Rare exoplanet alignment set for April Fool's Day 2026

Video: Exoplanets overlap as they cross their star

Planet-watchers, mark your calendars for April Fool's Day, 2026. That's when the next known case of a rare celestial alignment in an alien solar system is due. The event involves two planets overlapping as they cross their star – and has only ever been seen once before.

In 2012, Teruyuki Hirano of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, and colleagues reported the first sighting of this particular alignment. One name coined to describe it was the tongue-twisting exosyzygy: "syzygy" because that means three celestial bodies in a row and "exo" as it happens outside our solar system, as in exoplanet.

The team made the discovery by analysing data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. Before it broke down last year, Kepler spotted exoplanets by watching for a telltale dimming in light as a planet transits, or passes in front of, its star.

When two planets transit at the same time, they block even more of the star's light. If they overlap for a time during the transit, however, there is a momentary increase in brightness because the aligned planets cover less of the star.

Celestial forecast

Hirano's team looked at Kepler observations of KOI-94, a star with four unconfirmed planets, and found one example of this pattern, suggesting two planets had overlapped while transiting the star on 14 January 2010. Since then, the planets have been confirmed and the star has been renamed Kepler-89.

Eclipses of the sun and moon, along with transits of the sun by our planetary neighbours, are noteworthy in themselves, but this is the equivalent of seeing Mercury and Venus transit the sun at the same time – and overlap in the process.

Although there was a recent false alarm around Kepler-51, no similar events have been seen around other stars. That suggests they are very rare, so Hirano's team decided to predict when the next one might occur around Kepler-89.

They analysed the future orbits of the three largest planets – the smallest and nearest to the star had a negligible effect, the team decided – and discovered that the two outermost planets will transit and overlap again on 1 April 2026, for around two hours.

Hints from gravity

Gravitational interactions between the planets could throw a crossing off-course, but the researchers did take these into account and concluded they are very unlikely to do so. But Kepler-89 could have a fifth, as yet unseen planet, that would tug the other two apart. So if the event doesn't happen, that would be a novel indication that a new world might be lurking around Kepler-89.

"Since Kepler was forced to end its original mission, it became difficult for us to refine the system parameters and to search for another unknown planet," says Hirano, who has already circled the date. "I hope to observe but am not sure that I can get an observing time with an appropriate telescope for the whole event."

"I think they did a great job," says Darin Ragozzine of the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, who first suggested looking for such events. "We don't learn anything from the predictions of the model. However, we do know when to point our best telescopes, and that's valuable."

No agreed name

The event is so unusual that there is still disagreement about what to call it. Hirano's team uses "planet-planet eclipse", but that can be confusing because it suggests one planet entirely blocks the other, which isn't the case. "I'm not sure if the term PPE is actually accepted in the community," Hirano says.

Ragozzine coined the term "exosyzygy", but it has yet to catch on. "It may be too late to start retroactively calling these exosyzygies, although it is an awesome name," he says.

Scrabble players might want to take note, given the profusion of high-scoring letters in the word.

Journal reference: The Astrophysical Journal, DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/778/2/185

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Stuff: Goodbye to the disposable age

From self-repairing phones to a weightless collection of digital possessions, the future promises to let us enjoy our belongings without today's drawbacks

EVERYBODY has prized possessions. We collect things obsessively and yet simultaneously worry about the rise of clutter and the global impact of wasted stuff. But can technology offer ways to ease this ambivalent relationship?

Extending the lifespan of objects could help us minimise the guilt of wasted devices. When Dutch designer Dave Hakkens's camera stopped working, he wanted to have it repaired. After all, it was just one part that had worn out – the lens motor. But the manufacturer said it could not be replaced. "Basically, they told me to just get a new camera," he says. "That's how it goes with electronics. We buy it and if one small part breaks we just throw away the entire thing."

It inspired Hakkens to develop "Phonebloks" – a ...

To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

Read More

Five a day is not enough fruit and veg for best health

Forget five a day – you should be aiming for seven or more portions of fruit and veg. So say the authors of a large study, which found that people who ate seven or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day had a lower risk of dying during the seven-year study period than those who ate just five.

We have long known that people who eat more fruit and vegetables tend to live longer, but not why that is or how much is optimal. According to the World Health Organization, people should aim for 400 grams a day, which the UK government translates into five 80-gram portions.

Oyinlola Oyebode of University College London and colleagues looked at data from more than 65,000 adults who had taken part in a large public health survey in England, and linked this to national death records. People were divided into five groups, depending on how many portions of fruit and vegetables the survey showed they had eaten the on the day prior to taking the survey.

In line with other research, those who reported eating more fruit and vegetables were less likely to die of any cause by the end of the study, after an average period of 7.5 years.

Those who ate the most fruit and vegetables – seven or more portions a day – had a 42 per cent lower risk of death than those who ate less than one portion. Those who ate between five and seven portions had a 36 per cent lower risk.

Upping the intake

Based on the findings, Oyebode says there is a need for more initiatives improving access to affordable fruit and veg, so people increase their intake.

But Catherine Collins, a dietician at St George's Hospital in London, says the results may have been biased by the fact that people who eat more fruit and vegetables tend to be more financially well off and have healthier lifestyles in other ways. "I don't think they can totally exclude [such biases] from their data. So it isn't necessarily a causal relationship," she cautions.

Australia already recommends seven portions a day , and breaks that down into two portions of fruit and five of vegetables. In the US the advice is that about half of your plate of food should consist of fruit and vegetables.

The study also showed that vegetables carried more health benefits than fruit. So, should the UK raise recommendations from five to seven?

Good fruit, bad fruit

Such a high target might put unhealthy eaters off altogether, says Collins. But Marion Nestle of New York University says: "This isn't a matter of it being off-putting or not – it is a matter of what the data show."

There are other ways to promote uptake that go beyond portion recommendations, says Oyebode. For instance, working with retailers so that cheaper fruit and vegetables are prominently displayed, and regulating or monitoring school food to ensure that children are exposed to such foods.

The study also suggested that not all sources of fruit are healthy. People who ate canned or frozen fruit had a higher risk of dying by the end of the study – an extra 17 per cent risk per daily portion.

Oyebode says that as it is more common to eat tinned fruit than frozen in the UK, the explanation could be that it often has added sugar. But Collins says that because canned fruit is bought more frequently by those on lower incomes, that might be a statistical anomaly and not a real health effect. It could be that people who eat a lot of canned fruit also eat other processed foods that might be bad for their health.

The study did not explore the mechanisms behind the health benefits of fruit and veg. It could be down to their vitamin and mineral content. Other explanations include the benefits arising from the fibre content of plants.

Journal reference: Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, DOI: 10.1136/jech-2013-203500

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Stop Nicaragua's canal and save thousands of species

A massive canal bisecting Nicaragua would be an ecological disaster, says Jorge Huete-Pérez, who wants the world to intervene before it's too late

You oppose plans for a canal across Nicaragua. What do they entail?

There's not much information. This is a major construction project, crossing from ocean to ocean, but the bill was approved in just three days by the National Assembly. It says the canal could go through any region, but the route preferred by the Chinese company contracted to build the canal seems to be through Lake Nicaragua, the largest lake in Central America.

Why are you and others so concerned?

Environmental impact and economic feasibility studies would take at least a couple years. We haven't seen either, even though Nicaraguan law requires the government to do them before giving consent for any major project. No scientists here were consulted, nor any ethnic communities – whose rights to the land the canal would violate.

What are the arguments in favour of the canal?

The government claims that a major infrastructure project will bring a lot of jobs, and that eventually Nicaragua will be making a lot of money. But they're pulling these numbers out of the air; we haven't seen any data. Our economists say the numbers just don't add up.

Also, a major project like this will need a lot of specialists, which Nicaragua doesn't have. That means bringing in outside professionals. People are worried that this canal will be owned and run by a foreign country. I don't see how that could lift the country out of poverty.

What alternatives are there to improve the economy in Nicaragua?

The lake could be used to export water to other Central American countries, like El Salvador, which has serious drinking water issues. Also, in the past 25 years, Nicaragua's tourism industry has grown to the point that we can compete with countries like Costa Rica. Ecotourism could be a major industry for Nicaragua.

What natural heritage is at risk?

We can say for sure there will be damage to the lake's ecosystems. Lake Nicaragua is an important drinking water reserve, and communities depend on it for fishing. Many species live there, including cichlids, which have been important for studying evolution. On the beaches, there are also nesting sea turtles and as you go inland, many, many species, including jaguars and tapirs. It's not just a few species under threat, but whole ecosystems containing hundreds of thousands of species.

What action are you and others taking?

There were 32 lawsuits filed against the bill, but the government has dismissed them all. So now the Academy of Sciences is trying to organise an independent, multidisciplinary group to study this problem, and we are urgently requesting help from international experts. Caring for the Earth is a responsibility for all of humanity. This problem shouldn't be left for Nicaragua to deal with alone. I'm afraid that the government is going to start digging - perhaps as soon as this December - and nobody will have said anything.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Troubled waters"

Profile

Jorge Huete-Pérez is the director of the Center for Molecular Biology at the University of Central America and the president of the Nicaraguan Academy of Sciences. He is leading opposition to a canal that would bisect the country

• Subscribe to New Scientist and you'll get:


• New Scientist magazine delivered every week


• Unlimited access to all New Scientist online content -
  
  a benefit only available to subscribers


• Great savings from the normal price


• Subscribe now!

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

How climate pain is being spun into corporate gain

Continue reading page |1|2

• Book information


• Windfall: The booming business of global warming by McKenzie Funk


• Published by: Penguin Press


• Price: $27.95

As the Arctic melts, the Russians are eyeing new shipping routes (Image: Jan Vermeer/ Foto Natura/Minden Pictures)

The wolves of Wall Street have got climate change, but at a terrifying cost, reveals Windfall: The booming business of global warming by McKenzie Funk

MY BOOKSHELVES contain several metres of books on climate change. This addition makes many of them seem redundant. It is also by a long way the most readable – and it made me laugh.

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by journalist McKenzie Funk tells the story of the people and corporations trying to profit from climate change. Many of them don't want to halt its progress, they want to bring it on.

Here we meet private fire-fighters in drought-hit Los Angeles, selling their services to insurance companies, Russian shipping lines eyeing new routes opened up by the melting Arctic, Dutchmen rebuilding flooded islands in the Maldives, and manufacturers of snow-making machines selling their products to distressed winter resorts.

They all have an interest in global warming's destructive progress. Funk lays bare their vanities and insanities while also exposing the magic of markets that can profit from anything."I'm interested in climate change as a driver of human behaviour," says Funk. "It's a window into our collective state of mind."

Many environmentalists have been gratified recently to discover that corporations feature climate change in their annual reports, and entrepreneurs make pitches to bankers and hedge-fund managers that read like back-issues of the environmentalists' own doomsday scenarios.

The case seems to be won that climate change, rising population, and declining resources – from metals to water and land – are brewing up an environmental apocalypse. Gordon Gekko and the wolves of Wall Street have finally got climate change.

But not so fast. While greens fear the collapsing ecosystems, rising tides, climate migrations and mega-famines, the corporates and speculators see opportunity. Environmental pain can be corporate gain. In this synthesis of some of his great magazine journalism over a number of years, Funk brings the "booming business of global warming" spectacularly to life.

Some of his climate profit-takers do something useful to stem the problem at source – by building bigger and better wind turbines, for instance. But they are a small minority. Most of the windfalls are elsewhere. Seed companies like Syngenta and Monsanto develop more drought-resistant crops. Engineers ship air-conditioners or seek contracts to build sea walls round coastal cities.

Some of the entrepreneurs take advantage of politicians' desire to "do something", even something as screwy as planting a "green wall" of trees to stop the advancing Sahara desert. Others take advantage of human misery by ferrying climate refugees across the Mediterranean in leaky boats, or by building fences to keep people from fleeing Bangladesh for India.

But much of the potential profit in climate change is coming from the rapacious pursuit of resources that are in diminishing supply thanks to increasing drought and other climate changes.

Investment guru George Soros famously said "farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time". And land-grabbers are following his advice, buying up African farm and pasture land because, well, the world is going to run out of food, isn't it?

Elsewhere, water-grabbers are building dams and sinking wells to corral scarce supplies, or getting into desalination, or playing the water markets in Australia and California. Water is no longer a publicly owned resource for the world, but a highly profitable business. Veolia, the world's largest water company, is busy in 74 countries.

Even insurers win. Twenty years ago, green campaigners heralded insurance companies as the first in the corporate world to flag up concern about climate change. But, as the activists and actuaries shared conference platforms round the world, it has emerged that the insurers are not sweating about future payouts as natural disasters escalate. Instead, they are wearing Cheshire-cat grins as they consider the "pricing power" they gain as scared property owners in flood zones and on cyclone tracks pay up whatever it takes to get cover.

If things get too scary and even the insurance companies take fright, then the big daddy of all profit engines from climate change could be geoengineering. The people who brought cloud-seeding and Star Wars military technology to past generations now want to keep out the sun by throwing sulphate particles into the stratosphere and soak up carbon by dumping iron filings into the oceans.

For them, the worst-case scenario for climate could turn out to be a best-case scenario. For the rest of us, the vision of some Climate Inc mega-corporation, contracted to keep its hands on the planet's thermostat, may be unnerving – unless, of course, you plan on being a shareholder. With money, all can profit.

This, you may say, is how capitalism works. Sure. But it knocks on the head the idea that nobody can escape the dire consequences of rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns; the idea that we all have a vested interest in working together to fix it. Sadly, concludes Funk, that's not how it goes.

Continue reading page |1|2

• New Scientist


• Not just a website!


• Subscribe to New Scientist and get:


• New Scientist magazine delivered every week


• Unlimited online access to articles from over 500 back issues


• Subscribe Now and Save

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Stuff: The psychological power of possessions

We invest emotion and memories in our possessions, giving them deep meaning, but that doesn't necessarily make us happy – it may drive us slightly mad

"HAVE nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." This was a golden rule for those struggling to furnish or redecorate their homes, offered by William Morris, a 19th-century British textile designer.

Insightful as it sounds, Morris's advice turns out to be rather impractical. As we all know, our relationship to the things we own goes far beyond utility and aesthetics. Simply put, we love our stuff. Morris's contemporary, the psychologist William James, had a notion why. Our possessions, he argued, define who we are: "Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw."

As well as being useful, our possessions represent our extended selves. They ...

To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

Read More

Born to chat: Humans may have innate language instinct

People instinctively organise a new language according to a logical hierarchy, not simply by learning which words go together, as computer translation programs do. The finding may add further support to the notion that humans possess a "universal grammar", or innate capacity for language.

The existence of a universal grammar has been in hot dispute among linguists ever since Noam Chomsky first proposed the idea half a century ago. If the theory is correct, this innate structure should leave some trace in the way people learn languages.

To test the idea, Jennifer Culbertson, a linguist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and her colleague David Adger of Queen Mary University of London, constructed an artificial "nanolanguage".

They presented English-speaking volunteers with two-word phrases, such as "shoes blue" and "shoes two", which were supposed to belong to a new language somewhat like English. They then asked the volunteers to choose whether "shoes two blue" or "shoes blue two" would be the correct three-word phrase.

Semantic hierarchy

In making this choice, the volunteers – who hadn't been exposed to any three-word phrases – would reveal their innate bias in language-learning. Would they rely on familiarity ("two" usually precedes "blue" in English), or would they follow a semantic hierarchy and put "blue" next to "shoe" (because it modifies the noun more tightly than "two", which merely counts how many)?

People chose to group the words by semantic hierarchy about three-quarters of the time. They were even more likely to choose phrases like "shoes blue these" over "shoes these blue", in which the word "these" is even less tightly bound to the noun than the numeral. This suggests that the volunteers were consulting an internal hierarchy, not merely learning to invert the word order, says Culbertson.

The finding suggests that our brains learn language in a more complex way than simply working out which words are likely to go together in sequence, says Jeffrey Lidz, a linguist at the University of Maryland at College Park. This should add fuel to the debate over universal grammar. "For people who don't believe in the Chomskyan idea, this will be a challenge," he says.

Not everyone agrees. Our minds tend to group more similar objects in many different domains, says Adele Goldberg, a linguist at Princeton University. In a grocery store, for example, apples are more likely to be next to the oranges than next to the beer. A tendency to group adjectives close to nouns may reflect this general tendency, not any property universal to language in particular, she says.

Nonsense syllables

A second study, also released this week, hints at a second apparently innate facet to language. David Gomez, a neuroscientist at the University of Chile in Santiago, and his colleagues measured blood flow in the brains of 24 newborn infants as they listened to recordings of spoken nonsense syllables. The syllables differed in a linguistic property called "sonority", which describes the consonants that most easily precede and follow one another.

Blood-flow changes revealed that the infants could tell the difference between syllables with well formed sonority, such as "blif", and more poorly formed syllables, such as "lbif", Gomez found. Since the infants had heard little speech in their brief lives, and certainly had never tried to pronounce the syllables themselves, it suggests an innate sensitivity to sonority, says Gomez.

In response to an enquiry from New Scientist, Noam Chomsky said the papers add little evidence to what is obvious. It's like adding a toothpick to a mountain, he said.

Journal references: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1320525111 and 10.1073/pnas.1318261111

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Face map of mixed feelings could help AIs understand us

Is the person in front of you sadly fearful or fearfully angry? Look closely, you should be able to tell from their face.

External expressions of internal feelings have traditionally been studied based on six universally recognised emotions: anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, and surprise. The facial muscles and movements everyone uses to pull these faces are well documented. But we all know our emotional lives are much more complex.

"Why only six? It's such a small number for something so big as emotion," says cognitive scientist Aleix Martinez of Ohio State University in Columbus. "As we all know, humans can produce and feel many more emotions than just these six. The brain just isn't that simple."

Complex emotions

A team led by Martinez has now identified and categorised the facial muscles we use to recreate compound emotions – those made up of pairings of the basic six. The team studied 230 people's faces as they reacted to imaginary scenarios designed to provoke different emotions, and mapped tiny movements such as whether they raised their cheeks or if the corners of the mouth went up or down. They found 15 compound emotions that almost all participants expressed using the same facial muscles.

(Image: The Ohio State University)

Although these expressions had components of the expressions that characterise the basic six emotions, they were distinct enough from each other, and from the basic six, to be recognised as separate by a computational model of face perception. For example, "happily disgusted" (right hand image) included muscle movements that people use when they are both happy (left) and disgusted (central).

"All the expressions were consistently and similarly produced across our test subjects. That was a real shock," says Martinez.

Though others have suggested additional emotions beyond these six – contempt, embarrassment, or pride, for example – this is the first time compound emotions have been rigorously categorised.

"Researchers have always known that emotions can be shown as blends," says Jessica Tracy, who studies emotion and non-verbal expression at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "But not much research has looked at what these mean, how they're interpreted, what function they serve, or whether they reliably occur."

However, Tracey says that more evidence is needed to demonstrate whether observers reliably recognise displays of these compound emotions, or if people reliably display them in the expected circumstance.

More perceptive computers

Daniel McDuff, an affective computing researcher at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says determining the universality of more complex emotional expressions would be useful in his work, where his team use webcams to monitor a viewer's response to an advertisement or a political debate. "This research could certainly feed into computer vision algorithms," he says. Many of them use the same facial muscle movements as Martinez's study to determine expressions.

You could go even further than these categories, he suggests. It might be useful, for example, to be able to determine when a user or viewer is frustrated.

Martinez says the work could also broaden out behavioural and brain imaging studies. These have traditionally been based on the six basic emotion categories but that's not enough, he says. "If we want to understand the cognitive processes in the brain, we need to understand how compound emotions look in both behaviour and in brain scans, and how they influence our decision-making."

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1322355111

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Yum, Lego… Human babies born to move hands to mouth

Don't blame baby for trying to eat that Lego piece. Humans may have a brain circuit dedicated to grabbing stuff and putting it in our mouths, and it probably develops in the womb.

Researchers and parents alike have long known that babies stick all manner of things in their mouths from very early on. Some fetuses even suck their thumbs.

As putting something in the mouth seems advanced compared to the other, limited actions of newborns, Angela Sirigu of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences in Bron, France, and colleagues wondered whether the behaviour is encoded in the brain from birth.

To investigate, they studied 26 people of different ages while they were undergoing brain surgery. The researchers found that they were able to make nine of the unconscious patients bring their hands up and open their mouths, just by stimulating a part of the brain we know is linked to those actions in non-human primates.

Brain pudding

Because this behaviour is encoded in the same region as in other primates, it may be there from birth or earlier, the researchers say. If it was learned, you would expect it to involve multiple brain areas, and those could vary between individuals.

Newborn kangaroos are able to climb into their mother's pouch and baby wildebeests can run away from lions, but our babies appear helpless and have to learn most complex actions. The new work suggests that the way our brain develops is more like what happens in other animals than previously thought.

"If you've ever looked at a newborn primate's brain or a baby's brain, it's surprising that they work at all," says Jon Kaas, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who previously investigated the brain region responsible for hand-to-mouth motions in non-human primates. "The neurons aren't mature and the consistency of the brain is sort of like pudding. But some things have to work right away."

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1321909111

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Today on New Scientist

Super-submersible Alvin dives again after refit

The iconic crewed deep-sea sub that explored the wreck of the Titanic and discovered hydrothermal vents is back in action after a massive overhaul

Magnetic bricks beam 3D objects into your screen

GaussBricks lets you build shapes on your tablet that turn into digital drawings or make objects that interact with video games

Japan ordered to stop Antarctic 'scientific' whaling

The Japanese whaling programme in the Antarctic has been ruled invalid by the International Court of Justice

Stuff: The first things humans owned

How did humans evolve to be so materialistic? We've dug into the archaeological record for the earliest examples of possessions

Biology doesn't justify gender divide for toys

There is concern at the increasing segregation of toys and books for boys and girls. Is there any scientific justification, asks psychologist Cordelia Fine

World must adapt to unknown climate future, says IPCC

The new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change steps back from exact predictions, and focuses on how to survive unpredictable changes

How climate change will affect where you live

The new IPCC report spells out how climate change will affect regions of the world – here's our guide to the main impacts this century, and some coping tips

Stuff: The bare necessities, then and now

What is the smallest set of things that we need in a modern consumer society? Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller delves for insights

Stuff: Humans as hunters and mega-gatherers

How did we evolve from indigent apes with no possessions into hoarding humans with more stuff than we can track? Our urge to accumulate has deep roots

Battle-hardened oyster may help toughen combat shields

Nanoscale layers in the shells of windowpane oysters could inspire see-through shields and visors that can take multiple bullet hits without shattering

Obesity linked to our ability to digest carbohydrates

Having fewer copies of a gene that helps our bodies digest the starch found in carb-rich foods has been linked to obesity

Second skin diagnoses symptoms then delivers drugs

A smart patch that can be worn on the wrist could detect symptoms of Parkinson's disease or epilepsy and even deliver drugs

Our stuff: Why it's human nature to own things

How did ownership evolve? And what does a modern human actually need? Join New Scientist as we take stock of our ambivalent relationship with possessions

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Super-submersible Alvin dives again after refit

(Image: Chris Linder, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Call it the Joan Rivers of deep-sea submersibles: Alvin has had a longer career than most, but then it's had a lot of work done.

Last week, the veteran research submersible passed the field trials for its latest refit, which took three years and $42 million. Alvin is pictured here being recovered after one such test: its new, more dextrous robotic arms are cradling a basket of instruments, and its three front viewport "eyes" offer a better view than the previous single forward-facing viewport.

The trials took place in the Gulf of Mexico, where Alvin's next mission will investigate the effects of the horrific oil spill four years on.

Alvin was built in 1964, and since then it has discovered the first hydrothermal vents in 1977, found the remains of the USS Thresher nuclear submarine, explored the wreck of the Titanic and revealed a lost city of volcanic vents.

Read more about the mysteries of the deep oceans, from strange sea creatures to extreme new medicines, in our deep sea topic guide.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Magnetic bricks beam 3D objects into your screen

Video: Magnetic bricks beam 3D objects into your screen

Lego constructions can now go beyond the physical and join forces with their digital counterparts. Using magnetic Lego-like bricks, you can now build shapes on your tablet that turn into digital drawings or make objects that interact with video games, for example by creating a real paddle that can deflect graphical balls in the game Pong (see video).

Developed by Rong-Hao Liang from the National Taiwan University in Taipei and his colleagues, the system is called GaussBricks – in homage to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the German scientist who gave his name to the unit of measurement of magnetic flux.

A grid of sensors, attached to the back of a tablet, tracks the magnetic field around an arrangement of bricks. An algorithm uses this information to recreate the shape of the bricks in digital form and display it on the screen. "It's like an X-ray camera that can see through the tablet, detecting magnets on or above the display," says Liang.

Using different types of bricks lets you create a range of designs. Basic bricks have two styles of joints, allowing a block either to be locked to a neighbour or to bend freely. If you use more sophisticated bricks with motorised joints you can build a mechanically responsive structure, and conductive coatings can let bricks respond like a touchscreen. "We created a virtual pet where caressing the surface of the cat changes its facial expression," says Liang.

Let's get physical

Having a physical structure to play with provides a more natural way of interacting with a tablet. "We live in a physical world where we grasp physical things," says Liang. Giving users the same ability for virtual displays helps focus their attention, he says, potentially making educational programmes or virtual therapy, for example, more effective.

The team is working on tablet versions of popular board games that incorporate the bricks with augmented reality, and hopes that others will be inspired to experiment with the system. "We are trying to make the project open source," says Liang. "We hope that other engineers and designers will come up with new uses for the technology to bring it beyond the lab and make a real impact."

Yon Visell, who researches touch-based technologies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, thinks GaussBricks looks like a lot of fun. "In the next years, we'll see more and more toys and games that are able to mix the physical and digital worlds in evocative ways," he says, such as the Anki Drive game, an iPhone-powered racing game that uses real toy cars.

GaussBricks will be presented in April at CHI 2014, an international conference on human-computer interaction in Toronto, Canada.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Japan ordered to stop Antarctic 'scientific' whaling

Japan's scientific whaling programme in the Antarctic is not "for purposes of scientific research", and therefore must stop. That is the ruling by the International Court of Justice, the highest United Nations court, today in The Hague, the Netherlands.

Australia was suing Japan over the issue of commercial whaling, which is banned under the international whaling treaty of 1986. Japan insisted its whaling activities were carried out to gain scientific understanding of whale stocks needed to resume whaling, which is legal under the treaty. Both countries say they will abide by today's judgement. There is no appeal.

The court did not rule whether the whales, whose meat is sold to cover the costs of the hunt, were caught commercially or not. But it cited evidence – supported by Japan's own expert witness – that catch sizes were not set to meet scientific objectives. Rather, said court president Peter Tomka, a desire for certain catch sizes seemed to have determined the scientific plan, "rather than the other way around".

Now the whales – and the whaling treaty – may depend on what Japan does next. Statements by Japanese officials during the hearings suggested THAT Japan might leave the International Whaling Commission – the body governing world whaling. That might irrevocably weaken global protection of whales.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Biology doesn't justify gender divide for toys

There is concern at the increasing segregation of toys and books for boys and girls. Is there any scientific justification, asks the author of Delusions of Gender

Caught on camera in the "pink aisle" of a US toy store, 5-year-old Riley posed a multi-billion dollar question: "Why does all the girls have to buy pink stuff, and all the boys have to buy different coloured stuff?"

Her impassioned critique of profit-boosting gendered toy marketing has been viewed over 4 million times on YouTube. She isn't a lone voice. Campaigns such as Let Toys Be Toys in the UK have also expressed frustration at the way manufacturers and shops have increasingly restricted the interests of girls to the narrow domain between the twin pink pillars of femininity – being caring and being pretty – while the broader, "different coloured" terrain is for boys.

The campaign group has recently expanded its focus to include books, after the publication of titles such as The Brilliant Boys' Colouring Book and The Beautiful Girls' Colouring Book. It argues that, if the purpose of books is "opening minds and hearts… broadening horizons", such titles do the opposite.

In a recent UK parliamentary debate, politicians Jenny Willott, Elizabeth Truss and Chi Onwurah also expressed concern that the "pinkification" of toys for girls was contributing to gender inequality in careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Willott, for instance, drawing on a fundamental tenet of early education, observed that "children learn through play; it's how they develop skills and interests".

But the detrimental effects of this kind of marketing, though clearly only one factor in a mix of many influences on the young, may run broader and deeper. It polarises children into stereotypes. It's not just that vehicles, weapons and construction sets are presented as "for boys", while toys of domesticity and beautification are "for girls". Toys for boys facilitate competition, control, agency and dominance; those for girls promote co-operation and nurturance. These gender stereotypes, acquired in childhood, underlie a host of well-documented biases against women in traditionally masculine domains and roles, and hinder men from sharing more in the responsibilities and rewards of domestic life.

Relentless stereotyping

True, there is no research drawing links between gendered marketing of toys and books and later occupational discrimination or sharing of household chores. But the smart money would wager that the effects won't be trivial, given that children are enveloped in some of the most relentless stereotyping to be found in the 21st century.

A common rebuttal to movements towards more gender-neutral marketing, of the sort recently promised by Marks & Spencer, for example, is that what we see on the shelves reflects "innate" sex differences. Even monkeys, we are told, have gendered toy preferences, and there are no sexist toy ads in monkey society.

Newborn boys and girls, untouched by the forces of gender socialisation, supposedly show stereotypical preferences for looking at hanging mobiles versus faces, respectively. And, we are told, girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in utero, prefer "boy toys".

But these findings are far less compelling than they appear. For instance, if the preference of female rhesus monkeys for stuffed animals shows that love of dolls is "innate" in girls, what do we make of the fact that the favourite toy of male vervet monkeys was a stuffed dog, which they played with more than a third longer than a toy car?

Recent experiments, more methodologically rigorous than the much-cited mobiles versus faces newborn study, found no sex differences in the preferences of babies for looking at objects versus faces. Both preferred the latter to an equal extent. And girls with CAH – born with atypical or masculinised genitalia, who undergo intensive medical and psychiatric intervention and have physical characteristics inconsistent with cultural ideals of feminine attractiveness – may be more willing to play with "boy toys" because of unconsidered effects of the treatment on their psychosexual development, rather than because their brains have been "wired for wheels".

Self-socialisation

Existing scientific understanding simply doesn't support the view that gender-neutral toys or books are, at best, a pointless railing against nature or, at worse, politically correct meddling with children's "true" natures. Social experience isn't something that interferes with the emergence of a child's "real", underlying design. It is an integral part of the construction, step by step, of a child's developmental pathway – final destination uncertain.

Moreover, developmental psychologists have found that children are very aware of the importance placed on the social category of gender, and highly motivated to discover what is "for boys" and what is "for girls". Socialisation isn't just imposed by others; a child actively self-socialises. Once a child realises (at about 2 to 3 years of age) on which side of the great gender divide they belong, the well-known dynamics of norms, in-group preference and out-group prejudice kick-in.

When Riley's adult companion makes the common mollifying observation that, "If boys want to buy pink they can buy pink, right?", he's only right in the way that it's technically correct to say that men can wear dresses to work, if they want.

Gendered toy and book marketing doesn't create gender stereotypes, roles and norms, but it does reinforce them. It may be profitable to corporations, but there is a social cost – and science offers no moral comfort that there is a biological justification.

Why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff? Let's keep asking.

Cordelia Fine is a senior research fellow at the Melbourne School of Psychological Science and associate professor at Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne. She is author of Delusions of Gender: The real science behind sex differences (Icon Books)

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

How climate change will affect where you live

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change spells out how climate change will affect each part of the world, and what can be done about it. For many regions the IPCC only makes vague predictions, and in some cases the impacts are deeply uncertain.

Here is our rough guide to the main impacts this century, and some tips for coping with them. It is partly based on draft versions of the report's many chapters, the final text of which will be released within the next two days.

Europe: The south will fry

The Mediterranean looks to be the most threatened part of Europe, because the IPCC expects "multiple stresses and systemic failures due to climate change".

Energy demand will drop in the rest of Europe, but the increased need for cooling around the Mediterranean will drive up energy costs. Tourism, a key industry, will take a hit from 2050, when holidaymakers are expected to choose northern destinations. Forest fires and heatwaves will increase, crops and vineyards will become less productive, fishery production will decrease and rising seas pose a growing threat.

To adapt, people will need to use energy-efficient cooling technologies to reduce energy demands; insure their assets; plant more diverse crops; and build early warning systems and hard walls to defend against floods.

North America: Shifting water

Rain and storms will move northwards, flooding areas north of New York and leaving southern areas short of water. Mexicans will have to do everything they can to preserve water and escape the heat.

Adapting to water deficits is not too hard: the key is increased efficiency. But extra flooding is more problematic, with total costs expected to increase tenfold this century.

The US has the capacity to adapt, but is struggling with misinformation and a lack of political will. Nevertheless, New York is on the right path, raising infrastructure like boilers out of the way of expected floods and trying to capture flood water before it reaches sewers.

Asia: Too much water, too little water

Sea-level rise is the biggest problem facing Asia. Globally, the majority of the people directly affected will be in southern and eastern Asia.

But that is not the only problem. Water scarcity will affect most of Asia, and higher temperatures will lower rice yields in some areas by shortening the growing season. Food production in Russia is under particular threat, and the IPCC estimates that up to 139 million people could face food shortages at least once a decade by 2070.

Countries will need to manage water better: water-saving technologies in irrigation may help. Growing crops that cope with high temperatures can boost yields up to 15 per cent, offsetting much of the almost 20 per cent decline expected by 2100.

Australasia: Extreme unknowns

There is a lot of uncertainty about impacts in Australasia, but some things are clear.

More extreme rainfall and rising sea levels will increase the frequency of devastating floods like those that hit Queensland in 2011. People in some areas will have to move away.

Extreme heat will increase and threaten lives, particularly those of the sick and elderly, and also cause more wildfires.

The Great Barrier Reef will continue to degrade, with warmer and more acidic water bleaching more coral, and greater stress coming from factors like agricultural run-off.

Coping with all this requires early warning systems and response plans. But there is huge uncertainty about how rainfall patterns will change. It may be best to plan for the worst.

Africa: Struggling to cope

The big issue for Africa is food security. Crops and livestock will be affected by flooding, drought and shifts in the timing of rainfall and temperature, but where and how these impacts will be felt is uncertain. There will also be more soil erosion from storms, plus pest and disease outbreaks due to warmer temperatures.

Africa has little capacity to adapt. One of the most pressing problems is simply spreading the word about climate change so people can make informed decisions.

Central and South America: Changing norms

Northern Brazil may lose 22 per cent of its annual rainfall by 2100, while the region around Chile could get a 25 per cent increase.

The drying regions will face food shortages. In northern Brazil, that will affect some of the poorest people. Shrinking glaciers in the Andes also threaten water supplies for some people, and will increase tensions.

Climate change will also bring new diseases to many areas, including water-borne diseases like cholera.

The whole region is relatively poor so will struggle to adapt. The first step is to adapt to the current climate. That includes easing poverty and creating early warning systems for disease outbreaks and bad weather.

Small islands: Sinking and eroding

Unsurprisingly, sea-level rise is one of the biggest threats for small islands, including those in the tropics, the Mediterranean, off Africa, and in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Rising waters will swamp some areas, erode coasts and contaminate sources of fresh water.

Building sea walls can have mixed results. In Barbados, building them protected human assets but led to more erosion elsewhere on the coast. It is sometimes better to use "soft" measures like increasing coastal vegetation to reduce erosion.

If islands are near coral reefs, the inhabitants often rely on the reef ecosystems for their livelihood. Reefs are now threatened by warm seas and acidification. But reducing other pressures, like water pollution and destructive fishing, could help.

Read more: "World must adapt to unknown climate future, says IPCC"

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

World must adapt to unknown climate future, says IPCC

Continue reading page |1|2

There is still great uncertainty about the impacts of climate change, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released today. So if we are to survive and prosper, rather than trying to fend off specific threats like cyclones, we must build flexible and resilient societies.

Today's report is the second of three instalments of the IPCC's fifth assessment of climate change. The first instalment, released last year, covered the physical science of climate change. The new report focuses on the impacts of climate change and how to adapt to them. The third instalment, on how to cut greenhouse gas emissions, comes out in April.

The latest report backs off from some of the predictions made in the previous IPCC report, in 2007. During the final editing process, the authors also retreated from many of the more confident projections from the final draft, leaked last year. The IPCC now says it often cannot predict which specific impacts of climate change – such as droughts, storms or floods – will hit particular places.

Instead, the IPCC focuses on how people can adapt in the face of uncertainty, arguing that we must become resilient against diverse changes in the climate.

Here New Scientist breaks down what is new in the report, and what it means for humanity's efforts to cope with a changing climate. A companion article, "How climate change will affect where you live", highlights some of the key impacts that different regions are facing.

What has changed in the new IPCC report?

In essence, the predictions are intentionally more vague. Much of the firmer language from the 2007 report about exactly what kind of weather to expect, and how changes will affect people, has been replaced with more cautious statements. The scale and timing of many regional impacts, and even the form of some, now appear uncertain.

For example, the 2007 report predicted that the intensity of cyclones over Asia would increase by 10 to 20 per cent. The new report makes no such claim. Similarly, the last report estimated that climate change would force up to a quarter of a billion Africans into water shortage by the end of this decade. The new report avoids using such firm numbers.

The report has even watered down many of the more confident predictions that appeared in the leaked drafts. References to "hundreds of millions" of people being affected by rising sea levels have been removed from the summary, as have statements about the impact of warmer temperatures on crops.

"I think it's gone back a bit," says Jean Palutikof of Griffith University in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, who worked on the 2007 report. "That may be a good thing. In the fourth [climate assessment] we tried to do things that weren't really possible and the fifth has sort of rebalanced the whole thing."

So do we know less than we did before?

Not really, says Andy Pitman of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It is just more rigorous language. "Pointing to the sign of the change, rather than the precise magnitude of the change, is scientifically more defensible," he says.

We also know more about what we don't know, says David Karoly at the University of Melbourne. "There is now a better understanding of uncertainties in regional climate projections at decadal timescales."

"If your system is vulnerable to the total amount of rainfall, I kind of think we're getting to know that," says Pitman. "If however your system is vulnerable to the timing of rainfall, that's hard. If your system is vulnerable to the intensity of rainfall, that is very hard."

Are we less confident about all the impacts of climate change?

Not quite. There are still plenty of confident predictions of impacts in the report – at least in the draft chapters that were leaked last year, and which are expected to be roughly the same when they are released later this week. These include more rain in parts of Africa, more heatwaves in southern Europe, and more frequent droughts in Australia (see "How climate change will affect where you live"). It also remains clear that the seas are rising.

How do we prepare in cases in which there is low confidence about the effects of climate change?

That's exactly what this report deals with. In many cases, the uncertainty is a matter of magnitude, so the choices are not hard. "It doesn't really matter if the car hits the wall at 70 or 80 kilometres an hour," says Karoly. "You should still wear your seat belt." So when it comes to sea-level rise or heatwaves, the uncertainty does not change what we need to do; build sea walls, use efficient cooling and so forth.

But in some cases – such as African rainfall, which could go up or down – the models are not giving us great advice, so all we know is that things will change. "We are not certain about the precise nature of regional change, but we are absolutely certain there are going to be profound changes in many regions," says Pitman.

Continue reading page |1|2

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Stuff: The bare necessities, then and now

What is the smallest set of things that we need in a modern consumer society?

ON SOCIAL media site Instagram, thousands of people in the US post photos with the hashtag #edc, meaning "everyday carry". These show the tools, weapons and accoutrements that they haul around day in, day out. Men also show off the contents of their pockets through #pocketdump (currently 17,900 photos), whereas women tend to favour #whatsinmybag (25,450 photos).

The core stuff is remarkably similar for both groups. Those possessions we keep closest on a daily basis have a special practicality, concreteness, intimacy and symbolic importance. As the tool-making species, we are what we carry. And what we carry might offer a guide to what we really need, stripped of the clutter of overconsumption.

For an evolutionary psychologist like me it is natural to wonder if we can link our everyday stuff to that of our distant ...

To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

Read More

Stuff: Humans as hunters and mega-gatherers

How did we evolve from indigent apes with no possessions into hoarding humans with more stuff than we can track? Our urge to accumulate has deep roots

WHEN I moved house recently, I was overwhelmed by the number of boxes containing my family's possessions. It made me feel quite sick.

Even so, I couldn't bring myself to throw any of it out. Possessions define us as a species; a life without them would be barely recognisable as human. Without clothes, a roof over my head, some means of cooking and a supply of clean water, I couldn't survive at all. I struggle to imagine living without a bed, a bath, towels, light bulbs and soap – let alone indulgences and luxuries, and all those objects with sentimental value.

Our closest living relatives make do with none of this. Chimps employ crude tools and build sleeping nests, but abandon them after ...

To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

Read More

Second skin diagnoses symptoms then delivers drugs

Why wait for the doctor to see you? A smart patch attached to your skin could diagnose health problems automatically – and even administer drugs.

Monitoring movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease or epilepsy relies on video recordings of symptoms and personal surveys, says Dae-Hyeong Kim at the Seoul National University in South Korea. And although using wearable devices to monitor the vital signs of patients is theoretically possible, the wearable pads, straps and wrist bands that can do this are often cumbersome and inflexible.

To track the progression of symptoms and the response to medication more accurately would require devices that monitor cues from the body, store recorded data for pattern analysis and deliver therapeutic agents through the human skin in a controlled way, Kim says.

So Kim and his team have developed an adhesive patch that is flexible and can be worn on the wrist like a second skin.

Hot stuff

The patch is 1 millimetre thick and made of a hydrocolloid dressing – a type of thin flexible bandage. Into it they embedded a layer of silicon nanoparticles. These silicon nanomembranes are often used for flexible electronics, and can pick up the bend and stretch of human skin and convert these into small electronic signals. The signals are stored as data in separate memory cells made from layers of gold nanoparticles.

The device could be used to detect and treat tremors in people who have Parkinson's disease, or epileptic seizures, says Kim. If these movements are detected, small heaters in the patch trigger the release of drugs from silicon nanoparticles. The patch also contains temperature sensors to make sure the skin doesn't burn during the process.

For now it relies on an external power source, but it could be powered by other devices worn on the wrist, such as a watch, says Kim. Similar devices in future might be powered by the wearer's movements.

Wearable skin

Kim thinks the device is about five years away from being used in healthcare. But Alexandra Porter at the London Centre for Nanotechnology at Imperial College London is not convinced. "This is a nice device as it combines a sensor with a therapeutic as a 'wearable skin'," she says, but it still has a long way to go – especially with regards to the drug administration.

Kim says that there are ointment-like drugs available that have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration that would work with the device. But according to Porter, even if the drugs do cross the skin and get into the bloodstream, for Parkinson's disease they would need to reach the brain, and cross the blood-brain barrier, which most drugs cannot do.

Ijeoma Uchegbu a pharmaceutical neuroscientist at University College London says the device is a "remarkable feat of engineering", but agrees that finding the right drugs to cross the skin might be a limitation. Instead, she says, it could be developed as an implantable device for cardiac patients. "All in all it's a formidable effort," she says.

Journal reference: Nature Nanotechnology, DOI: 10.1038/NNANO.2014.38

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Obesity linked to our ability to digest carbohydrates

"I'm off the carbs" is a familiar refrain among dieters. But could this approach to losing weight be more beneficial to some people than others?

That's the implication of research suggesting that obesity may be linked to how our bodies digest the starch found in carbohydrate-rich foods like bread, rice and potatoes.

When we eat, an enzyme in saliva called salivary amylase kick-starts digestion by breaking down some of the starch found in carbohydrates into sugars. This enzyme is produced by the gene AMY1.

It's an unusual gene, in that people can have multiple copies of it, unlike most genes where there are just two. The more copies you have, the more enzyme you produce. One theory is that humans evolved to carry more copies of the gene as our diets shifted towards carbohydrate-rich foods.

Gene shortlist

Mario Falchi at Imperial College London and colleagues compared the genome sequences of a group of siblings where one was overweight, the other lean, and drew up a shortlist of genes which might help explain the difference. AMY1 topped the list.

Next, they studied a separate group of 5000 people from France and the UK and found that people with fewer than four copies of the gene were around eight times more likely to be obese than those with more than nine copies of the gene.

This suggests that people who are good at breaking down starch into sugars are less likely to be obese. However, why this should be the case isn't clear from this study as it doesn't take into account the amylase produced by the pancreas, says Falchi.

"It is possible that the effect of the salivary amylase genes isn't directly influencing the digestion of carbs and how much energy we get from them," he says. "It could be through more complex mechanisms such as influencing signalling pathways, or changing the gut microbiota."

Further studies to pull apart the mechanism are already underway.

Journal reference: Nature Genetics, DOI: 10.1038/ng.2939

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Battle-hardened oyster may help toughen combat shields

Video: Mollusc shells take a beating without shattering

Mighty molluscs with transparent shells could help protect soldiers in battle. Analysis of oyster shells shows how they can take repeated beatings without shattering, perhaps inspiring tougher combat armour.

Current transparent shields and visors are made from laminated glass, which fractures if it takes a bullet. That makes it hard to see through and vulnerable to breaking with a second hit, says Christine Ortiz at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Right now, once they're shot, that's it," she says. "So any sort of transparent armour that has multi-hit capability but can also stop penetrations would be of interest."

In nature, many creatures use transparent shells for camouflage, which can survive repeated attacks from predators. "If you just hit the shell and it fell apart, the whole animal would be dead," says Ortiz.

Damage limitation

So Ortiz and her team studied the nanoscale structure of shells of the windowpane oyster, which are made of 99 per cent calcite mineral. Pure calcite crystals shatter easily, but the oyster shell is organised in thin layers that shift orientation when stressed, confining damage to shallow craters and stopping fractures spreading (see picture, above right).

While natural shells would not stop a bullet, finding a way to create such nano-layers in military-grade ceramics could one day help build better transparent shields, says Ortiz.

"This work is fascinating, but the real punch line is if you could actually make a material," says Robert Ritchie at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, whose team made a material based on mother-of-pearl in 2008.

Constructing such materials with ceramics is challenging, because right now the temperatures needed to harden the ceramics will destroy the polymers used to slide in between them and create layers. "It's feasible, but it will be very difficult."

Journal reference: Nature Materials, DOI: 10.1038/nmat3920

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Zoologger: Sex in the city no lure for urban owls

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world

Species: Athene cunicularia

Habitat: Old mammal burrows throughout North and South America

What's out of sight is out of mind. It's perhaps not surprising that relatively rare predatory birds like owls are faithful to their sexual partners. After all, if they don't come into contact with many other owls, any temptation to stray would be easier to resist.

For one species of owl, though, the lure of a different sexual partner can be just a few steps away. The burrowing owls of Argentina have embraced town life, nesting in large numbers in urban areas near cities including Bahía Blanca. While owl nests in rural areas can be separated by as much as 15 kilometres, urban nests may be little more than 10 metres apart. So do urban owls stay faithful, like their country cousins?

Burrowing owls get their name for their tendency to set up home in abandoned mammal burrows – the only owl known to do so. They stand a little over 20 centimetres tall, on a pair of strikingly long legs. Those come in handy during hunts, during which the owls often run down insects and small mammals on foot rather than swooping on them from above. These are not your typical night owls either: they are often active during the day, feeding at dawn or dusk.

Urban migration

Burrowing owls are found throughout the Americas, although northern populations are dwindling as their preferred grassland habitats are being destroyed by human activity. In South America, the owls are still common, and recently they have begun moving into urban areas.

In 2011, Martina Carrete and José Tella of the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, found out that the owls' larger brains appear to lead to more behavioural variation within the species, with owls that are less fearful of humans being the ones most likely to live in urban environments around Bahía Blanca.

We know that urban life can also influence the sex lives of birds. For example, blackbirds exposed to the bright lights of the city instead of rural darkness develop to sexual maturity earlier. Curious to see whether there were any effects on the sexual behaviour of urban owls, the team returned to Argentina.

Faithful partners

Over six consecutive breeding seasons the team captured and took blood samples from a total of 1100 owls – both chicks and adults – from 61 urban and 7 rural nests. Genetic analyses showed that all rural chicks were the offspring of the two adults looking after the nest.

Despite the urban owls' greater opportunity to stray, the same applied in urban settings too, even though birds in other species are known to cheat on their partner when population density increases. Only in one case were the chicks not related to the adult male looking after the nest. Either female owls only have eyes for their partners, or male owls in urban settings watch their partners very carefully, the researchers conclude.

Dieter Lukas at the University of Cambridge, who studies the evolution of monogamy in mammals, thinks the results make sense. "While differences in breeding density are likely to directly affect changes in the social behaviour, mating behaviour is likely affected by a number of additional factors," he says. "For example, for some species of birds it has been suggested that the need for paternal care might constrain both partners to remain faithful even if [population] densities change."

Paternity question

Peter Dunn at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee agrees that other factors are important. He says the owl's longevity may come into play. "The basic idea is that if you are long-lived, you have other opportunities to breed, and so males are more likely to abandon a brood if their paternity is in question."

Greater population densities probably do test animals' faithfulness if those densities become really high, though. Populations of breeding mammals, for instance, are usually 10 times as dense as birds of similar body size, says Lukas. "Some researchers have suggested that this could help to explain why social monogamy is much more widespread among birds than among mammals."

Last week, the owl monkey was identified as a mammalian exception to the rule: genetics show it is the only primate known to be truly monogamous. Perhaps that's because baby owl monkeys need the care of two parents if they are to survive, says Lukas. Or perhaps there's something about the word "owl" that just instantly encourages fidelity.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0091314

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Frozen forest bent double by two-day ice storm

(Image: Judson Edeburn, director of Duke Forest)

You know something serious has happened when you see a scene like this. It might be drought or disease or mysterious meteoric events – but ice can also bend the mighty tree to its will, as here in Durham, North Carolina.

Freezing rain and ice struck the 2800-hectare wood on 6 and 7 March. It left pine trees over 3 metres high bent with their tips nearly touching the ground, and others uprooted or broken. Now the researchers from nearby Duke University who use the forest are pondering how to save it: they're thinking of using pulleys to straighten those that don't recover on their own.

Read more about the forces that bring down trees in "Big trees in trouble: How the mighty are falling".

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More

Don't let vaping, obesity and boozing become norms

Sally Davies , chief medical officer for England, thinks society needs to wake up to problems with body weight, drinking and e-cigarettes

What is the biggest health challenge that we face in the UK?

It is the normalisation of unhealthy behaviours. We have normalised obesity, and over drinking, and we are normalising e-cigarettes. We have normalised not taking sufficient physical exercise and the expectation that when people go to their GPs, they will walk out with a prescription for antibiotics, even though antimicrobial resistance is a problem.

Why are you against increased use of e-cigarettes?

If they were properly regulated as a medicine and we knew what was in them and the dose of nicotine, then they might play a useful role in stopping smoking. But they aren't, so at the moment we don't know their safety or the dose they deliver. They are often aimed at children with their flavourings – not only menthol but cookies and cream and bubblegum. They are sold rather cheaply and many of them are made in China, so I worry about what is in them. We have even got a verb for e-cigarette use: to vape. I am worried about normalising once again the activity of smoking. This matters particularly with children and adolescents.

So you are worried this could be a rerun of socially acceptable smoking?

Yes. Have you seen the adverts for e-cigarettes? They make them look cool and chic. In the Metrocentre in Newcastle they have a vaping boutique, which looks like a perfume boutique.

Do you think the UK has a problem with body weight?

Two thirds of adults in this country are now overweight, and one third of children. We have evidence that people don't recognise that being overweight is unhealthy. They don't think about the consequences, the increased blood pressure and risk of stroke, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. There is a study showing that 77 per cent of parents with overweight children didn't recognise they were overweight. We have normalised being overweight and even obese.

How do you get people to stop denying weight problems?

We are measuring children in primary schools, though there is evidence that some very large children opt out. People increasingly get their height and weight checked when they go to see their GP. Middle-aged and elderly people get offered an NHS health check every five years. People can also check their own body mass index (BMI). They just have to put BMI into Google and they will find the NHS Choices site and they can calculate it. It will tell them whether they have a healthy BMI or not.

BMI is sometimes criticised as a poor guide to health. Is it reliable?

It is a very good start. There are exceptions – if you are a body builder with a lot of muscle then it might be different, but that is a small minority. It is a good start and people should not shirk it.

Clothes-shop mannequins have got bigger too. Does that need to change?

We need to make people aware that a healthy weight is not overweight and the mannequins in dress shops showing large sizes rather than a range of sizes can contribute to this.

Could bringing in a sugar tax help to curb obesity?

This is a last resort. I want people to take individual responsibility, I want families to take responsibility, communities and society – and that includes industry. So if we move to a sugar tax, it would be a last resort and we haven't started working on what a sugar tax could be. We know that the fat tax in Denmark failed, we know that the tax on sugary drinks in France has had no impact, so we would have to investigate very carefully what impact a sugar tax here could have. At the moment it isn't on the table.

In what circumstances would a sugar tax be an option?

We would need to build a public coalition for it, which there isn't at the moment. You would have to have a government that felt they had public support and believed in regulation. We now have a generation of children who, because of their obesity, lack of physical activity and other behavioural issues, may not live as long as their parents. Maybe that will shift society.

Profile

Sally Davies is the chief medical officer for England and is chief scientific advisor for the Department of Health. Her latest report on the state of public health has just been published.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Read More