore Peterson. “This discovery could be a major step in the development of
vital treatment options for millions of patients,” Mikovits says. JILL NEIMARK
54 Seismic Waves Clarify How Continents MovePlate tectonic theory does a marvelous
job explaining how sections of Earth’s
crust shift about, moving continents and
reshaping oceans. Still, the underly-
ing structure that makes all this motion
possible was poorly understood until
Catherine Rychert and Peter Shearer
of the University of California at San
Diego dug through 15 years’ worth of
seismic data from around the world.
As seismic waves cross through differ-
ent materials, they change speed and
direction. By analyzing such effects,
the researchers were able to locate the
boundary below the earth’s rigid tec-
tonic plates where they meet the hot,
pliable asthenosphere beneath.
The base of the tectonic plates
appears to lie 44 miles beneath the
oceanic islands, on average, and 50
miles below young parts of the conti-
nents, the team reported in Science.
They also found a boundary 60 miles
below the oldest continental regions
but are not certain that it represents the
base of the plates. Previous evidence
had suggested that these parts of the
continents were at least 120 miles thick.
Rychert notes that some of the data
that generated the 60-mile estimate
While millions of Americans are trying
to shed fat, in the past year three research
teams announced that the adult body
contains a peculiar kind of fat that we might
prefer to hold on to. Called brown fat, it burns
energy rather than storing it. Activating this
improbable tissue might provide a new way
to rev up the body’s metabolism and acceler-
ate weight loss.
Packed with mitochondria (the energy-
generating units in cells), brown fat produces
heat in response to cold temperatures, con-
suming a lot of calories in the process. Brown
fat is present in newborns, whose bodies use
it to keep warm because they cannot shiver,
but it was thought to vanish by adulthood.
So it came as quite a shock when scientists
at fi ve Boston-area biomedical institutes
studied thousands of archived PET/CT scans
and found deposits of brown fat around the
neck and collarbone in about 5 percent of the
people examined. C. Ronald Kahn, the head
of obesity and hormone action research at
Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, believes that
brown fat is actually present in most adults
and that the only reason it did not show up in
the majority of the PET/CT scans was because
it had not been activated.
In a separate study, conducted in Finland
and Sweden, adult volunteers were kept in
cold rooms or subjected to ice-water footbaths
to spur any brown fat into action. Follow-up
PET/CT scans and biopsies then confi rmed
that the fat was indeed present. Meanwhile,
researchers in the Netherlands documented
that lean young men have more brown fat than
their overweight counterparts.
All three reports appeared in the New
England Journal of Medicine in April. “Adults
do have brown fat,” Kahn says. “Now the
question is to fi nd out how active it is in
controlling metabolism.” KATHLEEN MCGOWAN
Lose Weight With Brown Fat?
53
might have come from seismic stations
near thin edges of continents; she plans
to examine data from additional sta-
tions in those areas to con� rm her � nd-
ings. In the other environments, though,
the evidence seems clear, she says: “We
don’t know of any other mechanism that
can explain the sharp, globally pervasive
boundary we’ve seen.” Pinpointing the
location of that boundary will help clarify
how continents formed and why certain
parts of those continents are particularly
stable today. JENNIFER BARONE
The Arabian plate (lower left) collides with
the Eurasian plate (upper right) at the Persian
Gulf, driving Iran’s Zagros Mountains upward.
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56 Earth-like Storms Seen onSaturn’s MoonWith its thick atmosphere, rippling
lakes, and eroded landscapes, Sat-
urn’s giant moon Titan has a lot in
common with Earth. In August scien-
tists added another similarity shared
by these unlikely siblings: stormy
weather. Using the NASA Infrared
Telescope Facility and Gemini North
Observatory, planetary scientist
Emily Schaller of the University of
Arizona identi� ed a massive storm
that appeared near Titan’s equator.
“For so long, it was cloud-free,” says
Schaller, who devoted her doctoral
research to a largely fruitless search
for Titanic clouds. “Then, all of a sud-
den, they dramatically appeared.”
Schaller’s team could not con� rm
whether precipitation fell, but other
studies have offered strong evi-
dence that methane clouds on Titan
dump methane rain in a cycle much
like the exchange of water between
the atmosphere and the surface of
Earth. The scientists are now trying
to determine whether Titan’s storm
resulted from atmospheric condi-
tions or from surface activity, such
as methane-spewing geysers or
volcanoes. ANDREW GRANT
Five wild orangutans in Borneo—nick-
named Sam, Henk, Rambo, Kondor, and
Sultan—have learned to create a new
kind of distress signal, using leaves
to lower the pitch of their common
warning call, known as a kiss-squeak.
The leaf-produced kiss-squeaks seem
intended to make the orangutans sound
bigger and more threatening. “Primates
were assumed to have no control over
their calls,” says Madeleine Hardus, a
behavioral biologist at Utrecht University
in the Netherlands, who classifi es the
orangutans’ ability to alter their stan-
dard call as “a cultural innovation.”
Hardus and her colleagues discovered
that the orangutans had developed leaf-
assisted calls to identify humans (and
probably predators as well). She hypoth-
esizes that the technique is passed
down from one orangutan to the next.
Researchers have rigorously documented
leaf adaptation in the cluster of fi ve but
have also observed the behavior in the
wider orangutan population. JANE BOSVELD
58Orangutans Invent New Warning Calls
An orangutan changes its voice with a leaf.
57 Robots Learn to WalkLast year, robots got off their
behinds and began walking
upright. Inspired perhaps by
the success of drone aircraft
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
U.S. Department of Defense
is funding projects to build
machines that walk like
us—machines that could
carry loads, perform search
and rescue, or even assist
in combat.
One of the greatest
challenges for a bipedal
robot is navigating com-
mon obstacles like curbs
and stairs. Keith Buf� nton,
a mechanical engineer at
Bucknell University, recently
received a $1.2 million Navy
grant to tackle the problem.
He video-taped students
regaining their balance after
a shove and realized that
walking is actually a type of
controlled falling, with each
step an act of recovery.
That insight inspired new
algorithms for managing
hips, knees, ankles, and
toes. Collaborating with
the Institute for Human
and Machine Cognition in
Florida, Buf� nton’s team
has built a partial bipedal
robot (torso, legs, and feet)
that could soon walk over
simple obstacles, allegedly
with better balance than a
person. In 2010 the group
will add arms and a head
with stereoscopic vision.
Boston Dynamics, an
offshoot of MIT, is taking
a similar approach with
Petman, which struck out
this year on its � rst explor-
atory walks. This robot not
only stands like a person
but also simulates human
gestures, body warmth,
and—creepiest of all—it
can sweat. Those traits
are important to the Army,
which wants to use Petman
for testing chemical-pro-
tection gear in battle� eld
conditions starting in 2011.
Anybots of Mountain
View, California, is trying
something different with
Dexter: It incorporates self-
teaching software to help
the robot learn how to walk.
Dexter recently began its
� rst tentative movements.
That’s one small step for a
robot, but if this approach
succeeds, a giant leap for
robotkind. It would certainly
beat anything with wheels.
FRED GUTERL
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ASTRONOMY
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In September
the European Southern
Observatory released
one of the most
spectacular views ever
created of our home
galaxy (left). This edge-
on perspective offers a
good view of what the
Milky Way would look
like from the outside
because in a sense we
are on the outside: Our
solar system resides in
one of the peripheral
outer arms of our fl at-
tened spiral galaxy.
The central bulge
is packed tight with
old red stars and an
invisible black hole
some 4 million times
as massive as the sun.
Thick clouds of gas and
dust create the spidery
dark markings. Two of
the Milky Way’s satellite
galaxies, the Large
and Small Magellanic
Clouds, appear toward
the bottom right. The
800-megapixel image
comprises nearly 1,200
photos, but no high-
powered telescopes
were involved—just
the dark, clear skies of
the Chilean desert and
Canary Islands and a
Nikon D3 digital camera.
In a separate view
zooming in on the
galactic center (bottom),
a giant black hole at the`
Milky Way’s core (white
area at center) gobbles
up matter and spews
X-rays. Nearby,
large stars erupt in
cataclysmic supernova
explosions, sparking
additional emissions
from gas heated to
millions of degrees. This
image, captured by the
Chandra X-ray Observa-
tory, shows X-rays
ranging from relatively
low (red) to high (blue)
energy. ANDREW GRANT
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you had asked me just a few
years ago, I would have said it
would disappear somewhere
around the year 2070. But we
seem to be on the fast track
now. Climate models are tell-
ing us that we might lose that
summer ice by the year 2030.
Is there any way we can
reverse the changes?
We’re already committed. A
year ago I was focusing on
understanding why we’re los-
ing the ice cover so fast. But
my research has shifted now
to understanding the impact.
You can think of it as throwing
up my hands and saying, well,
all right, we’re going to lose the
summer ice cover, so get over
it, and let’s start thinking about
what it really means.
OK—so what will be different
about a warmer Arctic?
Shifts in the sea ice are going
to have cascading effects
through the food chain, from
the top predators all the way
down to the plankton in the
sea. We’ll see more coastal
erosion. Before, a big storm
would come through in sum-
mer but sea ice would limit the
size of the waves. As we lose
the ice, the wind has what we
call a big fetch over the open
water, and you get big waves.
Villages in Alaska and coastal
Siberia are eroding into the
ocean because of this effect.
Will we be able to cross the
fabled Northwest Passage?
You’re already seeing a
busier Arctic. Instead of taking
a boatload of Toyotas through
the Panama Canal or around
Cape Horn, shippers will take
them right from Tokyo across
the Arctic Ocean to Boston or
even New York, at great sav-
ings in time and fuel.
What will the impact be
beyond the Arctic?
By losing the sea ice cover
we’re changing the energy
budget of the Arctic. It’s cold
there because the sun’s rays
strike the surface at a much
shallower angle than they do
at the equator. Also, snow and
ice are so re� ective that much
of the solar radiation you do
get is re� ected right back up
into space. This means that
we set up a gradient in tem-
perature in the atmosphere
with the higher temperatures
in the lower latitudes and
the colder temperatures in
the Arctic. The temperature
gradient creates atmospheric
circulation, which transports
heat from areas of equato-
rial excess to the cold polar
regions. When we lose the
sea ice, we start to change
the nature of the temperature
gradients, and the rest of the
system must respond.
What kinds of responses do
you foresee?
There are going to be shifts in
storm tracks and the inten-
Geographer MARK SERREZE says a big Arctic melt is inevitable and readies us for what comes next.
text by PAMELA WEINTRAUB photograph by BETH WALD
How did you come to study
the Arctic?
I went up there with my
adviser to measure an ice cap
on northern Ellesmere Island.
I remember � ying in on an old
Twin Otter. There were sap-
phire blue skies—it was the
pristine beauty of the place,
the whiteness of the snow
and ice and the visibility of
100 miles in any direction. As I
came back again and again, I
realized that the Arctic was as
much a feeling, a smell, as it
was a place.
What do you feel when you
visit the Arctic today?
Now you can see the hand
of man. As we lose the ice,
the very color of the Arctic
is changing from pure white
toward the blue color of the
ocean breaking through.
We’re seeing areas of formerly
treeless, windswept tundra
transition into shrub vegeta-
tion as the climate warms and
different things grow.
Can you determine when this
process began?
We’ve been able to accurately
measure the extent of Arctic
sea ice from satellites since
1979. What we’ve seen is
an awesome loss of ice, 40
percent of what we used to
have in the 1970s. That’s about
equal to the area of all of the
states east of the Mississippi.
It’s a lot of real estate.
Will all the Arctic sea ice
eventually vanish?
Even in a greenhouse world,
it’s cold in the Arctic in winter.
We’ll have ice, but we will lose
the summer sea ice cover. If
6oWhen Mark Serreze fi rst traveled to the Arctic, in 1982, he was
hit with a thrilling expanse of white. “It was just the most incred-
ible, beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was hooked,” he says.
Returning many times, he got a Ph.D. in Arctic science and for 25
years has studied the region’s snow and storms. Serreze recently
recognized that current climate trends mean that the seasonal
Arctic ice could melt in 20 years or less. He is now trying to help
the world prepare for a very different Arctic: a place of dimin-
ished species, increased vegetation, and easy travel through the
Northwest Passage. Director of the National Snow and Ice Data
Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Serreze spoke
to DISCOVER about the future of the place he loves.
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sity of the cold air outbreaks
that you get in the winter. We
won’t have as many problems
with damaged citrus crops in
Florida. But talk to the farmer
who wants to grow winter
wheat, which requires that win-
ter precipitation. Think about
the American West, where our
whole water supply system is
strongly dependent on the win-
ter snowfall. You start to see
how these changes can have
real economic impact.
Will the shifts add to the
greenhouse effect?
The looming environmental
consequence, the one that’s
really global in scope, has to
do with the carbon cycle. The
issue here is that if we go up
to the Arctic and if we dig into
the soil, we’ll � nd it is peren-
nially frozen—permafrost,
with a great deal of carbon
from past plant and animal life
locked inside, roughly twice
what is in the atmosphere to
date. A big concern is that if
we start to thaw that perma-
frost, microbes living in the
soil will become active. As
they metabolize, move, and
reproduce, they’ll disturb the
soil, releasing the locked-in
carbon. Now we’ve initiated a
feedback loop. Put this stuff
in the atmosphere and you’ve
got even greater warming. The
circulation of the atmosphere
will spread that warmth out
across the land. There’s grow-
ing evidence that this effect is
going to be quite strong.
What do your studies tell you
about the earth of the future?
It’s unknown. The Arctic is
a wickedly complex sys-
tem, and there are all these
cascading effects. Change
in itself isn’t always that bad.
Look at the great ice ages of
the past. The key here is how
rapidly the change will unfold.
Do I fear for the extinction of
the human species? No, but
you can say good-bye to a
lot of species that we have
today. We’re looking at a
different world. That world is
coming fast, and the Arctic
is leading the way.
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61 Abuse
Leaves Its Mark
on Victim’s DNAChildhood trauma may leave a last-
ing imprint not just on the psyche
but also in the DNA. This news
comes from McGill University and
the Suicide Brain Bank, a Quebec-
based organization that carried out
autopsies on suicide victims who
had been abused as kids. Across
the board, their brains showed DNA
modi� cations that made them par-
ticularly sensitive to stress. Although
gene variations are primarily inherit-
ed at conception, the � ndings show
that environmental impacts can also
introduce them later on. “The idea
that abuse changes how genes
function opens a new window for
behavioral and drug therapy,” says
study leader and neuroscientist Pat-
rick McGowan.
During periods of adversity, the
brain triggers release of cortisol, a
hormone responsible for the � ght-
or-� ight response. Due to differen-
tial gene expression associated with
stress, the brains of child-abuse vic-
tims had lower levels of glucocor-
ticoid receptors, McGowan found.
Cortisol normally binds to these
receptors; with fewer of them pres-
ent, there is more cortisol and less
resilience to feelings of stress.
In his study, McGowan reviewed
medical records and police reports
and interviewed family members to
determine whether a subject was
abused early in life. He then exam-
ined the subjects’ brain tissues
and found that among those who
had been abused, glucocorticoid-
receptor expression was reduced
by 40 percent. “If we can identify
how these changes occur, we can
identify those at high risk and ulti-
mately find ways to treat them,”
McGowan says. AMY BARTH
For the fi rst time, astronomers predicted when
and where an asteroid would strike Earth—and
recovered pieces of the rock to prove it. By study-
ing the orbit of the asteroid and examining its
remains, researchers hope to reconstruct more
details about conditions in the early solar system.
The work also serves as a dress rehearsal for
efforts to discover larger, potentially deadly
incoming asteroids before they hit.
Astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey
in Arizona spotted a car-size object headed our
way on October 5, 2008, when it was about as
far away as the moon. After quickly deter-
mining that the rock was too small to cause
damage, scientists at the Minor Planet Center
at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
calculated its trajectory. Less than a day later
the asteroid—now classifi ed as a meteor—
Asteroid Strike Predicted
exploded 23 miles above Sudan’s Nubian
Desert, exactly as was expected.
The story did not end there, however.
Meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI
Institute in California suspected that chunks of
the rock might have survived the fi ery descent.
He enlisted a team of local Sudanese students
to comb the desert of northeastern Sudan and
managed to recover almost 300 fragments total-
ing 10 pounds. In a March paper published in
the journal Nature, Jenniskens reported that the
rocks were part of a porous asteroid that formed
rapidly during Earth’s infancy, some 4.5 billion
years ago. The fragility of the asteroid explains
why it exploded so high up in Earth’s atmo-
sphere. “By looking at this trail of bread crumbs,”
Jenniskens says, “we can go back in time and
see how the asteroid evolved.” ANDREW GRANT
62The meteor’s trail over Sudan, captured by cell phone.
Titanoboa as reconstructed by an artist.
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64 DEET Might Harm the BrainDEET is great at keeping away mosquitoes—200
million people around the world rely on it—but this
common insect repellent may also interfere with the
human nervous system, a group of European sci-
entists warn. Their widely covered study, published
in August, shows that DEET can disrupt nerve cells
and enzymes in insects, mice, and people.
Vincent Corbel of the Institute of Research for
Development in France, who led the research,
cautions that the conditions in his experiment did
not mirror real-world use of the chemical. “We
directly exposed speci� c neural cells to high
concentrations of DEET,” he says. He estimates
that the risks from applying it as recommended—
sprayed onto the skin, with no more than three
applications per day at a concentration of no more
than 50 percent—are far lower than the dangers
from mosquito-borne diseases, especially in the
tropics. Nevertheless, Corbel believes that DEET
deserves further investigation: “It’s funny that
after 60 years, there are still many things we don’t
know about this compound.” CYRUS MOULTON
65 Giant Snake Hints at Life in Hot Times In February researchers announced that they had uncovered the
60-million-year-old remains of Indiana Jones’s greatest nightmare:
Titanoboa, the biggest snake of all time. The bones of this 43-foot,
one-ton, crocodile-munching behemoth—found amid the remains
of an ancient rain forest—are helping scientists understand what
the earth was like when the climate was much warmer.
Snakes rely on external heat to regulate their body temperature,
and their size depends directly on the climate where they live. So
when a team of paleontologists unearthed several huge fossilized
snake vertebrae in a Colombian coal mine, the scientists were able
to deduce not only how big the creature was but also what the
temperatures were like in its era. Assuming the monster snake’s
metabolism was similar to that of its living relatives—anacondas
and boa constrictors—lead author Jason Head of the University of
Toronto at Mississauga estimates that equatorial Colombia must
have hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit on average, about
10 degrees warmer than the region is today.
The team’s � ndings, published in Nature, support the idea that
during warming periods, temperatures rise across the globe.
An opposing viewpoint holds that equatorial temperatures stay
roughly constant while excess heat accumulates in higher lati-
tudes. “Most climate models favor a hot equator,” says Paul
Koch, a paleontologist at the University of California at Santa
Cruz, who did not participate in the research.
Neither scenario would be particularly good news in the con-
text of modern climate change. Head notes that an overheated
equator could threaten a sizable portion of the earth’s biodiver-
sity and its people. “These areas are home to much of the earth’s
population,” he says. On the other hand, Titanoboa also shows
that rain forests can thrive at substantially higher temperatures
than they do in the modern Amazon. ANDREW GRANT
63 Did NASA’s Phoenix Find Liquid Water on Mars?Self-portraits taken by a NASA probe
on the surface of Mars may have pro-
vided our � rst glimpse of liquid water
on another planet. The Phoenix Mars
Lander, which touched down near the
planet’s north pole, was designed to
look only for ice frozen into the Martian
soil. But University of Michigan space
scientist Nilton Rennó says probe
images show blobs of liquid water
clinging to the lander’s titanium legs.
In an October paper in the Journal of
Geophysical Research, Rennó theorizes
that as Phoenix landed, its thrusters
displaced topsoil and splashed small
droplets of brine onto the probe’s legs.
Sodium and magnesium perchlorate
salts in the Martian soil may allow water
to remain liquid despite the extreme
cold, about –90 degrees Fahrenheit.
In successive images, the drops seem
to � ow downward and darken, as if
they are melting. “I think there is liquid
water on Mars right now,” Rennó says.
In a follow-up, he con� rmed that under
simulated Martian atmospheric condi-
tions, sodium salts do absorb water
vapor and form a liquid solution.
Michael Hecht of the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory disagrees with Rennó’s
assessment, saying the blobs could
merely be frost; Phoenix principal
investigator Peter Smith of the Univer-
sity of Arizona in Tucson thinks there is
not yet enough evidence to evalu-
ate the claim. “Whether you believe
Rennó’s case or not, though, he’s
created some interesting ideas that are
very relevant to future Mars research,”
Smith says. One intriguing possibility:
If � uid water does persist on Mars, life
that might have thrived there millions
of years ago, when the climate was
warmer and wetter, could be hang-
ing on in thin layers of salty water just
beneath the surface. ANDREW GRANT
The steep cliffs of
the Martian polar
ice cap.
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ASTRONOMY || MIND || BIOLOGY || TECHNOLOGY
67Giant Geysers From a Tiny MoonSaturn’s moon Enceladus seemed like a boring ball of
rock and ice—“until we fi gured out that it was spewing out
its insides,” says Hunter Waite, a space scientist at South-
west Research Institute. The fi rst major hint came in 2005,
when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft detected magnetic fi eld
distortions along with plumes of water vapor and ice erupt-
ing from its south pole. Last summer, two papers published
in Nature bolstered the possibility that the plumes originate
from buried reservoirs of liquid water (modeled below).
Waite and his colleagues reported that Cassini’s mass
spectrometer had caught a whiff of ammonia—an anti-
freeze that could keep water in a liquid state. Another
group, led by Frank Postberg of the University of Heidel-
berg, described fi nding sodium in the ice grains of Saturn’s
E ring, which is composed of material released by Enceladian
eruptions. Their discovery suggests the moon may have
a liquid ocean that, like Earth’s, picked up salt from rock,
Postberg says. A third team using Earth-based telescopes to
look for sodium near Enceladus came up empty, however.
Some scientists believe that pools of water lurk thou-
sands of feet below the frozen surface, while others think
the eruptions might be released directly from ice. More
answers should come soon: Cassini is scheduled to loop
by Enceladus several more times. MEGAN TALKINGTON
66 Girls Hit Puberty Earlier Around the WorldThe average age of puberty
is falling, according to a study
of 20,654 healthy Chinese girls
aged 3 to 20. On average the
girls developed breast buds by
9 and pubic hair by 11, notably
earlier than what used to be
the norm. A 15-year Danish
study similarly concludes that
girls today experience initial
breast development a year
earlier than they did in the early
1990s. Both reports are in sync
with a landmark 1997 study of
17,000 girls by the American
Academy of Pediatrics, which
found that Caucasian girls
were developing breasts 6 to
12 months earlier than they did
40 years ago.
Better nutrition—leading to
taller, heavier girls who mature
younger—probably plays a
role. Environmental exposure
to hormone-mimicking chemi-
cals may have an effect too.
Pediatrician Barbara Cromer of
Case Western Reserve Univer-
sity notes that many pesticides
and plastics contain synthetic
estrogens, and that cattle fat-
tened with estrogen have up to
� ve times as much of it in their
tissue as do untreated cattle.
“Early puberty could represent
a ‘canary in the coal mine’
for excessive estrogen in our
environment,” she says. If so,
the next generation of young
women are at greater risk of
health problems. Elevated
exposure to estrogen over
a long period is linked with
higher breast cancer rates in
adulthood and earlier onset of
risky sexual activity. JILL NEIMARK
68 200-Year-Old Cipher SolvedIn 1801 American mathematician
Robert Patterson sent a letter contain-
ing an encrypted message to Thomas
Jefferson. The president never � gured it
out, but this past March, mathematician
Lawren Smithline of the Center for Com-
munications Research in Princeton, New
Jersey, � nally cracked the code.
Patterson and Jefferson shared an
interest in cryptography. In his letter,
Patterson wrote that he had devised
the perfect cipher: simple, yet impossi-
ble to break without the key. It entailed
writing a message in vertical columns
on a grid, scrambling the grid’s horizon-
tal rows, and then inserting nonsense
letters at the start of each row. The key
consisted of numbers listing the proper
order of the rows and the number of
nonsense letters in each. Patterson
claimed that his message would stump
humanity “to the end of time.”
Smithline took on the challenge,
writing a computer program to test
different arrangements of rows and vari-
ous quantities of nonsense letters, and
zeroing in on options that produced the
most promising two-letter pairs. Pairs
like “qu” and “nt” suggested he was on
the right track, while combinations that
produced impossible neighbors like “vj”
and “dx” were rejected. After a week,
he exposed the mystery message as
words that Jefferson would have easily
recognized: the Preamble to the Decla-
ration of Independence. STEPHEN ORNES FR
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71 First Ground Animals Borrowed ShellsSome of the � rst
animals to venture onto
land commandeered
empty seashells for pro-
tection, according to an
April report in Geology.
Amherst College geolo-
gist Whitey Hagadorn
came to this realization
while studying imprints
in a 500-million-year-old
sandstone formation in
central Wisconsin. These
markings resembled oth-
er tracks thought to be
made by an early arthro-
pod, Protichnites, as it
dragged itself across an
ancient beach. But the
impressions exhibited
curious diagonal notches
between the leg prints
that puzzled Hagadorn.
He showed them to Yale
geologist Dolf Seilacher,
who noted that the
pattern resembled the
tracks created by mod-
ern hermit crabs as they
drag their shells.
Hermit crabs carry
shells on their backs
for protection and to
store water. Protichnites
probably used shells to
keep their abdominal
gills moist, Hagadorn
speculates. That would
have allowed the animals
to breathe and forage on
land for longer periods.
“Shells increased the
range of conditions
they could withstand,”
he says. Hagadorn is
following up on a related
development, the dis-
covery of a fossil of the
lobsterlike creature that
may have created the
tracks. JEREMY LABRECQUE
69 Prize-Driven Research Takes OffA growing number of organizations are taking a cue
from reality TV, offering prize money for successful
solutions to science and technology problems.
Three major prizes are currently up for grabs from
the X Prize Foundation, which aims to spur innovation.
The $10 million Archon X Prize will reward any group
or person who can sequence the human genome in
10 days or less for no more than $10,000 per genome.
So far, eight teams have registered. The $10 million
Progressive Automotive X Prize, recognizing high-
ef� ciency, commercially viable vehicles, completed
two rounds of judging this past year. Performance tests
will start in the spring of 2010, with winners announced
in September. And 21 teams are vying to land a pri-
vately funded rover on the moon in pursuit of the
$30 million Google Lunar X Prize. Last October a small-
er X Prize–operated contest, the Northrop Grumman
Lunar Lander Challenge, awarded $1 million to Masten
Space Systems and $500,000 to Armadillo Aerospace
for their progress in building a commercial rocket capa-
ble of safe vertical takeoff and landing, as demonstrat-
ed by successful tests in the Mojave Desert.
Other groups were also busy in 2009. Entries poured
in for the £10 million ($17 million) Saltire Prize, to be
awarded by the government of Scotland for wave or
tidal energy technology that can produce a continuous
output of 100 gigawatt-hours for two years. More than
100 teams will begin competition this month. In Septem-
ber, the DVD rental company Net� ix paid out a $1 mil-
lion purse to a seven-member team that developed an
algorithm to improve its predictions of customers’ movie
preferences. Net� ix plans to announce a sequel early
this year. Meanwhile, a company called InnoCentive
is hosting hundreds of open questions in science and
technology. Rewards range from $5,000 to $1 million.
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis thinks prize-based
innovation is much more than a fad: “Investments where
sponsors pay only for results are ef� cient, effective, low-
risk mechanisms to solve problems.” DARLENE CAVALIER
While digging for fossils in Pakistan,
paleontologist Philip Gingerich of the Uni-
versity of Michigan discovered the fossil
skeleton of a 47-million-year-old pregnant
whale with her fetus positioned for head-
fi rst delivery—a surprise since modern-
day whales are born tail-fi rst to prevent
drowning. The clear implication: Ancestral
whales may have given birth on land.
“Virtually all of mammal evolution has
occurred on land,” says Gingerich, who in
2001 described fossil evidence that whales
descended from split-hoofed mammals, a
fi nding that compounded earlier indications
of a genetic relationship between whales and
hippos. Fossils indicate that whales started
to make the transition from land to sea
Ancestral Whales May Have Given Birth on Land
about 50 million years ago. The pregnant
specimen, Maiacetus inuus, was found
near what was once a coastline. It probably
looked like a long-snouted sea lion, with
fl ipperlike limbs and a long, muscular body.
This intermediate species may have spent
most of its time in the water, coming onto
land to rest, mate, and give birth. A second,
even more complete Maiacetus fossil was
found nearby; it appears to be a male,
slightly larger.
Gingerich and team nearly overlooked
the two skeletons. “There was just a trace
of chalk dust on the ground,” he says. “I
thought it was nothing at fi rst, but when we
came to the mother’s skull, I knew this was
something special.” LINDSEY KONKEL
70
A ventral view
of the skull
of Maiacetus
inuus.
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ASTRONOMY || MEDICINE || EVOLUTION || ENERGY
74Hydrogen Energy Gets Two Big BoostsHydrogen fuel cells, which
expel only water and heat as
waste, are an appealing way to
generate clean electricity, but
the present technology relies on
expensive platinum catalysts.
Moreover, most of the hydrogen
available today is derived from
fossil fuels, so hydrogen is not
nearly as clean as it may seem.
This year, researchers made
notable progress in transcend-
ing both limitations.
Looking for an alternative
to platinum, Jean-Pol Dodelet
of the National Institute of
Scientifi c Research in Quebec,
found inspiration in the human
body, which uses iron-based
molecules to extract energy
from food. In April his group
described an enhanced
iron-based catalyst for fuel
cells. It works just as well as
platinum-based ones but could
be considerably less costly.
Chemist Daniel Nocera at MIT
is also looking to nature, trying to
fi nd a renewable way to generate
hydrogen. He has developed
a different catalyst—one that,
when coupled with a photovol-
taic cell, splits water into hydro-
gen and oxygen using energy
from sunlight,
just as plants
do during
photosynthe-
sis. Nocera
is working
to scale up
the system in
hopes that it
will bring clean,
abundant energy
to poor people living off
the grid. “With this,” he
says, “the only thing
you’re tied to is the
sun.” JOCELYN RICE
Illustration of how a pterosaur
might have launched using
all four limbs.
73 Venus Has a Secret PastThe fi rst detailed infrared map of Venus, unveiled by the Euro-
pean Space Agency (ESA) in July, suggests that Earth’s nearest
planetary neighbor may have had a watery past. In size, density,
and composition, Venus is the most Earth-like planet in the
solar system, but it is a hellish domain: Ground tempera-
tures settle around 860 degrees Fahrenheit beneath a
crushingly dense atmosphere laced with
a sulfuric acid haze. Thick clouds pre-
vent direct observation of the surface of
Venus, but its heated rocks emit infra-
red radiation that hints at their composi-
tion. Captured by ESA’s Venus Express
orbiter, this radiation indicates that the
highlands of the planet’s southern hemi-
sphere resemble granite, the same mate-
rial that makes up terrestrial continents. To
form, granite requires water, which does not
currently exist on Venus. It also requires plate tec-
tonics and volcanism—neither of which seems to be active at
this time either. The � nding suggests that the young Venus might
have been much like Earth, with oceans surrounding its extensive
landmasses, before a runaway greenhouse effect condemned it
to its bleak fate. ADAM HADHAZY
76
7572 Tiny Robots Prepare for Surgery Nobody is yet plotting to
shrink Raquel Welch and
inject her into your veins, but
engineers are making notable
progress toward the Fantastic
Voyage vision: creating
miniature probes that could
dart around in your blood and
treat disease from the inside.
This past year, mechani-
cal engineer James Friend
of Monash University in Aus-
tralia crafted a robot motor
just a quarter of a millimeter
in diameter and 2 millime-
ters long, smaller than the
head of a pin. It is built out of
piezoelectric materials that
vibrate when exposed to an
electric � eld. Those vibrations
can be converted into rotary
motion to propel a miniature
swimming robot. Inserted
into a patient, such a device
could transport catheters and
guide wires, carry a camera,
or deliver drugs to the site of
an injury. “It will increase the
ability of the doctor to see
and control what is happen-
ing during surgery,” Friend
says. His group is testing the
mini-motor in silicone models
of human arteries and plan-
ning even smaller versions.
Meanwhile, engineers at
Technion, the Israel Institute
of Technology, debuted Virob,
a buglike microbot that needs
no internal power source.
Instead, a magnetic � eld out-
side the body induces vibra-
tions in its legs, propelling it
forward. The Technion team
hopes to deploy Virob into
the ears of people suffering
from hearing loss, stimulating
nerve cells that lie beyond the
reach of cochlear implants.
BOONSRI DICKINSON
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Giant pterosaurs were masters of the
air from 108 million to 70 million years
ago. The biggest ones weighed 500
pounds, had a wingspan of 34 feet, fl ew
40 miles an hour, and covered hundreds of
miles a day. They were unable to launch
themselves like modern birds, though, so
how did these prehistoric giants get off
the ground? Common sense suggests they
must have run a long distance, built up
speed, and then leaped into the air.
Wrong, says Michael Habib, a paleontolo-
gist at Chatham University in Pittsburgh.
“My fi ndings suggest there was no running
involved.” According to his analysis,
published in the European journal Zitteliana,
pterosaurs folded their wings so they could
act as arms and then used all four limbs to
shove themselves aloft. “Pterosaur arms
were much stronger than their legs,” he
77 Did an Early Pummeling of Asteroids Pave the Way for Life on Earth?The “late heavy bombardment” of asteroids that
clobbered Earth and the rest of the inner solar
system for 20 million to 100 million years, ending
3.85 billion years ago, is generally regarded as
one of the most hostile eras in our planet’s his-
tory. Collision after collision would have blasted
and heated the surface, wiping out any primordial
organisms trying to eke out an existence. New
studies are turning this view on its head, however,
hinting that the ancient rain of asteroids may actu-
ally have established a more congenial environ-
ment for biology to take hold.
There already were clues that the late heavy
bombardment was not the full-on killer it was
once thought to be, says planetary scientist Oleg
Abramov of the University of Colorado. The ear-
liest evidence for living organisms dates back
almost exactly to the time when the rain of aster-
oids ended. Unless life appeared nearly instantly,
it must have survived the onslaught. Abramov’s
study, published in the May 21 issue of Nature,
shows how that could have happened. Certain
modern bacteria thrive deep underground; their
ancestors may have done the same, he argues.
In fact, some scientists think life might have
originated in subsurface hydrothermal sys-
tems. “Nobody had calculated how far steriliza-
tion would have extended below the surface,”
Abramov says. He and his coauthor, geochemist
Stephen Mojzsis, also of the University of Colo-
rado, found that if early bacteria were living more
than 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) down, the impacts
could have helped life by creating more hot-water-
� lled cracks for microbes to inhabit.
Soon after, the late heavy bombardment might
have aided life on the surface, too. Back then the
sun was so dim that Earth should have frozen solid,
and yet geochemical evidence indicates the pres-
ence of oceans 4 billion years ago. One proposed
explanation is that heat-trapping greenhouse
gases kept things balmy, but it was not clear
where those gases could have come from.
In August, geochemist Richard Court of
Imperial College London published
a report showing that impacting
rocks would have shed tremendous
quantities of carbon dioxide and
water vapor, both of which effectively
trap heat. “People had always known that the bom-
bardment would have changed the atmosphere’s
chemistry,” he says, “but nobody had really done
the experimental work.” MICHAEL D. LEMONICK
Yes, You Really Can Smell Fear
says. “Together the wings could withstand
more than 2,000 pounds of force in launch
position. They would crouch down on all
fours, vault, and push off.” Once airborne,
the giant creatures would snap their wings
into fl ying position and eventually soar.
Habib used CAT scans to analyze
bone strength in a number of species
of living birds and compared them to
measurements taken from 12 species of
pterosaurs. He could fi nd no evidence to
support the idea that large pterosaurs got
off the ground using only their hind legs
to launch. In this regard they resembled
vampire bats, which use a “quadrupedal
launch” to accelerate quickly, Habib says.
This kind of launch allows the bat to
employ its strongest muscles (in forelimbs
and chest) for takeoff. JANE BOSVELD
“The smell of fear” turns out to have a foundation in science. All sweat
smells—and some sweat screams anxiety to the world, according to a study
published in June in PLoS One. “The chemical transfer of anxiety may cause a
feeling of discomfort in the perceiver. It’s like a sixth sense,” says psychologist
Bettina Pause of the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, one of the authors of
the paper. Pause and her colleagues collected sweat from 49 students at two
times—right before a university exam and during exercise. The researchers
then had other students sniff the samples and scanned their brains with fMRI,
which registers activity. Sniffers’ brains responded to sweat made during an
anxious period differently from sweat produced through physical exertion. In
humans, anxious sweat activates a cluster of brain areas known to be involved
in empathy. “That suggests,” Pause says, “that anxiety—and maybe also other
emotions—can be chemically transferred between people.” JANE BOSVELD
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In the heart
of the National
Ignition Facility
(NIF), a techni-
cian inspects the
optics assem-
bly where 192
powerful laser
beams will zap a
pellet fi lled with
deuterium and
tritium, two
heavy forms
of hydrogen.
The pellet will
immediately
implode, reaching
a temperature of
more than 100
million degrees at
a pressure
100 billion times
that of Earth’s
atmosphere.
Under those
conditions the
hydrogen will
fuse into helium,
releasing a vast
amount of
energy and creat-
ing the kinds of
nuclear processes
that occur deep
inside the
sun. The NIF,
dedicated in May
in Livermore,
California, will
also mimic the
detonation of
nuclear weapons
and will perform
astrophysics
experiments.
Research at
the facility
could speed the
development of
abundant, clean
fusion power
—literally the
stars brought
down to Earth.
AMY BARTH
Star Power Comes to California78
ENERGY
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79 80 Chimps Plan AheadAs a group, humans know how to think about the future. We are the species of agendas, delayed grati� cation, and � ve-year plans. But this year two studies found that chimpan-zees premeditate too.
In one study, a chimp named Santino—the dominant male at Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden—was observed collecting and piling caches of stones, then returning later to hurl them at people who had come to look at him. Mathias Osvath, a cognitive scientist at Lund Uni-
81 Human Gene Changes Mouse TalkHow important was a single gene in the evolu-tion of human language? Scientists have been asking that question since linking a mutation in a gene called FOXP2 with a rare hereditary speech disorder seen in a British family. Other animals possess their own versions of FOXP2, suggesting that it might be possible to deter-mine which evolutionary changes to the gene’s DNA sequence are most closely related to our ability to talk. This year molecular biologist Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, explored that possibility with an extraordinary
versity in Sweden, posits that Santino may be showing off his strength to human visitors and other chimps. “He has a great time scaring visitors,” Osvath says, “and as the group’s dominant male, he is showing the other chimps that he can protect them.”
A kind of Darwinian quest for survival underlies the second thread of evidence as well. That study comes from behavioral ecologist Chris-tophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolution-ary Anthropology, who spent years observing wild chimpan-zees in the Taï National Park in
Côte d’Ivoire. Boesch and his fellow researchers found that male chimps frequently had sex with the females they had previously shared meat with, thus increasing their mating success. The female chimps, for their part, thrived because of their increased caloric intake. The way the chimps hoard food makes Boesch suspect that the animals plot such trades ahead of time. “But we want to know more about their planning abilities,” he says. “How long ahead and how detailed is this planning, and is there some kind of hierarchical way that they plan?” JANE BOSVELD
An adult male chimp (right) offers meat to a female carrying her infant.
experiment: He inserted the human version of FOXP2 into mice and studied the effects on the creatures’ brains and vocalizations.
Enard and his collaborators found that neu-rons in the brains of mice with human FOXP2
showed greater plasticity, the ability to change the strength of their connections with one another. Such plasticity might be involved in vocal learning, he suspects. Mice endowed with the human gene also expressed themselves with lower-pitched sounds. Those deeper squeaks provide additional evidence of FOXP2’s central role in spoken language. “We have no clue which mechanisms could cause such a change,” Enard says, “but we don’t know of any other gene so directly linked to speech.” ALLISON BOND
PHYSICS || MEDICINE || BIOLOGY || ANTHROPOLOGY
Black Hole Created in LabIn June researchers at Technion,
the Israel Institute of Technology,
announced they had made an earth-
bound analogue of a black hole. Not to
worry: Instead of a superdense object
from which no light can escape, their
more docile version merely prevents
sound waves from getting out.
Constructing a sonic black hole
was first proposed by Canadian
physicist William Unruh nearly 30
years ago, but the Israeli team was
the fi rst to successfully create one.
They cooled 100,000 rubidium atoms
to a few billionths of a degree above
absolute zero and used a laser to cre-
ate a void in this tiny cloud. As the
atoms, attracted to the breach, zipped
across it at more than four times the
speed of sound, they gave rise to a
black hole effect. Under such con-
ditions, no sound wave could travel
against the fl ow of the racing fl uid.
“It’s like trying to swim upstream
in a river whose current is faster
than you,” says team member Jeff
Steinhauer. The boundary between
the subsonic and supersonic fl ows
mimics a black hole’s event horizon,
the point of no return.
The discovery could potentially
provide a way to test Stephen Hawk-
ing’s prediction that a real black hole
should slowly evaporate as it emits
radiation generated in the quantum
turmoil at its event horizon. A sonic
black hole ought to act in the same
way by releasing phonons, or packets
of sound energy. Finding phonons
would provide strong evidence that
black holes “ain’t so black,” as Hawk-
ing likes to put it. MARCIA BARTUSIAK
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83 Light Can Bend ItselfIn July engineers demonstrat-
ed that beams of light can be
made to repel each other, much
like repulsive electric charges.
The discovery could help
control data transfer through
the Internet and enable cell
phones to work more quickly
while drawing less power.
The � ndings from Yale Uni-
versity electrical engineer Hong
Tang and his team build on
discoveries they announced in
late 2008, in which they dem-
onstrated the opposite effect:
attraction between light beams
con� ned within a silicon chip.
Together, the attraction and
repulsion effects make up
what is known as the “opti-
cal force,” a phenomenon
that theorists � rst predicted in
2005. The force acts along an
axis perpendicular to the direc-
tion in which light is traveling.
Parallel beams can therefore
be induced to converge or
diverge.
Tang proposes that the opti-
cal force could be exploited
in telecommunications. For
example, switches based on
the optical force could be
used to speed up the routing
of light signals in fiber-optic
cables, and optical oscillators
could improve cell phone sig-
nal processing. Unfortunately
for amateur physicists, the
optical force effect becomes
imperceptible for larger light
sources, so � ashlight beams
cannot tug on one another.
“You need a transistor-size
object to see it,” Tang says.
STEPHEN ORNES
Light-wave
circuit
enables
engineers
to study
the newly
discovered
optical force.
Computer reconstruction of an ancient deformed skull shows that the
child to whom it belonged must have been nurtured. Such a brain
deformity would have made the child unable to surive without assistance.
82 Early Humans Tended the DisabledThe 530,000-year-old de -
formed skull of a child found
in Spain indicates that some
early humans must have nur-
tured and cared for disabled
members of their tribe.
This child, estimated to be
10 years old at the time of
death, had a debilitating birth
defect called craniosynosto-
sis, in which joints in the skull
fuse before the brain has � n-
ished growing. The disorder
increases pressure in the skull,
impairing brain development.
“It is amazing that this child
was able to survive until 10
years old. This is the most
ancient proof of social care of
the handicapped,” says Ana
Gracia, a paleoanthropologist
based in Madrid, who pub-
lished an analysis of the skull
in March in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Many mammals kill burden-
some offspring, she points out.
The child, unearthed in the
Atapuerca Mountains of Spain,
belonged to the species Homo
heidelbergensis and was prob-
ably part of a small tribe of
hunter-gatherers who migrat-
ed in response to food and
weather. “Survival would have
been dif� cult even for healthy
individuals,” Gracia says. “The
incredible part of this story is
that the parents must have
looked after this child.”
The discovery was made in
Sima de Los Huesos—“the Pit
of Bones.” Located at the bot-
tom of a 137-foot-deep chim-
ney inside a cave, the pit is
littered with remains of ancient
animals and also includes
about 28 hominid skeletons
dating back to the Middle
Pleistocene. AMY BARTH
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On July 19, 15 years after the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet slammed
into Jupiter, Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley noticed
a dark spot near the planet’s south pole that resembled marks he
had seen after the 1994 crash. NASA scientists took a closer look
and concluded that another comet or asteroid had slammed into
Jupiter with the force of 2 billion tons of TNT. The Hubble Space
Telescope snapped this photo four days later, showing an enigmatic
cloud spread out by Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere. ANDREW GRANT
84Jupiter Gets Comet-Whacked
ASTRONOMY || ENVIRONMENT
85Plankton Record Earth’s CO2 History
Trace elements trapped in ancient plankton reveal that
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been largely stable
over the last 2.1 million years. In a study published in
Science in June, paleoceanographer Bärbel Hönisch and
colleagues at Columbia University examined the remnants
of planktonic foraminifera—single-celled creatures with
elaborate shells—buried beneath the seafl oor off the coast
of Africa. The plankton incorporate different forms of boron
into their shells, depending on the seawater’s acidity, so
each shell serves as a chemical record of the ocean’s pH
during its occupant’s brief life. The sea’s acidity, in turn,
refl ects how much carbon dioxide was present in the
atmosphere at the time. By analyzing boron in shells accu-
mulated over more than 2 million years, Hönisch was able
to reconstruct in unprecedented detail how atmospheric
carbon dioxide levels have changed over time.
As expected, carbon dioxide fl uctuated with variations
in local temperature, with higher levels corresponding to
warmer epochs. But despite major shifts in the climate
over the period she studied, Hönisch found that overall con-
centrations of the gas remained remarkably constant. That
makes today’s sky-high readings look even more anoma-
lous. “It really shows how much we have interfered with
the environment,” Hönisch says. “This goes way beyond
anything that earth has seen in a really long time.” The
researchers now want to dig deeper below the seafl oor,
where plankton have been piling up for some 100 million
years, to study times when carbon dioxide levels were as
high as they are today. JOCELYN RICE
Plankton shells show that CO2 levels have never been so high in 2 million years.
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ADVERTISEMENT
Scientists have made significant contributions to the safety and well-being of the human race. They have identified laws of nature that explain the functioning of the universe, Earth’s flora and fauna, and especially of the physical activities of Homo sapiens. But “why” planet Earth and its occupants exist is still an admitted mystery to them. What follows explains an important part of that mystery.
For millennia great developmental progress has taken mankind from a simple desire to survive to our present complex systems of social laws and inherited customs. Most readers would agree that despite those man-made systems, human affairs are still in a state of confusion with problems and trouble growing daily.
We have races pitted against one another, political groups pitted against one another, as well as individuals who pit themselves against one another in their careers, marriages, and sports to name a few obvious areas.
An appropriate question is, Why? Our answer fol-lows: From the beginning people have been living by their own laws of behavior and inherited customs, but those man-made systems contradict a natural law, causing people to get wrong, troublesome results.
That natural law was identified by Richard W. Wetherill almost a century ago and was presented in his book, Tower of Babel, published January 2, 1952. It is a law of behavior that Wetherill called the law of absolute right, indicating that rightness in all human activities is required for successful outcomes.
As a result of Wetherill’s identification of the law, he developed a program called humanetics to ex-plain the wrongness of people’s attitudes and behav-ior and how to correct them. Wrongness has not only been destroying people’s lives but also increasingly is damaging the environment that supports the life of the planet.
When scientists identify natural laws, they apply their principles to better human existence and well-being—that is, usually, until the nuclear age developed. Scientists could now investigate nature’s behavioral law and help to inform people of its principles. Wetherill used words to describe right behavior such as rational, honest, logical, and moral but cautioned that words
are just symbols. The law is the final arbiter: Right begets right results; wrong begets wrong results.
What are society’s results? Are people rational and honest? Or do they act on their own motives to do, be, have, get, and become whatever they desire?
People know they must obey nature’s laws of grav-ity, friction, and all the other laws of physics, but for nearly a century scientists, religionists, educators, and the public have resisted acknowledging creation’s law of rightness. Is that sane?
Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. For millennia people have reasoned from man-made laws and inherited customs over and over again, expecting a different result. Instead, over and over again, humanity has been getting incalculable wrong results. Is that sane?
This essay/ad provides a brief description of the behavior that natural law requires of us. Are we going to comply and get out of the muddled mess of human affairs being caused by acting on man-made laws?
Visit our colorful Website www.alphapub.com where essays and books describe the changes called for by whoever or whatever created nature’s law of absolute right. The material can be read and down-loaded free. As people worldwide visit our Website, they can join those who are already benefiting from adhering to the behavioral law with rational and honest thoughts, words, and action.
That is creation’s way to change what is wrong until everything is made right: perfectly behaving people on the one planet in this universe that sup-ports life as we know it!
This public-service message is from a self-financed, nonprofit group of former students of the late Richard W. Wetherill.
Richard W. Wetherill1906-1989
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We’ve been analyzing other
possible failure modes and
making sure none of them
would have unfortunate con-
sequences. Most of that work
is done, but there are still some
other precautions people
want to take. Those would be
necessary before we go to
maximum energy. For 2010
the plan is to start up at half
energy, then in a few weeks or
months go to about three-
quarters energy. Full energy
won’t be possible until 2011.
When will you start making
particles collide again?
We might see some half-power
collisions before the end of
2009. That would require
quite a lot of luck. It’s like
NASA’s launching a space
probe. If you discover a faulty
valve reading somewhere or
other, you have to go back and
check it. It’s one thing to make
collisions; it’s another to under-
stand what’s going on and � nd
new physics.
Will you be able to do nota-
ble science at half power?
Already at half power, particles
will be colliding at energies
beyond what has been
achieved with any previous
accelerator. Just to put this
into perspective, the energy
distance between half power
and the Tevatron accelerator
[at Fermilab in Illinois] is greater
than the difference between
the Tevatron and the previous
collider. As soon as we make
half-power collisions, we’ll
be seeing beyond what the
Tevatron can see. That should
be enough to start looking for
high-pro� le items on the shop-
ping list, like dark matter. The
Higgs boson [the hypothetical
particle that endows other
particles with mass] would not
be seen immediately. That’s a
real tough cookie.
How will the LHC aid the
search for dark matter?
Dark matter by de� nition
consists of something you
can’t see. So the way you
would detect it is by observing
events in which some particle
carries away energy invisibly.
You observe something by its
absence, so to speak. That
is pretty delicate because
you have to make sure you
couldn’t possibly have missed
anything more conventional.
You have to demonstrate
that you can see and mea-
sure accurately all the known
particles—muons, quarks, and
so on. When the experiment-
ers have demonstrated that
they can measure all those
things accurately, then they will
be able to start convincing us
that they can really measure
whether there’s any miss-
ing energy. There have been
false alarms in the past, when
people have thought they were
seeing missing energy. So you
have to be very, very careful.
What about supersymmetric
particles—hypothetical parti-
cles that are like weird twins
of the known ones? Will the
LHC look for those, too?
Supersymmetry is one
example of something that
could explain dark matter. But
the two are not equivalent.
You could imagine a scenario
in which supersymmetric par-
ticles do not produce missing
energy and do not make dark
matter. So if you do see miss-
ing energy, you have to ask if
it’s a result of supersymmetry;
The world’s greatest particle-smasher gears up for a second try. Physicist JOHN ELLIS previews what will happen when the fi reworks resume.
There’s been a lot of
downtime at CERN. What
have you been doing—long
lunches in the cafeteria?
People are working their butts
off, bashing away on their
computers. Experimentalists
are using this time to work on
the alignments of their detec-
tors, the data acquisition sys-
tem, and all that. There haven’t
been any idle moments. One
upside of the delay is that the
experiments are really ready to
take collision data.
What happens next?
The damage that occurred in
2008 has been fully repaired.
The biggest particle accelerator ever made—the Large Hadron
Collider in Geneva—spectacularly fi zzled shortly after scientists
turned it on in September 2008. What felled the gargantuan
machine was a single badly soldered connection. When the
powerful electrical currents running through the LHC came to
bear on that tiny piece of solder, the resulting heat set off a
cascade of events, ending in a sudden release of helium that
blew aside several of the collider’s massive superconducting
magnets. The staff at the European Organization for Nuclear
Research, or CERN, spent the past year repairing the damage,
inspecting tens of thousands of connections, and bolting down
the magnets in case of another accident. By the end of 2009,
CERN scientists were ready to start again, using the LHC to
investigate the deepest mysteries in physics—including why
matter has mass. John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN
who has been involved in the project for 25 years, talked with
DISCOVER about the repairs and the prospects for the LHC.
86
text by FRED GUTERL photography by ROBERT HUBER
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the energy might also be going
into extra dimensions, or there
might be some other explana-
tion. There would be a long
period in which you would try
to � gure it out. You can also
imagine supersymmetry sce-
narios that don’t involve miss-
ing energy at all. Those would
be quite tricky to look for.
Could you fi nd some sign of
the Higgs boson early on,
while operating at half or
three-quarters energy?
Finding the Higgs boson is
a question of seeing a signal
against a background. It’s
not as if you would produce
an event so distinctive that it
couldn’t possibly be anything
other than the Higgs. So
you would have to build up
statistics to convince people
that the signal you’re seeing
is the real deal. At half or
three-quarters power, we will
be able to start looking for the
characteristics of the Higgs
boson, but it will take quite a
bit of time to � nd.
If there were another big fail-
ure of the LHC, would that be
the end of particle physics?
If we never got the thing run-
ning reliably, that would be the
end, because nobody would
trust us to build anything else.
I don’t see that happening.
What happened on the day of
the � rst start-up was not typi-
cal—it was just one of those
things. You drive a new car
and get a punch in a tire, but
that doesn’t mean you’ll get a
punch every � ve miles. You put
on a new set of tires, and after
that the car normally works. It’s
worth remembering that the
problem didn’t arise in some
high-tech component. It was a
simple soldering problem.
The lengthy repairs must be
agonizing to people like you,
who have waited so long for
results from the LHC.
You bet. It has been even more
frustrating for the accelerator
guys, who, when they started
up, thought they would be
able to produce collisions very
soon. It has also been frustrat-
ing for many of the experimen-
talists, who thought they were
going to be able to start doing
physics, many of them having
spent 10 years in preparation.
The atmosphere has been very
subdued. Now I can feel the
fever mounting a little bit.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 75
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MEDICINE || EARTH
8887 Mockingbirds Know Who You AreDon’t mock the mockingbirds,
because they can recognize you...
and they hold a grudge. Doug
Levey, a biologist at the University
of Florida, found that the birds
could easily pick out a threatening
person from a crowd.
Levey sent students, called
“intruders” in the paper he
published last May in the journal
PNAS, to perturb nests of mock-
ingbirds. The intrusion constituted
standing by an egg-� lled nest for
15 seconds, then touching it for
an additional 15 seconds. This
aggressive loitering, which was
repeated over four days, elicited
an increasingly intense response.
The mockingbirds ignored the
approach of other, nonthreaten-
ing students, but every time the
intruder student swung by, the
birds quickly and sneakily left
the nest and eventually dive-
bombed the malefactor. “The
� rst time a male mockingbird
drew blood on the back of my
neck, I was shocked,” says
intruder Monique Hiersoux.
Mockingbirds’ strong aware-
ness of their surroundings makes
them well suited for living so
close to humans, Levey con-
cludes. “We might be walk-
ing along on campus and see
a mockingbird perched on a
branch and think, ‘Oh, that bird
is minding its own business,’ ” he
says. “But what we don’t realize
is that we are its business.”
MICHAEL ABRAMS
This past September, a pair of research
teams announced that they had identified
three new genes associated with Alzheimer’s
disease. The scientists also tagged another
12 gene variants as promising candidates for
further study. Previously, only four genes were
known to be linked to Alzheimer’s, which
affects an estimated 5 million Americans.
Both reports appeared in Nature Genetics.
To pinpoint the new genes, the two groups
conducted studies looking for differences
between the DNA of people who have Alz-
heimer’s disease and those who do not. Epi-
demiologist Philippe Amouyel of the Pasteur
Institute of Lille in France and his colleagues
closed in on genes called CR1 and CLU. The
precise function of these genes is unknown,
but previous research suggests they may be
involved in removing a protein fragment called
beta-amyloid from the brain. In people with
Alzheimer’s, beta-amyloid molecules clump
Alzheimer’s Genes Located together and form destructive plaques.
The other team, led by medical psychol-
ogist Julie Williams of Cardiff University
in Wales, noted the same CLU gene and
identi� ed another Alzheimer’s-related gene,
PICALM. This gene is thought to help main-
tain the health of synapses, the connection
points between neurons, and it, too, may
regulate beta-amyloid levels in the brain.
These findings mark “the first time any
novel Alzheimer’s gene has been identi� ed
in genomewide studies,” says Washing-
ton University geneticist Alison Goate, one
of Williams’s coauthors. Previous studies
had examined small numbers of people to
con� rm already-known genetic risk factors.
Locating new Alzheimer’s genes will aid
efforts to understand the chemical pathways
that drive the disease, Amouyel says, and
might eventually point the way to effective
drugs to keep it at bay. BOONSRI DICKINSON
89 Radiation Is WhatTurns Your Hair GraySooner or later almost everyone’s hair goes gray, but the
cause has never been clear. Last spring a team of Japa-
nese researchers said they think they have found the trigger:
radiation-induced stress.
Within every hair follicle is a population of melanocyte stem
cells. Over time these cells split into two populations. One pro-
duces pigment for the hair before dying off, while the other
becomes a new melanocyte stem cell. In a stress-free world,
these cells would replenish themselves inde� nitely and we
would keep our youthful hair color until our dying day (baldness
notwithstanding). But stress free this world is not—nor is the lab
of dermatologist Emi Nishimura at Kanazawa University. There,
she and her colleagues bombarded brown- and black-haired
mice with DNA-damaging radiation. The consequences, as
described in a paper published in Cell this June: The melano-
cytes that originally went on to rejuvenate instead only matured
and died. The brown- and black-haired mice soon went gray.
Researchers posit that the melanocyte die-off may be a
way for the body to shed potentially cancerous, radiation-
stressed cells. It is too early to blame your spouse for your
silver strands, though—emotional stress has not yet been
shown to harm stem cells. MICHAEL ABRAMS
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90 Oldest Octopus UnveiledNinety-fi ve million years ago, � ve octo-
puses met their end in the waters covering
what is now Lebanon. The lack of oxygen
on the local sea� oor kept the area free of
bottom-dwelling scavengers, and sediment
quickly covered the animals’ corpses, pre-
serving them in unprecedented detail. Last
January paleobiologist Dirk Fuchs of the
Free University of Berlin and his colleagues
released their analysis of these fossils—the
most ancient octopods known.
Due to their delicate construction, octo-
puses have left almost no evolutionary trail
to follow. “The preservation of these soft-
bodied creatures is the result of a chain of
lucky chances,” Fuchs says. Previously
only a single species of prehistoric octopus
had turned up in the fossil record, so the
new � nds represent an explosion of informa-
tion about the animals’ history.
The � ve individuals include three previ-
ously unrecorded octopus species: Keuppia
hyperbolaris, Keuppia levante, and Sty-
letoctopus annae. Each specimen shows
the animal’s head, eight arms, ink sacs, and
suckers. The two Keuppia species appear
primitive, but Fuchs was surprised to � nd
that Styletoctopus’s anatomy places it in the
same family as Octopus vulgaris, the living
common octopus. “Its appearance indicates
that modern octopods developed much
earlier than previously thought,” he says.
SAM KISSINGER
A rare octopus fossil from
the time of the dinosaurs,
seen here in ultraviolet light.
91 Oxygen’s Odd OriginRoughly 2.4 billion years ago,
a rapid buildup of oxygen in the
atmosphere set in motion big
changes that allowed multicellu-
lar life to emerge. Most scientists
believe photosynthetic bacteria
produced the oxygen. The driv-
ing force behind the transition
has been unclear, though.
In April, new research showed
that our planet itself might have
been the primary cause: Today’s
oxygen-� lled atmosphere may
owe its existence to a dramatic
decline in nickel in the world’s
oceans. In a study published in
Nature, a team led by geomicro-
biologist Kurt Konhauser of the
University of Alberta in Canada
examined rocks from around the
world known as banded iron for-
mations (right), which contain a
sequentially layered record of
the concentrations of various
elements in the ancient oceans.
Their analysis showed a drop
of almost 50 percent in oceanic
nickel levels between 2.7 and
2.5 billion years ago.
According to Konhauser,
this “nickel famine” coincided
with the cooling of the earth’s
mantle, which curtailed volcanic
eruptions of nickel-rich lava.
Deprived of this source of nick-
el, marine methane-producing
bacteria known as methano-
gens—which require nickel to
function—would have been
sidelined, paving the way for
the rise of photosynthetic, oxy-
gen-producing cyanobacteria.
Konhauser marvels at the
interdependence of geology,
chemistry, and biology that the
research reveals. “It links vol-
canism and trace elements in
seawater to changing popula-
tions in the biosphere,” he says,
“which in turn led to changes
in the earth’s atmosphere that
made the rise of complex life-
forms possible.” JEREMY JACQUOT
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 77
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Getting away from it all is harder than ever, according to a new map
developed by Andy Nelson for the European Commission’s Joint Research
Centre and the World Bank. An ever-expanding network of roads, railways,
rivers and shipping lanes means that only 10 percent of the earth’s surface is
now remote, de� ned as being at least 48 hours away from a major city. More
than half of the world‘s population lives within an hour of a major city, largely
because “accessibility is a precondition for the satisfaction of almost any
Nowhere to Hide78 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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92
economic or social need,” Nelson says. “The main story of the map is connec-
tivity. It brings home how important it is to manage our resources, lifestyles,
and economies in a sustainable manner, since we are all interdependent, and
shows the remote places left behind. It also reminds us that the price of connec-
tivity is that there is little wilderness left.” The brightest areas of the map represent
the most densely populated and accessible regions; the darkest areas are the
sparsest and most remote. Spanning lines show shipping lanes. HEATHER MAYER
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 79
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93 Einstein’s Brain Re-AnalyzedThere has been yet another attempt to identify the unique traits
of Einstein’s brain, this one by anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida
State University in Tallahassee. Falk did not have access to the
actual brain, so she used techniques developed for the examina-
tion of fossils and applied them to photographs of Einstein’s brain
taken after his death. In a study published in Frontiers in
Evolutionary Neuroscience last May, Falk reports that
the brain exhibited “an unusual mixture of sym-
metrical and asymmetrical features” that may
have contributed to Einstein’s genius.
For one thing, the parietal lobes of the great scien-
tist’s brain were wider than normal (something that other research-
ers have noted in the past), and its grooves and ridges were oddly
patterned. These details are important, Falk says, because the
brain’s parietal lobes process numbers; they also integrate sensory
information from different parts of the body. She believes that the
novelties in Einstein’s lobes may have contributed to his “prefer-
ence for thinking in sensory impressions, including visual images
rather than words.”
Falk also observed a small, knoblike structure coming off the
right motor cortex, an area of the brain that controls the � ngers of
the left hand. This knob is sometimes seen in the brains of right-
handed string players who train from a young age. Einstein was
an avid violinist from childhood on. “It tickled me,” Falk says, “that
the knob may well have been tied to Einstein’s musical ability.”
The cognitive connection between music and mathematics has, of
course, been noted for many years. JANE BOSVELD
Two colonies of butterflies
flapped their wings in north-
ern England and the resulting
debate was felt around the
world. In February a group led
by biologist Stephen G. Wil-
lis of Durham University in the
U.K. reported that they had
introduced two butterfly spe-
cies—known as the mar-
bled white (left) and the
small skipper—into
new habitats about
40 miles and 22 miles,
respectively, from their
homes. The move was a
success, Willis’s six-year
study showed. The trans-
planted species increased
their populations at the same
rate as they would have in their
current territory, proving that
the team’s models accurately
predicted habitats suitable for
the insects. Willis says that
he undertook the experiment
because temperature increas-
es are outpacing the butter-
� ies’ ability to compensate by
spreading northward.
Months earlier, marine biolo-
gist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and
colleagues, writing in the journal
Science, proposed a broader
program of relocating organ-
isms that are facing extinction
due to climate change. Dis-
mayed scientists raised the
alarm, pointing to the devas-
tating effects of species intro-
ductions such as the invasive
kudzu vine. But Willis notes that
he chose two thoroughly stud-
ied species that were unlikely to
become invasive. “It would not
have been good for our careers
if we introduced the next cane
toad,” he says. That unpopular
creature was brought to Austra-
lia to control agricultural pests
and quickly became a pest
itself. CYRUS MOULTON
Species Transplant Succeeds
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ENVIRONMENT || MIND
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It happened on our last trip to SouthAmerica. After visiting the “Lost City” of
Machu Picchu in Peru, we venturedthrough the mountains and down theAmazon into Brazil. In an old village wemet a merchant with an impressive collec-tion of spectacular, iridescent emeralds.Each gem was tumbled smooth and glistened like a perfect rain forest dew drop.But the price was so unbelievable, I was sureour interpreter had made a mistake.
But there was no mistake. And after return-ing home, I had 20 carats of these exquisiteemeralds strung up in 14k gold andwrapped as a gift for my wife’s birthday.That’s when my trouble began. She lovedit. Absolutely adored it. In fact, she rarelygoes anywhere without the necklace andhas basked in compliments from totalstrangers for months now.
So what’s the problem? I’m nevergoing to find an emerald deal this goodagain. In giving her such a perfect gift, I’vemade it impossible to top myself.
To make matters worse, my wife’s becomeobsessed with emeralds. She can’t stopsharing stories about how Cleopatra
cherished thegreen gem aboveall others and howemeralds wereworshiped by theIncas and Mayansand prized bySpanish conquis-tadors and Indianmaharajahs. She’seven buying intoancient beliefsthat emeraldsbring intelligence,well-being andgood luck to anyone who wears them. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I’mnever going to find another deal this lucky.
Our elegant Emeralds in 14K GoldNecklace features 20 carats of smooth,round emerald beads, hand-wiredtogether with delicate 14K gold links. Each bead is unique in both size and color, ranging from transparent to translucent.The 18" necklace fastens with a spring ringclasp. If you are not thrilled at this rarefind, send it back within 30 days for a full
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ANTHROPOLOGY || ENERGY || EVOLUTION || BIOLOGY || MIND
Right: Ring-tailed lemurs in tropical Madagascar.
OP
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95 Hidden Civilization Found Under Lake HuronTraces of an ancient caribou
hunting ground lie buried beneath
Lake Huron, according to archae-
ologist John O’Shea at the Univer-
sity of Michigan. Modern Siberian
herders manage reindeer migra-
tion by chopping down trees and
laying them on the ground, he
noted; the animals instinctively
follow these “drive lanes.” O’Shea
has found evidence that Paleo-
Americans did the same thing
thousands of years ago, when the
climate around the Great Lakes
was similarly Arctic-like.
On land, old drive lanes would
be quickly disrupted and become
unrecognizable. In the middle of
Lake Huron, however, such lanes
could have been buried when
lake water levels rose rapidly
about 7,500 years ago, after the
end of the last ice age. Equipped
with sonar and remote-operated
underwater vehicles, O’Shea and
a team of University of Michigan
colleagues plunged through the
dark waters to look around. They
found thousand-foot-long lines of
rocks peppered with large boul-
ders, which strongly resemble the
drive lanes used by prehistoric
hunters in the Canadian Arctic.
The rocks have been buried there
for more than 7,000 years.
“This has potential to fill an
important gap in knowledge of
cultural development,” O’Shea
says. The discovery also leaves
him wondering what other relics
lie hidden beneath Lake Huron.
“The features are subtle,” he
says. “I’m sure people have
passed over these areas with
sonars running and not recog-
nized them for what they are.”
O’Shea plans to send divers back
to the 28-square-mile site in pur-
suit of further evidence, including
stone tools and preserved animal
remains. AMY BARTH
96 Microbes Build Better BatteriesIn the never-ending search
for improved ways to store
energy, two groups are
looking to biology, enlisting
microbes to produce methane
and viruses to build batteries.
Penn State environmen-
tal engineer Bruce Logan
and his colleagues identi-
� ed micro organisms called
methanogens that ef� ciently
reduce carbon dioxide to
methane. When the microbes
receive an electric jolt, Logan
reported in March, they use
the electrons to combine
CO2 and protons, creating
methane gas. Methane can
be stored and later used to
fuel a vehicle or run a genera-
tor. Exploiting the microbes’
chemistry might be a way
to make inconsistent energy
sources like wind and solar
more practical.
Along the same lines, MIT
materials scientist Angela
Belcher has engineered
viruses to help store electric-
ity. Her genetically modi� ed
bacteriophages (viruses
that infect bacteria) cloak
themselves in iron phosphate,
a metal salt, then attach to
carbon nanotubes to produce
a framework of microscopic
conductive wires that can
hold a charge just like a car
battery. Genetic tweaks
enabled the virus to bind
tightly to the carbon nano-
tube, creating a high-powered
battery, as she described in a
May issue of Science. Unlike
traditional battery manufac-
turing, the process requires
no toxic chemicals and
can be set up very cheaply.
Belcher is working to improve
the batteries’ storage capac-
ity further by experimenting
with different virus-coat
materials.
ELIZABETH SVOBODA
97 Tropical Heat Speeds Up EvolutionIf alien biologists were on an expedition to Earth, it would
not take long for them to realize that there are a lot more
species in the tropics than there are in temperate regions.
“It’s the biggest, most obvious pattern in nature,” says Len
Gillman, an evolutionary ecologist at Auckland University
of Technology in New Zealand. Why that pattern exists has
been a long-standing puzzle. This year, however, Gillman
found a possible answer: A warm climate makes life evolve
more quickly.
Gillman and his colleagues compared 130 closely related
pairs of mammal species. In each case, one species
lived at a higher latitude or elevation than the other. The
researchers tallied the number of mutations each species
had accumulated in the same stretch of DNA since it split
from a common ancestor. On average, mammals living
in warmer climates collected mutations 50 percent more
quickly—that is, they evolved 50 percent more rapidly—
than their sister species in cooler regions.
These results matched up with Gillman’s earlier study
on plant evolution, as well as with independent research
on cold-blooded animals. Gillman thinks that a warm
climate accelerates evolution by raising the metabolism of
organisms. A higher metabolism produces more mutations,
which in turn provide the raw material for evolutionary
change. To con� rm this hypothesis, he says, scientists will
have to make year-round measurements of the metabolism
of many different species. “Boy, that will be a big job,” he
warns, “even for one species.” CARL ZIMMER
A model of tPNA,
a molecule that can
assemble itself; it
may resemble the
precursor of life’s DNA.
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98 First Molecule of Life Discovered?In the beginning there was RNA. RNA begat DNA,
and DNA begat lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins:
That is Genesis according to the “RNA world”
hypoth esis, a leading but still sketchy picture of
how life began. In June, chemist Reza Ghadiri of the
Scripps Research Institute started � lling in details.
99 God Lives in Your HeadReligion can cause wars,
unify communities, and
help us rationalize our
world, but does thinking
about God activate par-
ticular areas of the brain?
Cognitive neuroscientists
at the National Institute of
Neurological Disorders
and Stroke sought the
answer through function-
al magnetic resonance
imaging, or fMRI.
The researchers asked
religious and nonreligious
test subjects to ponder
God as a savior, a for-
giver, and a moral guide.
The fMRI scans revealed
activation of particular
neural pathways, includ-
ing those in the anterior
prefrontal cortex. But this
brain region is not used
only for religious thought.
Investigator Jordan Graf-
man says it is also a cen-
ter for empathy and for
the perception that others
have thoughts and feel-
ings of their own. “People
were using established
cognitive processes to
try to understand the
actions of a supernatural
being,” he says.
The prefrontal cortex is
the most recently evolved
region of the human brain,
much larger in us than in
apes. It is thought to have
bene� ted us by allowing
humans to explain myste-
rious phenomena and by
bringing groups of peo-
ple together. “You would
persuade others that
the way you think about
something was the way
they should think about
it too,” Grafman says. “It
creates group cohesion,
and that’s important for
survival.” ALLISON BOND
Ghadiri posited the existence of a helper molecule:
a kind of prebiotic template that might have enabled
RNA to spawn more complex organic compounds.
Then he actually constructed a version of the mol-
ecule in his lab. Called tPNA (thioester peptide nucleic
acid), it comprises the same four base pairs as DNA.
The amazing thing about tPNA is that it adapts,
chameleon-like, as it interacts with other molecules.
When Ghadiri poured tPNA molecules into a soup of
DNA bits, the tPNA base pairs reshuf� ed until they
matched the sequence of a DNA strand. When he
mixed tPNA with a single strand of RNA, it conformed
to RNA’s structure. And when he let tPNA mingle with
its own kind, the molecules danced until their struc-
tures became stable. In short, Ghadiri says, it “exhib-
its the most basic properties needed for evolution.”
The next challenge for Ghadiri is to show that tPNA
can self-replicate, crucial for a DNA precursor. If so,
RNA world—and the whole � eld of biogenesis—will
look a lot more credible. BOONSRI DICKINSON
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 83
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ASTRONOMY
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Hubble’s Amazing New VisionThe Hubble Space Telescope demonstrated its newly enhanced capabilities with this stunning image of
the Butterfl y nebula. In May astronauts docked the space shuttle Atlantis onto the 19-year-old telescope to
make repairs and add new instruments. For astrophotography buffs, the most important upgrade is Wide
Field Camera 3 (WFC3), whose predecessor captured many of Hubble’s iconic images, including the Pillars of
Creation in the Eagle nebula. The latest version boasts higher resolution and an expanded fi eld of view.
This WFC3 shot captures strands of superheated gas that were expelled by a dying star almost 4,000
light-years away. The Butterfl y nebula’s distinctive shape results from a ring of dust that prevents the gas
from spreading uniformly in all directions. Its wings stretch more than two light-years across—equivalent
to about half the distance between our sun and the nearest star. ANDREW GRANT
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 | 85
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OBITUARIES
Willem Kol� (Feb. 14, 1911–Feb.
11, 2009): During World
War II, the pioneering
biomedical engineer
created a dialysis
machine from sausage
casings and an auto-
motive water pump.
Kolff later built the � rst
arti� cial heart.
Jacob Schwartz(Jan. 9, 1930–March 2,
2009): A proli� c math-
ematician, Schwartz
made signi� cant
contributions to parallel
processing, com-
puter programming,
logic, robotics, and
bioinformatics.
Hidesaburo Hanafusa (Dec. 1,1929–March
15, 2009): His discov-
ery of cancer-causing
genes, or oncogenes,
earned Hanafusa the
1982 Lasker Award for
basic medical research.
It was his insight that
viruses can turn normal,
healthy cells into malig-
nant ones by activating
those oncogenes.
IN MEMORIAM A powerful idea
far outlasts a brilliant
mind. We remember
some of the giants
we lost in 2009
and look forward
to standing on their
shoulders.
BY HEATHER MAYER
Sir John Maddox (Nov. 27, 1925–April
12, 2009): The editor
of Nature for 22 years,
he reestablished the
in� uence and reputation
of that august British
weekly science journal.
He was also the father
of DISCOVER contribu-
tor Bruno Maddox.
Herbert York
(Nov. 24, 1921–May
19, 2009): After work-
ing on the Manhattan
Project to construct the
� rst atom bomb and
supervising missile and
space research under
President Eisenhower,
York became an impor-
tant � gure in arms con-
trol. He was involved
in launching Lawrence
Livermore National
Laboratory and was the
� rst chancellor of the
University of California
at San Diego.
Jean Dausset (Oct. 19, 1916–June 6,
2009): Dausset shared a
1980 Nobel Prize for the
discovery of human leu-
kocyte antigens (HLAs),
the immune-regulating
gene complex that must
be “matched” for organ
transplants to succeed.
Wallace Pannier (Aug. 22, 1927–Aug. 6,
2009): He was a trail-
blazer in the study of
biological weapons. In
one top-secret project
in 1966, Pannier staged
a mock attack on the
New York subway. His
team threw light bulbs
� lled with microbes
onto the tracks and
monitored the swirl of
the released bacteria as
trains sped past.
Norman Borlaug
(March 25, 1914–Sept.
12, 2009): The Nobel
laureate was dubbed
the “father of the Green
Revolution” for devel-
oping high-yield crops
and modern agricultural
techniques that have
greatly increased the
global food supply and
prevented starvation.
Lawrence Slobodkin
(June 22, 1928–Sept.
12, 2009): The
renowned ecologist
argued in a 1960 paper,
dubbed “The World Is
Green,” that because
vegetation is abundant,
predation—and not the
availability of food—is
the primary check on
the herbivore popula-
tion and a key in� uence
on ecosystems.
Malcolm Casadaban(Aug. 12, 1949–Sept.
13, 2009): This
molecular geneticist
devised techniques to
study the genes of dis-
ease-causing microbes.
He died after being
exposed to a weakened
strain of Yersinia pestis
(the bacterium that
causes bubonic plague),
which he was studying.
Mahlon Hoagland
(Oct. 5, 1921–Sept. 18,
2009): The molecular
biologist described a key
step in the way proteins
are synthesized from
amino acids. He also
codiscovered transfer
RNA, an essential player
in gene expression.
Leon Eisenberg
(Aug. 8, 1922–Sept.
15, 2009): A child
psychiatrist and human
rights advocate, he
brought scienti� c
rigor to psychological
studies, scrutinizing
treatment for autism
as early as the 1950s
and conducting the � rst
randomized clinical trial
in psychiatry.
Sheldon Segal (March 15, 1926–Oct.
17, 2009): He devel-
oped Norplant, a
hormonal form of birth
control that is implanted
under the skin of the
arm; it can prevent
pregnancy for up to � ve
years. Wyeth stopped
selling the implant in the
United States in 2002.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
(Nov. 28, 1908–Oct.
30, 2009): The French
anthropologist was a
pioneer of structuralism,
arguing that diverse cul-
tures share underlying
similarities and that the
human mind is funda-
mentally predisposed to
think in terms of binary
opposites: black and
white, hot and cold. His
writing in� uenced social
science, philosophy,
comparative religion,
literature, and � lm.
1O1
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BIS
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YEAR INSCIENCE
2 0 0 9
INDEX
ANTHROPOLOGY
Meet Your New Ancestor . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
World’s First Grain Silos
Discovered in Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . .39
Another Baby Boom Hits Rich Nations . . . .44
Neanderthals Get Personal . . . . . . . . . . . .47
Oldest Musical Instrument Found . . . . . . .54
Early Humans Tended the Disabled . . . . . .71
Hidden Civilization Under Lake Huron . . . .82
ASTRONOMY
Interview: Alan Dressler . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
Earth-like Worlds Come Into View . . . . . . .28
Fresh Hints of Life on Mars . . . . . . . . . . . .38
Twin Black Holes Found . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53
Magnetic Mysteries of
Sunspots Decoded . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54
Earth-like Storms Seen
on Saturn’s Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57
Milky Way Panorama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
Asteroid Strike Predicted . . . . . . . . . . . . .62
Giant Geysers From a Tiny Moon . . . . . . . .64
Did an Early Pummeling of Asteroids
Pave the Way for Life on Earth? . . . .67
Jupiter Gets Comet-Whacked . . . . . . . . . .72
Hubble’s Amazing New Vision . . . . . . . . . .84
BIOLOGY
Stem Cell Science Takes Off . . . . . . . . . . .23
Skip a Meal, Extend Your Life . . . . . . . . . .39
Genetic Disease Cured With Two Moms . . .44
Fake DNA Fools Crime Lab . . . . . . . . . . . .45
Blast of Biodiversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46
Strange Gaze of the See-through Fish . . . .49
Lose Weight With Brown Fat? . . . . . . . . . .56
Orangutans Invent New Warning Calls . . . .57
Girls Hit Puberty Earlier
Around the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64
Yes, You Really Can Smell Fear . . . . . . . . .66
Chimps Plan Ahead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70
Human Gene Changes Mouse Talk . . . . . .70
Mockingbirds Know Who You Are . . . . . . .76
Radiation Turns Hair Gray . . . . . . . . . . . . .76
EARTH
Seismic Waves Clarify
How Continents Move . . . . . . . . . . . .56
Oxygen’s Odd Origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
ENERGY
Experimental Power Plant
Takes the CO2 Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
Algae Make Clean,
Renewable Diesel Fuel . . . . . . . . . . .48
A Smart Makeover for
the Electrical Grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48
Hydrogen Energy Gets
Two Big Boosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
Star Power Comes to California . . . . . . . . 68
Microbes Build Better Batteries . . . . . . . . .82
ENVIRONMENT
Clear-Cutting Has a High Cost. . . . . . . . . .38
Sun’s Changes Have Surprise
Effects on Earth’s Weather . . . . . . . .45
El Niño’s Cousin Spurs Hurricanes . . . . . .52
Interview: Mark Serreze . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60
Plankton Record Earth’s
CO2 History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72
Map Tracks Remote Places . . . . . . . . . . . .78
Species Transplant Succeeds . . . . . . . . . .80
EVOLUTION
Oldest Animal Fossils Uncovered . . . . . . . .34
Intact Tissue Found in Dinosaur . . . . . . . .35
Hunters Accelerate
the Pace of Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . .45
Darwin’s Next Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . .50
Dino Mummy Spills Its Secrets . . . . . . . . .52
Giant Snake Hints at Life in Hot Times . . .62
Ancestral Whales May Have
Given Birth on Land . . . . . . . . . . . . .65
First Ground Animals Borrowed Shells . . . .65
Leaping Flying Lizards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
Oldest Octopuses Unveiled . . . . . . . . . . . .77
Tropical Heat Speeds Up Evolution . . . . . .82
First Molecule of Life Found? . . . . . . . . . .83
INTERVIEWS
Astronomer Alan Dressler . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
Economist George Loewenstein . . . . . . . . .32
Geneticist J. Craig Venter . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
Geographer Mark Serreze . . . . . . . . . . . . .60
Physicist John Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .74
MEDICINE
Vaccine Phobia Becomes a
Public-Health Threat . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
Swine Flu Outbreak
Sweeps the Globe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26
The Age of Genetic Medicine Begins . . . . .34
Hope for HIV Vaccine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
The Common Cold Is Decoded . . . . . . . . .36
Interview: J. Craig Venter . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
Diarrhea Vaccine Could Save Millions . . . .47
Infection Seen as It Happens . . . . . . . . . . .49
Eye Drops Could Cure Glaucoma . . . . . . . .52
Fight Rages Over Cancer Genes . . . . . . . .55
Virus Linked to Chronic Fatigue . . . . . . . . .56
DEET Might Harm the Brain . . . . . . . . . . .63
Tiny Robots Prepare for Surgery . . . . . . . .66
Alzheimer’s Genes Located . . . . . . . . . . . .76
MIND
Interview: George Loewenstein . . . . . . . . .32
Rise of the Mind Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
Can a Shock to the Brain
Cure Depression? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
Abuse Leaves Its Mark
on Victim’s DNA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62
200-Year-Old Cipher Solved . . . . . . . . . . .64
Einstein’s Brain Re-Analyzed . . . . . . . . . . .80
God Lives in Your Head . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83
PHYSICS
Model Solves Fundamental
Packing Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
Math Could Fix Traffic Jams . . . . . . . . . . .48
Quantum Freakiness Leaks
Into the Big World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49
Black Hole Created in Lab . . . . . . . . . . . . .70
Light Can Bend Itself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71
Interview: John Ellis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .74
SPACE
NASA Braces for Course Correction . . . . .20
The Moon: Cold, Wet,
and Breathing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
Probe Shows Mercury’s Hidden Face . . . .44
Spaceport Breaks Ground
in New Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52
Space Trash Causes Orbital Crash . . . . . .54
Did NASA’s Phoenix Find
Liquid Water on Mars? . . . . . . . . . . .63
Venus Has a Secret Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
TECHNOLOGY
The Graphene Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
New Battery Tech Could
Transform the Car . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
Computer Learns to Reason
Like Isaac Newton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
Computers Go Quantum . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46
Robots Learn to Walk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57
Prize-Driven Research Takes Off . . . . . . . .65
DECEMBER WHAT IS IT?
HONEYBEE EYE
Each of a honeybee’s eyes
comprises 6,000 hexagonal
units for capturing light.
The eyes are attuned to
rapid movement—useful for
keeping up with a speedy
queen during her mating
fl ight—and geometric
patterns. Bees prefer radial,
symmetrical arrangements
typical of fl owers. They
respond to many colors and
can see ultraviolet light; UV
patterns on fl ower petals
may help them distinguish
among plant species.
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20 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUTDWARF PLANETS
NA
SA
, E
SA
AN
D G
. B
AC
ON
(S
TS
CI)
1 Pluto—once the ninth
planet, now infamous as the
fi rst dwarf planet—was dis-
covered by Clyde Tombaugh
at the Lowell Observatory
80 years ago this month, in
a series of photos taken in
January 1930.
2 The news was kept
quiet until March 13, the 75th
birthday of the observatory’s
founder, Percival Lowell, who
was obsessed with fi nding a
planet beyond Neptune.
3 Lowell was also obsessed
with the idea that thirsty
aliens had built enormous
networks of irrigation canals
on Mars. That one didn’t pan
out quite so well.
4 Gotta start early: Tom-
baugh was a 24-year-old
staff observer who had not
attended college when he
was assigned the tedious
task of scanning the sky for
Lowell’s “Planet X.”
5 Tombaugh considered
many names for his new
planet, including “Percival”
and “Lowell.” The winning
suggestion came from Vene-
tia Burney, an 11-year-old
British girl whose grandfa-
ther had connections to the
Royal Astronomical Society.
6 Pluto was regarded as a
planet for 76 years, until the
International Astronomical
Union (IAU) created the des-
ignation “dwarf planet.”
7 The IAU recognizes fi ve
dwarf planets: Pluto, along
with Eris, Ceres, Makemake
(“MAH-kay MAH-kay”), and
Haumea (“ha-ooh-MAY-ah”).
8 Caltech astronomer Mike
Brown’s 2005 discovery of
Eris, which is bigger than
Pluto, helped bring about
the downfall of Pluto’s plan-
etary status.
9 Brown now Tweets under
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10 Brown also led the team
that found Makemake and
Haumea, making him the
only person in history with
three planets—albeit dwarf
ones—to his credit.
11 Eris is 10 billion miles from
the sun, roughly three times
as far out as Pluto, making
it the most distant known
object in the solar system.
12 My, how time fl ies: Hau-
mea spins so quickly that
its “day” is only 3.9 hours
long, probably the result of
a tremendous impact.
13 Makemake is covered
in frozen methane, and like
a comet, it may develop
an atmosphere only
when it approaches most
closely to the sun and
vaporizes slightly.
14 Pluto probably does the
same thing. Perhaps we
should call these things
“obese comets”
instead of dwarf
planets.
15 More identity
issues: When
Italian monk
Giuseppe Piazzi
discovered Ceres on
January 1, 1801, it too was
hailed as a new planet.
16 By the 1850s astrono-
mers realized that Ceres
was just the largest among
a swarm of objects circling
between Mars and Jupiter,
and they reclassifi ed it as
an “asteroid.”
17 But Ceres weighs nearly
as much as all the other
asteroids combined and has
enough gravity to pull its
surface into a sphere—a key
criterion that earned it new
respect as a dwarf planet.
18 Designed by a kid?
According to the latest
studies, the surface of Ceres
consists of clay, and it may
be wet and muddy on
the inside.
19 A good year for dwarf
planets: In 2015
NASA’s Dawn
spacecraft will
swing by Ceres
and the New
Horizons probe will
reach Pluto, giving
us our fi rst good look
at each one.
20 New Horizons will
arrive bearing a special
cargo—some of the ashes
of Tombaugh.
Andrew Moseman
DISCOVER® (ISSN 0274-7529) is published monthly, except for combined issues in January/February and July/August, by Discover Media LLC, 90 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011. Volume 31, number 1; copyright 2010 Discover Media LLC. Periodical postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. In Canada, mailed under publication mail agreement 41245035, P.O. Box 875, STN A Windsor, ON, N9A 6P2. GST Registration #817800345RT0001. SUBSCRIPTIONS: In the U.S., $29.95 for one year; in Canada, $39.95 for one year (U.S. funds only), includes GST; other foreign countries, $44.95 for one year (U.S. funds only). Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Discover Media LLC, New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Please address all subscription corre spondence, including change of address, to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 37808, Boone, IA 50037, or call toll-free 800-829-9132; outside the U.S.A., 515-247-7569. Printed in the U.S.A.
96 | DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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EXTREME UNIVERSEEXTREME UNIVERSEDISCOVER PRESENTS ON NEWSSTANDS
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