After tweeted rape threats, Twitter promises change

"You better watch your back.... Im gonna rape your ass at 8pm and put the video all over the internet."

This is one of the many rape threats UK politician Stella Creasy received on Twitter this week. Creasy put herself in the line of fire after she expressed her outrage at the graphic threats of rape and murder that Caroline Criado-Perez started receiving on 24 July, when she kicked off a campaign to get a picture of author Jane Austen on the UK's new £10 note. Two men have been arrested regarding those threats.

Many feel that Twitter is not doing enough to combat abusive users. John Whittingdale, the leader of a House of Commons select committee, says he wants to haul in Twitter executives before members of parliament to explain themselves. And more than 100,000 users have signed a petition calling on Twitter to make it easier to report abusive messages by adding a "report abuse" button to every tweet.

At the moment the process is rather unwieldy. Anyone with Apple's iOS operating system has the option of reporting tweets with a button but everyone still has to fill in a long form on Twitter if they want to file a complaint about an abusive user. As Criado-Perez said last week, this is unfeasible if you are facing a sustained attack. "When you are drowning in rape threats, when they are coming in every second, it's just not practical to report in this way," she tweeted.

The repercussions of the row may drag Twitter closer to taking more responsibility for its users' tweets – something the firm has resisted until now. It is certainly not the first time that it has come under fire in this way. Earlier this year a French court forced the company to hand over data on Twitter users who had been posting racist tweets.

Troll control

Jonathan Bishop, who studies internet-based abuse, known as trolling, at the Centre for Research into Online Communities and E-Learning at Swansea University, UK, says that for most sites like Twitter the crowd is generally able to govern itself. But when that self-regulation fails, he says, we need a way of applying existing laws to the problem.

Bishop has developed a sliding scale of trolling behaviour, ranging from minor offences to serious harassment. It is designed to make it easier to work out under what laws a particular online abuser, or troll, should be prosecuted (International Review of Law, Computers and Technology, doi.org/nbx).

Bishop says the extreme threats that Creasy and Criado-Perez faced are right at the very top end of the scale, and that Twitter should be doing more to help. For example, he reckons that Facebook has a better mechanism for reporting abuse than Twitter. "On Facebook you can police your own page with a report button. Twitter should be able to let you automatically report or delete any post that's on your timeline," he says.

Blocking manoeuvre

In reaction to the criticisms, Twitter has said it is taking steps to update its policy. "We're testing ways to simplify reporting, e.g. within a Tweet by using the 'Report Tweet' button in our iPhone app and on mobile web," the site's general manager Tony Wang tweeted last week.

Third party apps like @the_block_bot also exist, which mines Twitter to look for people that others have blocked and pre-emptively blocks them from your feed too. Users sign up and specify what level of blocking they want – from spammers and cyberstalkers right down to just those with different views.

But simply blocking those who send abusive messages is not enough, Creasy told New Scientist. Social media firms like Twitter should be identifying users' IP addresses, so they can tell when someone with a blocked account signs up under a different Twitter handle. Software tools could also be used to look for patterns of abusive behaviour.

This is certainly feasible in principle. Karthik Dinakar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab has developed a tool called ConceptNet that lets software analyse words and phrases to work out whether they are abusive or not. He says that with a little training a system like his would find it fairly easy to filter abusive tweets. But there are other issues. "There are Twitter dynamics like retweeting and 'favouriting' someone else's abusive tweet so as to take a position, so it adds another layer of complexity," he says.

"Freedom of speech is massively important," Creasy says. "Abuse is one thing, but it's not the same as threatening that they are going to rape me or kill me. If someone was saying that to me in the street you'd dial 999. It's no different online. How we deal with that kind of culture is what needs to be addressed."

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Astrophile: How Saturn's tiger moon got its stripes

Astrophile is our weekly column on curious cosmic objects, from the solar system to the far reaches of the multiverse

Objects: tiger stripes of Enceladus

Origins: ripped open by a jealous ruler

Here is the story of how Saturn's geyser moon got its stripes. Once upon a time, in the blackness of space, there lived a giant gas ball known for his vanity. Unlike most of the other denizens of the solar system, mighty Saturn wore great big rings of ice that glittered for all to see.

Presently Saturn laid eyes on a small moon called Enceladus, who danced around him in an elongated path. Enceladus wore a bright coat of ice that covered her body and dazzled all who beheld her. Saturn grew jealous of the shining moon, and decided to remind Enceladus who was boss. The great big planet reached out and squeezed her.

Enceladus bulged and grew hot inside with anger but could not escape Saturn's mighty grip. Her smooth white coat cracked and dark fissures appeared in her flanks, like tiger stripes. Then icy geysers erupted from them. To Saturn's great delight, the ejected ice threw itself into orbit around him. From that day to this, cruel Saturn has pumped Enceladus for ever more of her ice so that he can gather the sparkling water around himself and make a new ring to wear.

Here on Earth people have told this tale for years, but no one could say for sure if it was just a myth – until now. Images taken by NASA's Cassini probe support the idea that Saturn's gravitational squeezing of the moon causes its fissures to widen and contract, controlling how much icy material erupts from the cracks.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

As Enceladus orbits Saturn, changes in the strength of the giant planet's tug create tidal stresses that squeeze and heat the moon's interior. The ice geysers erupt from features on the moon's south pole known as tiger stripes. These geysers sandblast other nearby moons and are probably the source of Saturn's faint E ring. It is thought that a briny subsurface ocean is what feeds the plumes.

Previous calculations had suggested that tidal stress could also be why the amount of material ejected in the plumes varies. To test the idea, Matt Hedman of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his colleagues analysed seven years' worth of Cassini data.

Looking at the brightness of the plumes and adjusting for the viewing angle, the team found that geyser activity peaks when Enceladus is at its most distant point from Saturn. That is when the moon experiences the strongest tensile stress, which probably widens the fissures and lets more material escape, says Hedman.

Sideways action

"The correlation is very striking and very convincing," says John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It gives us a really solid handle on how Enceladus works."

But this just-so story has not yet reached its conclusion. "We still don't know whether there's a liquid ocean below the surface or not," says Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, a member of the team that first discovered the moon's plumes in 2006.

Saturn could be pumping water from an underground body of water by widening the moon's fissures, as Hedman's team suggests, says Ingersoll. But it is also possible that ice on the surface is simply evaporating around the cracks, he says, which might grind against each other in a sideways motion and be heated by friction.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature12371

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Gold-diamond duo takes temperature of single cell

TALK about bling. Miniature diamonds more usually found in quantum computers, combined with fragments of gold, can be used to measure the temperature of individual cells. That could lead to a more accurate way to kill cancers while sparing healthy tissue – and a new way to explore cell behaviour.

There are already ways to take a cell's temperature, using glowing proteins or carbon nanotubes. However, these lack sensitivity and accuracy because their components can react with substances inside the cell.

So Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University and colleagues turned to nanodiamonds, which have defects in their structure that mean they sometimes contain extra electrons. The tendency of these electrons to exist in many states at once, a superposition, makes nanodiamonds promising as the bits, or qubits, of a quantum computer, where superposition enables multiple calculations in parallel. However, these states vary with temperature, which is troublesome for computing.

Lukin's team wondered if this temperature dependence could instead be exploited to build a thermometer, particularly as diamonds are inert, so wouldn't interfere with a cell's chemistry.

The team used nanowires to insert diamonds about 100 nanometres across, along with gold nanoparticles, into a human cell in a dish. Shining a laser onto the cell heats it and the gold particles. The diamond, in turn, changes shape, squeezing the defect electrons and rearranging their energy levels.

Shining a different type of laser on the cell causes the electrons to absorb and then emit light with a brightness that depends on the new energy-level arrangement. The team used this light to deduce the cell's temperature.

They found they could detect temperature differences of just o.oo18 °C inside the cell, a sensitivity record. And when they placed two diamonds in the cell, they could detect temperature variations between them, caused by their varying closeness to the gold. This should be possible even when the diamonds are just 200 nanometres apart.

The team also used the set-up to heat a cell enough to kill it, and recorded a temperature upon death. Lukin presented the work on 22 July at the Second International Conference on Quantum Technologies in Moscow, Russia, and this week in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature12373).

If such thermometers can be used in the body, they might improve cancer therapy, says Lukin's colleague Norman Yao. The temperatures of cancerous cells and their healthy neighbours could be monitored, and just enough heat applied to kill the cancer but not the healthy cells.

"In certain cases, particularly near critical structures such as great vessels, arteries or nerve bundles, an accurate read-out of local cellular temperature would be advantageous in the sparing of those structures," says Glenn Goodrich of Nanospectra Biosciences in Houston, Texas, a company carrying out human trials of cancer therapy based on gold nanoparticles.

Diamond thermometers could also explore cellular mysteries. "If a cell is unhappy, if it's in contact with a virus, a chemical reaction starts and it locally starts producing heat," says Lukin. "How this occurs no one understands in detail. Perhaps we can answer this question."

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US soldiers used in human experiments lose legal case

Editorial: "Beyond the call of duty"

FOR decades, in secret military experiments, tens of thousands of US soldiers were deliberately exposed to agents such as mustard gas, sarin and weaponised LSD. It was a voluntary programme, but few soldiers had any idea what they were letting themselves in for. Now the US Department of Defense (DoD) has been ordered to reveal the consequences of what the soldiers were subjected to.

They include then-20-year-old Franklin Rochelle, who in 1968 was stationed at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. After inhaling an odourless gas, he hallucinated for three days straight. He saw insects under his skin that he tried to kill with a razor.

Last week, a Californian district judge ruled that Rochelle, along with tens of thousands of other veterans who had taken part in experiments since 1920 must, from now on, be informed by the DoD of any new information that ...

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Crude-oil spill blights idyllic Thai island

(Image: Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)

Pristine white beaches turned black this week when crude oil spewed out from an offshore pipeline near the Thai island of Ko Samet.

The pipeline, owned by Thai oil and gas company PTT Global Chemical, spilled an estimated 50,000 litres of crude oil. This is modest – the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico spilled millions of litres of oil per day – but there are fears that unfavourable ocean currents and weather conditions could allow some of the oil to reach the Thai mainland.

"What's interesting about this oil spill is the disproportionate effects it's having," says Paul Johnston of Greenpeace Research Laboratories in Exeter, UK, which provides scientific advice to the environmental campaign group Greenpeace. "It's a relatively small volume of oil compared to tanker disasters, but it's having huge impacts on tourism and the marine industry."

Tourists are deserting the island even though not all its beaches are affected. "Oil slicks are not nice to be around," says Johnston. "Not only are they ugly, but they also smell pungent."

Fishing in the vicinity will suffer, too: shellfish and other aquatic life will take up water-soluble toxins from the oil, rendering them toxic.

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Garden of Eden to become Iraqi national park

THE "Garden of Eden" has been saved, even as chaos grows all around. Last week, amid a wave of bombings on the streets of Baghdad, Iraq's Council of Ministers found time to approve the creation of the country's first national park – the centrepiece of a remarkable restoration of the Mesopotamian marshes in the south of the country.

This vast wetland of reed beds and waterways, home of the Ma'dan Marsh Arabs, is widely held to be the home of the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden, the paradise where Adam and Eve were created and from which they were subsequently expelled.

After the Gulf war in 1991, Iraq's president, Saddam Hussain, used dykes, sluices and diversions to cut off the country's two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. This drained 93 per cent of the marshes, largely obliterating the largest wetland ecosystem in the Middle East.

The purpose was to expel the rebellious Ma'dan, but in the end, it sped Saddam's downfall in 2003. Invading US tanks were able to drive north over the desert he had created and enter Baghdad far more easily. The Ma'dan later returned and broke the dykes. Water returned to some areas, as did the reed beds that sustained the birdlife and water buffalo.

Conservationists have been amazed that, despite the disappearance for many years of most of the marsh, every species survived. All 278 recorded bird species remain, including the endemic Basra reed warbler and Iraq babbler. "They had hung on in small spots. When the water spread again, so did the birds," says Richard Porter of Birdlife International. "It shows how resilient nature can be, and gives hope that other lost wetlands can be restored."

But it's not quite paradise regained. "While some patches returned, others did not," says Mudhafar Salim, chief ornithologist for Nature Iraq, the NGO that led the campaign for the park's creation.

The main issue now is the hydro-politics of the region. Syria, Turkey and Iran, Iraq's upstream neighbours, are increasingly restricting the flows of the Tigris and Euphrates. In response, Nature Iraq has persuaded the Iraqi government to construct an embankment to enable water flow in the Euphrates to be diverted onto the marshes in spring, recreating the strong "pulse" of water that is essential to its ecological cycles. Last year, 76 per cent of the potentially restorable marshland flooded.

"Declaring a park isn't just a bit of paper," says Nature Iraq's founder, engineer Azzam Alwash. "It will mean we can reserve a percentage of the water from the rivers for the marshes."

Salim adds: "Having a stable share of the water should allow the number of birds and other creatures to reach levels even greater than in the 1970s."

But in the long run, the marshes can only be protected if there is an international agreement on water-sharing, Alwash says. And managing the park itself will require money. He hopes tourists will pay, though they are unlikely to be flooding in just yet.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Garden of Eden safe as Iraq national park"

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Biosphere 2: Saving the world within a world

Editorial: "Reality bites: The lessons of Biosphere 2"

See more in our gallery: "Earth in miniature: Tour a mini-world under glass"

AROUND 10am, the rain began to fall. It wasn't especially heavy, but it was relentless. Hour after hour the downpour continued, soaking into the deep black soil. After midnight, the hill was saturated, and the water began to pool on the surface and run, carving a gully that deepened and flared as the rain continued.

A few weeks later, I am standing beneath that hill. Overhead, the sun shines in through a latticework of white metal bars. In front of me is the slush of black mud that washed onto the concrete floor, much to the consternation of the rain-makers. They hadn't meant to carve out a chunk of the hillside – after all, they had only just built it.

Once, the giant glass chamber in which ...

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Out-of-control oil leaks at Canadian tar sands site

Ah, the beautiful wilds of western Canada. Rivers, mountains, forests… and out-of-control oil leaks that have already spurted thousands of barrels of toxic bitumen into the environment.

The leaks were caused by an underground blowout at a tar sand project in north-east Alberta run by Canadian Natural Resources that had been certified safe by government regulators. One of the firm's scientists has been reported saying that they are mystified as to what went wrong or how to stop the leak. The company hasn't disclosed how fast the leaks are progressing.

Since May, there have been leaks through surface fissures at four of the firm's sites in the area, killing wildlife and raising questions about how well the safety of tar sands operations can be assessed. The company extracts bitumen by injecting steam into the tar sands at high pressure to melt the bitumen and push it to the surface.

Chris Severson-Baker of the Pembina Institute in Edmonton, Alberta, estimates that the method, known as cyclic steam stimulation, accounts for about 30 per cent of tar sands extraction. There's nothing inherently risky about cyclic steam stimulation, he says, making these leaks all the more worrisome. "If there are cases like this, it shows things are not as predictable as we might like," says Severson-Baker.

In January, Canada's Energy Resources Conservation Board revealed that some 5700 barrels of bitumen had leaked from well sites run by Canadian Natural Resources four years ago. But investigations by the company and regulator couldn't determine what had gone wrong. They suggested that the geology of the area was weaker than they had thought and couldn't contain the pressure from the steam.

The spill could fuel opposition to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from this and similar sites. Opponents worry that the pipeline itself has a high risk of leaking, and that increased extraction will exacerbate carbon emissions. US president Barack Obama has said that he will only give the project the green light if it doesn't add to carbon emissions, and on Saturday he questioned the economic benefits of the pipeline.

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Track change at heart of Spain train crash inquiry

Why did Francisco José Garzón, a train driver with 30 years' experience, hit a bend at 190 kilometres per hour when the speed limit was 80 km/h? Did he ignore the automated warnings? Or did his train's alert system fail at a critical time?

An inquiry is under way into the derailing of the packed train, which killed 79 people in Santiago de Compostela, north-west Spain on 24 July. Garzón has admitted to "confusion" over the train's speed and, though freed on bail, is facing the prospect of 79 charges of negligent homicide.

One focus of the investigation will be the fact that the crash took place at a point where one safety system hands over to another – from one that controls the train's speed to one that does not. On high-speed sections, the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) intervenes wirelessly to ensure a train slows down if alerts are ignored.

Crucially, ERTMS cuts in if its alerts are ignored. It does so using GSM-R - a robust railway version of the GSM standard used by cellphones to communicate with the cell towers.

"ERTMS has all sorts of measures that prevent trains going over speed and will eventually be fitted over the whole route from Santiago to Madrid," says Roger Kemp, a safety-critical systems engineer specialising in railway technology at Lancaster University, UK. "But it is not a finished project."

This means that, 4 kilometres from Santiago de Compostela, on a slower, bendier section of track that snakes through the town, ERTMS has not yet been fitted. Instead, an older Spanish-developed system called ASFA advises the driver of the necessary safe speeds. But ASFA can only intervene if the driver does not respond.

"The driver only has to acknowledge that they have seen the speed advisory by pushing a button - otherwise the system will apply the brakes - but you don't have to comply with that speed under ASFA," says Kemp.

Spanish TV station Antena 3 says that Garzón told some witnesses immediately after the crash that he was not able to slow down to the necessary 80 km/h before the sharp curve - but it is not known why.

To find out, investigators are now retrieving data from the train's electronic systems - a process that must be performed carefully to prevent critical data in the damaged systems being overwritten. This could take two weeks.

"There is a lot of data that can be downloaded from various traction control computers on a train - and that should tell the investigators if the train was doing what it should have done," says Kemp.

While ERTMS works well in general, it does have vulnerabilities which researchers are attempting to address. Researchers led by Gianmarco Baldini at the European Commission's Institute for the Protection and the Security of the Citizen in Varese, Italy, have developed a system that can detect radio jamming and interference of the GSM-R signal and, within 1 second, inform train drivers and track controllers (International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, doi.org/dpfmht).

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Morphing molecule may shine in high-resolution screens

Shape-shifting molecules that emit primary colours have been mixed to create a rainbow of hues for the first time. This morphing ensures that the colours are crisp and clear, potentially giving the molecules a future in high-resolution displays.

Modern displays use bundles of micrometre-sized pixels of each primary colour – red, green and blue – to create a range of colours. But even such small pixels become noticeable on devices that are held close to the user's face, such as smartphones, computer screens and virtual reality headsets. To get round this, researchers are attempting to make pixels the size of a molecule.

All molecules absorb and emit light at certain wavelengths based on their structure. Single molecules that emit red, green or blue light have been made before, but blending them is a challenge. A mixture of blue and red ends up looking red, for example, because the high-energy blue light gets absorbed by red molecules and re-emitted as lower energy red light.

Elegant solution

To fix this, Soo-Young Park of Seoul National University in South Korea and colleagues have made coloured molecules that can each have two structures. Exposing one of these molecules to ultraviolet light boosts its energy level, but this new excited state is unstable so the molecule morphs into its alternate structure. The still-excited molecule then emits a photon at the desired wavelength and relaxes, shifting back to its original form. This duality means light emitted by one molecule won't be absorbed by its neighbours.

By mixing the molecules, the team was able to produce dyes and plastic films that appear clear under normal light but shine in a range of colours under UV light. The films can also fluoresce when a current flows through them, making them suitable for use as organic LEDs, larger versions of which are found in many modern screens.

Since the dyes don't emit colour unless exposed to UV or electricity, they could also prove useful for drawing security marks or even printing hidden photos on credit cards and other objects, says Park.

"It's quite elegant," says John de Mello at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. But he believes there is still room for improvement. Red light is at the furthest end of the spectrum from UV, he says, and the current version of the red molecule must absorb 30 times more UV light than the other colours to create equivalent levels of brightness.

Journal reference: Journal of the American Chemical Society, DOI: 10.1021/ja404256s

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NASA's upcoming astronaut capsule has hints of Apollo

A flashback to the space future (Image: NASA/Robert Markowitz)

For an out-of-this-world commute, you need a perfectly tricked-out vehicle. With sky-blue LED lighting and seating for seven, this space capsule certainly fits the bill.

This photo gives a glimpse inside of the CST-100, a commercial crew capsule being built by Boeing with support from NASA, which aims to restore the US's ability to independently launch astronauts into space.

The full-scale mock-up of the capsule recently underwent a day-long series of tests by two NASA astronauts. The purpose of the tests was to see how the astronauts were able to work with the space and equipment available before the design is finalised.

Don't be fooled by its retro, Apollo-like exterior appearance – the CST-100 uses the latest technology, including enhanced thermal protection for that long drop back through the atmosphere and touchscreen tablets to replace the sea of buttons seen in space capsules of yore.

"What you're not going to find is 1100 or 1600 switches," says Chris Ferguson, a former astronaut and director of Boeing's commercial crew development programme. "We don't want to burden [the astronauts] with an inordinate amount of training to fly this vehicle. We want it to be intuitive."

The project is funded by NASA in its bid to get the US back in the astronaut transport business after it retired the shuttle programme in July 2011. Currently, US astronauts are dependent on Russia's Soyuz capsules. The US forks out $71 million (£46 million) per seat to reach the International Space Station.

Boeing has plans to test the CST-100 in 2016 in a crewed, three-day orbital flight, riding an Atlas V rocket into space. The capsule will attempt to dock with the ISS in 2017 – as long as NASA gets the funding from the US Congress.

NASA is also funding the development of Boeing's rivals: the Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser spaceplane and SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. Dragon is already powering ahead, charged with delivering crucial supplies to the ISS, having first successfully docked with it in May 2012.

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Chemical analysis of the hair of the 13-year-old "Llullaillaco Maiden" reveals that drugs and alcohol played an important role in her last months

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Teen jabs to prevent cervical cancer stall in US

Rwanda doesn't do many things better than the US, but in some ways it protects its teenage girls better. It is more than twice as successful as the US at vaccinating girls against human papillomavirus (HPV), which can lead to cervical cancer.

"Our vaccination rate is stuck at one-third of our teen girls, yet Rwanda has vaccinated more than 80 per cent of its target population," says Tom Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has released new figures on the US vaccination rate.

In 2012, only 33 per cent of eligible girls had all three doses needed for maximum protection, well short of the 80 per cent target. The CDC warns that unless uptake improves, there will be 1400 unnecessary deaths from cervical cancer each year.

Frieden said that a continuing worry among parents is that the jab will tempt their daughters to engage in risky sex. "HPV vaccine does not open the door to sex," he said. "It closes the door to cancer."

Questionnaires to parents and doctors as part of a survey of 19,000 girls showed that parents often misunderstand that to be fully effective, the jab is necessary in girls aged only 11 or 12, before they're sexually active.

And doctors are not proactively offering the jab, even though they have opportunities to do so when girls visit for other routine vaccinations.

Despite this, Frieden said the vaccine is already working. In June, the CDC released results of another study showing that rates of infection with the virus had halved from 11 to 5 per cent since introduction of the vaccine.

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Wacky spaces: The odd orbits that boost rocket trips

ON HER second morning in space, Anousheh Ansari was filled with excitement. She slipped out of her sleeping bag and somersaulted effortlessly through the Soyuz spacecraft. Then it all went horribly wrong.

Her head and back throbbed with pain owing to the effects of weightlessness. Even the slightest movement made her feel sick. The joy of watching Earth spin was replaced with a much stronger emotion. The telecoms entrepreneur, who had paid $20 million to become one of the first space tourists, couldn't wait to get off.

Leaving wasn't an option, of course. Ansari had to tough out the rest of the 50-hour journey rolled up in a sleeping bag with her head pushed against cargo destined for the International Space Station (ISS).

That was back in 2006 when a trip to the ISS took two days and involved 34 laps around Earth. Earlier this year, though, ...

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DNA fails to take off

For every dollar invested in the Human Genome Project, $141 was returned to the US economy (Image: Donald E. Hurlbert and James di Loreto/Smithsonian)

Even crucial science doesn't necessarily translate into an exciting exhibition, to judge by Genome: Unlocking life's code, an exhibition in Washington DC

Genome: Unlocking life's code, National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, until 1 September 2014, then across North America

WHITE, filamentous and twisted into a 25-millimetre-long glass test tube, the dehydrated DNA is not much to look at. Yet it unites humans, animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms, making them what they are.

The humble jar sits in a corner of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. It is part of a new exhibition called Genome: Unlocking Life's Code, dedicated to efforts to understand the code in those frail strings.

The timing could hardly be more perfect, according to Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and the scientist behind the exhibition. It is 60 years since James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA's structure, and 10 years since the completion of the US's $3.8-billion Human Genome Project (HGP).

But building an engaging show around something that is crucial and yet fundamentally unexciting to look at is a brave and problematic endeavour. The 7 million people who flock annually to the most visited natural history museum on Earth are savvy folk, expecting surprise and sophistication. Even a mannequin imprinted with glowing As, Cs, Ts and Gs – representing the four nucleic acid bases that make up DNA – pales in comparison to a giant squid on another floor.

That said, the organisers try hard to compensate for the visual shortcomings of their subject, offering lessons in how the human genome relates to our health, medicine and ethics, and how the genomes of humans and other creatures compare.

The taxpayer-funded HGP was controversial from its inception in 1990. Scientists promised that mapping the 3.2 billion base pairs that comprise the human genome would help doctors cure disease. Yet people worried about eugenics and designer babies – or that the project would fail to deliver at all.

It is only now that the HGP's leaders can brag about its successes. At the exhibition's opening last month, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the HGP, said that for every dollar invested in the project, $141 was returned to the US economy. He added that we now know the genetic basis for around 5000 disorders, compared with a handful when the project started.

The public can judge whether it was worth the money by watching a series of videos documenting life-changing improvements. For example, one shows a pair of twins and their parents explaining how the twins seemed to have cerebral palsy, until genetic sequencing revealed they had dopa-responsive dystonia, a rare, treatable condition.

Visitors can also use a touchscreen to explore what might happen if a family with a massively overweight baby opts to have the child's genes sequenced. The test reveals a rare, unnamed genetic condition that can only be treated with a tailored diet. If the parents don't opt for the test, the baby will gain weight even on a drastic, sugar-free diet.

With all this potential, the public may want to understand how the human genome actually works. But here the explanations flounder. The genome is presented as a stack of papers with As, Cs, Ts and Gs printed out across them. Below, a drawing shows that a full printout of all the 3.2 billion letters in the genome would approach the height of the Washington Monument – about 169 metres.

And elsewhere, biodiversity is depicted using pillars of sand, with each grain representing a letter of the genetic code. An amoeba's pillar, for example, reaches close to the ceiling, with 670 billion letters, while a far shorter pillar next to it illustrates humanity's 3.2 billion letters. But with no obvious explanation of why size doesn't correlate with complexity, visitors will probably come away mystified.

Taxpayers have a right to hear about research they fund. But in an age of multiple media, curators and outreach specialists ought to worry more about the fit between subject and format. In the case of the genome, might they have done better to make a film, or use virtual or augmented reality to make their points?

Either way, the exhibition's schedule affords plenty of time for changes.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Why DNA is a tough sell"

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Natural chemical boosts organ regeneration

Your body naturally contains a chemical that can boost organ regeneration and speed up wound healing.

Epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs) help new blood vessels to form, so Dipak Panigrahy at Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues wondered whether they might also accelerate other types of growth. To find out, they injected mice with EETs straight after the surgical removal of a lung or part of their liver.

Four days later, treated mice had 23 per cent more tissue growth in their remaining lung or 46 per cent more liver growth compared with mice that had received a placebo injection. Applying EETs to wounds in mice shortened healing time.

The team also showed that EET concentrations in blood trebled in the week after human liver donors had undergone surgery.

"This looks promising," says Dan Weiss, who studies lung regeneration at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

"EETs have been overlooked in regeneration schemes, so this might provide a window of opportunity."

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1311565110

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Monogamy evolved to keep baby-killers away

Why stick with just one member of the opposite sex when there are so many to choose from?

Love and tax breaks may be the reasons we cite today, but our primate ancestors had other motivations. Preventing a newborn from being killed by an unrelated male was top of the list.

Social monogamy – when a male and female of the species stick together for the long term, although may mate with others – is rare in mammals generally. However, it occurs in over a quarter of primate species, including humans, gibbons and many New World monkeys, such as titis.

To investigate what originally drove us to establish such pair bonds, a team led by Kit Opie of University College London and Susanne Shultz from the University of Manchester, UK, gathered data on the mating behaviour of 230 primate species. They selected behavioural traits associated with several possible evolutionary drivers of monogamy, including the risk of infanticide, the need for paternal care and the potential for guarding female mates.

Using data on the genetic relationships between the species, the team ran millions of computer simulations of the evolution of these traits to work out which came first.

All three were linked to the evolution of monogamy but only behaviours associated with infanticide actually preceded it, suggesting that this was the driver. Suckling infants are most likely to be killed by unrelated males, in order to bring the mother back into ovulation.

With pair-bonding in place, not only would a mother have a male to help protect the infant from marauding males, but there would then be the opportunity for the male to help care for it by providing extra resources. This means the infant can be weaned earlier, again reducing the chance of it being killed.

"Until recently, reconstructing how behaviour evolves has been very tricky as there are few behavioural traces in the fossil record. The statistical approach we have used allows us to bring the fossils to life and to understand the factors that have led to the evolution of monogamy in humans and other primates," says Shultz.

Carel van Schaik, a primatologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland says the results are solid but questions whether they can be extrapolated to humans. He says evidence suggests that humans were never really monogamous and that the monogamy we see today in many cultures is socially imposed.

Shultz counters that there is fossil evidence pointing to monogamy in australopithecines, the hominin genus from which modern humans descended.

"Although we suggest that infanticide may help explain the evolution of monogamy in humans, we do not argue that it is the only factor nor that monogamy is universal," Shultz says. "I would suggest that where infanticide risk is high, as it would be with our ancestors, having a father provide protection and care would facilitate the evolution of the modern human extended childhood."

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1307903110

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Crocodiles may need their fruity five-a-day

Even crocodiles need their five a day, it seems. At least half of all species of alligator and crocodile supplement their meaty diet with the flesh of fruit.

Reports that crocodiles have a taste for fruit go back decades, says Thomas Rainwater at the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Charleston, South Carolina. "But since these animals were long considered carnivores, no one paid much attention."

In a routine analysis of American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) living in the Everglades National Park in Florida, Rainwater and his colleagues found fruit including pond apples in the alligators' stomachs. They then turned up reports that at least 13 of the 23 living crocodilian species are fruit eaters.

Whether or not crocodilians actively go after fruit is debatable – especially as the predators are secretive and tend to do most of their foraging at night. A crocodile might simply eat an animal that has itself recently dined on fruit, for example.

Watermelon lover

But there is some evidence that fruit is consumed deliberately, too. Last year a researcher working in south-east Asia reported seeing a wild Siamese crocodile tucking into a watermelon. Perhaps, like grinding stones in a bird's crop, the heavy seeds of some fruits may help the animals digest their meatier meals.

Crocodilians roam and swim over large areas, so could they be important seed dispersal agents? "As far as we can tell, there are no plants that rely exclusively on crocodilians as dispersal agents," says Rainwater. Indeed, saurochory – the act of seed dispersal by reptiles – has largely been ignored by researchers, he says. "But given the number of seeds we have found in some stomachs, we suspect they may be important for some wetland species."

Carlos Herrera at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, who has studied fruit-eating in carnivorous mammals, says the results make sense. "Whenever sufficient attention is paid, nearly all vertebrates are found to ingest seeds of fleshy-fruited plants at one time or another, either deliberately or accidentally," he says.

Journal reference: Journal of Zoology, doi.org/m9x

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Shiny new teeth concocted from mice and human urine

Is a missing tooth ruining your smile? Here's an unlikely recipe for cooking up a replacement – with the help of a mouse and some of your own urine.

Duanqing Pei from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou and colleagues took stem cells from human urine and used them to grow teeth inside mouse kidneys. The stem cells, implanted under the outer layer of the mouse's kidney, transformed into dental epithelial tissue, which develops into the enamel, while the rest of each tooth was formed from mouse cells.

Pei claims that a method for using mice to grow teeth containing only human cells "could be easily designed".

The work is promising but figuring out what governs the size and shape of different teeth is going to be a big problem in making it useful, says Mark Bartold from the University of Adelaide in Australia, who works on regenerative dental medicine. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out there's a big difference between an incisor and a molar tooth," he says. "That's going to be very tricky, because we don't really fully understand what's involved in that development."

Pei agrees, but says having natural replacement teeth available to fit into the right slots in the mouth may be of benefit. He also notes that the teeth his team grew were a bit softer than real teeth, which might be because they were not being used as they grew. "We do not have the physical stimulations found in the mouth," he says.

Bartold says there are already very good titanium dental implants available today, but the work is still useful as it could help us understand the development of teeth, which could in turn boost other areas of regenerative medicine. "The tooth, believe it or not, for decades has been used as a wonderful tool for understanding development biology," he says.

Pei and colleagues agree, writing that the tooth represents "one of the best models in organogensis".

But why did they grow the teeth from cells in urine? "This is the most convenient source," says Pei.

Journal reference: Cell Regeneration, in press

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