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10.49

Extreme weather could become norm around Indian Ocean

Climate models predict that the torrential rain and severe droughts created by El Niño's sibling will be typical by 2050 if nothing is done to stem warming

The night: Your nocturnal transformation revealed

Darkness triggers a cascade of changes that transforms you into an alien creature. While you're lost in dreams, your nocturnal nature is getting busy

Copycat Russian android prepares to do the spacewalk

Cosmobot SAR-1 will join a growing zoo of robots in space – and will be the first android designed to leave the space station, taking the pressure off humans

Crazy comet ISON returns bearing solar system secrets

Despite being pronounced dead, Schrödinger's comet is back – and should reveal a treasure trove of data about the solar system's distant past

The benefits of realising you're just a brain

It can be hard to accept that our hopes and dreams are just functions of our brains, says neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland, but it shouldn't scare us

The night: What happens at night, stays at night

Night is more than a separate time, it's a separate place altogether, freed from the constraints of our daytime lives. Step with us into darkness

Feedback: Light of whose life?

The solar light of whose life, a further parcel of puzzles, a holiday in the past, sculpture is not for everyone and more

The night: A surprisingly strange place to visit

Not all mysterious, little-known locations are physically remote. You can just wait for the sun to go down

Synthetic primordial cell copies RNA for the first time

Genetic information inside simple cells designed to mimic primordial life has been copied, with the help of a chemical made from citric acid

Beer brewing could help make better bricks

Adding a by-product of the brewing process – spent grain – to bricks can boost their strength and insulation

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Extreme weather could become norm around Indian Ocean

10.35

What do the torrential rains that swept across a swathe of East Africa in 1997 have in common with the record-breaking drought that Australia has just emerged from? Both can be blamed on El Niño's Indian Ocean sibling.

A study looking at how climate change will affect this ocean oscillation pattern has predicted that if the world is allowed to warm uncontrollably, these kinds of extreme events will become the norm by 2050.

The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is an oscillation of warm water across the equator. In the oscillation's positive phase, sea surface temperatures in the Arabian Sea rise whereas temperatures around Sumatra, Indonesia, fall. In the negative phase, it's the other way around.

As well as being blamed for Australia's recent dry spell and the 1997 East African storms, the IOD's positive phase has been linked to droughts in Australia and dry weather in Indonesia over the last 6500 years, according to a 2007 study of fossilised coral. The study also concluded that positive events are becoming more frequent, with an unprecedented 11 occurrences over the past 30 years.

Modelling the past

Now Wenju Cai from the Australian research agency CSIRO in Melbourne and colleagues have used the latest climate models – employed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – to replicate those events. They improved the models' handling of the relevant processes, such as cloud formation in response to sea surface temperatures, and let them run.

The researchers were able to see just how the IOD generated those weather events and how it interacted with other systems such as El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. Importantly, this also enabled them to forecast what might happen to the IOD.

"We are able to show that these linkages [the rainstorms and droughts] are produced by all climate models," says Cai.

Broadly speaking, the rain follows the warm water, he says, so when the warm water moves away from Indonesia during a positive phase, it takes the rain with it.

By looking at climate models, Cai found that most of the time, this oscillation is dampened by the wind flowing in the opposite direction. The wind keeps a layer of warm water near the surface in Indonesia, reducing the temperature difference across the Indian Ocean and so minimising the strength of positive IOD events.

Stuck in the positive

But all 54 climate models the team examined predict that this wind will weaken as the world warms. This means that rather than oscillating between positive and negatives events, the dipole will get increasingly stuck in the positive direction, oscillating between less positive phases and more positive phases. This will bring rain of varying intensity to Africa that once would have fallen on Australia and Indonesia.

The models suggest that the temperature difference between the two Indian Ocean regions involved in the dipole will increase. If the world keeps burning fossil fuels and does little else to prevent climate change – the trajectory we are on – weather events now considered extreme, like the one in 1997 which led to floods so severe that hundreds of thousands of people in Africa were displaced, and the one in 2009 that led to the worst droughts and bushfires in Australia's history, will become average by 2050. By 2100, these events will be at the mild end of the spectrum. If we do manage to start reducing planet-warming emissions soon, similar trends will be seen but they will be less pronounced.

"The mean condition will resemble what is now the positive state," says Cai. "We will need to change our definitions to refer to the new normal conditions."

Nerilie Abram from the Australian National University in Canberra, who led the 2007 work that used fossilised corals, says the projections in the new study are important, underlining the importance of the IOD, a phenomenon only properly recognised in 1999. "Studies have looked at the historical era where we have instrumental records but projecting out over the coming century, and doing it so comprehensively – that's impressive," she says.

Abrams says the finding that the Indian Ocean temperature gradient will get steeper – with the Arabian side warming faster – is a surprise. It had seemed possible that in a warmer world, the oscillations would become more extreme without the average point moving, she says.

Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO2009

The night: Your nocturnal transformation revealed

09.49

Night turns us into alien creatures (Image: Kiril Standev/Gallery Stock)

THE transformation starts while you are still awake. Just before bedtime, body temperature plummets almost half a degree from its mid-evening peak. Melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone, surges in response. Suddenly, the pressure to sleep that has built throughout the day no longer encounters the resistance of a high body temperature, and waves of fatigue assail you.

This isn't just your body priming you for a good night's rest. In some ways, it is preparing you to become a whole different creature, because the night-time body has functions and a character all its own. If night never ended, we would hardly recognise what we become.

The moment you succumb to sleep's inexorable pull, your body temperature drops. The lower body heat slows chemical reactions, setting the ...

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Copycat Russian android prepares to do the spacewalk

09.49

(Image: Mikhail Pochuyev/Photas/Tass/PA)

This robot is looking pretty pleased with itself – and wouldn't you be, if you were off to the International Space Station? Prototype cosmobot SAR-401, with its human-like torso, is designed to service the outside of the ISS by mimicking the arm and finger movements of a human puppet-master indoors.

In this picture, that's the super-focussed guy in the background but in space it would be a cosmonaut operating from the relative safety of the station's interior and so avoiding a risky spacewalk. You can watch the Russian android mirroring a human here.

SAR-1 joins a growing zoo of robots in space. NASA already has its own Robonaut on board the ISS to carry out routine maintenance tasks. It was recently joined by a small, cute Japanese robot, Kirobo, but neither of the station's droids are designed for outside use.

Until SAR-401 launches, the station's external Dextre and Canadarm2 rule the orbital roost. They were commemorated on Canadian banknotes this year – and they don't even have faces.

Crazy comet ISON returns bearing solar system secrets

09.34

You can't keep a good comet down. After a nail-biting night in which comet ISON disappeared into the sun and then initially failed to re-emerge – prompting premature declarations of its demise – the most famous comet of recent times is now back.

What remains of the teasing, icy fuzzball is unlikely to provide us with the spectacular lightshow that once looked possible. But ISON looks set to remain a source of bafflement and scientific data – not to mention entertainment– for the days and weeks to come.

"This ridiculous, crazy, dynamic and unpredictable object continues to amaze, astound and confuse us to no end," writes Karl Battams of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, on the Comet ISON Observing Campaign blog.

He even dubbed it "Schrödinger's comet" because of its apparent ability to be both dead and alive like the hypothetical quantum cat .

Dirty snowball

A host of solar observatories watched the sun-dive last night and initial images looked like bad news as the comet seemed to have been obliterated. The European Space Agency pronounced ISON dead in a tweet at around 9.30 pm UK time: "Comet #IISON is gone, thanks for sharing this comet-watching night with us." New Scientist followed suit.

But the latest pictures tell a different story. A bright object has remerged along ISON's predicted trajectory, suggesting at least some of it survived. "Over night it looks like quite a significant proportion of the large particles that were in the comet before it reached the sun have made it through," says Geraint Jones of University College London.

The "dirty snowball" of ice and dust that makes up ISON will have shrunk significantly from its original 2-kilometre size. "If it has survived, it's a much smaller nucleus than what existed just a few days ago," says Jones.

ISON's strange re-brightening has left astronomers baffled. One explanation is that ISON had the life squeezed out of it by the sun's immense gravity and is now gasping for breath. "What might have happened is the nucleus had already fragmented a couple of days ago, but it still looked like one nucleus going in," says Jones.

These fragments would have individually sped up and spread out as they whipped around the sun, which would have reduced their collective brightness. "Then after going past the sun they're starting to bunch up again, so it's looking brighter."

Massive opportunity

Unfortunately, if this theory is correct, it means you probably won't be able to spot ISON in the dawn sky over the next few weeks as had originally been hoped – at the very least you'll need a pair of binoculars. "The chances of it being an impressive comet viewed from the ground are looking dim now, but I'd love to be proven wrong," says Jones.

Astronomers still have a busy period of observations ahead of them, however, as ISON's ordeal is a massive scientific opportunity. "We were hoping to get more out of it if it had survived, but the fact that it has broken up now is telling us answers to different questions," says Jones.

ISON has travelled for more than a million years from the Oort cloud, a collection of distant objects containing material frozen as the solar system was formed. The comet has now released this material, giving researchers a glimpse into the distant past. "We've got a bonanza of data and we're looking forward to analysing it," says Jones.

The benefits of realising you're just a brain

08.05

Our hopes, loves and very existence are just elaborate functions of a complicated mass of grey tissue. Accepting that can be hard, but neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland tells Graham Lawton that what we know should inspire us, not scare us

You compare revelations in neuroscience with the discoveries that the Earth goes around the sun and that the heart is a pump. What do you think these ideas have in common?

They challenge a whole framework of assumptions about the way things are. For Christians, it was very important that the Earth was at the centre of the universe. Similarly, many people believed that the heart was somehow what made us human. And it turned out it was just a pump made of meat.

I think the same is true about realising that when we're conscious, when we make decisions, when we go to sleep, when we get angry, when we're fearful, ...

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The night: What happens at night, stays at night

07.35

Worshipping the night light (Image: Steven Schofield/Corbis)

WHAT is "night"? A mundane answer is that it is the result of a planet rotating under a shining star. But for humans it has always meant much more than that. Night is a strange and special time, not only different from the day but also a place of unorthodox beliefs and behaviours.

If we look at how various cultures imagine the time before the world came into being, it is often conceptualised as a kind of night. Judeo-Christian cultures, for instance, conceive of a world that emerged out of darkness. Many cultures view darkness in negative terms, a time distinguished not only by the absence of light and often warmth, but also by chaos and fear.

But there is another side to the human relationship with the night. ...

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Feedback: Light of whose life?

04.20

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

POWER your home "24 hrs a day with green energy generated by your solar system," says the website aweenergy.com, plugging the "revolutionary product" Midnight Sun. It goes on to say that users can still benefit from the "Feed in Tariff". That's what the UK government calls the "guaranteed" price at which people with solar panels can sell their excess electricity to the National Grid.

Reader Simon Mallett dug around and found reports that the system costs £5500 plus tax, and its rated storage capacity is 9 kilowatt-hours of energy.

Simon wants to know how long it would take to recoup your investment. A friend of Feedback contacted Awe Energy for details, but received no response. As far as we can tell, the device stores electricity generated when it is sunny, leaving ...

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The night: A surprisingly strange place to visit

01.05

"FEWER people have been there than have walked on the moon."

The places that can make that claim – the ocean deeps, the bowels of huge caves – tend to be few and far between.

But not all mysterious places are physically remote. Every human on the planet visits one of the most peculiar every single day – or rather, night. Think of night as a place, rather than a time, and its oddity becomes apparent (see "The night: The nocturnal journey of body and mind"). It has its own wildlife and its own climate, which is changing in its own way.

Nor are the night's human residents quite like those of the day. Our bodies change radically while we sleep, as do our minds. And those of us who regularly stay up past bedtime may be putting our health on the line. So the night still holds its terrors. A nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

This article appeared in print under the headline "The strange place we go to at night"

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Synthetic primordial cell copies RNA for the first time

17.04

We are a step closer to understanding how life began, and we can thank the humble lemon.

For the first time, genetic information has been copied inside a simple cell designed to mimic primordial life. Until now, such copying had the unfortunate side effect of destroying the cell, but researchers have found that the cell can be stabilised by adding a dash of citrate. The substance is synthesised from citric acid, a chemical found in lemons and oranges.

"We've found a solution to a long-standing problem in the origin of cellular life," says Jack Szostak of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

The work is part of an ongoing project that aims to figure out how the first life on Earth formed from a collection of lifeless molecules. To reconstruct what happened, Szostak and his team have been experimenting with simple "protocells", essentially bubbles of fatty acids. These protocells are crude versions of the cells that make up all modern organisms. Despite lacking any of the complex cellular machinery, they can reproduce by dividing to form daughter protocells. "What's missing is a replicating genetic material," Szostak says.

The first life on Earth probably used RNA instead of DNA to carry its genes. It is a simpler molecule and can perform a host of other functions that would have been helpful to the first organisms. Szostak has already persuaded his protocells to carry a cargo of RNA. The next step is to get that RNA to copy itself. That way, when the protocell divides, each daughter cell can be endowed with copies of all the genetic material.

Stop the destruction

RNA molecules make copies of themselves from a mix of smaller molecules called nucleotides, each of which is a "letter" in the genetic code. The nucleotides must come together on the existing RNA, and hook up.

In the lab, the assembly needs a helping hand from magnesium ions, or similar charged particles. But by itself that won't work in Szostak's protocells, because the magnesium ions react with the fatty acids, tearing the cell to pieces and dumping the newly minted RNA into the surrounding water where it would rapidly disperse.

With Katarzyna Adamala, Szostak has now found a way out. They tried adding lots of different chemicals to the magnesium and protocell cocktail, and eventually found one that stabilised the cells while still allowing the RNA to copy itself.

The wonder chemical is called citrate, and is easily produced from citric acid. In the protocells, each citrate molecule clamps on to a magnesium ion like a hand around a ball, preventing it from reacting with a fatty acid but still allowing it to interact with the RNA.

"It's a very remarkable observation," says Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. "This citrate is able to stabilise RNA against degradation, and also stabilise the protocells against leakage."

If citrate was an essential ingredient for the formation of the first life then it must have been abundant on Earth 4 billion years ago. Citrate is found in many modern organisms but it is unclear whether it could have existed that long ago. However, Krishnamurthy says that similar molecules certainly did form, and might work just as well. Szostak is also examining whether small peptides, which are known to bind magnesium ions, might do the trick. "We haven't found a simple peptide that is as good as citrate yet, but we are looking," he says.

Primordial Xerox

Szostak's method is crude, and does not use any enzymes to help the copying along.

He says there is still some way to go before the system works well enough to sustain living organisms. For example, Szostak wants the copying to be faster and more accurate.

There is an alternative approach, promoted by Philipp Holliger of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. RNA can act as an enzyme, so Holliger is trying to create an RNA enzyme that can self-replicate, by accelerating its own natural copying process. He recently built one that could copy strands of RNA longer than itself, a major step towards a self-copying enzyme.

However, Krishnamurthy says that such complex enzymes probably evolved at a later stage, once RNA-based life was established. "In the absence of the sophisticated enzymes, citrate could have played that role," he says.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1241888

Genetic info copied in artificial cell for first time

11.34

We are a step closer to understanding how life began, and we can thank the humble lemon.

"We've found a solution to a long-standing problem in the origin of cellular life," says Jack Szostak of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Stop the destruction

Primordial Xerox

Szostak's method is crude, and does not use any enzymes to help the copying along.

He says there is still some way to go before the system works well enough to sustain living organisms. For example, Szostak wants the copying to be faster and more accurate.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1241888

Beer brewing could help make better bricks

10.50

THERE'S more to brewing than beer. A by-product of the process could be about to give an upgrade to a workhorse building material – red clay bricks. By blending in the grains left over from making beer, the bricks can be more environmentally friendly and better insulators.

Bricks are often impregnated with polystyrene as a way to enhance their heat-trapping abilities. This is appealing, because the bricks remain strong, and they can be built into energy-efficient buildings, says Eduardo Ferraz of the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar in Portugal. However, EU restrictions on carbon emissions have made it expensive to incorporate polystyrene and other synthetic materials into bricks.

Ferraz and his colleagues have now shown that brewery grains can be mixed into clay bricks to enhance their ability to trap heat, without compromising strength.

Spent grain for the process should be easily available, because commercial breweries produce huge quantities of it as a pulpy mixture that is usually used in animal feed or ends up in landfill.

With a clay paste containing 5 per cent spent grains, the team was able to create bricks just as strong as the conventional type, while reducing the amount of heat they lost by 28 per cent (Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering, doi.org/p6k). The reason for this, the team says, is that the grains make the bricks more porous, and so they trap more air, which increases heat retention.

One thing could stand in the way of using this process, though: the smell. Bill Daidone of the Acme Brick Company, one of the largest brick manufacturers in the US, says his lab abandoned experiments because the stench of the moist grains was overpowering. "We opened up the bucket and it was terrible," he says. This problem vanishes once the bricks are fired, though, says Ferraz.

Bricks that provide insulation without sacrificing strength could be a big boost to the brick industry, says John Sanders, a researcher at the National Brick Research Center at Clemson University in South Carolina.

"With the current concern for energy codes, I think the industry is open to change," Sanders says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Brewing benefits? Alcohol, hangovers and better bricks"

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Today on New Scientist

10.50

Mathematical crime-fighter helps hunt for alien worlds

A statistical tool called Benford's law has been shown to fit existing exoplanet data, supporting the notion that the galaxy is brimming with alien worlds

'Soft' biometrics is the new way to monitor people

The US government is challenging researchers to use cameras to ID people by unique features like their gait or the shape of their ears

The night: The nocturnal journey of body and mind

Explore the still-unfamiliar world of the night: the eerie ways it can transform us, the creatures that thrive in it, and our efforts to banish it

Crunch time as comet ISON hurtles towards the sun

It is make or break time for comet ISON as it nears its closest approach to the sun, set to occur just a few hours from now

Smart software uses drones to plot disaster relief

A coordinated army of smart software and pilotless aircraft could help emergency workers save lives and mitigate damage after disaster strikes

Quantum lab is dazzling vision of computer chip future

Dizzying light, a pervasive stillness and a longing to play video games are all part of Jacob Aron's visit to the lab that's shrinking down quantum computers

Inbreeding shaped the course of human evolution

Many early humans were highly inbred, according to a new genetic analysis. Their isolation may explain why modern behaviour took so long to arise

If diabetes causes Alzheimer's, we can beat it

Evidence is growing that Alzheimer's could actually be a late stage of type 2 diabetes – if it is, we all have another big reason to live healthier lives

Cleaned-up Bitcoins could change commerce forever

Bitcoin may be notorious as the currency of black marketeers, but the technology behind it may power the next online revolution

Oxygen drop makes people with spine injury more mobile

Brief exposure to low oxygen levels, similar to those found on top of mountains, improves walking speed and endurance for people with spinal injuries

Piercing steers wheelchairs with a flick of the tongue

A magnetic barbell-shaped tongue piercing gives paralysed people the fastest way yet of controlling their electric wheelchair

Whirling dervish skirts are ruled by hurricane physics

The mesmerising patterns created by the flowing skirt of a whirling dervish dancer are governed by the same Coriolis force responsible for hurricanes

Are Alzheimer's and diabetes the same disease?

People with type 2 diabetes often have memory problems. That may be a result of Alzheimer's-like brain changes – changes which can be reversed in rats

Mathematical crime-fighter helps hunt for alien worlds

10.20

A curious mathematical crime-fighter has just boosted our confidence that the galaxy is brimming with alien worlds.

The statistical phenomenon, called Benford's law, has been shown to fit existing data on both confirmed and candidate exoplanets. The results suggest that of the thousands of planetary candidates, the majority will turn out to be real worlds and not errors in the data.

Initially a mere mathematical oddity, Benford's law states that the first digits of the numbers in certain sets follow a pattern of probability. For the numbers in a variety of data sets, 1 is the leading digit about 30 per cent of the time. Higher digits are less frequent: on average, just 4.6 per cent of numbers in such sets begin with 9.

Fraud alert

It turns out that this numerical quirk is rife in nature with phenomena from the lengths of rivers to the depth of earthquakes all following the law. It also works on various forms of financial data and has been used to detect fraudulent attempts to cook the books with fake transactions, which usually fail to fit the pattern. The law works whether you measure the same rivers in feet or kilometres, or the same monetary transactions in pounds or dollars.

Thomas Hair at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers wondered if Benford's law would hold true even beyond the solar system. "I became intrigued with the idea that exoplanet mass might fit," he says.

Hair examined data from the online catalogue exoplanets.org, which lists 755 confirmed exoplanets and nearly 3500 planet candidates, many of them found only in the past few years by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Masses are given in multiples of Earth's or Jupiter's mass. He found that the figures closely fit Benford's law for both units.

Beliefs confirmed

Previous efforts at matching exoplanets to Benford's law showed a discrepancy, but that was with a sample of just 400 planets, and the larger data set we have now is more statistically valid, he says. The latest results show our cosmic accounting is sound, Hair says. Other work has suggested that 90 per cent of the known candidates will turn out to be planets, and that billions of habitable worlds are strewn across the Milky Way.

"The close fit with Benford's law gives a confirmation to experts' belief that most of the candidates are valid," says Hair, who will present the work in January at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.

This mathematical tool probably won't help astronomers find more planets, cautions Christoph Mordasini of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. Benford's law is not a law in the physical sense, like Newton's laws, but a consequence of how we represent numbers, he says. "However, it could help us to understand if the search for exoplanets leads to sound results."

'Soft' biometrics is the new way to monitor people

09.35

The US government is challenging researchers to use cameras to ID people by unique features like their gait or the shape of their ears

CAMERAS are strewn around our environment, catching glimpses of our faces everywhere we go, yet even the best facial recognition technology still has a hard time picking us out of the crowd.

So the US government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has called for a new approach. The agency announced a contest on 8 November, challenging teams of the country's top researchers to revolutionise how machines recognise people. Those entering the competition already know that conventional facial recognition won't cut it.

The usual approach to identifying people is to sift through camera footage frame by frame, find a few that offer the best chance of an ID, and then attempt to match them to a database of known images. Ideally, this will mean the subject is facing the camera, with a neutral expression, and without any shadows on their face. All other frames are discarded, and only then do the facial recognition algorithms get to work.

"One of the goals of the IARPA challenge is to see what you can do with the discarded data," says Mary Ann Harrison of the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation in Fairmont.

That data contains "soft" biometrics, information which does not explicitly identify a person, but narrows the range of possibilities. This could be height, size, gait or other features.

"Our main focus has been ear recognition," says Harrison. "The evidence is that the structure is unique to each person. There is a whole science of the structure of ears." People can be categorised according to details such as whether the ears have lobes, or ear size in comparison to the head.

Bir Bhanu at the University of California, Riverside, who leads another team, says this type of work will result in faster, more flexible tracking that will help law enforcement after events like the bombing of the Boston Marathon in April. Partial shots of the suspects' faces, as well as their gait would have been abundant from CCTV cameras, but it took an army of trained professionals several days of poring over footage to unearth their images.

There are other applications too. Airport security could be streamlined to allow passengers to walk freely from check-in to the gate, their movements monitored and identities verified automatically by cameras.

"Ultimately the goal is to be able to recognise a person in natural motion through any scene," says Jack Ives of machine vision company, CyberExtruder in Newark, New Jersey, who stresses that the benefits are not only for the military and government.

"A department store or bank could have a system which is able to recognise each person as they approach the counter," he says. "Wouldn't it be nice to walk in and get the service you want without having to say a word."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Soft surveillance"

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The night: The nocturnal journey of body and mind

08.50

(Image: Tim McDonagh)

For most of human history, dusk augured a night full of mortal terrors. We may have tamed the dark, but our ancient fear of it has left an indelible mark on us.

In these articles, we explore this still-unfamiliar world: the eerie ways it can transform our bodies and minds, the unseen creatures that thrive in it, and our increasingly successful efforts to banish it

Crunch time as comet ISON hurtles towards the sun

07.20

(Image: Emily Lakdawalla/ESA/SOHO/NASA)

It is make or break time for Comet ISON as it nears its closest approach to the sun, set to occur just a few hours from now.

The won't outshine the moon as previously thought, but astronomers suspect it could match the brightness of Venus – if it survives its solar encounter.

This animation from NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which orbits the sun, gives a taste of what ISON has in store. The images run from late Tuesday evening to earlier this morning and show ISON coming in as the sun (upper left) releases a coronal mass ejection, a burst of charged particles.

The comet, which is mostly made from ice and rock, will be heated to 2700°C and buffeted by the sun's immense gravity as it passes by, potentially fracturing its nucleus. If that happens, ISON is unlikely to give astronomers the light show they crave.

But if its nucleus survives, ISON will be brighter than ever. All eyes will be on the comet as it emerges from behind the sun over the rest of the week, when it will be best viewed around dawn.

If you are planning to look yourself, be extremely careful and do not look directly at the sun.

Smart software uses drones to plot disaster relief

06.49

Video: An army of drones to the rescue

A coordinated army of smart software and pilotless aircraft could help emergency workers save lives and mitigate damage after disaster strikes

IN THE aftermath of a disaster like the massive typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines on 8 November, confusion often reigns and sketchy information abounds. This can leave responders unsure if their efforts are being put to the best effect.

A coordinated army of smart software and aerial drones could change that. By gathering information from across an affected area, software agents – algorithms that can work with a degree of autonomy – will build a picture of the situation and give recommendations for how people should direct their resources to mitigate damage and save lives.

The system, called Orchid, is being developed as part of a £10 million project of the same name funded by the UK government. Initial testing has shown promising results, and Rescue Global, a London-based disaster responder, is planning a field trial next year (see "Getting Orchid on the ground").

Orchid's software agents come in several flavours: they inhabit flying drones with on-board cameras, and servers that sift data coming in from the disaster area, like pictures, tweets or even sensor readings.

Each is programmed to watch for rapid changes to a situation. For example, if air quality sensors suggested that a chemical plant was leaking toxic gas, the sensors could send a signal to drones on a mapping project that could then fly to the scene, take further readings and shoot video from several different camera angles.

The information is then communicated wirelessly to an agent called a planner that assesses it and makes a suggestion to the person coordinating the aid effort on how to proceed.

"We are trying to fix the inefficiencies in deploying emergency responders that prevent proper prioritisation and scheduling of rescue tasks," says Sarvapali Ramchurn, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton in the UK, which leads a consortium of universities and companies working on the Orchid project.

In the wake of the magnitude 7 quake that devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in January 2010, such a system could have been a huge help, says Ramchurn. "Roads were completely blocked and buildings were down so they had to remap the city to find the accessible zones for relief operations," he says. That was performed via crowdsourced reports to the Ushahidi website and use of Open Street Map – but it took 48 hours to complete. The Orchid team say software agents in charge of swarms of airborne drones could do that far quicker.

The agents are also designed to address a common problem in disasters: unreliable data. Distressed people in traumatic circumstances can supply inaccurate information. For instance, following the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan, people bought or built their own Geiger counters to track the spread of radiation. But many of the reported readings were implausibly high.

Orchid's information-gathering agents weed out reports that appear erroneous, quashing outlying high or low numbers in a dataset. In simulations of radioactive plumes that the team has run, this has worked well.

If it works in the field, Orchid could fill an important role in disaster situations, says Paul Donohue of International Rescue Committee UK in London. "It's core to where we are going," he says. "We are always looking to use more technology to try and ensure that we have all the information necessary after a disaster."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Drones could aid relief"

Getting Orchid on the ground

Orchid's swarm of software agents (see main story) will get its first real-world test next year when David Jones, head of disaster response group Rescue Global, fields them in the flood-prone Bay of Bengal.

"We're hoping Orchid will make sense of the deluge of intelligence data we get, using human-agent collectives to get a better picture of ground truth," he told New Scientist from the Philippines, where his team is working in the wake of typhoon Haiyan. "We hope Orchid will widen our ability to maintain multiple lines of control, letting us use quality information on a multitude of tasks at the same time. It's vital incident commanders know what data they can have belief and faith in."

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Quantum lab is dazzling vision of computer chip future

05.35

THE record-smashing quantum computer reminds me of Prince of Persia . A dizzying array of lenses and prisms that stretch across the room, it looks rather like the light-directing puzzles common in such video games. I long to twist the lenses and shoot laser beams everywhere.

That wouldn't make me popular here. A quiet stillness pervades the Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information, part of the University of Bristol. Because quantum states are fragile, the building's design dampens vibrations and even filters the power supply to remove electrical noise. Each part of the machine spread before me is carefully aligned so that mixing a pair of light beams carries out a specific calculation. Now, it's set to turn 21 into 3 and 7, the two prime numbers that it is divisible by. It is the biggest number a quantum computer has ever broken into primes using the famous quantum protocol, Shor's algorithm. Still, I can do the same thing in my head – so what's the big deal?

The answer is clearer at my next stop, where I see a wafer of 20 or so chips, each a few centimetres long and made of silicon dioxide. Although not yet as capable as the behemoth I first encountered, these chips are the next stage in the lab's attempt to build quantum computers that outperform even the best non-quantum machines.

Information on an ordinary computer is stored as bits, which can be either a 1 or a 0. Quantum bits, or qubits, are both at once, so a large array could process a great deal more information. But assembling even a handful of qubits is tough because of their fragility, so the best way to scale up is to scale down. "You could potentially start doing bigger and more complicated experiments," says my guide, physicist Graham Marshall. "But can you make it so that it doesn't feel the presence of the moon, or the movement of tectonic plates? There is a limit to how well you can stabilise something on that scale."

That's where the chips come in. Instead of using glass prisms to mix photons, channels filled with silicon nitride are etched into the chips' surface in patterns that I can just make out. The channels confine and steer photons, guiding them so that they become "entangled" – a quantum property needed for computation. This should lead to computers that are easier to stabilise and so can scale up.

A similar chip (see image) is already hooked up to the internet, making history as the first quantum processor available to the public. Still, the device doesn't incorporate a photon source or detector – these components spill out across another bench.

My third and final stop represents the lab's most recent efforts. Made from pure silicon, as in ordinary computers, this chip is capable of bending light around sharp turns, so it can be much smaller – it is half the size of my thumbnail. The channels are too small to see but green and purple shades dance across its bright surface.

Crucially, this chip can generate its own photons as well as entangle them. Detection still takes place in a small chamber at the other end of the lab, which must be cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero (arxiv.org/abs/1304.1490) but Marshall says they are working on less chilly detectors that could be added to the chip.

"One vision I like is you buy a laptop or a desktop and it has 'quantum inside'," he says. It's not clear whether these quantum guts would find uses in video games: quantum processors won't make all calculations faster, but they should speed up database searches and simulations of molecules. At least I would be able to command my own quantum light beams.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Honey, I shrunk the quantum computer"

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Inbreeding shaped the course of human evolution

04.34

TALK about an inauspicious beginning. For thousands of years our ancestors lived in small, isolated populations, leaving them severely inbred, according to a new genetic analysis. The inbreeding may have caused a host of health problems, and it is likely that small populations were a barrier to the development of complex technologies.

In recent years, geneticists have read the genomes of long-dead humans and extinct relatives like Neanderthals. David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston has now sequenced the Neanderthal genome and that of another extinct human, the Denisovan, to an unprecedented degree of accuracy. He presented his findings at a Royal Society meeting on ancient DNA in London on 18 November.

Describing the genomes as "nearly error-free", Reich says both species were severely inbred due to small populations. "Archaic populations had low genetic diversity, really extraordinarily low," he said. "It's among the lowest diversity of any organism in the animal kingdom."

One Neanderthal, whose DNA Reich obtained from a toe bone, had almost no diversity in about one-eighth of the genome: both copies of each gene were identical. That suggests the individual's parents were half-siblings.

That's in line with previous evidence of small populations, says Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. "In the distant past, human populations were probably only in the thousands or at best tens of thousands, and lived locally, exchanging mates only with their nearest neighbours."

Our genomes still carry traces of these small populations. A 2010 study concluded that our ancestors 1.2 million years ago had a population of just 18,500 individuals, spread over a vast area (PNAS, doi.org/dv75x8).

Fossils suggest the inbreeding took its toll, says Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Those he has studied have a range of deformities, many of which are rare in modern humans. He thinks such deformities were once much more common (PLoS ONE, doi.org/p6r).

Despite the impact on health, it is unclear whether inbreeding could have killed off the Neanderthals and Denisovans. More likely is the effect of small populations on culture and technology, says Mark Thomas of University College London. Larger populations retain more knowledge and find ways to improve technologies. This "cumulative culture" is unique to humans, but it could only emerge in reasonably large populations. In small populations, knowledge is easily lost, which explains why skills like bone-working show up and then vanish, says Trinkaus.

Tiny populations may have prevented Neanderthals and Denisovans from developing cumulative culture. "It would place some limits on their cultural complexity," says Thomas. The same thing held our species back, until the population reached a critical density, unleashing the power of culture – at which point there was no stopping us.

The genomes also show that early human species interbred with other hominins (see "We're all Homo, aren't we?"). Many of us carry genes from Neanderthals, or from the mysterious Denisovans, who are known only from a single cave in Siberia.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Inbreeding shaped human evolution"

We're all Homo, aren't we?

Early hominins weren't picky about their sexual partners. We already knew that our species, Homo sapiens, interbred with two other hominin species, the Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Now it looks like the Denisovans did some interbreeding of their own. Some stretches of the Denisovan genome look much older than the rest, says David Reich of Harvard Medical School. The most likely explanation, he says, is that the Denisovans interbred with an unidentified species and picked up some of their DNA. The question is, who?

It could be evidence of a new species of hominin, as yet unknown to science. Alternatively, it could be the first genetic record of one of the many known species. Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany suspects it was the latter, since many hominin species identified from their fossils have never been genetically analysed.

The most likely candidate is Homo heidelbergensis, says Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum. This species lived between 600,000 and 250,000 years ago, and spread from Africa into Europe and western Asia. That means Denisovans, whose ancestors followed a similar path, could well have met them.

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If diabetes causes Alzheimer's, we can beat it

00.35

Evidence is growing that Alzheimer's could actually be a late stage of type 2 diabetes – if it is, we all have another big reason to live healthier lives

JUST over 100 years ago, German pathologist Alois Alzheimer dissected the brain of a 57-year-old woman who had died, demented, in a hospital in Kassel. He found tangles of strange fibrous deposits that seemed to have destroyed her brain from within.

Today, the disease that bears his name is a bogeyman stalking our ageing societies. About 35 million people have Alzheimer's; most of them require expensive, exhausting care. By 2050 that number is expected to triple. We still don't really know what causes the disease or how it destroys the brain. There is no way to prevent it and no cure. Dealing with the epidemic will cost trillions.

All it not lost, however. We could be in the midst of a rethink that promises to banish the bogeyman. There is growing evidence that Alzheimer's is actually a late stage of another disease, type 2 diabetes. The link between the two has been noted for a few years and though it remains a hypothesis, the evidence is growing (see "Are Alzheimer's and diabetes the same disease?").

At first glance that sounds like bad news. If the Alzheimer's epidemic is scary, the type 2 diabetes one is truly terrifying. About 270 million people have type 2 diabetes already and their ranks are swelling rapidly – among them adolescents and young adults. If they are destined to progress to Alzheimer's disease, the future looks bleak.

Or perhaps not. Type 2 diabetes is largely a lifestyle disease, caused by obesity, poor diet and lack of exercise. It can be prevented, alleviated and even cured by lifestyle changes, which holds out the hope that we could start to deal with Alzheimer's in a similar way.

Experience tells us, of course, that exhorting people to eat better and exercise more often falls on deaf ears. But with obesity rates levelling off in some parts of the world and falling slightly in others, there is some evidence that the message is getting through.

If the link between diabetes and Alzheimer's is firmed up, there will be even more reason to take heed – and even more reason to keep banging the public health drum. Good news comes in many guises. The possibility that Alzheimer's is "just" diabetes is one of them.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Banish the bogeyman"

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