New Scientist - December 14 2013 UK

SICK SOCIETYDiseases of poverty haunt world’s richest country

THE HIDDEN LAW OF CITIESFour rules that define our urban spaces

EARTH’S WEAK SPOTHit it in the wrong place and all hell breaks loose

ULTIMATE SELFIE Mission to snap the Milky Way

ALCHEMISTS AHOYThe quest to turn seawater into gold

WEEKLY December 14 - 20, 2013

Science and technology news www.newscientist.com

US jobs in science

No2947 US$5.95 CAN$5.95

Rediscovering the secrets of killing bugs without drugs

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14 December 2013 | NewScientist | 3

CONTENTS Volume 220 No 2947This issue online newscientist.com/issue/2947

News6 UPFRONT Saharan wildlife on the brink. Relapse in

men “cured” of HIV. Cost of healthy eating8 THIS WEEK

Youthful surface helps hunt for Martians. 24 hour gut makeover. Why Japanese megaquake was audible from space. Deep-Earth network of bacterial super-invaders. Bad brain connections result in dyslexia. Spare parts for damaged brains. Big bang afterglow could have warmed aliens

17 IN BRIEF Mojito mosquito defence. War paint reveals

chameleon toughness. Waltzing black holes

Coming next week…Bumper holiday specialReindeer to the rescue, body cheese, the gallant ant, shoestring physics, and much more

PLUS: Get ahead in 2014Your essential guide to the near future

Cover image Alex Kent

34

42

Tropical disease of AmericaMillions of US citizens

have diseases few

have even heard of

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Forgotten antibioticsRediscovering the

secrets of killing bugs

without drugs

Earth’s weak spotsHit it in the wrong

place and all hell

breaks loose

Technology21 Death of the password. Gaming to beat

hackers. Control a spermbot. Radio blast stops cars. Drag and drop with your eyes

News

On the cover

Features

8 Sick society Diseases of poverty haunt richest country

30 The hidden law of cities Four rules that define our urban spaces

47 Alchemists ahoy Turning seawater to gold

42 Earth’s weak spots Hit them and unleash hell

38 Ultimate selfie Snapping the Milky Way

Opinion28 The science of porn Mark Limmer and

Miranda Horvath on what we need to know 29 One minute with… Ian Dunlop The mining

boss who wants to close down coal for good30 Urban truths Luís Bettencourt explains the

hidden laws that govern our cities 32 LETTERS Beyond evolution. Death row

Features34 Forgotten antibiotics (see above left)38 Ultimate selfie Mission to snap the

Milky Way42 Earth’s weak spots (see left)47 Alchemists ahoy The quest to

turn seawater to gold

CultureLab50 Chaos to complexity We need a paradigm

shift if aid is to save lives in the 21st century 52 Bug brains The human response to insects

Regulars5 EDITORIAL A hidden epidemic is helping to

perpetuate poverty in the rich West32 ENIGMA56 FEEDBACK Quantum-leap workshops57 THE LAST WORD Crystal crisis54 JOBS & CAREERS

Aperture26 Monster wind tunnel that tests jet engines

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A cure for inequality

EDITORIAL

A hidden epidemic is helping to perpetuate poverty in the rich West

Mars cash dash up in the air

“A dozen chronic parasitic diseases that plague the tropical poor also plague people in the US”

Can we be adult about this?

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6 | NewScientist | 14 December 2013

Mars TV gets robot Healthy diet costs

–Lost to the Sahara–

Sahara mammals decline THE Sahara desert is looking ever

more like its nickname, the sea of

sands, as its native wildlife

populations decline catastrophically.

Of the 14 species of large animal

historically found in the region,

half are now extinct in the wild or

confined to just 1 per cent of their

normal range, says a report by the

Wildlife Conservation Society and the

Zoological Society of London. These

include the scimitar-horned oryx

(pictured), categorised as extinct

in the wild, and the addax, of which

there are thought to be just 200 left

in the world. Leopards and Saharan

cheetahs are also among those

species most at risk (Diversity and

Distribution, doi.org/qfk).

The troubled politics of the region

makes it difficult to study wildlife, so

conservationists are still uncertain

about the cause of the decline, but

hunting is partly to blame. “Hunting

is widespread across the region, and

almost certainly has played a key role

in the declines of antelope and

ostrich. But habitat degradation and

increasing desertification may also

play a role,” says the study’s lead

author, Sara Durant. A recent rise in

mining activities and oil extraction is

likely to have led to increased access

to the more remote regions of the

desert, which could also contribute

to overhunting and unsustainable

use of natural resources, Durant says.

Some countries are taking steps to

remedy the situation. Niger has just

established the Termit and Tin

Toumma National Nature Reserve,

which shelters the remaining addax.

“Mars One says it will send the first privately funded lander and orbiter to the Red Planet in 2018”

AMONG the tributes to Nelson

Mandela this week were those

extolling his role in galvanising

the global effort against HIV.

“His actions helped save millions

of lives and transformed health in

Africa,” said Michel Sidibé of UN

agency UNAIDS.

Mandela, who died on

5 December, gave speeches at AIDS

conferences in Durban, South Africa,

in 2000 and Bangkok, Thailand,

in 2004.

Mandela’s HIV legacyIR

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His address in 2000 is credited

with catalysing a scale-up in the

supply of antiretroviral therapies

to people in Africa with HIV,

especially pregnant women.

“Every word uttered, every gesture

made, has to be measured against

the effect it can and will have on

the lives of millions,” Mandela

told the conference. “Mandela

had the power to change hearts

and minds,” said Bertrand Audoin

of the International AIDS Society.

UPFRONT


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Uranium mine leak

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Record-breaking chillsTrek along the ridge between

Dome Fuji and Dome Argus on the

East Antarctic ice sheet and you’ll

find the coldest place ever recorded

on Earth. The record was set on

10 August 2010, when the surface

temperature of a pocket of snow on

the ridge plummeted to −93.2 °C, the

American Geophysical Union meeting

in San Francisco heard this week.

Viagra pain reliefRelief from menstrual pain could

come from an unusual source. A

small study of 25 women shows that

vaginally applying sildenafil citrate,

sold as Viagra, seems to reduce

menstrual pain without any side

effects, although how it subdues the

pain remains a mystery (Human

Reproduction, doi.org/qff).

Space rock re-emergesA rare meteorite that might contain

parts older than the solar system has

been rediscovered by an amateur

astronomer in the Netherlands. The

rock was found in 1873, but ended

up in a private collection. The

5-centimetre-wide stone is made of

a rare carbonaceous chondrite.

Similar rocks have contained dust

particles predating the solar system.

Lunar blueprintMoon Express has revealed the

design of its MX-1 spacecraft, which

it hopes to land on the moon in 2015

in an effort to win the Google Lunar

X Prize. The California-based firm

says the coffee-table-sized craft

could also be used in Earth orbit to

service satellites or clean up debris.

Sauron-friendly climateThere’s no dark tower, and the

hordes of orcs have been replaced by

hipsters, but otherwise Los Angeles

is Mordor. Or at least its climate is,

according to a climatologist who has

simulated the prevailing conditions

of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional land of

Middle Earth. Conditions in the rest

of Middle Earth are similar to

Western Europe and north Africa.

–Catching shrimp is so last year–

Shrimp collapse

HIV cure fails to last

“Acid is the main risk – the sludge has a pH of 1, which can damage ecosystems if it gets into waterways”

“What is unusual is a decline in shrimp of all sizes, suggesting an upsurge in predation or disease”

60 SECONDS

–Tributes poured in–

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news


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Millions of US citizens have diseases most doctors there have barely heard of, says Debora MacKenzie

AMERICA’S HIDDEN EPIDEMIC

Above: “Kissing

bug” that spreads

Chagas disease

Right: Toxocara

canis roundworm

that can cause

epilepsy

SPECIAL REPORT / TROPICAL DISEASES


“They’re called ‘neglected tropical diseases’, but the reality is this is about poverty”

Although poverty is mainly to blame

for the spread of neglected tropical

diseases (NTDs), climate change is

exacerbating the problem. Many

NTDs are spread by parasites that

like warm weather.

The WHO warned last month that

warming will spread mosquitoes,

putting an extra 2 billion people at

risk of dengue fever by 2080. The

snails that carry schistosomiasis

are also projected to invade new

territory, as are the sandflies that

carry leishmaniasis in Europe

and the Americas.

Extreme weather events also

spread disease. There were more

“kissing bugs” and vermin that can

carry Chagas disease in Louisiana

after hurricane Katrina in 2005,

for example.

But climate’s biggest impact on

NTDs could simply be increased

poverty, as changes puts pressure

on crops, water sources and

economic systems that people

depend on for their food and

livelihood. High temperatures

cut yields of staples such as wheat,

for instance, and malnutrition also

favours disease.

“Poverty is the most serious

obstacle to effective adaptation [to

warming]”, the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change wrote in

2007. And the process feeds back

on itself: failure to adapt in turn

means increased poverty, and the

diseases that come with it.

A CLIMATE OF DISEASE

UNDER THE RADAR

Diseases commonly associated with

tropical climates and impoverished

countries are hurting the US too. There

is inadequate research to provide confident

numbers, but the best estimates suggest

that millions of US citizens are affected

PARASITIC WORMS

Toxocariasis 1.3-2.8 million cases

Strongyloidiasis 68,000–100,000

Ascariasis 4 million

Cysticercosis 41,000–169,000

Schistosomiasis 8,000

PROTOZOAN PARASITES

Chagas disease 330,000

Toxoplasmosis 1.1 million

Trichomoniasis 7.4 million

VIRUS

Dengue fever 110,000-200,000

(acute cases annually)

In this section Youthful surface helps hunt for Martians, page 10

Spare parts for damaged brains, page 14

Death of the password, page 21


Lisa Grossman, San Francisco

–Like a spring chicken–

Mars’s youthful skin helps hunt for life

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THIS WEEK

Dark streaks that grow in summer on

sun-scorched slopes suggest there is

water in the Martian tropics, once

assumed dry. If so, it could be harder

to protect them from contamination

by earthly life forms, a finding that

could shape future exploration.

Hints of moisture south of Mars’s

equator came in 2011, when orbital

images showed dark spots in late

spring and summer, fading in winter.

The best explanation was that

ice under the surface was melting

into water that seeped up and

evaporated.

The latest pictures from NASA’s

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter double

the number of southern sites with

streaks and add some near the

equator. These also appear on sunny

slopes and then vanish (Nature

Geoscience, doi.org/qfp). Water

wasn’t expected in the tropics, which

are hot enough to vaporise even

buried ice, but Alfred McEwen at the

University of Arizona in Tucson, who

led the research, is sure that’s what

it is. “As something that wets and

dries again, water is a very attractive

explanation.”

Spacecraft headed to Mars are

sterilised before launch, but there is

still a risk of contamination. A 2008

report concluded that tropical Mars is

too dry for terrestrial life to survive

there, making it a relatively safe

choice of landing zone. The latest

results could change that. Jeff Hecht

UNEXPECTED WATER IN THE TROPICS

“ This is the first time we have ever measured the age of rocks on another planet”


For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

Linda Geddes

Dietary change sparks rapid gut bug revolution

Why Japan megaquake was heard in spaceIT WAS literally a slide towards

disaster. An ultra-thin fault zone

packed with slippery clay was behind

the massive seismic slip during the

devastating Tohoku earthquake of

2011 in Japan. The quake was so

great that it changed the region’s

gravitational field and was “heard”

from space.

To find out how such a large slip –

greater than 50 metres in places –

happened, seismologists on board

Japan’s deep-sea research vessel

Chikyu drilled boreholes nearly

850 metres deep into the seabed

around the plate boundary that

ruptured in 2011.

This revealed significant amounts

of smectite, a slippery clay largely

responsible for many major

landslides in Europe. The researchers

also found that the fault zone was

less than 5 metres thick, tens of times

thinner than at other subduction

zones, facilitating the slip (Science,

doi.org/qdn).

“This will continue to help us

explain the mechanism of

earthquakes,” says Robert Geller of

the University of Tokyo, who was not

part of the study. “But I don’t think it

[will] help us to say when or where

the next one will occur.”

The Tohoku slip generated

infrasound waves that rose more

than 200 kilometres through the

atmosphere, nudging the orbit of

the European Space Agency’s GOCE

satellite (Geophysical Research

Letters, doi.org/qb8). The probe

measures small regional variations

in Earth’s gravity, which changes

with the terrain and density of the

crust beneath.

Measurements made before and

after the quake show subtle changes

in the local gravity field, the

European Space Agency said last

week. The Tohoku event joins the

2004 Sumatra-Andaman quake and

the 2010 quake off the coast of Chile

on a list of gravity-deforming

ruptures. Rob Gilhooly

“ The seismic slip generated infrasound waves that rose more than 200 kilometres through the atmosphere”

–Recipe for a microbe coup–

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THIS WEEK


Catherine Brahic

Deep Earth zombie bugs went global

Dyslexia’s roots traced to bad chat in the brainTHE neural basis of dyslexia may

finally have been nailed. It seems

that different areas of the brain’s

language network don’t communicate

properly. The discovery may lead to

ways of helping people with dyslexia

improve reading and writing skills.

One theory proposes that people

with dyslexia have subtle hearing

problems, particularly involving

timing of speech, which in turn leads

to the brain’s neural representation

of phonemes – the basic units of

speech sounds – developing poorly.

The trouble with this idea, says

Sophie Scott at University College

London, is that people with dyslexia

have no problem understanding

speech.

To investigate, Scott and her

colleagues scanned the brains

of 23 adults with dyslexia and

22 without. In all the participants,

patterns of nerve activity in the

auditory cortex, which processes

incoming sound, were equally

reliable in their response to different

speech sounds. This suggests that

the brain represents sounds equally

well, whether or not a person has

dyslexia.

Another possibility is that other

parts of the brain’s language network

may have trouble accessing those

sound representations. To test this,

the team explored connections

between 13 brain regions involved in

language processing. They looked at

how similar activity was across these

regions and the structure of the

actual nerves that connect them. In

people with dyslexia, both types of

test revealed faulty connections,

and therefore bad communication,

between the brain region that

contains the auditory cortex and

the area involved in language

processing and speech production.

The poorer the connectivity

between these regions, the worse

participants performed on reading

and other phonological tasks

(Science, doi.org/qcw).

The team suggest that non-

invasive brain stimulation techniques

might be able to restore the faulty

connections. Simon Makin

Deep Earth communityTeams drilling deep into Earth’s crust at different sites keep finding the same bits

of microbial DNA everywhere they look. Nobody knows how the microbes got there

SOURCE: CENSUS OF DEEP LIFE

“The study points to using brain stimulation to target faulty connections to improve reading”

–Microbes down below–

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of

THIS WEEK


Life could have emerged in the big bang’s glow ANCIENT life could have basked in

the big bang’s afterglow.

Astronomers hunting for signs of

alien life today look for planets within

the habitable zone of stars – the

region around a star that is warm

enough for liquid water to exist on a

planet’s surface. Worlds beyond this

zone, in the deep freeze of space,

should be inhospitable for life.

But space wasn’t always so frigid,

points out Abraham Loeb of Harvard

University. The very early universe

was filled with superhot gas, or

plasma, that gradually cooled and

condensed to form stars and galaxies.

Loeb calculates that about 15 million

years after the big bang, the whole

universe would have been warm

enough to be one large habitable

zone. This life-friendly epoch would

have lasted a few million years,

enough time for microbes to emerge

but not multicellular life, he suggests.

A thornier issue is whether any

planets could have formed so early in

the universe’s history, along with the

complex molecules necessary for life.

When the hot plasma cooled, it

initially produced only hydrogen and

helium atoms. Heavier stuff had to be

cooked up inside the nuclear forges

of stars, then expelled when those

stars exploded.

Standard cosmology says that in

most parts of the universe, the

amounts of heavy elements needed

to make planets didn’t appear until

hundreds of millions of years after

the big bang. But our current

understanding of the early

distribution of matter is incomplete,

says Loeb. If some regions were

much denser than average, it is

possible stars and planets formed

there earlier – perhaps in time to

coincide with the cosmos being at

the right heat.

Such physical conditions might

have existed, but microbes would

also have needed enough time

to evolve, says Jack O’Malley-James at

the University of St Andrews, UK, and

the earliest stars would have been

very massive, with short life spans

of only a few million years or so.

“These systems would have to have

been very calm and stable from a

very early stage to give life a good

chance of gaining a foothold,” he says.

Jacob Aron

“A life-friendly epoch could have lasted for a few million years, long enough for microbes to emerge”

First steps to lab-grown brain tissue

C.J.

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Rowan Hooper

–Brain cells: set to be spare parts–

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VICTORIAN DREAM HACKERThe marquis who led a second life in his sleep

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WALKING WITH CAVEMENHow to read a Stone Age footprint

GOODWILL TO ALL ANTSSix-legged heroes of selflessness

FLYING FROGS AND TACO SAUCEWhen physicists get experimental

PRIMAL CURSEOn the origin of swearing

CHOCOLATE’S HARDEST PROBLEMHalf the fat, all the taste

COWPOKE INTERNETSocial networking in the wired Old West

FAKE FLAKESThe ugly truth about snow crystals

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Warming favours deep-voiced bats

Check out my paint job before you take me on

FOR chameleons, war paint isn’t just an accessory, it is a

battle flag. The brightness of the colours these lizards

display and how rapidly they change are good indicators

of which animal will win in a fight.

Chameleons are famous for changing colour to hide from

predators by blending into their surroundings, but they

also use colour for social communication. To see how this

applies to combat, Russell Ligon, a behavioural ecologist

at Arizona State University in Tempe, pitted 10 adult male

veiled chameleons, one of the most diversely coloured

species, against each other. He used a high-speed camera

DIG

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Mozzie mojito could offer cheap defence

to capture the colour changes from 28 points on each

animal, taking into account how the colours would look

to a chameleon’s eye – they can see in ultraviolet.

Males with the brightest side stripes were more likely

to instigate a fight, whereas those with brighter heads

that changed colour most rapidly were more likely to win.

This suggests that different colours and patterns may

signal different aspects of competitive behaviour – how

motivated the chameleon is versus its strength (Biology

Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0892).

Early in an aggressive interaction, signalling a

willingness to fight by showing bright side stripes could

stop a less motivated lizard from approaching, says Ligon.

If both want to continue, however, the last chance to size

up an adversary would be to look at the pattern on its head.

Suntan harnessed for edible battery


Comet to deliver Mars meteor storm

Brain zap gives you desire to triumph over adversity

BLACK holes really know how to

shake up a dance floor. A pair of the

massive objects at the centre of a

bright galaxy are spinning so closely

that they are creating fluttering

ribbons of matter. The sight has

astronomers riveted and it could

mean we are close to witnessing a

black hole merger.

Thomas Jarrett at the University of

Cape Town in South Africa and his

colleagues found the galactic waltz in

images from a NASA telescope. As it

feeds, the supermassive black hole at

the distant galaxy’s centre emits jets

of matter from its poles. But while

one jet shoots straight outwards as

expected, the other is curved into

an unusual spiral. Smaller structures

also jut out from the galaxy at

odd angles.

Jarrett thinks a second black hole

in a close orbit is pulling on the jet

and making it jiggle. The team

estimates that the objects are about

100 trillion kilometres apart – a hair’s

breadth in galactic terms, which

means the dance could soon end

with a powerful merger (The

Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/qcv).

Waltzing black holes near grand finale

NA

SA

Cuttlefish never forget a meal

IF YOU struggle to recall where you

left the keys, knowing that a mollusc

would have no such trouble may be

something you would like to forget.

A form of episodic memory – the

ability to recall when and where a

particular experience happened –

has been discovered in the common

cuttlefish, the first time such skills

have been seen in an invertebrate.

Cuttlefish spend most of their

time hiding from predators, only

nipping into the open briefly to look

for food. So, Christelle Jozet-Alves

at the University of Caen Lower

Normandy in France wondered

whether episodic memory might

help them maximise their foraging.

Her team trained cuttlefish to

associate a visual cue with either

a shrimp or crab snack. Next,

they delayed when the food was

delivered after the cue. Crab was

available in one location 3 hours

after, whereas shrimp was available

in another spot every hour. At first,

the cuttlefish returned to both

locations every hour but, after

about 11 trials, they began to

sync their visits with the delivery

times, suggesting that they had

remembered the pattern.

The rapid change implies that

cuttlefish are able to keep track of

what they have eaten, where, and

how long ago – something akin to

episodic memory, says Jozet-Alves

(Current Biology, doi.org/qdq).

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

www.newscientistjobs.com

Print Online Mobile


For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technologyTECHNOLOGY

Hal Hodson

Death of the passwordCan’t remember your login? Not to worry – hardware keys could soon replace those vital bits of gibberish

>

My father and I both had our

passwords stolen in the recent

security breach at Adobe that saw

hackers make off with tens of

millions of account details. According

to online security site Lastpass, my

father’s password was common

enough that 97 other people in the

breach had the same one.

Major security breaches are one

of the main ways for hackers to gain

access to other people’s accounts. If

your email address shows up on sites

like haveibeenpwned.com, then it’s

a good idea to reset your passwords.

Good password “hygiene” is vital:

don’t reuse passwords on different

sites, especially for services like

banking, and ensure your passwords

are long and unguessable.

–Unlocking a safer digital future–

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“ The distinctive physical properties of an individual object could form the basis of an unclonable key”

When me and my dad were hacked


TECHNOLOGY

<

How do you control a spermbot? Stick its head in a tubeTAKE bull sperm, mix in some

nanotubes, and what do you get?

Why the very first spermbot, of

course. Eventually, these biobots

could be used to shepherd individual

sperm to eggs or to deliver targeted

doses of drugs.

Oliver Schmidt and colleagues

at the Institute for Integrative

Nanosciences in Dresden, Germany,

combined individual sperm cells with

tiny magnetic metal tubes to create

the first sperm-based biobots (watch

the video at bit.ly/spermbot).

It is far from easy to control a single

cell that propels itself through fluid

with its whip-like flagellum. Until

now researchers had only managed

to persuade groups of cells to

cooperate, with the help of chemical

gradients and magnetic fields. For

example, a group of bacteria were

used to push a tiny bead along.

To create the spermbots, the team

made microtubes 50 microns long,

by 5 to 8 microns in diameter from

iron and titanium nanoparticles.

They added the tubes to a fluid

containing thawed bull sperm.

Because one end of each tube was

slightly narrower than the other,

sperm that swam into the wider end

become trapped, headfirst, with their

flagella still free.

To control the orientation of the

microtubes, the team used external

magnetic fields. It works much as a

compass needle aligns with Earth’s

magnetic field. This enabled the team

Cat Ferguson

Play games for The Man Five video games get players looking for holes in military software

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–Study the runes in Storm Bound–

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology


ONE PER CENT

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You will remember ‘me’It can be hard to stand out in the crowd on the web. To boost

the memorability of faces online, Aditya Khosla at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed

software that tweaks photos. His team gave a memory test

to online volunteers to identify memorable faces . They then

tweaked photos, changing the face or eye shape slightly, for

example, to make them look more like the memorable faces.

The changes resulted in a 10 per cent jump in memorability.

Khosla presented the technique at a computer vision

conference in Sydney, Australia, last week.

“The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual”An open letter in all major US newspapers signed by leading

tech firms, including Apple, Facebook and Google, calls for the

US government to reform how it carries out surveillance

Attack of the zombie dronesThe zombies are coming. A hacker has shown how easy it is

to use one drone to hijack another, allowing someone else

to take control of its flight. The SkyJack software written

by Samy Kamkar sniffs out a drone’s Wi-Fi control signal,

which is usually unencrypted. It then severs that wireless

connection and establishes itself as the controller – allowing

the drone’s flyer to make the other drone do their bidding.

Kamkar has made the code available for anyone to download.

See through animal eyesWant to know how your cat or dog sees the world? Now you

can look through their eyes in the first 3D game to accurately

recreate the vision of different species. The simulation from

3D design company Dassault Systèmes, based near Paris,

mimics the vision of five animals – cats, dogs, rats, hawks

and bees. Players can steer them through the city’s Place

Vendôme. Watch the video at bit.ly/animalvision.

to control the direction in which the

sperm swam (Advanced Materials,

doi.org/f2n46m ).

Schmidt says that sperm cells are

an attractive option because they

are harmless to the human body, do

not require an external power source,

and can swim through viscous liquids.

“This type of hybrid approach could

lead the way in making efficient

robotic micro-systems,” says Eric Diller

at the University of Toronto, Canada,

although it is hard to get micro-robots

to swim as fast as biological cells.

MacGregor Campbell

“The game developers managed to entirely hide the tedious aspects of testing behind fun games”

–One direction?–

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TECHNOLOGY


IMAGINE you could disable a car

remotely just by pressing a button. It’s

not a distant dream: devices that use

radio waves to disrupt the control

computers of modern cars are already

in the pipeline. Police will be able to

use them to halt suspect vehicles in

their tracks.

At the request of police in France,

Spain and Germany, a European

Commission-funded consortium is

developing such a device. Meanwhile,

electronics firm E2V of Chelmsford, UK,

is developing a similar system for

both the police and the military, and

successfully tested its technology

last week.

Europe has given €4.3 million to

the SAVELEC (Safe Control of

Noncooperative Vehicles Through

Electromagnetic Means) project. As

part of this, engineers at the German

Aerospace Center DLR in Stuttgart

have pored over automotive Engine

Control Units (ECUs) to identify

vulnerabilities in microchips that can

be exploited using radio signals. The

electronics and portable antennas that

will transmit those signals are being

designed at IMST, a German radio

antenna research lab in Kamp-Lintfort.

At MBDA, the French missile maker

based near Paris, staff are running

simulations with large groups of

volunteers drivers to gauge how they

react when cars cut out at speed.

“We want to be able to stop the

really powerful cars that we cannot

stop with the tools police forces have

today,” says Cécile Macé, a systems

engineer at MBDA. “Really fast cars on

the motorway are hard to stop in a safe

way,” she notes. Police in Dallas, Texas,

for instance, last year stopped using

stingers –strips of tyre-shredding

spikes – after five officers were

killed attempting to deploy them.

The new devices work not by

frying a car’s electronics as military

electromagnetic pulse weapons do,

but by temporarily disabling them. “We

want to disturb the car’s electronics so

we can stop it, but we don’t want to

break the car and leave it stuck on the

motorway. And we don’t want to harm

the occupants, nearby pedestrians or

the police with the beam either,” says

Macé. Drivers should not feel the

beam – but they might hear something.

“This is known as the Frey microwave

hearing effect and consists of audible

clicks… just a pop in the ear,” she says.

The SAVELEC consortium has yet to

test its system, but the aim is to have

a prototype ready by 2016. For now,

it is releasing few details in order to

prevent people from developing

countermeasures – or their own version.

But the system is likely to be much

smaller than the one E2V is working on.

Named RF Safe-Stop, E2V’s device

uses a 350-kilogram transmitter

mounted on an SUV and a horn-like

metal waveguide to beam microwave

pulses at a car or motorbike up to 60

metres away. With the vehicle’s wiring

acting as an antenna, the pulses

disable the ECU temporarily by

constantly forcing it to reset itself.

That stops the vehicle. E2V gave a

proof-of-principle demonstration

at Throckmorton airfield in

Worcestershire, UK, last week.

Both teams need to be wary of

unintended consequences, says Jay

Abbott of Advanced Security Consulting

in Peterborough, UK, warning that the

technology might also affect steering

and brake systems. “Disrupting all of

them at once could potentially leave

a car travelling at speed as a dead

weight, with limited control over its

direction and braking.” Paul Marks

Speed gun with a twistFiring radio pulses at cars can stop them by scrambling their computers

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“ We want to disturb the car’s electronics so we can stop it, but not leave it stuck on the motorway”

INSIGHT Policing technologies

BORED of using a mouse? Soon

you’ll be able to change stuff

on your computer screen – and

then move it directly onto your

smartphone or tablet – with

nothing more than a glance.

A system called EyeDrop uses

a head-mounted eye tracker that

simultaneously records your field

of view, so it knows where you are

looking on the screen. Gazing at

an object – a photo, say – and then

pressing a key selects that object.

It can then be moved from the

screen to a tablet or smartphone

just by glancing at the second

device, as long as the two have

a wireless connection.

“The beauty of using gaze

to support this is that our eyes

naturally focus on content that

we want to acquire,” says Jayson

Turner, who developed the system

with colleagues at Lancaster

University in the UK.

Turner believes EyeDrop would

be useful for sharing photos or, say,

transferring an interactive map or

contact information from a public

display to your smartphone. He says

he has also looked at how content

can be cut and pasted or drag-and-

dropped using a mix of gaze and

taps on a touchscreen.

The system was presented at

the Conference on Mobile and

Ubiquitous Multimedia in Luleå,

Sweden, last week. Niall Firth

Drag and drop files with just a glance

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–No more quick getaways–

www.newscientistjobs.com

26 | NewScientist |26 | NewScientist | 14 December 2013

APERTURE


Ice station Winnipeg

TO CHECK whether jet engines can survive a bird

strike, manufacturers famously fire oven-ready

chickens into them. But it doesn’t end there:

aircraft also have to be able to cope with the

freezing conditions that can hit at any stage of a

flight. And that’s where this massive wind tunnel

in Winnipeg, Canada, comes in.

Here, General Electric’s aviation division

blows ice-laden, frigid gales through its engines

to make sure they can weather ice, hail and snow.

The 6.4-metre-wide aperture to the right of the

image contains seven high-powered fans that

blast the engine on the left with winds reaching

105 kilometres per hour. Then an array of

125 adjustable nozzles – operated from the control

station, pictured below – sprays micrometre-sized

water droplets into the gale to create the kind of

freezing ice, hail and snow cloud that planes will

habitually meet on their journeys. The outdoor

wind tunnel has been sited in Winnipeg because

the temperature there is guaranteed to be below

0 °C on at least 50 days each year.

And when it warms up? It’s back to the

oven-ready chickens. Paul Marks

Photographer Noah Kalina noahkalina.com


OPINION

“Pornography is linked to unrealistic expectations about sex and a belief that women are sex objects”

Offensive materialsOur society is drenched in pornography. But what do we know about its true impact on young people, ask Mark Limmer and Miranda Horvath


For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

ONE MINUTE INTERVIEW

You now champion a low-carbon economy.

Why do you want a seat on the board of BHP,

the world’s biggest mining company?

If I got on it, I would hope to spark a much more

extensive discussion on climate issues. We need

emergency action if we are going to stop the worst

outcomes of climate change becoming a reality.

Corporations have been waiting for government

to develop the right policies. But it has become

clear that governments are never going to provide

that leadership, so if we want to see serious

action then business is going to have to lead it.

Why should businesses take the lead?

It is in their own interest. If you look at the

science, we are headed for a world, on current

policies, where temperatures will go up by at least

4 °C by the end of the century. Business in that

world is not possible. The potential damage to

shareholder value is huge.

You got 4 per cent of the vote, far off what's

needed for a BHP board seat. Is that a failure?

The board was against my appointment, so I

needed investors to give me sufficient votes to

At the climate coalface

countermand that. A lot of them were supportive

but didn’t want to appear to lack confidence in the

existing board. But this is just the beginning. I will

try again. So no, I don’t regard it as a failure.

What should companies such as BHP do?

First, stop investments in thermal coal and then

phase it out completely. But in Australia, we are

talking of doubling coal exports in 10 to 15 years

and quadrupling oil and gas exports. It is suicidal.

How might such a change work in practice?

It is not a question of divesting these resources.

That solves nothing from an environmental point

of view. You have to leave them in the ground.

What about other types of natural resources?

Coking coal, used to make steel, is a bit different

because we will need steel to create the low-

carbon economy. Oil will still be a premium fuel

because we don’t have an alternative to transport

fuels yet, although the impact of unconventional

oil and gas needs to be better understood. Potash

is a good investment because we are going to

have a fertiliser problem. Uranium too, because

nuclear needs to be part of the energy mix.

Surely one company can’t act alone?

Somehow you have to form coalitions and that

isn't going to be an easy task. It needs to be

between the big emitters in business who have

enough resources and clout to be listened to, and

also the capability to shift things. So it has to be

the BHPs, Shells, BPs and Exxons of the world.

Why is it so hard for businesses to change?

Climate change, for both the company and most

big industries, is still what they call an ESG issue –

environmental, social and governance – which has

become a focus in the last 10 years or so. But ESG

issues are second-order priorities compared with

the top-order priority of shareholder value. And

people see shareholder value as some magical

thing independent of climate change. To me this

has always been a big mistake.

Interview by Michael Slezak

To avert a climatic and economic meltdown, mining companies must voluntarily shut many coal pits for good, says Ian Dunlop

PROFILE

Ian Dunlop, a former oil, gas and coal industry

executive and ex-chair of the Australian Coal

Association, now directs Safe Climate Australia.

Last month he ran for a seat on mining giant

BHP Billiton’s board on a climate change ticket

Mark Limmer is a lecturer in public

health at the University of Lancaster, UK.

Miranda Horvath is a reader in

forensic psychology at Middlesex

University in London.


Cities are an ingenious solution to a central problem of being human, says Luís Bettencourt. And if you look closely enough, the hidden laws governing them are revealed

Urban truths

OPINION THE BIG IDEA

PROFILE

Luís Bettencourt is a

professor at the Santa

Fe Institute, New Mexico,

who researches the

hidden laws by which

complex systems arise

and evolve. He has a

PhD from Imperial

College London in the

statistical physics of

the early universe

Is there anything analogous to a

city in the natural world? Cities

have been compared to brains,

organisms, ecosystems and

machines, but are any of these

analogies correct or useful?

For sure, some characteristics

of cities resemble natural

structures. The vasculature of

a leaf is a bit like the layout of

roads, for example, but this

resemblance is only superficial.

Unlike in organisms, urban

infrastructure is open-ended,

so that it can adapt to

accommodate more people.

Cities are not analogous to

machines or other engineering

systems either (though parts of

cities may behave in this way in

the short term) because they

self-organise and evolve.

I can only think of one system

in nature that operates like a

city: a star. A star is a nuclear

reactor, whereas a city is a “social

reactor”. A star, like a city, forms

when there is an implosion of

interacting elements impelled

by their attractive interactions.

And as they get bigger, both

become denser and “shine

brighter”. But cities are much

more complex than stars in the

information they produce and

their ability to evolve.

THE CITY AND THE STARS

For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion


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“ After 10 years of obsessing over these questions, I had a series of epiphanies ”

This vision of Shanghai in 2020 obeys the same

basic rules as the first cities, 10,000 years ago


Footprint size

Dead space

Feeling the heat

Beyond evolution

Must do better

Death row

Enigma Number 1779

OPINION LETTERS

WIN £15 will be awarded to the sender of the first correct

answer opened on Wednesday 15 January. The Editor’s decision is final.

Please send entries to Enigma 1779, New Scientist, Lacon House,

84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS, or to [email protected]

(please include your postal address).

Answer to 1773 Cutting corners: The other two sides of the triangle

were 7.0 and 7.5 centimetres

The winner Tony Griffin of Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada

RICHARD ENGLANDI drew four right-angled triangles. The hypotenuse of my first triangle

was also the shortest side of my second triangle; the hypotenuse of my

second triangle was also the shortest side of my third triangle; the

hypotenuse of my third triangle was also the shortest side of my fourth

triangle. The length in millimetres of each side of each triangle was an

integer less than 100.

What were the lengths of the shortest and the longest sides that I drew?

Four triangles


Ghost in machine

Let us play

To read more letters, visit newscientist.com/letters

Letters should be sent to:

Letters to the Editor, New Scientist,

84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS

Fax: +44 (0) 20 7611 1280

Email: [email protected]

Include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.

For the record We fudged the role of insulin in our

story on the link between Alzheimer’s

and diabetes (30 November, p 6);

we should have said the hormone

instructs cells to absorb glucose.

Our claim that 500 tonnes of

methane per square kilometre was

bubbling up from the Arctic seabed

(30 November, p 18) was inflated: it

should have read 500 kilograms.

House of Ugh Unplug me

How many ETs?

Gas guzzler


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Two answers to the looming antibiotic crisis are all around us – in great supply and free of charge. Frank Swain reports

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR


I

Miracle in a dish

>

COVER STORY

Light, airy hospital

rooms don’t just have

psychological benefits


Before antibiotics,

UV light was a standard

therapy for tuberculosis

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Open-air regime

Frank Swain is a freelance science writer and editor

of Medium’s Futures Exchange. You can follow him on

Twitter @Sciencepunk

Sterilising raysUltraviolet light of the right wavelength can kill

bacteria while leaving human cells unharmed

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700

Wavelength (nm)

UV VISIBLE

207nm UV light

HUMAN CELL

Nucleus

BACTERIA

UV light with a wavelength of 207nm can attack cells because it is absorbed by protein molecules

Human cells are large enough that this UV light only penetrates the surface. Bacteria, on the other hand, are small and so are killed

Throwing open a few windows

might be healthier than relying

on ubiquitous air-conditioning

TOP theCHARTS

of


We’re about to get the most stunningly detailed map yet of our cosmic neighbourhood, says Stuart Clark


>

I

129BC Hipparchus measuredthe positions of 850 stars with the naked eye

1598 Tycho Brahe mapped 1004 stars with the naked eye

1801 Using a telescope, Jérôme Lalande catalogued 47,390 stars including some 8 timesas dim as the nakedeye can see

2000 Hipparcos space telescope published data from 2,500,000 stars 64 times as dim as the naked eye can see

Star charts have grown ever more detailed over the ages as technology has improved

= 1000 stars

= 50,000 stars

2020 Gaia space telescopewill publish catalogue of 1,000,000,000 stars,(see left) including those 400,000 times as faint asthe naked eye can see.Only half are represented here


Celestial selfie

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By keeping itself cool with a sun

shade, Gaia can spot faint objects

” The accuracy of Gaia’s camera would allow it to pinpoint a flea on the moon”


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Stuart Clark is a consultant for New Scientist and the

author of The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth (Polygon). Follow

him on Twitter @DrStuClark

Astronomers estimate that Gaia will

discover about 2000 planets around

other stars. The spacecraft will not be

able to see those planets directly

because they are too small and dim.

Instead, it will infer their presence by the

effect they have on their central stars.

As the gravity of a mighty star pulls

on a planet, the puny planet tugs back,

causing the star to perform a small

pirouette. Gaia will be able to measure

these motions for stars within about

500 light years of Earth. Its haul of

planets should span everything from

Earth-size rocky worlds to gas giants

like Jupiter and Saturn.

These planets aren’t much bigger

than the exoplanets discovered by

NASA’s Kepler mission. But Gaia will

search “nearby” stars across the entire

sky, rather than distant stars in a tiny

patch of the galaxy as Kepler has done.

With astronomers currently planning

missions to analyse the atmospheres of

nearby planets, the resulting catalogue

will be invaluable.

WOBBLY WORLDS

” The ability to track stars’ movements could help us identify the ones born in the sun’s litter”

Gaia will chart

1 per cent of the Milky

Way’s hundreds of

billions of stars


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Mass extinctions have regularly devastated life on Earth – but have we been missing a crucial ingredient in explaining them, asks Colin Barras

E

Impact science

>


Wrong numbers

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Henrik Svensen at the University of Oslo,

Norway, has long argued that location is

crucial to grasping the consequences of

events like asteroid impacts (New Scientist,

8 December 2007, p 42). About 214 million

years ago a massive space rock hit north-east

Canada, forming the 100-kilometre-wide

Manicouagan crater. Yet it seems to have had

little effect on the global ecosystem. What

are we to make of that?

Svensen’s hunch is that the Manicouagan

asteroid hit inert, hard crystalline rock rather

than sediments stuffed full of climate-

changing gases that were subsequently

released, as has been suggested happened

before the end-Permian extinction 252 million

years ago (see main story). “This may explain

why sometimes impacts trigger global

disasters and sometimes they just trigger

local effects but no mass extinction,” he says.

In fact, he goes so far as to suggest that

a similar “fracking” process could have been

the X-factor that turned the Chicxulub

asteroid into a dinosaur killer. Most

geologists think the size of this asteroid

alone explains its lethal effect, but Svensen

points out that the rock struck a thick

sequence of sediments, rich in salty deposits

called evaporites. As a rule, evaporites

contain a lot of sulphur that can escape into

the atmosphere, causing extensive acid rain.

“This might help explain why that extinction

was so big,” says Svensen (see diagram, right).

If there is any truth to such ideas, that

means that there are especially vulnerable

spots on Earth today. We might particularly

wish an incoming asteroid to avoid a place

like the Williston Basin, which straddles

Montana, the Dakotas and Saskatchewan

in North America, for instance – a major

site for present-day human fracking

activities. “They could be vulnerable,” says

Eric Tohver at the University of Western

Australia in Perth.

Peter Ward at the University of Washington

in Seattle is sniffy. “An impact is an impact,”

he says. No matter where it hits, it’s going to

throw up so much stuff into the atmosphere

that you would get several years without

a summer.” He thinks the Manicouagan

impact – and indeed Brazil’s Araguainha

impact – failed to make a global impression

simply because they were too small. Large

though the Manicouagan crater is, it would fit

into Chicxulub three times over. “It seems to

me that there is an impact threshold,” he says.

According to this view, impacts have to be

exceptionally large, like Chicxulub, to trigger

a mass extinction – but it doesn’t matter

where on Earth they fall. It’s pretty safe to

say we wouldn’t be entirely happy following

a large impact anywhere on the planet.

Flood basalts in Siberia are evidence of a convulsive

bout of volcanism some 250 million years ago


Small impact, big impact

>90% MASS EXTINCTION 75% MASS EXTINCTION NO EXTINCTION

ARAGUAINHA, BRAZIL (255 million years ago)

METMMMETMETHANHANHANA EEE SULSULPHUPHURREARTH TREMORSEARTH TREMORS EARTH TREMORS

SHALE ROCK

WARMING

EVAPORITES STABLE ROCK BED

CHICXULUB, MEXICO (65 million years ago) MANICOUAGAN, CANADA (214 million years ago)

40km 180km 100km

ACID RAIN

” What lay at the impact site may have been the key: an extensive shallow sea and, beneath that, large deposits of methane”


” As the pressure grew, eventually the rock blew, explosively venting ozone-destroying chemicals”

The end-Permian extinction, or Great Dying,

252 million years ago was certainly not good

news for 90 per cent of the species on Earth

(see main story) – but it may be claiming human

lives even today.

In the early 1980s, health authorities

in China became aware that cases of lung

cancer not associated with smoking were

20 times higher in parts of Yunnan province,

in the south of the country, than elsewhere.

A likely source of the problem was quickly

identified, says David Large, a geologist at the

University of Nottingham, UK: the combustion

of coal in cast-iron stoves kept inside without

adequate ventilation, releasing potentially

carcinogenic polyaromatic hydrocarbons.

The mystery was that coal was burned in

a similar way in other areas without those

effects. One possibility was that locals in

Yunnan were genetically predisposed to

lung cancer. Large and his colleagues have

a different idea.

“No one has thought to ask if the coal itself

was different – and it is,” he says. His team

has found tiny, sharp grains of silica, recently

identified as a possible carcinogen, in the fuel.

Large thinks he knows how it got there. The

coal dates to the very latest stages of the

Permian, and would still have been peat during

the end-Permian mass extinction. During the

formation of the vast Siberian volcanic region

around this time, gases released into the

atmosphere made rainwater more acidic,

dissolving surface rocks and leaving the

groundwater unusually rich in silica – silica

that eventually made its way into the coal

(Environmental Science and Technology,

vol 43, p 9016).

“It’s a fascinating piece of detective work,”

says Large. “It shows there is a geological basis

for a lung cancer epidemic, which links it to

this mass extinction more than 250 million

years ago.”

Richard Twitchett of Plymouth University,

UK, needs more convincing that the series of

events happened that way, and points out that

the source of the silica might be closer to the

coal’s home. “We know from ash beds that there

was extensive late-Permian volcanism in south

China,” he says.

Colin Barras is a freelance writer based near Ann

Arbor, Michigan

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Modern attempts to extract precious metals from the sea follow a long and chequered history, says Paul Collins

Gold tidings

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“It was a bitter cold night,” Arthur Ryan recalled later. “Great cakes of ice were floating about, and we could hear them crunching against the piles.” He and his fellow investor shivered through the night in February 1897 on a rickety jetty near Providence, Rhode Island, guarding a hole in the floor of their shack. Hours earlier, Prescott Jernegan – Baptist minister, gentleman scientist and inventor – had lowered an “accumulator box” through it into the waters of Narragansett Bay below.

The next morning, on prising open the box, the bleary-eyed men had their reward: gold. But all was not quite as it seemed…


Nanoparticles not nuggets

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” Nobel laureate Fritz Haber posed as crew on a transatlantic liner, while surreptitiously testing the sea for gold”


Paul Collins is a writer based in Portland, Oregon

The sheer quantity of seawater out there

means that even when elements exist only

in trace quantities, they add up to a vast

potential resource. Bromine, magnesium

and iodine are already profitably extracted

from the sea. Of heavier elements, besides

gold (see main story) uranium has long

aroused interest. The few parts per billion

found in seawater, mostly as the ion uranyl,

is enough fuel to power the planet’s nuclear

power plants for thousands of years.

Attempts to extract this uranium have

a long history. In 1964, the UK’s Atomic

Energy Research Establishment tried

harvesting it from the waters off Portland

Bill on the south coast of England using

titanium hydroxide, which bonds with uranyl

(Nature, vol 203, p 1110). In the 1970s,

German researchers bred algae to absorb

high concentrations of heavy metals

like uranium. Neither technique is yet

competitive with conventional mining, but

they have been of ongoing interest above all

to the mineral-poor and nuclear-dependent

island of Japan.

More recent approaches include sinking

plastic matting soaked with the uranium-

absorbent amidoxime into the sea, and the

use of compounds known as metal-organic

frameworks that have a particular affinity

for uranium (Chemical Science, vol 4, p 2396).

The hope is that even if such extraction

techniques fail to make the grade for

commercial mining, they may prove valuable

for treating radioactive wastewater.

NUCLEAR SUBMARINE

The great seawater

gold swindle electrified

the town of Lubec, Maine,

in the late 19th century

CULTURELAB


Aid on the Edge of Chaos by Ben

Ramalingam, Oxford University

Press, £25

“Poor societies aren’t machines where you pour money in and development comes out”

Out of chaos into complexity We need a paradigm shift if aid is to save lives in the 21st century, finds Debora MacKenzie

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


Machine solutions

Complexity theory helped reveal

fragilities in aid distribution in Haiti

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An infant science

Debora MacKenzie is a consultant for

New Scientist

“Even at its best, aid is a child of the 19th-century, with reductionist solutions for simple problems”

Humanitarian aid was distributed in

Haiti after an earthquake hit in 2010

CULTURELAB


The Infested Mind: Why humans fear,

loathe, and love insects by Jeffrey A.

Lockwood, Oxford University Press,

£16.99/$24.95

Mark Viney is a biologist and studies

parasitic worms at the University of

Bristol, UK

“ No one is neutral about insects. A few of us have a debilitating horror of them, and a very few love them”

Our fear of insects has inspired

countless horror movies

Bugs on the brainThe strong emotional responses that insects elicit from us have deep roots, finds Mark Viney

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The Stone Age Institute Band

“From the Big Bangto the World Wide Web” “Ancestral Faces”

The Stone Age Institute Band Carrie Newcomer, vocals Seymour Duncan, lead guitar

Listen to our science education songs about Evolution and download them for free at our music webpage!

http://www.stoneageinstitute.org/music.html

“Homo erectus”

“Modern Humans” “Olduvai Gorge” “98% Chimpanzee”


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Professor in Ecology and Conservation Biology, University of Toronto ScarboroughUniversity of Toronto

Scarborough

Toronto, Canada

The successful

Northeastern’s College of Engineering seeks outstanding faculty candidates for appointments

at the associate or full professor level, both within the college and in conjunction with

interdisciplinary positions across the university. We will also consider exceptional candidates at

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programs that complement existing expertise aligned with one or more of Northeastern’s

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applicant must have an excellent publication record, evidence of strong potential to attain a sustained and externally funded research program, and a commitment to graduate student supervision and training. Candidates with an active field program in terrestrial ecology are especially encouraged to apply. The successful candidate will join an expanding and dynamic group of faculty working in the areas of Ecology and Environmental Science within the department and the wider campus, and contribute to the delivery of a Professional Master’s program in Conservation and Biodiversity. For more information visit NewScientistJobs.com Job ID: 1401483329

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THE SMART GUIDE TO 2012

Ten ideas that you’ll want to understand next year

HOLIDAY SPECIAL

Apps for apes

Phantom photos

3, 2, 1... Drift off!

When games leak into reality

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The great hack of 1903

Poetry in (the laws of) motion

How does my icicle grow

Buffet food fights

The compendium of dust

Into the crumple zone

Shiver yourself slim

Win 2011’s best books

Enter our treasure hunt

And much, much more...

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December 24, 2011 - January 6, 2012

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FEEDBACK

Does the caption that Frank Fahy saw in The

Guardian newspaper on 4 November – “Solar

eclipse lights up Africa” – imply the discovery

of anti-light, he wants to know

RECEIVING an email entitled “WEFTEC

2014 Abstract Deadline Approaching”,

Graeme Faris was initially “not quite

sure what to do”. Fret about lateness

in an abstract sense, possibly?

Recall the dictum attributed to writer

Douglas Adams: “I love deadlines.

I love the whooshing sound they

make as they go by”? Fortunately,

reading on, a more concrete sense of

“abstract” came to mind, and the air

was thick with the sound of papers

being summarised.

MEANWHILE, Gerald Legg read the

promise of the Midnight Sun system

discussed above to power your home

“24 hrs a day with green energy

generated by your solar system”

quite differently. “With the sun’s

output alone being approximately

3.86 x 1026 watts,” he observes,

“this ‘revolutionary product’ would

certainly do more than power

one’s home.”

FINALLY, pedestrians, according

to the sign that Hugh Carter

photographed at a construction

site in Toronto, “must adhere to

traffic personnel”.

Luckily, as his sister Norma reports,

“there weren’t any traffic personnel

around at the time, so he went home”.

You can send stories to Feedback by

email at [email protected].

Please include your home address.

This week’s and past Feedbacks can

be seen on our website.

For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback

PA

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THE LAST WORD

Crystal crisisThis tub of plasticine (see photo

below) has been sitting in a box at

the back of my study. I don’t think

it has been subjected to any

particularly extreme environmental

events, yet it looks like it is covered

in white crystals. Any ideas how

this has happened?

Dung-ho insectsIn a boggy field in Dorset, we saw

these butterflies apparently

feeding on dung (see photo right).

What is going on?

This week’s questions FASTER THAN THE WIND

RIGHT LEANING

CAN’T STAND THE HEAT?

BRIGHT SPARK

WASPS ON THE WING

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Documents

New Scientist - December 14 2013 UK