6 | NewScientist | 12 October 2013

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AIR travel isn’t yet guilt-free, but it might be getting a bit greener. A UN agreement announced on 4 October means that airlines will have to curb their greenhouse gas emissions for international flights

from 2020. The deal, brokered by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), seems like a big step forwards for efforts to tackle climate change.

The agreement is a historic milestone for air transport, says ICAO council president Roberto Kobeh González. “We have ultimately determined our greener way forward.” All 191 ICAO member states have signed up to the plan, which will incorporate an emissions trading scheme.

But there are two major uncertainties. First, countries that have only a small number of international flights have asked to be exempt. Each of these

Green flights? industries might be small, but there are a lot of them. If they get their way, about 25 per cent of the emissions from international flights would be exempt.

And crucially, so far we do not know how much CO2 the industry will be allowed to emit. If airlines get a large quota of emissions, the trading scheme will have little effect. The system will only cut emissions if the cap fits tightly.

“It could range from great to a complete waste of time,” says aviation expert David Lee of Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK.

Choose a babyWOULD you like a child with sticky earwax and a penchant for marathons? Genetics company 23andme of Mountain View, California, has been granted a US patent that allows people to use DNA sequences to choose eggs and sperm that give their child certain traits. Critics charge that screening for characteristics other than disease edges close to eugenics.

The patent describes “gamete donor selection” that would, for example, allow a woman to choose a sperm donor whose

genes would maximise the child’s health or lifespan. These are controlled by many, so-far-unknown genes, however.

After enquiries by New Scientist, the company denied it plans to use its technology as anything more than an engaging way to allow people to see whether their child might inherit simpler traits such as earwax texture, or muscles geared towards endurance.

23andMe’s plans had changed in the five years since filing the patent, says spokesman Donald Cutler, but he could not say how they might change in the future.

To TV and beyond! REALITY TV is going a little more out of this world. Last week, Virgin Galactic and NBC announced Space Race, a series whose winner will fly into space. It is one of three space-based reality TV shows that may grace our screens in coming years – assuming producers can get their hands on a working craft.

Virgin Galactic has sold more than 600 tickets for flights on its sub-orbital craft SpaceShipTwo, but has repeatedly delayed a

–A meeting of prizewinning minds–

–Coming to a screen near you–

Higgs Nobel at long lastWHEN you have waited nearly 50 years, what’s another hour? As many predicted, Peter Higgs (right) of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and François Englert (left) of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, won this year’s physics Nobel prize for the theory of how particles acquire mass.

The announcement came after a short delay, perhaps while the Nobel committee led its own Higgs hunt.

Although the Higgs boson – first predicted in 1964 – gets all the glory, it is the Higgs field that gets physicists excited. It gives fundamental particles their mass by interacting differently with each one. For instance, the top quark experiences the Higgs field as a thick treacle, so it is the heaviest elementary particle; the photon doesn’t feel its influence at all, so is

massless. The Higgs boson is a quantum ripple in the field whose detection proves the field exists.

Englert and his late colleague Robert Brout were the first to describe how this field might operate, but it was Higgs who first predicted the particle that bears his name. The Nobel committee also gave a nod to the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN for the actual discovery of the Higgs last year.

“I am overwhelmed to receive this award,” said Higgs in a statement. He is rumoured to be on holiday without a phone. “We tried quite hard to get hold of him, but all the numbers we tried he didn’t answer,” said Staffan Normark of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Instead they sent him an email.

“If airlines get a large quota of emissions, the trading scheme will have little effect”

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