Ear bath helps explain rare urge to cut off own limb

Some people are seized with a desire to cut off their own limbs, which they somehow feel are not really part of their body. An attempt to treat them using indirect brain stimulation has failed, but could help explain what lies at the root of this strange disorder.

People with body integrity identity disorder (BIID), or xenomelia, say that some part of their body – usually a limb – doesn't belong to them. They often resort to desperate measures such as freezing the limb in dry ice to force doctors to amputate it.

Bigna Lenggenhager of the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues sought to treat the condition by targeting part of the system that gives us a sense of awareness of our body. They used a technique called caloric vestibular stimulation (CVS), involving pouring cold water into the ear canal. The flow of water induces an illusion of motion, and is thought to stimulate regions of the brain that create a mental map of the body. These regions integrate external senses such as touch with internal sensations, including those from the vestibular system, which helps us balance.

Previous work had showed that CVS can temporarily relieve the effects of a condition called somatoparaphrenia, where people deny ownership of a paralysed limb. But when Lenggenhager's team tested the technique on 13 people with BIID, they found no such effect.

Durable desire

"Obviously the desire to amputate is much more durable than these other disorders of body image [such as somatoparaphrenia]," says Paul McGeoch at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the new work.

What makes BIID so intractable? Neurological differences may be implicated. Previous studies have shown people with BIID have a thinner cortex in brain areas involved in integrating different types of sensations to root us in our bodies.

Brain scans of five people with BIID also showed they had less activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex when their alienated limb was stimulated compared with other limbs. This brain area is thought to be crucial for our sense of body ownership.

Even if adult BIID patients show such neurological changes, it is possible that long-standing behaviours could eventually lead to the neurological changes seen. For instance, people with BIID can ignore their offending limb for decades, by sometimes strapping it and walking on crutches or sitting in wheelchairs. "This might also affect how the body is represented in the brain," says Lenggenhager.

If BIID really is neurological, the next step would be to pinpoint the exact brain areas affected. "I think it could be relevant for therapies," says Lenggenhager.

Journal reference: Cortex, DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2014.02.004

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Girls may be more resilient to autism-linked mutations

More genetic mutations may be needed to give rise to autism in girls than in boys. The finding supports the notion that the female brain is somehow protected against autism, and this may in turn explain why four times as many males have autism than females.

Although some cases of autism are associated with one mutation, most are thought to involve several genetic abnormalities. In the past few years, hundreds of mutations have been discovered that can make people more vulnerable to the condition.

To see if the mutations affect men and women differently, Sébastien Jacquemont at the University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland and colleagues measured the frequency of two different kinds of mutation in 762 families that had a child with autism.

Among the children with autism, one class of mutation known as a copy number variation – deletions or duplications of a large chunk of genetic material – was three times more common in girls than in boys. The team also found that substitutions of a single letter of DNA were about one-third more common in affected girls.

Jacquemont says this suggests it takes more mutations for autism to arise in girls than in boys. "Females function a lot better than males with similar mutations," he says.

Females shielded

The results reflect the "shielding" effect of being female, he says. "There's something that's protecting [their] brain development."

A larger, as yet unpublished, study of about 2400 people with autism, conducted as part of the Autism Genome Project - an attempt to sequence the whole genome of 10,000 individuals affected by the condition – has produced similar results, says Joseph Buxbaum of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

The hope is that understanding the mechanism behind the "female protective effect" can be translated into a treatment for autism, says Buxbaum, who was not part of Jacquemont's study. "That's why we are doing this research."

Jacquemont says the finding is compatible with the controversial idea that autism represents an extreme version of the male brain, first put forward by Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge. According to the theory, males have, on average, more tendencies that could be thought of as mildly autistic – so it makes sense that it would take fewer mutations for autism to arise.

Journal reference: The American Journal of Human Genetics, DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2014.02.001

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Today on New Scientist

Healing by faeces: Rise of the DIY gut-bug swap

As regulators struggle to classify faecal transplants, people are doing it themselves to ease symptoms of colitis, Parkinson's disease and even autism

Super-rice defies triple whammy of stresses

A strain of genetically modified rice can thrive in drought, salty soils and without fertiliser. It could help rice farmers cope with climate change

Curry cure: Chillies are the hot new thing in medicine

Understanding why mint tastes cool and chilli is hot could bring new cures for chronic pain, obesity and even cancer

Crime rates could rise as climate change bites

As temperatures soar, so do crime rates – suggesting climate change will lead to millions of extra offences in the coming decades

The WhatsApp edge: Why it was a must-buy for Facebook

As the dust settles on Facebook's $19 billion WhatsApp takeover, a social networking researcher explains what really lies behind the deal

'Great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled'

An X-class solar flare – the most powerful kind – caused spectacular displays of the aurora borealis over the UK last night

Father of big bang carries its hiss on his cellphone

Fifty years after discovering the big bang's afterglow, Robert Wilson carries its sound in his pocket and admits to ordering a hit on pigeons for science

Feedback: All shall have pills

Pill inflation, enthusiasm for exercise, determinism of heart health and more

Sensor backpacks for oysters say when they are happy

At an oyster farm in Tasmania, shellfish are having sensors strapped onto their backs to monitor their health

Pancreatic cancer's killer trick offers treatment hope

Each pancreatic tumour evolves its own mechanism for generating the energy that lets it proliferate wildly. Good news: we have drugs that target the process

Rule-breaking black hole blows weirdly powerful winds

A black hole is eating faster than a cosmic speed limit allows, suggesting that small black holes may play a larger role in galaxy evolution than realised

Location-aware Wi-Fi lets fans be part of the show

A system for getting Wi-Fi access to every fan at a gig or match gives a whole new meaning to the concept of audience participation. Mexican wave, anyone?

Some breastfeeding benefits questioned by US study

A study comparing siblings fed either by breast or bottle hints that the long-term benefits of breastfeeding may have been distorted by social factors

Music-making card turns objects into wacky instruments

A simple credit card sized device lets you transform a plant into a piano or make a glass of water behave like a drum

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Fewer mutations needed for autism in boys than girls

More genetic mutations may be needed to give rise to autism in girls than in boys. The finding supports the notion that the female brain is somehow protected against autism, and this may in turn explain why four times as many males have autism than females.

Although some cases of autism are caused by one mutation, most are thought to involve several genetic abnormalities. In the past few years, hundreds of mutations have been discovered that can lead to the condition.

To see if the mutations affect men and women differently, Sébastien Jacquemont at the University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland and colleagues measured the frequency of two different kinds of mutation in 762 families that had a child with autism.

Among the children with autism, one class of mutation known as a copy number variation – deletions or duplications of a large chunk of genetic material – was three times more common in girls than in boys. The team also found that substitutions of a single letter of DNA were about one-third more common in affected girls.

Jacquemont says this suggests it takes more mutations for autism to arise in girls than in boys. "Females function a lot better than males with similar mutations," he says.

Females shielded

The results reflect the "shielding" effect of being female, he says. "There's something that's protecting [their] brain development."

A larger, as yet unpublished, study of about 2400 people with autism, conducted as part of the Autism Genome Project - an attempt to sequence the whole genome of 10,000 individuals affected by the condition – has produced similar results, says Joseph Buxbaum of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

The hope is that understanding the mechanism behind the "female protective effect" can be translated into a treatment for autism, says Buxbaum, who was not part of Jacquemont's study. "That's why we are doing this research."

Jacquemont says the finding is compatible with the controversial idea that autism represents an extreme version of the male brain, first put forward by Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge. According to the theory, males have, on average, more tendencies that could be thought of as mildly autistic – so it makes sense that it would take fewer mutations for autism to arise.

Journal reference: The American Journal of Human Genetics, DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2014.02.001

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Healing by faeces: Rise of the DIY gut-bug swap

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LAST year wasn't kind to 27-year-old Jim. He was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and it was causing him a lot of pain. Drugs failed to provide relief, and it seemed as if the only option was to surgically remove his colon. Instead, he opted for something else. Two weeks after having filtered faeces inserted into his guts, Jim improved massively. "The blood and pain are reduced, and I'm not having to worry about going to the toilet."

Jim is one of a growing number of people turning to faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) to restore their gut bacteria to a healthy state. The idea is to reset the gut flora using bacteria in the stools of a healthy person.

Jim lives in the UK, where this procedure is not regulated so he was able to find a clinic to do it for him. In the US and Canada, however, the rules are stricter, and some people are taking the matter into their own hands. "People are turning to faecal transplants without any medical supervision. They don't even get the donor screened," says Emma Allen-Vercoe, a microbiologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. "They're putting themselves at significant risk."

Last week, a group of microbiologists writing in Nature called for the US Food and Drug Administration to change the rules on FMT, and for regulators around the world to work out how to deal with the procedure. So how should such transplants be regulated? And is it worrying that people are doing it themselves?

The technique has shown most promise for treating people infected with Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that colonises people's gut when antibiotics have obliterated the other inhabitants, sometimes to fatal effect. The results of a clinical trial using FMT to treat people with recurring C. difficile infections, the first ever for any FMT treatment, were published last year. Fifteen out of 16 people given transplants were cured of their infections, compared with 4 of 13 patients receiving standard antibiotics.

Several case reports suggest that FMT can also relieve inflammatory bowel disease, including Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, and a few reports suggest possible benefits for people with autoimmune disorders and Parkinson's, but clinical trials have yet to be done.

As a result, the FDA considers FMT as an investigational drug for everything apart from treatment of non-responsive C. difficile. This means doctors have to apply for a licence to use the treatment as part of a study. The situation is similar in Canada. "It takes hundreds of hours to open an application and many more are spent monitoring patients," says Mark Smith at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This means people are doing their own transplants at home, using little more than stools from a relative, a blender and an enema kit (see "From trash to treasure"). "People are making this in their basement," says Smith.

A quick online search offers up how-to guides and success stories, not just for gastrointestinal disorders, but for other conditions, for which evidence of FMT efficacy is even more scant. Some parents of children with severe autism, for example, are swapping notes on FMT on online forums, even though all they have to go on is limited evidence of an altered gut flora in autism, and a study that showed a species of bacteria could reverse some symptoms in mice with an autism-like disorder. "It worries me," says Allen-Vercoe. "This is a paediatric population. We have a duty of care here which is beyond that of adult patients."

Even in adults, inserting faeces into the gut is not without risk – there is a chance of introducing disease-causing bacteria and parasites, for example. Side effects have been rare so far, but there are reports of faecal transplants causing infection and gastrointestinal bleeding.

Microbiologists are just starting to understand the roles of the various bacteria that line our gut. Some types have been linked to diseases including cancer, obesity and diabetes – and there is no way to be sure the recipient of FMT isn't increasing their risk of these disorders, says Allen-Vercoe. "We shouldn't blithely be doing faecal transplants wherever we can just because we think it's a good idea," she says. "Nobody is monitoring what's happening long term."

But if people are going to take a DIY approach, might it not be safer to provide people, or their doctors, with safe samples?

Last year, Smith co-founded OpenBiome – a non-profit company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that provides pre-screened, frozen faecal samples from healthy donors. At the moment, it offers samples only to doctors treating people with C. difficile infections – so it is of no use to people trying FMT at home. "It's really challenging, ethically," says Smith. "If a patient is dead set on getting treatment, it's probably a good idea to have a doctor help."

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Super-rice defies triple whammy of stresses

For the first time, a single strain of genetically modified rice has been developed to handle drought, salty soils and lack of fertiliser. The aim is to "climate-proof" rice farms in Asia and Africa so that they can grow the same variety each year, regardless of the conditions.

Crops have previously been developed that cope with individual environmental stresses such as drought and salt, but this rice is the first to counter three at once.

"Considering the impact of climate instability on crop yields and food security, trait combinations such as our triple-stack technology will play a critical role in sustaining future generations," says Eric Rey, president of Arcadia Biosciences in Davis, California, which developed the rice.

The salt-tolerance gene came from Arabidopsis thaliana, a type of cress widely used in plant research, and the drought-tolerance gene came from a common soil bacterium called Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The gene that enables the plant to use nitrogen more efficiently, so that it doesn't need fertiliser, came from barley.

According to the International Rice Research Institute, drought affects 23 million hectares of rice in south and South-East Asia and costs $13 billion a year globally. In some states in India, it can reduce rice yields by 40 per cent. Salt is similarly problematic. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, about 800 million hectares of land are affected by salt, costing agriculture an estimated $1 billion per year.

Passed the test

On 21 February, Arcadia announced it had completed two years of trials on the rice. The company compared the performance of its super rice with that of the unmodified parent rice in different environments.

Under a range of drought conditions, the yield of the modified rice was 12 to 17 per cent greater than that of the parent rice. With low levels of fertiliser, its yield was 13 to 18 per cent greater. When exposed to both of these stresses at once, the yield of the modified rice was 15 per cent more than that of the unmodified rice. Trials using a range of salty conditions showed the altered rice had a yield that was as much as 42 per cent more than the parent rice.

"This sounds very promising," says Jonathan Jones of the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK. "It is the first public claim I've heard of a stack of three different environmental tolerance traits, though I'm sure other companies are attempting something like it too." Jones's team recently developed and tested potatoes resistant to blight, the disease that caused the Irish potato famine.

"This looks good from the press release, but I'd like to see it pass peer review," says Matthew Paul of Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, UK.

Arcadia is in the process of submitting its results to a peer-reviewed journal, says spokesman Ken Li.

Lots of genes

Arcadia is working to advance the technology in Asia and in Africa, collaborating with the African Agricultural Technology Foundation in Nairobi, Kenya. "In Africa, rice plants with some of these genes have completed initial trials already," says Li. Arcadia is also developing wheat and maize with the climate-stress resistance genes.

Last year, drought-resistant maize became available in the US for the first time. Around 2000 farmers in the Corn Belt planted it on 50,000 hectares, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, a monitoring group funded by the biotechnology industry. The ISAAA also says the world's first drought-resistant sugar cane is due for commercial release in Indonesia later this year.

Many genetically modified crops with "stacked" traits have been developed, says the ISAAA. But most are resistant to weedkiller, insects or diseases, rather than environmental stresses.

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Curry cure: Chillies are the hot new thing in medicine

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Could the heat of some spices solve some of medicine's biggest problems? (Image: Spencer Wilson)

Understanding why mint tastes cool and chilli is hot could bring new cures for chronic pain, obesity and even cancer

IT STARTS out as a pleasant tingle, before growing into a burning sensation that feels like your whole mouth is ablaze. You sweat, you cry, and your nose streams. You gasp for water, but it feels like nothing can douse the flames. Once the pain has subsided, however, you suspect you'll seek out an even more extreme fix the next time around.

Anyone who enjoys a curry knows this feeling – and chefs have been using the sensation of chillies and other peppers to spice up their culinary experiments for centuries. But it is only in the last decade or so that scientists have begun to understand how we taste piquant foods. Now they have found the mechanism that not only explains the heat of chillies and wasabi, but also the soothing cooling of flavours like menthol.

The implications of this discovery extend far beyond cuisine. The same mechanisms build the body's internal thermometer, and some animals even use them to see in the dark. Understand these pathways, and the humble chilli may open new avenues of research for conditions as diverse as chronic pain, obesity and cancer.

The story begins in earnest in 1997, with David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco. Although people had long speculated about the source of the chilli's fire, his team was the first to discover how its key component, capsaicin, sets our mouth aflame. Most of our sensory perception depends on specific "channels" on the surface of certain cells, each responding to a different kind of stimulation. When the channel is activated, its pores open up, allowing electrical charge in the form of ions – charged particles – to flow in. These ion channels are often found on nerves, where this influx of ions triggers an electrical impulse.

There were many candidates for the channel that responds to capsaicin, but with some nifty genetics work, Julius was able to pin it down. It is called TRPV1. Crucially, he then showed that the channel also responds to uncomfortably hot temperatures – about 43 °C or higher – that would be enough to damage tissue. This neatly explains why chillies feel like they are burning the mouth.

Other TRP (pronounced "trip") channels had previously been implicated in different kinds of sensory perception, but this was the first to represent our internal thermometer (see diagram). It didn't take long for other, related protein channels to emerge that explain our sensitivity to other temperatures and food ingredients. In 2002, for instance, Julius discovered the TRPM8 channel, which is activated by relatively cool temperatures, between about 10 and 30 °C. This channel is also triggered by menthol, giving it that cooling sensation.

Just chillin'

Having identified the TRPM8 channel, Julius and his colleagues went on to create a strain of genetically engineered mice that carried two defective copies of the gene that normally codes for its protein. They then tested the animals' sensitivity to cold by placing them in a box containing two chambers, each with a different ambient temperature, and compared their behaviour with that of their normal littermates.

The normal mice showed a strong preference for the chamber kept at 30 °C, but the genetically engineered animals happily stayed in the colder chamber for long periods of time, preferring the warmer one only when the temperature dropped to below 15 °C. They were also far less able than their littermates to distinguish between cool and warm surfaces.

The researchers are now filling in the other gaps in our understanding of the body's thermostat. As they do so, it is becoming clear that in some animals these mechanisms have evolved in surprising ways. For instance, in pit vipers and vampire bats, a super-sensitive variant of the TRPA1 channel, which responds to temperatures of around 10 °C, has been co-opted for infrared-based thermal imaging.

A new understanding of the senses was only half the cause for excitement, however, as it soon emerged that these channels' responsibilities are wide-ranging, potentially implicating them in a range of disorders. Of particular interest is the fact that they are found on nerves that respond to painful stimuli – and that they can act as a kind of switch that amplifies or damps down the nerve's sensitivity. When that mechanism backfires, thanks to certain mutations, even the slightest changes in temperature can produce devastating pain (see "Worse than childbirth"). But the flip side is that these channels open promising avenues of research for new kinds of analgesics that could potentially use the pathway as an entry point.

Initially, most research focused on TRPV1 – the first channel that Julius discovered. Unfortunately, finding ways to alter pain perception through this route was much more difficult than it first seemed, since the potential drugs were quickly found to have unwanted and potentially dangerous side effects. Because TRPV1 is involved in detecting hot temperatures, anything that blocked its function made people less sensitive to painful heat. That meant they were more prone to injury, by scalding themselves in a hot shower for instance. And, due to its involvement in regulating the core body temperature, drugs that block the channel can cause a dangerously high fever. "Every major pharmaceutical company piled in," says pain researcher John Wood at University College London, "and something like $60 billion was spent trying to make drugs based on TRPV1. We made hundreds and characterised them really carefully, but none were any good."

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Crime rates could rise as climate change bites

In a warmer world it might be best not to leave your windows open. As temperatures rise, so do crime rates, suggesting climate change will lead to millions of extra offences in the coming decades. However, factors such as better policing may keep a lid on the problem.

The link between temperature and crime has been researched for years, and criminologists agree that warm days see more offences. Nobody is sure why. Snow and closed windows in colder weather may deter some crimes, while warmer weather may increase social interaction and thus the likelihood of some offences. Hotter days may also affect people's physiology, making them more aggressive.

In theory, climate change should make this worse. To find out how much, economist Matthew Ranson of social policy think tank Abt Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studied monthly figures from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports database, which collates crimes recorded by police for nearly 3000 US counties between 1980 and 2009. He combined them with daily weather information to figure out how the rates of crimes vary with the maximum daily temperature.

Ranson then used a mathematical model to predict how climate change would affect crime rates in each county, using his crime-temperature relationships and the average daily maximum temperature changes predicted by 15 climate models. He used a modest climate scenario in which the world warms by 2.8°C by 2100.

The model predicts relatively small increases in crime rates, of 0.5 to 3.1 per cent depending on the type of crime. But that amounts to a lot of extra crimes. Between 2010 and 2099, his model predicts climate change will lead to an extra 22,000 murders, 180,000 rapes, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny and 580,000 vehicle thefts – and that's just in the US.

Fever pitch

"It is a step forward in understanding the relationship between weather and various social phenomena, in this case crime," says Neil Adger of the University of Exeter, UK. He says Ranson's daily weather data allows a fine-grained analysis of social impacts.

However, the relationship between temperature and crime is not entirely settled, says John Simister of Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK, who has studied the link between thermal stress and violence. He favours a linear relationship, but says that some researchers think offending rates will fall once temperatures rise above a particular threshold, perhaps because it is simply too hot to go out. If that's true, the effects of climate change will be less severe than Ranson's model predicts.

The 21st century may not see the increases in crime that Ranson's data predict, says criminologist Ellen Cohn of Florida International University in Miami. Other factors, such as better policing or better rehabilitation, might mean the overall crime rate still falls.

Ranson agrees that the thermal effect on crime is likely to be masked. "There are many other factors that affect crime, ranging from the economy to culture to changes in socio-economic factors," he says. But the iniquitous effects of a warmer world will still be operating in the background. "There has been a strong historical relationship between temperature and crime and that is likely to continue in the future," he says.

"Climate change is going to affect our lives in a variety of ways," says Ranson. "It is going to affect the social fabric of the places where we live."

Journal reference: Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, doi.org/rpj

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The WhatsApp edge: why it was a must-buy for Facebook

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As the dust settles on Facebook's $19 billion WhatsApp takeover, a social networking researcher explains what really lies behind the deal

Now that Facebook has announced it is to buy the popular smartphone messaging platform WhatsApp, much has been made of the sum agreed, even more about might and power and competition rules. It's not what WhatsApp does (or might become) that the commentators are focusing on, but the billions Facebook is shelling out for it. Facebook has become, we are warned, a mighty leviathan of corporate wealth, and this is the proof.

Many ask whether this sort of corporate behaviour will negatively affect the world we live in. After all, the enormous and beneficial impact of the internet is precisely because it allows diversity and creativity; it creates new business possibilities. Is it one of the most successful of these possibilities that will now fund the net's sterilisation?

These concerns, legitimate and proper though they are, miss another question. WhatsApp is a communications technology, so one can understand the logic of Google's rumoured bid – subsequently denied – for it; it would have extended the portfolio of a search-engine enterprise. But surely Facebook has already cornered the market for messaging, via social networking?

What is WhatsApp? It's basically an instant messaging (IM) application: users log on and post text, an image or even a sound file, and this can be accessed immediately by the intended recipients. Only buddies or registered users can participate, so it's all safe and private.

Break with tradition

In some respects, however, WhatsApp is unlike other IM services. Content doesn't disappear when you log out; it lingers like graffiti on a virtual wall. Recipients can see it whenever they log on – it's waiting for them to drop by. It runs on most smartphones, too, so though it looks a bit like BlackBerry Messenger, it is not associated with any specific operating system or mobile network.

But doesn't Facebook offer all this? Can't you download its IM client on to your smartphone and tell your buddies 'what's up' through Facebook? Yes and no. The real distinction with WhatsApp - and the thing that made WhatsApp so appealing to Facebook - is how it is used. And this is in part a result of the way Facebook use has itself has evolved over the years and in part changes in the way we manage friendships digitally.

For many people, Facebook was one of the first social networking sites they used. This was where they first brought their friends together digitally to show and share; this was where they familiarised themselves with the basic grammar of status updates, postings and Likes. Facebook was also the place where they discovered that you can not only bring friends together, but also exclude people. As I noted in my book, Texture: Human expression in the age of communications overload , teenagers soon found that one of the key values of Facebook was that they could exclude mum and dad. If bedroom doors could be opened by nosy parents, access rights could be denied on Facebook.

But just as teenagers learned this, so did parents. Thus, as various anthropologists have pointed out, parents are insisting on access to the accounts of younger family members. And as these rights are gained, so teenagers have realised that they cannot just abandon Facebook altogether. Something has to be there, or else their parents would be suspicious.

Content on Facebook reflects this ebb and flow. What there is can best be described as anodyne - postings that articulate a public profile, tweaked with some intimacies, updates about a new job, say, or a major family event, but little more. And it is not just parents and teenagers who negotiate thus to produce this. It has become an augmented digital Yellow Pages with a personal spin. It's a personalised directory of people in the digital age.

Backing friendship

So what of friendship? Doesn't Facebook still support and enable it? Of course. But the way it does so is not sufficient to really let friendship in fully, and that's the value of WhatsApp.

When asked what they use WhatsApp for, many people will reply, with some embarrassment, that they can't actually say. "Well, it's for my friends. You know with your friends you don't really need to say anything, but we do sort of say something. I mean, it's mostly tosh." They might go further and say that, when using WhatsApp, they don't have to formulate proper sentences either. They can simply say out loud (as it were) what they are thinking, since a friend will understand; they might well be thinking the same thing.

And they might add that they use WhatsApp pretty much all the time. By way of further explanation, they might explain why Facebook doesn't do all they need. "I don't need to put up a status update. My friends know what I am up to; mostly they are doing it with me."

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'Great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled'

(Image: Reuben Tabner/LNP/Rex)

Why try and describe the aurora borealis when I can just nick Philip Pullman's description?

"The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer. Lyra thought she could even hear them: a vast distant whispering swish." (From Pullman's novel Northern Lights).

This aurora was visible over large swathes of the UK last night, from the north of Scotland to as far south as Essex, Gloucestershire and South Wales – the photo above was taken bang in the middle of this range, in Whitley Bay on the country's east coast. Caused when high-energy electrons crash into Earth's atmosphere, the show was particularly intense because of a monster solar flare that erupted from the surface of the sun on 24 February.

The flare was "X-class" – the most powerful kind – and originated from a long-lived sunspot.

The US Space Weather Prediction Center says that further eruptions from the same region are possible.

If you missed it last night, this might partially make up for it: "Time-lapse Tuesday: Ultimate aurora".

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Father of big bang carries its hiss on his cellphone

Video: Recording captures hiss of big bang radiation

Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias accidentally discovered the afterglow of the big bang in 1964. Their now-famous horn antenna, built for Bell Labs in New Jersey, was supposed to be picking up the radio waves emitted by galaxy clusters and supernova remnants. But it recorded a temperature that was 3.5 kelvin hotter than it should have been, no matter where they pointed it.

We now know this was caused by the first photons to be released after the big bang, which still pervade the cosmos as radio waves. These days, Wilson keeps a sound recording of those waves on his cellphone (see video, above), as New Scientist discovered when we interviewed with him last week at a celebration marking half a century since the discovery.

What was your view of the history of the universe before your discovery?

As a graduate student, my one cosmology course was taught by Sir Fred Hoyle, a British astronomer who was a proponent of the big bang's biggest competitor, the steady state theory of the universe. Philosophically, I really liked the steady state theory, with no beginning and no end.

How did it feel when you first found what later turned out to be the big bang's afterglow?It was a big disappointment. The antenna was hotter than it should have been by 3.5 degrees. We spent nine months improving, checking, calibrating, but that 3.5 degree difference was always the same everywhere we looked.

You converted the radio waves your antenna detected into sound waves to help you analyse the data. What does the big bang's afterglow sound like?

[Takes out his phone and hits "play" (see video, above)] This is what it sounded like at the time, though this recording was taken later. About 10 per cent of that noise is from the cosmic microwave background. The rest of it is system noise, unfortunately, but that's the best we could do. Mostly we only listened to it to see if there was radar or something going on – we were not really listening to it.

There's a famous story about pigeons roosting in the antenna. You worried that their droppings could be causing the noise. What happened to the pigeons?

We trapped the pigeons and mailed them to a pigeon enthusiast in New Jersey, but he released them and two days later they were back. So in the interest of science, our technician came in with a shotgun, and that was the end of the pigeons.

That's so sad.

Yes, well, there are lots of pigeons in the world. They aren't endangered.

What did it feel like when you finally realised what you had discovered?

Arno and I were happy to have any explanation at all, but we didn't take the cosmology explanation seriously at first.

When did you realise how important it was?

There was no "aha!" moment. How big a deal it was only became clear after many years. I don't think anyone had a concept of how much information was going to be available from it at that time.

At that time, the US was willing to spend money on basic research, partly thanks to Sputnik. Have things changed?

I see less tendency of the nation to want to support fundamental science. And I think the country should realise that some of the amazing position we're in now is because of basic research that's been done here that doesn't pay off in the first six months, the first year, maybe even the first decade, but eventually it pays off. And I would like to see that continue.

Profile

Robert Wilson is now at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1978, he shared the Nobel prize with Arno Penzias for their discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

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Feedback: All shall have pills

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

All shall have pills

SOME time ago Feedback noticed posters plugging nutritional supplements, exhorting us to buy "his" and "her" pills from Vitabiotics, and shrugged. We started from a sceptical stance on the benefits of supplements, especially for the people who buy them – who probably have a more balanced diet than those who don't. We were more sceptical still when it came to separate pills for women's and men's subtly different recommended daily amounts. One effect of the division would seem to be that twice as many pills would lurk untaken in certain bathroom cabinets, increasing sales.

Recently we have spotted the company promoting a plethora of pregnancy-related pills: Pregnacare® Original, Plus and Max; Pregnacare® Breastfeeding; Pregnacare® New Mum; Pregnacare® Conception; Wellman® Conception; and, for that feeling of togetherness, Pregnacare® His & Her Conception. If there's some kind of quantum limit for this kind of subdivided advertising, they must be approaching it. Perhaps the next step will be a super-specific supplement to be taken only during the hour before conception? Or during?

Tesco supermarket's labelling helpfully informed Geoffrey Thomas that what he had bought was "freezer safe": "Indeed," he says of his ice-cube trays, "I hope so"

Keep taking the tablets

SEARCHING for research on the efficacy of vitamin supplements, Feedback noticed that Vitabiotics references the paper "Effect of multiple-micronutrient supplementation on maternal nutrient status, infant birth weight and gestational age at birth in a low-income, multi-ethnic population", published in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2010. Out of 353 women featured in this study, only 39 per cent reported having taken the specified pills or placebos. In the jargon, they were "compliant" with the study. Among these women there was a statistically significant (small) effect on the size and weight of their babies.

Correlations between birth size and weight, and vitamin and mineral deficiencies – that "nutrient status" – were weak and patchy. Feedback concludes that just taking the pills, or perhaps just reporting "compliantly", had a stronger effect than what was in them. The authors aren't the first to conclude that "further larger studies are required". We wonder whether it's the psychology of compliance that these studies should look into.

Enthusiasm for exercise

GOOD news for those who don't get around to proper exercise. A blog in The New York Times describes a study concluding that "Over all [sic], the data reveal that 'sex can be considered, at times, a significant exercise'." It adds that researcher Antony Karelis therefore believes that sex is worth encouraging in people who otherwise balk at working out.

Ninety-eight per cent of Karelis's volunteers reported that sex felt more fun than jogging. Feedback notes that the study included 21 couples, so that other 2 per cent was one individual.

Determinism of heart health

FEEDBACK thanks the Journal of Improbable Research for alerting us to new research on nominative determinism – the name given by Feedback reader C. R. Cavonius to the phenomenon of people's names appearing to influence their occupation or publishing history (17 December 1994). The latest finding, published in the BMJ's year-end issue, is that among people in Dublin with the surname Brady, "the unadjusted odds ratio for pacemaker implantation [required due to the condition bradycardia] was 2.27 (95% confidence interval 1.13 to 4.57)." Whether changing one's name is protective, we know not.

Improbable Research also alerts us to the existence of hundreds of articles whose authors include a Wong and a Wright – which it dubs "nominative indeterminism".

Nominatively environmental

THE above leads us to break our many resolutions of abjuration and mention David Green of the Clean Energy Council; Paul Collier, author of Why Coal Production Must End; and Terry Marsh, hydrologist.

Thanks to Luke McGuiness, Robin Hanan and Ian Nelson.

Overcrowding in Australia

LOOKING up their phone number on a free public "reverse phone directory", a reader was a little startled to be informed that "In 2006, there were 14,267 persons usually resident" at their address: "51.7% were males and 48.3% were females. Of the total population... 3.7% were Indigenous persons, compared with 2.3% Indigenous persons in Australia." (Digits have been changed to protect the reader's remaining privacy.)

The reverseaustralia.com service went on to list the marital status and religious affiliation of the population of the reader's address. Feedback wonders how much we would have to pay to find out how many of the alleged population of this one house were registered to vote, for whom, how early and how often.

Things we'd rather not know

FINALLY, software that logs our every online interaction – called the "Big Brother engine" by a practitioner of Feedback's acquaintance – is producing more insights into human behaviour, including grisly ones of which we would rather have remained ignorant. For example, Dave Smith sends a screenshot of amazon.com assuring him that those who bought the textbook Gray's Anatomy also bought a slew of other anatomical texts – and black-handled kitchen scissors.

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Sensor backpacks for oysters say when they are happy

IN A pleasant spot on Tasmania's coast, Barilla Bay Oyster Farm has been growing and serving oysters for more than three decades.

But are their oysters as healthy as they can be? The farm is about to find out. Some of the oysters are having sensors the size of credit cards tacked onto their shells.

Farm manager Justin Goc says the information will help him make better decisions. The farm is one of a handful of places that have joined a trial organised by Sense-T, a government-funded project to build a sensor network across Tasmania. The project aims to link up several types of existing sensors, as well as install new ones, to create an agricultural database.

Sensor technology is now sophisticated enough to be able to monitor an oyster's heartbeat. The new sensors will do this, and also track whether the oyster's shell is open, which provides insight into the oyster's feeding habits. It will record how deep in the water the oyster has settled, and what the temperature and light levels are like down there. Meanwhile, separate sensors keep tabs on changes in the water's salinity, and overall temperature and oxygen levels.

All the data can be analysed in real time, so if an oyster's condition changes, it will be possible to search for corresponding changes in the water. For the last six months, Sense-T physiologists have been analysing the sensors' output in the lab to figure out what combination of factors produce the best oyster.

"If we can start to use the data to predict how oysters have grown, that will be useful," says John McCulloch at CSIRO, Australia's national research agency and a partner in Sense-T.

For example, farmers must periodically take oysters out of their baskets to see how much they have grown. This process is time-consuming and disruptive. The hope is that a handful of strategically placed sensors could do the job instead.

Other Sense-T projects aim to make similar improvements with abalone, vineyards and cattle. "It's when you put it all together that the exciting stuff happens," says Ros Harvey, Sense-T director. "We can find better ways to use our resources – how to do more with less."

This article appeared in print under the headline "A happy oyster is a big-data oyster"

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Rule-breaking black hole blows weirdly powerful winds

A black hole in a nearby galaxy is blowing a mighty wind. The black hole is about 100 times the mass of the sun but is causing the emission of millions of times more energy, breaking a long-accepted rule about the way black holes feed. The discovery suggests that even small black holes may play a larger role in galaxy evolution than previously realised.

When black holes consume matter from their surroundings, the incoming gas and dust reach scorching temperatures just before falling in. The hot gas emits powerful "winds" of radiation, and theory has it that the energy in these winds cannot exceed a certain limit tied to the black hole's mass, called the Eddington limit. Winds more powerful than this limit would blow the incoming gas away and halt the black hole's growth – or so we thought.

Recently astronomers have been finding black holes blowing especially powerful jets, and they wondered if they could be breaking the Eddington limit. Roberto Soria of Curtin University in Western Australia and his colleagues have measured the mass of one of these apparent outlaws and found that it does in fact blow stronger winds than its mass should allow. That suggests the Eddington limit is more of a guideline than a rule, says Soria.

Faster feeding

The team found the black hole in a spiral galaxy called the Southern Pinwheel, one of the most-studied galaxies in our cosmic neighbourhood. They observed the bright black hole for over a year, measuring its output in visible light, X-rays and radio waves. The object weighs in at about 100 times the mass of the sun, making it relatively small, but the amount of energy it emits is a few times higher than its Eddington limit.

The black hole's brightness also means that it must have been eating at this extreme rate for at least 10,000 years, says team member Knox Long of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. "There was some question about whether one could exceed the Eddington luminosity on a very short timescale, but that wouldn't be as interesting," he says. "This shows that it's not a transient thing. It has to be pretty persistent."

Some black holes in the early universe grew hundreds of thousands of times more massive than the sun in a shorter time than theoretically possible, so astronomers had previously suggested they were breaking the Eddington limit. The researchers are not yet sure how the black hole in the Southern Pinwheel is breaking the limit, but figuring it out may be key to understanding how those early monstrous black holes grew so big so fast.

And if other bright black holes we see today are also breaking the limit, the objects might have had a bigger impact on the evolution of their host galaxies than previously thought. "We may have underestimated the effect that stellar-mass black holes have on the heating and ionisation of interstellar gas, especially in the early universe," says Soria.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1248759

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Location-aware Wi-Fi lets fans be part of the show

A system for getting Wi-Fi access to every fan at a gig or match gives a whole new meaning to the concept of audience participation. Mexican wave, anyone?

EVERY fan in a packed sports stadium or music venue will soon be able to get bespoke content direct to their phones, thanks to a new wireless system that knows exactly where every person is sitting.

The system, developed by UK start-up Mobbra, will let organisers send football replays, backstage interviews with pop stars, or area-specific food deals direct to fans' phones. It will also encourage the audience to become part of the show.

Mobbra's technology forms part of a new wave of innovation in indoor positioning. For instance, last week, Google unveiled Project Tango – a phone with 3D sensors that can make a quarter of a million measurements every second to capture and map its position and orientation in any environment. This means you will always know where you are. And so will Google, of course. Developers are due to receive their prototype Project Tango phones later this month to see what they can create with this data, such as turning the inside of your house into an augmented reality games world.

Meanwhile, Philips Research Eindhoven in the Netherlands last week launched a system that lets LED lighting in shops transmit position data to an app. Codes hidden in each LED's imperceptible flicker tell the app where the user is and so can steer shoppers to the right goods and, like Mobbra, alert them to special offers.

With Mobbra's system, dubbed Massivity, organisers can take control of fans' phones to create spectacular effects. For instance, the camera flashlight on each phone could be activated remotely, turning the crowd into a glittering star field. Or a team's colours could sweep around the phone and tablet screens in the venue like a Mexican wave. A host of Premier League football clubs in the UK are investigating the technology and it is a strong contender for the in-stadium wireless tech at the 2015 NFL Super Bowl, Mobbra says.

These kinds of applications are possible because Mobbra has found a way to deliver Wi-Fi to every user in a large crowd. A typical wireless access point can supply just 50 connections – so unless a venue can afford to run an access point for every 50 or so people, Wi-Fi is not guaranteed. Even then, simple radio interference can destroy any chance of stadium-wide access. "Some venues are spending millions on conventional Wi-Fi access points and finding it just doesn't work," says Will Walton, Mobbra's founder.

With Massivity, 500 users can log on at each wireless access point. Because Massivity is patent pending, some technical elements of the system are being kept secret. We do know it manages wireless connections in a more intelligent way: such as adding imperceptible delays to each user's internet access, a process known as time sequencing.

In a test, the Mobbra team charged up 1000 Samsung phones and used two Massivity access points to make them all stream and display the same video, vibrate at once and fire their flashes together.

The phone side of the equation is choreographed by an app called Fangage, which tweaks the phone's Wi-Fi settings. It will launch on the Apple and Android app stores later this month. During a game, all phones could vibrate to tell the crowd of a betting opportunity, or a special food and drink offer, says Walton. "You can have four streams of video, which could be replays or goals from other matches that are on at the same time. At gigs you'll get behind-the-scenes news and backstage interviews with the stars."

Health and safety rules mean you can't take a lighter to a concert these days and hold it up, he says. "But we can illuminate all the camera lights to great effect."

"If one seat block has spare hot dogs you can tell just those people they are on offer behind them," Walton says. Mobbra is in negotiations to provide its service to major gig promoter Live Nation, and also to Virgin's V Festival in the UK.

One London-based gig producer, who preferred to remain anonymous, is impressed by the possibilities: "It could turn every phone in the crowd into pixels of a massive screen so you could show pictures too."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Be part of the show"

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Some breastfeeding benefits questioned by US study

Breast is still best, but the long-term benefits of breastfeeding might have been inflated, say researchers who have compared the effects of breastfeeding and bottle-feeding on siblings.

Short-term benefits, such as protection against chest and gut infections, have been clearly demonstrated in previous research and are not being questioned.

But claims that breastfeeding boosts children's IQ and protects against a range of health conditions in later life could have been based on flawed research, suggest Cynthia Colen and David Ramey of Ohio State University in Columbus, who have studied almost 700 US families. Unsurprisingly, their work has been criticised by those who support the promotion of breastfeeding.

Breast milk is more than just food; it contains antibodies and enzymes that fight germs and help babies grow. Research has shown that breastfed babies get fewer chest and gut infections in their first few months of life.

Some studies have also indicated that there are longer-term benefits on intelligence and conditions such as obesity, asthma and eczema.

Selection bias

But these studies relied on comparisons between babies born to different families, leading some people to suspect that other factors – such as income level – could be affecting the result. "Many studies suffer from selection bias," says Colen.

To address this, Colen and Ramey looked at 665 families in the US where one child was breastfed and another bottle-fed. They found that breastfeeding gave no benefits for obesity, asthma, hyperactivity, academic achievement or a child's bond with its parents.

Advice leaflets given to parents often claim the long-term benefits.

On the basis of past research, many healthcare staff also heavily promote breastfeeding to new mothers. In many Western countries, adverts for formula milk are regulated and some hospital maternity wards have policies that discourage bottle feeding.

Some argue that such schemes make women feel guilty if they are unable to breastfeed – or simply choose not to.

Fair test?

Colen and Ramey did not examine the short-term protection against chest and gut infections, because these have been most clearly demonstrated by previous research. Breast is still best, says Colen, but the findings suggest that health systems should put less effort into promoting breastfeeding and more into other ways to help poorer households, she says.

However, Mary Renfrew, who studies mother and infant health at the University of Dundee, says the study was designed too crudely to observe any effects. For instance, babies fed with a mixture of breast and formula milk would still have been classed as breastfed. "It's not a fair test," she says. Renfrew is investigating whether new mothers can be encouraged to breastfeed by paying them with shopping vouchers.

Alison Tedstone, director of diet and obesity for Public Health England, says there is good-quality evidence that "breastfeeding is associated with reduced risk of asthma during early feeding years, although the evidence for later years is not as clear".

Journal ref: Social Science & Medicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.01.027

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Music-making card turns objects into wacky instruments

Video: Music-making card turns objects into instruments

Guitars, trombones and violins are so last century. A device about the size of a credit card lets you transform a plant into a piano or make a glass of water behave like a drum.

Developed by Joseph Pleass and a team at Dentaku design studio in London, the pocket-sized board, called Ototo, combines a synthesiser with twelve touch-sensitive keys arranged like an octave on a keyboard. Conductive objects can be connected to the keys with crocodile clips, allowing you to trigger notes by touching the object. "It uses the same technology as a touchscreen," says Pleass.

The company's Kickstarter campaign has already surpassed its target of £50,000 with a few days to spare. They will soon begin production, ready to ship the first devices in June.

Drainpipe saxophone

Up to four different sensors can also be connected to modify the pitch, loudness and texture of a sound. Blowing into a breath sensor, for example, allows you to modify a tune with the strength of your breath – handy if you fancy making a drainpipe into a saxophone. Other sensors let you use inputs like light, force or swiping motions to control a sound.

The device will enable people to make their own wacky instruments without having to learn how to write code or solder. Compared with systems like Makey Makey, the first product to turn everyday objects into instruments, it has the advantage of being self-contained. "Ours is portable, you don't need to connect it to a computer," says Pleass. However, the system can still be attached to a computer to act as a MIDI controller.

Andrew McPherson of Queen Mary University of London is also developing novel, customisable electronic instruments. He says what makes the self-contained device even more appealing is the fact that it is completely reconfigurable – you can connect it to something different every time you use it. "It's a compelling combination that should let people make creative and intuitive new instruments," he says.

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Today on New Scientist

Spacesuit future looks sleek, speedy and commercial

An astronaut nearly drowned last year when his suit sprung a leak. But sleek skinsuits and high-tech "suitports" are about to transform spacewear

Zoologger: Superfemale mice have secret male DNA

A female mammal that carries a "male" chromosome should struggle to reproduce, but if it is an African pygmy mouse, this offers an unexpected advantage

Europe's law on e-cigarettes sets global benchmark

Tough measures branded "unscientific" make it into law, but ensure e-cigarettes remain a consumer product rather than a medicine

Stunning six-sided snowflakes bloom in slow motion

Watch in mesmerising detail as snowflakes crystallise into unique beauties, their rapid growth caught by a high-speed camera

Tell us what made you happy, win 14 Folio Society books

You could win a bookshelf full of beautifully bound, iconic works of science and natural history simply by telling us what purchase made you happiest

Racial categories aren't hardwired in our minds

Psychologists have shown that people subconsciously identify their peers more strongly by how they work with others than by the colour of their skin

Sharp thinking: How shaping tools built our brains

How did we become the smartest creatures on Earth? The story of our ancestors' mental leaps can be found in stones – a modern-day flint-knapper is our guide

How can you ensure that your life is worth living?

Dramatic advances in communication with people in a minimally conscious state have provoked questions central to our ideas about what makes life worth living

Origin of organs: Thank viruses for your skin and bone

Organs like muscle and skin require genes that slipped into our primordial ancestors' genomes when viruses infected them

Brain zap rouses people from years of vegetative state

People in a vegetative state showed signs of awareness after electric brain stimulation – and minimally conscious people were able to communicate again

Whale graveyard reveals most ancient mass strandings

The oldest and greatest graveyard of extinct marine mammals now sits under a highway in South America – but researchers got access first

Hundreds of mini solar systems found in the Milky Way

More than 700 possible planets found by a NASA telescope have been verified as real, and most live in scaled-down versions of our inner solar system

Quantum electric dewdrops produced for first time

A quantum droplet of an "electric liquid" – a new kind of quasi-particle – can be squeezed from a semiconductor by shooting it with lasers

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Spacesuit future looks sleek, speedy and commercial

NASA has learned the hard way that water is an extra-slippery customer in space. Water leaking around fan blades in a spacesuit life-support system almost caused an astronaut to drown last July, according to a report the US space agency released yesterday.

Thankfully, Luca Parmitano, who was outside the International Space Station when he reported feeling water on the back of his head, abandoned the spacewalk in time and made it back inside. NASA now says the likely cause of the leak was that a water-separation pump became clogged, causing water to back up and flow into the suit's air vents – something its engineers had not anticipated.

The agency also revealed that the same suit had leaked only days before. At the time it was put down to a minor problem with the suit's bag of drinking water, one that posed no barrier to the suit being used again by Parmitano.

The malfunction highlights the complexity of spacesuits, which are much, much more than souped-up clothing. The type of suit Parmitano wore has been in use for 35 years, but now space garb may be on the brink of a transformation. From NASA "suitports" to designs from emerging commercial players, we bring you three things that look set to transform spacewear.

Suitport: Just jump in and spacewalk

(Image: NASA)

Taking into account other cases of spacesuit glitches, NASA is currently honing its next-generation suits, called the Z series. The focus of the first prototype – the Z-1 (above) – is easy dressing and undressing.

Existing suits have soft legs and a hard fibreglass upper body, which are tough to put on and take off. Rather than being worn on and pressurised inside a spacecraft, the Z-1 would be mounted to the outside of the craft. Astronauts would simply slide through a hatch into the back of the Z-1, then close the hatch behind them and spacewalk away.

The technology that makes the Z-1's "suitport" possible also shortens the time it takes for an astronaut to get used to breathing the purer air inside. That means astronauts can more quickly be suited up and ready to explore. De-suiting is also easy: returning explorers would self-dock with the craft and slip back out – especially helpful if things go wrong during a spacewalk, as they did for Parmitano.

Sadly, the suitport won't be headed to the ISS any time soon, as you would have to change the configuration of the station's airlocks to use it, says Philip Spampinato at ILC Dover in Frederica, Delaware, the company working on the Z series for NASA. The Z series is a kind of testbed for several concepts that are being developed in parallel. The first sample of the next in the series, the Z-2, should be delivered to NASA by the end of 2014, says Spampinato. A flight-ready suit won't be ready until 2020 at the earliest.

Indoor suit: Skin me up, Scotty

(Image: NASA-Waldie)

Spacesuits aren't just for spacewalks: they can also help astronauts inside the ISS. Next year the space station should welcome its first "skinsuit" – a sleek spandex affair that looks something like a futuristic wetsuit. Named the Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit (above), it was designed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the support of the European Space Agency.

The skinsuit is meant to squeeze an astronaut to create pressure, mimicking the way Earth's gravity affects the body. The idea is that wearing the suit should counterbalance some of the effects of weightlessness, such as muscle loss and weakening bones.

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have worked on various iterations of such a suit for a decade , and one is finally close to going into space. Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen will try it out when he heads for the ISS in September 2015.

Commercial outfitters: watch this space

We all know that these days, government agencies aren't the only game in space, so will private enterprise shake up spacesuit technology just as it could revolutionise space flight and exploration?

ILC Dover is hoping to share its spacesuit smarts with commercial firms vying to launch astronauts into space, either as tourists or to do work on board space-shuttle replacements, on behalf of NASA. These companies' plans do not include spacewalks, at least in the short-term, so their suit specifications are different. "The commercial guys are only looking for suits that stay inside the vehicle. All they are doing is carrying people up and down, so that's a different beast," says Spampinato.

Commercial space-flight firm SpaceX plans to send astronauts to the ISS using a modified version of its Dragon capsule, which already ferries supplies there. The firm recently posted a job opening for a spacesuit engineer. Spokesperson Hannah Post confirmed the company is developing its own suit, but says it is not ready to share details.

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Origin of organs: Thank viruses for your skin and bone

NEXT time you have a cold, rather than cursing, maybe you should thank the virus for making your skin. Genes borrowed from viruses seem to give cells the ability to grow into tissues and organs, and even reproduce sexually. Without these genes, animals could not have evolved beyond simple blobs of cells.

Our cells often need to fuse with other cells, making big cells with multiple nuclei. They do this with the help of proteins on their outer surfaces that stick the cell's walls together and then break them open, so the insides can mix. This mixing is essential for the production of most organs – such as muscles, skin and bone – and even for reproduction, when eggs and sperm fuse. For instance, fused cells form barriers in the placenta that prevent harmful chemicals crossing into the fetus, and internal tubes like blood vessels are also made of fused cells.

But despite its importance, nobody knows how cell fusion evolved. That is partly because the proteins responsible are hard to spot. Only two types of cell fusion protein have been identified so far. The first was syncytin, found in 2000, which is essential for the formation of the human placenta. The gene for syncytin came from a virus (Nature, doi.org/c53gpz).

Then in 2002, a second protein called EFF-1 was found. It helps form the skin of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans , which biologists often study because it is so simple (Developmental Cell, doi.org/cd7mcf). By 2007 it was clear that EFF-1 was one of a family of similar proteins, called FF proteins, after a similar protein called AFF-1 was also found.

Now Felix Rey of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, has found that the FF family of cell fusion proteins also comes from viruses.

Rey's team figured out the 3D structure of the EFF-1 protein using crystallography and X-ray diffraction – the same kinds of techniques that were used to determine the structure of DNA in the 1950s. The structure of EFF-1 resembles that of a protein made by viruses, and the active part – which does the work of linking one cell to another – is virtually identical. Viruses use the protein to rip open the membrane of a cell, which they can then infect. In the worms, both cells must have the protein before they can fuse, but the protein still works in a similar way. He presented his results at the Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function in Australia last month, and they have been accepted by the journal Cell .

Since EFF-1 is so similar to the viral protein, the gene for it almost certainly came from a virus that infected one of the worm's ancestors, says Rey. That is not unprecedented: the human genome is littered with DNA that slipped in when viruses infected a cell of an ancestor. But few of these bits of code are known to have important functions.

While EFF-1 has only been studied in C. elegans, Rey says many other organisms may use the same protein. Since syncytin is also viral, all the cell fusion proteins found so far are from viruses. Does that mean early animals picked up all these proteins through viral infections?

"That's the gut feeling we have," says Fasseli Coulibaly from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. "It's the most enticing hypothesis but as scientists we need to look into it. If this is true, that's a huge advance."

It is plausible that all cell fusion stems from viral genes slipping into our genome, says Elizabeth Chen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. "But the jury is still out." Right now her team is trying to find the protein responsible for cell fusion in muscle tissue. It is too early to tell if it came from a virus.

The findings so far suggest a pattern, says Rey. If cell fusion proteins came from several sources, you wouldn't expect the first two found to be from viruses.

If viruses really did gift us cell fusion, then they are responsible for complex multicellular life, says Coulibaly. Cells could have clumped together into clusters on their own, but without the ability to fuse they could not have evolved into anything advanced like sponges, let alone humans.

"Before cells can make something like skin or a digestive tract – as soon as you are thinking tissue and organs – usually you need some kind of fusion," says Coulibaly. "If it's proved, it could be a Nobel prize."

Rey goes even further. He speculates that viruses may be responsible for the very existence of multicellular organisms. Viruses come and go between different cells, exchanging genetic information between them. "This makes me think that viruses have contributed enormously to the communication between cells, and to the appearance of multicellular organisms on Earth," Rey says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "No viruses? No skin or bones either"

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