Wired Wild West: Cowpokes chatted on fence-wire phones

Before phone lines gave barbed wire the boot (Image: Kevin Taylor/Alamy)

Personalised ringtones, chat rooms and online music – 19th-century ranchers pioneered social networking

LONG before Facebook or Twitter, there was a different kind of social network. Born in the Old West, it allowed communities to share updates and music, and to spread news and gossip. For a brief period at the start of the 20th century this network, owned by no one, was a model of democracy, openness and free speech – something that today's internet activists can only dream about. Eventually, though, it faded, overwhelmed by commercially minded competitors. This is the story of a long-forgotten social revolution and the extremely unlikely technology it was built on: barbed wire.

Getting connected could be a big problem in North America in the 1890s, especially in the vast open spaces of the rural west. You could buy a ...

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Today on New Scientist

2014 preview: Paralysed teen scores in Brazil

The millions tuning into the opening match of the World Cup will see the world's most advanced mind-controlled exoskeleton take the ceremonial first kick

We want to know meat's origin – but not if it costs

90 per cent of consumers thought that all meat products should be labelled with their country of origin, but most weren't willing to pay extra for the info

Athletes' biological passports will track steroid use

In 2014 pro athletes will be subject to routine checks on steroids in their urine – and deviations from their normal physiology will trigger doping alarms

Texas repels creationist threat to biology textbooks

Children in Texas will use biology textbooks free from anti-evolution propaganda, but the portion of US Republicans supporting evolution has fallen

Water plumes spark a race to Jupiter moon Europa

Recent water geysers on Europa are raising hopes that the icy moon is a hot destination in the hunt for alien life – several craft are lining up to visit

Elvis vs Jesus: PageRank for people says who's bigger

Which historical figures command most attention? A computer scientist and a Google engineer have devised an algorithm to rank them all in Who's Bigger?

Higgs boson could reveal deviant behaviour in 2014

The particle could reveal exotic physics even before the Large Hadron Collider switches back on in 2015, thanks to a new catalogue of possible misbehaviour

Ice-loving sea anemones found in Antarctica

A sea anemone has turned up embedded in the underside of Antarctica's ice sheets; the only marine animal known to live like this. How does it survive?

Replacement artificial heart keeps first patient alive

An artificial heart made by the French firm Carmat has been implanted in its first human patient – and is working well so far

Improvise! Shoestring solutions to big physics

What do you do when the money's too short to run your expensive experiment? Reach for the duct tape, ping pong balls and taco sauce, says Richard Webb

2014 preview: Three-parent babies close to conception

The UK parliament will vote on a novel form of IVF that allows women with mitochondrial mutations to have a child without fear of passing on disease

Rude awakenings: How swearing made us human

Our crudest outbursts can unravel ancient links between words and thoughts. They may even hint at our ancestors' first utterances, finds Tiffany O'Callaghan

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2014 preview: Paralysed teen scores in Brazil

Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"

It will be quite some show of skill. The first kick of the 2014 Football World Cup in Brazil might not come from the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi. Instead, if all goes to plan, a teenager paralysed from the waist down will use the world's most advanced mind-controlled exoskeleton to swing at the ball.

The spectacle will showcase the Walk Again Project, an international collaboration using technology to overcome paralysis. The team's exoskeleton supports the lower body and is controlled by patterns of brain activity detected by electrodes placed either on the scalp or within the brain itself. These signals are sent wirelessly to a computer worn by the wearer, that converts them into movements. The kicker will be one of a small group of people training in Brazil with a virtual exoskeleton before trying the real thing.

Movement alone isn't enough to make the experience of walking feel natural, so the team hopes to incorporate sensors into the exoskeleton that feed information about touch, temperature and force back to the wearer. That feedback will come through a visual display or a vibrating motor. Eventually these sensations could be transmitted straight to the brain, which would allow the wearer to truly feel that the exoskeleton is part of their body.

"The vibrations can replicate the sensation of touching the ground, rolling off the toe and kicking off again," says the lead robotic engineer Gordon Cheng, at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. The challenge will be to match those sensations to the brain patterns and movements. "There's so much detail in this, it's phenomenal," he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Paralysed teen scores in brazil"

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We want to know meat's origin – but not if it costs

WE WANT to know where our meat comes from, but not if it will cost us to find out, it seems.

A report published on 17 December by the European Commission found that 90 per cent of consumers thought it important that the country of origin should be indicated on all meat products. But only 20 per cent of respondents said they were willing to pay 5 to 10 per cent more money for the information.

UK consumers' sensitivity to the origins of their meat has increased over recent decades, exacerbated by the BSE outbreak and the more recent scandal in which horsemeat was sold as beef and pork in several products.

Indication of origin is mandatory for unprocessed beef and beef products, and the commission is looking into extending this to include all meat used as an ingredient in pre-packed foods. There is less concern over unprocessed meat from other animals as those supply chains are less convoluted, with less room for abuse.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Meat source"

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Athletes' biological passports will track steroid use

SPORTS cheats beware. As of 1 January, professional athletes became subject to routine checks on steroid concentrations in their urine. These tests won't be used to spot specific drugs, but to form a baseline by which to detect any future suspicious deviations from the athlete's normal physiology. The checks have been added to the World Anti-Doping Agency's , a procedure for monitoring every athlete's metabolic profile.

Since WADA introduced the passports in 2009, various components of athletes' blood are tested about nine times a year. These include the mass of oxygen-carrying haemoglobin, and the number of red blood cells present in a sample, which can reveal a suspected blood transfusion or doping with the hormone erythropoietin, which enriches the oxygen content of blood.

Now the same routine is being applied to steroids found in urine. To date, the only routine check on steroid misuse is through individual measurements of testosterone and epitestosterone.

WADA says that the new steroid profile will monitor six steroids and the ratios between them to gauge any abnormal fluctuations from ratios normally present in urine. "We can't put a number on how many people will be caught out, but a more intelligent anti-doping programme should deter athletes from cheating," says Ben Nichols, a WADA spokesman.

This article appeared in print under the headline "'Passport' to spot steroid cheats"

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Texas repels creationist threat to biology textbooks

Children in Texas will spend the next decade reading biology textbooks free of anti-evolution propaganda, thanks to the defeat last month of creationist attempts to cast doubt on the evolution content of such books.

Creationists on the 15-member Texas State Board of Education had been trying since 2009 to force textual changes designed to undermine the scientific consensus on evolution.

If the changes had been accepted, the "contaminated" books would almost certainly have spread to other states. Texas is the second largest buyer of schoolbooks, behind California.

The defeat of this attempt to sabotage the evolution content has cleared the way for the acceptance of the Pearson Biology textbook.

Partisan divide

An unidentified volunteer reviewer complained to the board in November that the book contained 18 errors of fact. To settle the issue, the board appointed a panel of three eminent biologists to pass final judgement on the criticisms. "Our sources said all three panellists dismissed the claims of factual errors and recommended no changes to the textbook," says Dan Quinn, of Texas Freedom Network.

Meanwhile, a poll of almost 2000 adults across all 50 US states reveals that 33 per cent reject the idea of evolution, and 60 per cent are behind it, the Pew Research Center of Washington DC reported on 30 December.

That is roughly the same share as in 2009, says Pew, when it last asked people about their views on the subject. However, the split has become more partisan. Similar to in 2009, roughly two-thirds of people voting for the Democrats or independent candidates say that humans have evolved over time – but the portion of Republican voters who support evolution has fallen from 54 per cent in 2009, to 43 per cent in 2013.

Additional reporting by Celeste Biever

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Water plumes spark a race to Jupiter moon Europa

Editorial: "We don't need to land to find life on Europa"

LET'S put Mars in our rear-view mirror. Recent signs of water gushing from Europa could make Jupiter's icy moon the next hot destination in the hunt for alien life. And novel ways to propel tiny, cheap satellites could get us there within the next decade – although such a trip won't be easy.

Europa has long been one of astrobiologists' most desired destinations. The Galileo probe, which toured the Jovian system between 1995 and 2003, revealed signs of fissures on the moon that may periodically open up, letting water escape from a suspected sub-surface ocean.

Although searches for plumes during that period found none, the chance that its seas hold life has made Europa a high-ranking target for the US National Academy of Sciences. So far, however, none of the proposed missions has won NASA funding.

Many planetary scientists think they now have the evidence needed to change that. "The drumbeat is getting louder," says Kevin Hand at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The main reason is a paper that sparked huge excitement at a geophysics meeting last month. Lorenz Roth at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, presented images from the Hubble telescope that show a towering cloud of water vapour spouting from Europa's south pole. Other presentations at the meeting also showed that Europa has intriguing minerals on its surface, and hinted that active plate tectonics could help get nutrients into its seas (see "The case for life under the ice").

Plumes would make it easier to find and study any potential life, as samples could be scooped up from orbit without the more challenging task of drilling through the ice. Saturn's moon Enceladus also has such geysers, but they are thought to gush from a water pocket that seems less life-friendly than Europa's ocean.

So what needs to happen next? First, scientists must confirm that the plumes exist. The sighting appeared only in images from December 2012, which suggests that either the plume was an anomaly, or such eruptions are not always active. If a mission is mistimed, it may be in vain.

We should soon know more: William Sparks at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, has been granted time to use Hubble to watch Europa pass in front of Jupiter, allowing his team to search for plumes.

If they are real and predictable, the next challenge will be choosing a spaceship. Europa is much further away than Mars, and Jupiter's powerful magnetic field bathes the moon in radiation that can fry inadequately shielded hardware. NASA has run through several ideas for a Europa mission, and the current front runner is the Europa Clipper. It is a lean craft that would avoid radiation damage by taking a wide orbit of Jupiter, only swooping in close to Europa during a series of fly-bys.

The team is now planning to add an instrument to sample and analyse the plumes. But the Europa Clipper is projected to cost up to $2 billion, and with NASA's cloudy budget forecast, it may be a while before it can set sail, if ever.

In the meantime, mini-probes called CubeSats, some funded by private groups, could take a first look. Until now, these cheap little satellites have stayed in low-Earth orbit. Earlier this year, two teams announced plans for propulsion systems capable of taking the probes into deep space.

Benjamin Longmier at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is developing xenon thrusters for CubeSats, with a first test flight planned for the end of next year. His team had originally targeted Europa as a destination, and the plume has upped the ante. They are already working with NASA to develop tiny instruments that could sample the cloud. If all goes well, the thrusters could be ready in three to five years. "I'm hoping we can be at Jupiter before they launch the Clipper," Longmier says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Water plumes spark a race to Europa"

The case for life under the ice

Reports of a possible water plume on Jupiter's moon Europa have raised the stakes for a trip there – and two more findings, presented last month, also add to its appeal.

James Shirley at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory applied updated analysis to archival data from the Galileo probe, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. He found clay-like minerals on Europa's surface, debris from meteor impacts that may contain life-building compounds called organics.

Simon Kattenhorn at the University of Idaho in Moscow also looked at Galileo data and found that Europa's ice crust has active plate tectonics. Water may rise to the surface where the plates are pulling apart, while ice may sink to the ocean where one plate slides under another. This would provide a way to seed the water with fresh nutrients.

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Elvis vs Jesus: PageRank for people says who's bigger

• Book information


• Who's Bigger? Where historical figures really rank by Steven Skiena and Charles B. Ward


• Published by: Cambridge University Press


• Price: £18.99

Descartes: arguably the 82nd most significant person in history (Image: Dumesnil, Pierre-Louis the Younger (1698-1781)/Bridgeman Art Library)

Which historical figures command most attention? A computer scientist and a Google engineer have devised an algorithm to rank them all in Who's Bigger?

ISAAC NEWTON, Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great: who should we rate as most significant? And how does Elvis Presley fare next to René Descartes?

Posing such questions would once have been laughable. Not any more. Now we can make these comparisons as rationally as whether Twitter is a better investment than Apple. This is the thrust of Who's Bigger? Where historical figures really rank by Steven Skiena, a computer scientist at the State University of New York, and Charles Ward, a software engineer at Google.

They approach world history with the tools of quantitative analysis favoured by Wall Street traders and baseball managers, distinguishing from the outset traditional history from their interest, historiography – the study of history as a discipline. They try to measure which historical figures command our attention most powerfully and persistently. This is people as memes, so the contest of Elvis versus Descartes becomes a question of whether "ain't nothin' but a hound dog" is more viral than "cogito ergo sum".

Evidently it is, since Elvis ranks 69 to Descartes's 82 on their list of history's 100 most significant people. Skiena and Ward derive this list from a ranking algorithm they created, inspired by Google's PageRank system, which looks at how many links to other Wikipedia pages there are on a person's own page. This measure of gravitas is combined with statistics on the entry's length, revision history and monthly hits to achieve what the authors call celebrity. It is then adjusted for "reputational decay", an estimate of how fame falls when someone passes out of living memory.

Each of the 843,790 people who had their own Wikipedia page on 11 October 2010 when the model was run is now reduced to a number, from Jesus (1) to aikido master Sagusa Ryusei (843,790).

But it's one thing to rate Jesus higher than Ryusei, another to rank Elvis above Descartes. The authors try to verify their algorithm by taking people from narrow categories (US presidents, baseball stars) and comparing their ranking to expert/popular ratings, or to game statistics. Examining dozens of lists in nine categories, they found an average correlation of 0.544 between their rankings and those on published lists, significantly higher than the 0.49 average correlation between all published lists in a category.

For example, here's the ranking for eminent scientists: 12 Darwin; 19 Einstein; 21 Newton; 31 Linnaeus; 44 Freud; 49 Galileo; 74 Copernicus; 81 Bacon; 103 Ptolemy; 112 Pasteur; 156 Kepler; 175 Faraday; 216 Hooke; 250 Mendel; 276 Lavoisier.

Even so, what do rankings mean when there is no real connection between those being compared? While Skiena and Ward's claim that their analysis provides a new way to interpret the past seems promising, they rarely offer an observation that isn't obvious or wildly speculative. For example, they plot autograph prices against historical significance to calculate Jesus's signature should be worth $5,780,960, but admit that a lack of data on ancient autographs makes matters very tricky.

This is all fun: reputational face-offs are great entertainment. And, shrewdly, Skiena and Ward have an app. More seriously, historians will put quantitative analysis to good use – and their model may help historiographers grapple with Wikipedia.

But there is a dark underside, revealed when the authors offer their rankings as guidelines for textbooks. When it comes to educating under-11s, Skiena and Ward propose favouring higher rated figures over lower, and banish those who rank over 5000 to the "dead zone".

Skiena and Ward's techniques are new, but their "great man" view of history is ultimately old-fashioned. Importance is a matter of context.

This article appeared in print under the headline "People as memes"

Jonathon Keats is the author of Virtual Words (Oxford University Press, 2010)

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Higgs boson could reveal deviant behaviour in 2014

The Higgs boson could reveal exotic physics even before the Large Hadron Collider switches back on in 2015, thanks to a new list of ways the famous subatomic particle could misbehave.

First predicted almost 50 years ago, the particle was only discovered in 2012 by scientists working at the LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

Misbehaviour sounds like a strange thing to catalogue, but when it comes to the standard model – our leading theory of particles and forces – it is desirable. The model cannot explain everything, so the hope is that the Higgs will offer clues to how to extend it to include entities such as dark matter.

The Higgs might do this by decaying into daughter particles in an unexpected way inside the LHC. "The Higgs is very sensitive to the presence of new particles," says Matt Strassler of Harvard University.

Lurking discoveries

For all the decay pathways tracked since the boson's discovery, it has behaved exactly as the standard model dictates. But there are other ways the Higgs could decay – too many, in fact. "Experimentalists didn't really know where to start," says Strassler.

To solve this problem, he and his colleagues have put together a list of further decays that would count as misbehaviour. "We felt we could help organise the subject and give people a set of guideposts," he says. Researchers can now match these to LHC data to hunt for deviant Higgs bosons.

The LHC is currently shut down for an upgrade and isn't due to be switched on again until 2015. But Strassler says that up to 100,000 of the deviant decays on the new list could be lurking in the existing data. "The possibility of discoveries in existing data is what's driving us," he says.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1312.4992

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Ice-loving sea anemones found in Antarctica

Talk about being chilled out: a species of sea anemone has been found on the underside of Antarctica's ice sheets. They are the only marine animals known to live embedded in the ice, and no one is sure how they survive.

Frank Rack of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and colleagues made the surprise find when they drilled through the ice for a geological study. They were using a camera attached to a remote-controlled drill to explore the underside of the Ross Ice Shelf when they discovered large numbers of the white anemones, which they christened Edwardsiella andrillae, burrowed inside the ice with only their tentacles dangling into the water.

Marymegan Daly at the Ohio State University analysed samples, but dissecting the creatures revealed little – they looked just like any other anemone.

"I would never have guessed that they live embedded in the ice because there is nothing different about their anatomy," she says.

Other species burrow into surfaces by inching their bodies in or digging with their tentacles, but ice should be too hard, says Daly, who thinks the new species may secrete chemicals to dissolve the ice. It is also unclear how they survive without freezing, and how they reproduce.

"We would like to have some genetic information so we can answer some of these questions," Daly says. Unfortunately, as the team were not expecting to find animal life, they only had a preservative with them that could fix the animals' anatomy but destroyed their DNA.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0083476

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Replacement artificial heart keeps first patient alive

(Image: Carmat)

If you stayed awake during biology in school, you might recognise the shapes at the left and top right of this image: they are models of the heart. The object at lower right, looking like a cross between a tape dispenser and a second-world-war gas mask, will be less familiar.

Developed by French firm Carmat, this is an artificial heart designed for people whose hearts are so weak that they can no longer pump enough blood to sustain life. It was implanted in its first human patient on 18 December 2013 at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in Paris.

The device replaces the real heart and is meant to keep patients going while they wait for a donor: Carmat claims it can be used for up to five years. Lithium-ion batteries outside the body keep it pumping, while sensors monitor and automatically control blood flow to adapt to the patient's activity.

Biomaterials in the artificial heart help to prevent the body from rejecting it. It is about three times larger than the natural organ, so it fits only about 65 per cent of patients. It would fit 86 per cent of men, though, because they have larger chest cavities.

So far, the operation seems to have been a success: the patient is said to be awake and talking to his family, and in a statement issued to Reuters, the hospital said the device is working well.

"The artificial heart is functioning normally, automatically catering to the body's needs without any manual adjustment necessary," the surgeons said.

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Improvise! Shoestring solutions to big physics

(Image: Getty)

What do you do when the money's too short to run your expensive experiment? Reach for the duct tape, ping pong balls and taco sauce

In 1996, Andre Geim was a junior professor at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. His day job was teasing out the magnetic properties of superconductors, but he itched to investigate a more basic question: could you make water magnetic?

The textbook answer was no. "But sometimes if something hasn't been done before, you have to do something," says Geim. "Sometimes something ridiculously simple." For him, late one Friday evening, that something turned out to be pouring water into his lab's mighty 20-Tesla electromagnet.

It could all have gone disastrously wrong, but the dancing balls of levitating water that Geim saw in the electromagnet's core provided all the answer he needed. In a dense enough field, water droplets were magnetic ...

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2014 preview: Three-parent babies close to conception

Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"

The first three-parent baby could be on its way next year, when the UK parliament votes on whether to legalise a novel form of IVF. The procedure would allow thousands of women with mitochondrial mutations to have a child without the fear of passing on disease.

Mitochondria, the energy generators of cells, have their own DNA, passed down by the mother and distinct from the chromosomes in the nucleus. About 1 in 5000 people in the UK have mitochondrial DNA mutations that lead to blindness, seizures, dementia or mental impairment.

There is a way to prevent the faulty DNA being passed on: IVF using a donor egg with normal mitochondrial DNA and a nucleus taken from the would-be mother's egg. Researchers pioneering such mitochondrial replacement therapy have already produced several healthy monkeys. However, the procedure – the first that would alter the DNA of future generations – has yet to be approved for use in humans.

In March, the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority advised the government to do so after a lengthy review of safety, efficacy, ethics and public opinion. UK researchers are tight-lipped about when exactly they could recruit the first couples, but technically, all that is needed is a vote in parliament, which could happen before July. It will then take several more months to pass into law. The US Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, is due to discuss the issue in February.

Would the egg donor enjoy rights as a parent? Contributing just 0.1 per cent of the child's total DNA, she wouldn't legally or ethically be considered one, say most bioethicists.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Nursing dreams of a three-parent baby"

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Rude awakenings: How swearing made us human

(Image: Andy Smith)

Our crudest outbursts can unravel ancient links between words and thoughts. They may even hint at our ancestors' first utterances

IT WAS the first time one of us swore at Dad. My older sister was 13, and had been looking forward to the school trip to Washington DC for years. It was the pinnacle of middle school – a long bus ride to the capital, two days visiting important sites and an overnight stay in a hotel with her friends.

But as I eavesdropped from the next room, I realised my parents were telling her she couldn't go. A severe asthmatic, she had just recovered from pneumonia, and it wasn't worth the risk. Their voices rose, and she pleaded, implored, screamed. Finally, she thundered past me and ran up the stairs. Dad followed, furious. Then something surreal happened. As he reached the bottom of the ...

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What do you do when a giant carnivorous lizard heads straight for you? Try giving it a good scratch behind the ears

2014 preview: The ships that could take us to Mars

The maiden flights of two spacecraft could make or break plans to put humans on the Red Planet within the next few decades

Dawkins: 'I'd rather be remembered for science'

The world's pre-eminent atheist speculates about why he polarises people, what prompts him to take on religion and whether humans are built to be irrational

2013 review: Top ten breakthroughs in physical science

From time-travel movies to the most accurate map of the big bang's afterglow, 2013 brought mind-boggling ideas and long-awaited results in equal measure

Dream Job: Scientific glass-blower

Steve Ramsey describes how glass-blowing can take you to labs, museums and TV studios, and makes us a festive bauble

Chocolab: The secret recipe for low-fat chocolate

They said it couldn't be done – but tasty half-fat chocolate is here. And we have a recipe that you can try at home

The great ideas hiding under the invisibility cloak

Physicist John Pendry talks about the profound physics obscured by his invisibility cloak and how metamaterials could help realise the perfect lens

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2014 preview: Google Glass for the masses

Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"

This time next year, we might all be wearing computers on our heads. Already a hit with early adopters, the much-hyped Google Glass headset will be released to the public in 2014. And in response to feedback from those testers, it is likely to boast a few extra features.

For starters, developers are keen to incorporate eye-tracking so that the device can overlay information on top of objects or areas that the wearer is gazing at. That could boost the headset's ability to deliver ultra-personal, targeted advertising.

Glass could also get tricked out with gesture recognition, which would allow users to control it just by waving their hands.

The Explorer program to test early versions of Glass has already given rise to a slew of potentially game-changing applications. For example, it has allowed surgeons to transmit their view of an operation to medical students elsewhere, and helped people watch what they eat – literally – as a way of managing diabetes.

Critics say the headset's camera will destroy privacy, and its distracting screen could ruin social interaction. But if Glass and several competing products launch next year as expected, millions of people could become hooked. That's bound to change the way we look at the world.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Through the looking glass"

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Magical giant: The story of a much-loved museum whale

(Image: Peter Hall/Keystone Features/Getty Images)

Created in the 1930s, the life-size model blue whale at London's Natural History Museum has lost none of its ability to thrill crowds

THIS month, thousands of people will fall under the spell of a giant.

But this is no fairy tale or pantomime giant. It's a life-size model of the blue whale, the world's largest mammal. Now celebrating its 75th birthday, the 28.3-metre-long model dominates the mammal gallery at London's Natural History Museum, dwarfing whale skeletons and other mammals.

Richard Sabin, the NHM's principal curator of vertebrate collections, says the model was "incredibly ambitious" when it was built in the 1930s. He saw it as a 10-year-old on his first trip to London, nearly 40 years ago. "I was absolutely blown away," he recalls. Back home, he raided school and local libraries for whale books.

When the model was unveiled at the end of 1938, it was the world's only life-size replica of a blue whale. But other museums soon wanted to copy it. Some museums in the US made a point of making their version fractionally longer.

The giant was created by Percy and Stuart Stammwitz, a father and son team in the museum's zoology department, using photographs and measurements made by scientists on British whaling fleet vessels in the south Atlantic. Although it was accurate for its time, modern underwater photography shows the model doesn't match reality, says Sabin, probably because it was based on carcasses that became distorted as they were dragged on to ships.

Built in situ in the museum's Whale Hall, the model drew on technology used to make first-world-war planes. The general foreman, William Sanders, suggested building a wooden frame, covering it in lightweight wire meshwork, then coating it with plaster and painting over that, rather than using traditional plaster casts.

The replica whale has gone on to feature in books and movies, and is also the stuff of urban legend. Some of the best stories concern what went on inside its hollow belly before the trapdoor was sealed shut forever. They feature everything from hidden time capsules to romantic trysts and gambling dens. Only one story is true, Sabin reckons: that workmen used to take their lunch and cigarette breaks inside the whale.

The whale remains a magnet for children. Sometimes when Sabin overhears chattering school parties, he hopes that among the more excited children lurks the next generation of marine biologists who will keep the magic of the whale alive.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Whale of a time"

Shaoni Bhattacharya is a consultant for New Scientist

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Snow monkey leaps into hell

(Image: Diane McAllister/naturepl.com)

WELCOME to hell. This is the Jigokudani monkey park in Nagano prefecture, Japan. – although it is actually a rather heavenly place for monkeys.

Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata fuscata) are the only monkeys native to Japan, and live further north than any other non-human primate. Famous for their habit of bathing in hot springs, they can also leap, as can be seen in this shot by US photographer Diane McAllister. The monkeys are strong swimmers, so if the one in this photo didn't make the leap, it would be fine.

I once swam out to an uninhabited island off the Izu Peninsula south of Tokyo and encountered a troop of macaques. The alpha male didn't notice me, he was happily copulating with his females. The females, for their part, seemed unperturbed by his attention. I later learned that bisexuality is often seen in Japanese macaques.

These monkeys can also use tools – something more commonly associated with apes. They have been spotted washing food in the sea, perhaps even using the saltwater to season their food. I wouldn't fancy sharing a hot spring with them, though, because they have the unpleasant habit of turning the spring into a giant, bubbling latrine. Come to think of it, that would be quite hellish.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Mind the gap"

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The great white lie: What snowflakes really look like

The classic image of a symmetrical, six-sided snowflake is everywhere at this time of the year. But that's not what you'll see falling from the sky

WHEN Bing Crosby dreamed of a white Christmas, chances are he imagined one fashioned by flurries of perfect, six-sided snowflakes. This image of what a snowflake looks like has become ubiquitous. It is found on everything from cards and woolly jumpers to shop windows during the festive season. So you may be surprised to discover that the vast majority of snowflakes look nothing like this.

The classic image of a snowflake can be traced back to home-schooled farmer Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley of Vermont. When he was 15, he started peering down his mother's microscope. "Always, from the very beginning, it was snowflakes that fascinated me most," he later said. Bentley eventually persuaded his parents to get a camera and hooked it up to ...

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2014 preview: Private internet to beat the spooks

Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"

What's the price of loss of trust? We will find out in 2014 as the after-effects of the revelations about the spying campaigns on the world's internet and cellphone networks become apparent.

The financial costs are already mounting. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington DC think tank, reckons US firms could lose $35 billion in sales in the next two years because of fears over snooping by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

The revelations might also change how we use the internet in more fundamental ways. World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has warned that a lack of faith in privacy could make people interact less freely with one another online.

But there may be some benefits, too. People are now more aware of what they do online. For example, use of DuckDuckGo, a search engine that promises not to collect a user's personal information, soared in the weeks after the NSA's activities were revealed. This personal data protection is likely to accelerate next year.

We might also see the first signs of internet fragmentation. Some nations, including Brazil and Germany, are considering reining in internet routing to within their own borders, although such moves would play into the hands of authoritarian states and cause delays for international traffic.

Other methods to beat the spooks could also hit the mainstream, including ways of masking traffic and even local internet networks that keep sensitive data off the public internet.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Hiding from spying eyes"

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All spruced up: Breeding a better Christmas tree

It's easier to get a tree from the attic (Image: Plainpicture/ESTA)

If you're pining for a real tree but not for its needles in your carpet – or green just isn't your colour – we have glad tidings for you

IF YOUR household celebrates Christmas, you may well have chosen to put up an artificial tree this year. Fake Christmas trees have been around almost as long as the real thing, but they first began to sell in large numbers in the 1930s, when a toilet-brush manufacturer realised it could make them cheaply by slightly altering its product. Artificial trees are now more popular than the real thing, some surveys suggest, not least because they can last for years and don't drop annoying needles all over the carpet.

But tree growers aren't giving up without a fight. They have long been trying to develop more attractive trees to ...

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2014 preview: Hydrogen SUV ready to hit the road

Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"

Did you know that the Empire State Building's spire was designed as a mooring point for hydrogen airships? That proved too dangerous, though, and then a deadly fire on the Hindenburg in 1937 brought the hydrogen fad to an abrupt end. Now the lightest of elements is making a comeback as the first mass-market hydrogen car gears up to hit the road.

Whereas airships harnessed hydrogen's buoyancy, the Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell, an SUV, uses it to make electricity. Its fuel cell combines hydrogen from the tank with oxygen in the air, creating an electrochemical reaction that generates current to supply electric motors. Water is the only waste product, making the cars green. Unlike battery-powered vehicles, which need hours to charge, refuelling takes minutes – and a full tank should last for 480 kilometres. Hyundai says the Tucson can hit 160 kilometres per hour.

Starting in spring next year, the firm will lease the cars for $499 a month in southern California. Home to nine of the US's 10 existing hydrogen refuelling stations, and committed to building 100 more, the Golden State is ahead of the hydrogen curve. Honda and Toyota plan to follow Hyundai's lead with fuel-cell cars in 2015. By contrast, a 2006 BMW offering burned liquid hydrogen but it was inefficient and never mass-produced.

Is the Tucson safe? If the tank springs a leak, fuel vents up into the air rather than pooling below, as in ordinary, gasoline-powered cars. Extensive crash and fire tests make Hyundai confident its offering won't go the way of the Hindenburg. The cars may just be the start of an environmentally friendly, 21st-century hydrogen economy.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Fill her up... with liquid hydrogen"

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