Zoologger: Deep-freeze maggot feeds on new form of fat

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

(Image: Scott King)

Species: Eurosta solidaginis

Habitat: the great outdoors of North America from Florida to Canada, mostly inside cancer-like galls on the stems of the goldenrod plant

There are a few ways to resist death in the deep freeze of a cold winter. If you are a human, you might invest in a warm coat and a storage heater. Other animals, like some Arctic fish, pump antifreeze chemicals through their veins.

The maggot of the goldenrod gall fly has a more gung-ho approach to chilly weather. It simply bites the bullet and freezes almost totally solid during the winter.

Now it seems the maggot owes its survival to a newly described type of supercooling fat, which provides it with food by staying liquid at much lower temperatures than other kinds of fat.

Starchy globe

Adult goldenrod gall flies are the dictionary definition of short-lived. Their adulthood can be as short as a few hours, while even the luckiest flies get two weeks at most. Females spend their brief existence mating, choosing suitable homes for their offspring and laying about 100 eggs inside buds on the stems of goldenrod plants.

They have to be choosy, as some goldenrod plants are impervious to goldenrod gall flies. "Whether or not they are baby-killers depends on the individual plant's genotype," says Warren Abrahamson of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

He has found that, given a choice between resistant plants and non-resistant ones, females make the right decision more often than not. The flies seem to taste the plants before settling for one, although it is not clear how this helps them pick out which are safe. If a plant bud tastes and feels right, the female deposits an egg inside.

Over the next few weeks, the plant grows and bulges out around the fly larvae, eventually producing a distinctive globe-shaped gall on the stem. The inside is made of protein-rich plant starch, which the maggot chews on, and the plant continuously produces for its parasite. The gall dies if the maggot does, suggesting the maggot somehow stimulates the plant into making more food for it.

The maggot's last meal (Image: Custom Life Science Images / Alamy)

The maggot eats its last meal in late autumn. When temperatures drop, the plant dies, the gall turns hard and brown, and the maggot winds down its bodily processes to go into a sort of suspended animation known as diapause.

A dormant maggot can survive surprisingly cool conditions. In lab experiments, they have endured temperatures as low as -60 °C with no consequences. Many cold-tolerant animals avoid freezing solid by stocking up on molecules with low freezing points. But a goldenrod gall fly maggot will allow up to 60 per cent of the water in its body to turn to ice.

How it survives is a mystery, particularly as the maggot seems to be able to tolerate ice crystals forming inside some of its cells. Other freeze-tolerant insects do partially turn to ice, but only by hiving off the ice crystals to the space between their cells. Ice inside cells has a nasty habit of causing them to burst.

However the maggot's brain is more vulnerable, so it may shuttle water out of the cells there using proteins called aquaporins. A 2011 study found that the maggots' levels of aquaporins are higher from October to December, and are concentrated in their brains.

Frozen food

Energy is also problematic in the deep freeze. After its last autumn meal, the maggot must keep its systems ticking over using stored energy. For most animals, that comes in the shape of fatty molecules, but the most efficient types tend to turn solid at the temperatures the maggots must endure.

Now Katie Marshall at the University of Western Ontario in Canada and her colleagues have found that goldenrod gall fly maggots have a special kind of fat. Acetylated triacylglycerols (acTAGs) are a less efficient storage system, but Marshall found that they stay liquid at lower temperatures than other kinds of fat. She also found that maggots boosted their production of acTAGs in the autumn, and in response to repeated cycles of freezing and thawing.

On top of all these hardships, the maggot faces a final challenge. Come spring its energy reserves are almost used up, so even if it has survived the cold and transformed into an adult fly, it could wind up entombed within the gall.

To avoid that sorry fate, the maggot chews an exit tunnel just before going into hibernation for the winter, leaving only a thin, hard plug on the outside. In the spring, all the fly has to do is pop off this seal and burst out into the warm outdoors. And there it is, with just hours to live.

Journal reference: Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI: 10.1242/jeb.099838

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Extreme hygiene: Cleaning a hippo's mighty molars

(Image: Reuters/Alex Lee)

Open wide, please. Keeping a safe distance, this man is brushing the teeth of a hippopotamus at a wildlife reserve in Guangzhou, in Guangdong province, China. Hippos have 40 teeth, and with the only recorded bite measuring a colossal 8100 newtons, he can't be blamed for taking precautions.

The visible canines grow throughout the hippo's life, some reaching 50 centimetres in length. As the teeth don't yellow over time, such hippo ivory is popular with poachers, and used to be made into dentures – most famously for US president George Washington.

These ferocious fangs are used for fighting and for shearing off plants close to the ground. Hippo back teeth are often not seen, but these unsung heroes munch up the 40 kilograms or so of grass the animals can consume every night.

Hippopotamuses usually let eager fish and birds clean their teeth for them, but this one doesn't seem to be complaining about the human touch.

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Losing our religion: Your guide to a godless future

(Image: Sylvia Serrado/Plainpicture)

The human mind is primed to believe in god, so why are so many people abandoning religion – and should we be worried about living in an atheist world?

ON AN unseasonably warm Sunday morning in London, I do something I haven't done for more than 30 years: get up and go to church. For an hour and a half, I sing, listen to readings, enjoy moments of quiet contemplation and throw a few coins into a collection. At the end there is tea and cake, and a warm feeling in what I guess must be my soul.

This is like hundreds of congregations taking place across the city this morning, but with one notable exception: there is no god.

Welcome to the Sunday Assembly, a "godless congregation" held every other week in Conway Hall, home of the world's oldest free-thought organisation. On the ...

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A visual time machine into US history

19:30 30 April 2014

Only researchers could explore the fascinating corners of the American Museum of Natural History's archive of photographs – until now. The museum has just launched a digital database of more than 7000 images, now accessible on its Digital Special Collections website. Here is our pick of some of the finest images from across the collections. David Stock

Image 1 of 8

In 1918, artist Howard Russell Butler painted this solar eclipse as seen from Baker City, Oregon, capturing the fleeting event in only 112 seconds. Butler was elected a member of the American Astronomical Society in recognition of his astronomical photography – he also captured eclipses in 1923 and 1925. The photograph was taken by Denis Finnin.

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Stem cell revival: The 1990s are back

"SINCE what works in sheep is likely to be possible in humans, we are suddenly propelled right past the imagined techniques of Brave New World." That was how New Scientist greeted the news, in March 1997, of the creation of Dolly the cloned sheep.

It has taken longer than expected. More than 17 years later, what worked in sheep finally appears to be working in humans (see "Insulin-making cells created by Dolly-cloning method"). This is a potentially major medical breakthrough, but no longer feels as challenging as it once did. In fact, after endless hope, hype and failure, it is hard to feel there is anything brave or new in this line of research.

To say stem cell science has a chequered past would be an understatement. Those with long memories will recall that South Korea's fallen stem-cell hero Woo Suk Hwang falsely claimed to have replicated the Dolly technique in humans in 2005.

Controversy has dogged the field ever since. Because the Dolly technique involves the destruction of human embryos, its ethical dimensions have been fiercely debated. But the search for alternatives is not going well.

In January, spirits soared when a Japanese team announced a simple way to create embryonic stem cells with no embryos required. Now, however, the situation is verging on farcical: the results have yet to be verified, the lead author has been accused of misconduct, and the head of the committee that investigated her has resigned over mistakes in his own publications.

Another promising technology that turns adult cells into "induced pluripotent" stem cells has been stalled by concerns that it could lead to cancers and other problems. We will know more when the first human trials start later this year.

It is still too early to say whether the latest breakthrough is the real thing or another false start. But signs are promising: two groups have independently shown that it works, reducing the chance of yet another disappointment.

The promise of stem cell medicine clearly remains alive and well. That is good news. But if we must revert to the techniques of the late 1990s, ethical concerns will return too: embryos, cloned adults and more. We may see that brave new world yet.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Life in the old sheep yet"

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Neanderthals may have been our intellectual equals

Enough of the cheap jibes: Neanderthals may have been just as clever as modern humans. Anthropologists have already demolished the idea that Neanderthals were dumb brutes, and now a review of the archaeological record suggests they were our equals.

Neanderthals were one of the most successful of all hominin species, occupying much of Europe and Asia. Their final demise about 40,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens walked into their territory, is often put down to the superiority of our species.

It's time to lay that idea to rest, say Paola Villa at the University of Colorado in Boulder and Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Just as smart as you

For instance, there is evidence that Homo sapiens could use fire to chemically transform natural materials into glue 70,000 years ago, but Neanderthals were performing similarly complex chemical syntheses at least 200,000 years ago.

And although 70,000-year-old engraved ochre from South Africa is seen as evidence that our species had developed sophisticated symbolism and perhaps even language, similar artefacts have been found at 50,000-year-old Neanderthal sites in Spain.

What's more, Neanderthals might have been able to talk. Late last year we learned that our extinct cousins had a hyoid, a small bone in the neck that plays a big role in speech, very like ours.

Evidence has even emerged that Homo sapiens may have learned some skills by copying Neanderthals. Yet despite all of this evidence, the idea that Neanderthals were our inferiors still persists.

Fossilised behaviour

Archaeologists are reluctant to accept evidence of advanced behaviour if it is attributed to extinct hominins, says Roebroeks. This prevailing attitude influences our ideas about the causes of the Neanderthal extinction.

Villa and Roebroeks say this is not the case for other transitions in the archaeological record, such as the arrival of farming in Europe and the subsequent disappearance of Europe's hunter-gatherers. Our ideas about the disappearance of European hunter-gatherers do not assume that they were less intelligent than farmers.

Villa and Roebroek are right to apply the same standards to Neanderthal and human archaeological sites, says Francesco d'Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France. "This makes their argument in favour of equal cognitive abilities more robust than previous attempts."

However it may be that the archaeological evidence simply isn't good enough to identify the differences between Neanderthal and modern human behaviour, says Shannon McPherron at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "I believe there were significant differences between Neanderthals and moderns and that this is why we have the replacement of one by the other," he says. "But it is still a challenge to see this in the archaeological record and demonstrate it properly."

Journal reference: PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0096424

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Antibiotic-resistant superbugs now a global epidemic

Bacteria that resist antibiotics are widespread around the planet, concludes the first global review of antibiotic resistance

To make matters worse, the World Health Organization, which produced the report, has revealed that there is no globally standardised way to assess and share information on drug-resistant infections – something the WHO will now make a priority.

"Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating," says Keiji Fukuda, head of health security at the WHO.

The WHO also points out that without incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics, we will run out of ways to fight resistant infections. The data in the WHO report raise the spectre that most antibiotics could become largely useless while we are still trying to measure the extent of the problem.

Wonder drug

When they were first introduced in the 1950s, antibiotics were the original wonder drugs: most people alive today can't remember a time when common bacterial infections – a sore throat, an attack of diarrhoea, an infected tooth, a minor cut – could be deadly.

But bacteria have increasingly resisted antibiotics since then. When an infection is treated, bacteria with genes that code for enzymes that destroy or exclude the drug survive. There may be too few of these to matter at first, but if enough bacteria repeatedly encounter the antibiotic, the resistant ones can have enough selective advantage to eventually dominate the population. This happens when the drugs are used too widely or to boost growth in livestock.

The problem is expensive: in the US, it costs the health system $34 billion, and knocks 0.4 to 1.6 per cent off gross domestic product, every year. To investigate how widespread the problem is, the WHO carried out the first global survey of antibiotic resistance.

It was unable to conduct a similar economic impact assessment for the whole globe. But it did have member states' reports of resistance to one or more common classes of antibiotics in seven major bacteria that commonly cause lung, gut, blood or other infections: E. coli , salmonella, Streptococcus, Klebsiella, Shigella, Staphylococcus, including the methicillin-resistant strain MRSA, and the bacteria behind gonorrhoea.

Only 114 of its 194 member states had national data on antibiotic resistance, and there were many gaps in that, especially in Africa, western Asia and eastern Europe. There was also no consensus on how to measure resistance, for example how many samples of what kind needed to be tested.

Different bacterial worlds

Countries in all regions reported that more than half of Klebsiella infections resist antibiotics called third-generation cephalosporins. If those drugs fail, the only ones left are a class called carbapenems – and some countries in the European and eastern Mediterranean regions reported more than 50 per cent of Klebsiella infections resisted those as well, making them almost untreatable.

Most regions had countries where at least half of E. coli infections resisted both classes of drug, making many urinary tract infections, usually regarded as merely a nuisance, effectively untreatable. Countries worldwide reported that half or more of Staphylococcus infections were MRSA, which carries a 64 per cent greater risk of death than non-resistant Staphylococcus.

All regions had countries reporting that at least a quarter of Streptococcus infections, which include pneumonia, meningitis and ear infections, resisted penicillin. Meanwhile, gonorrhoea that resisted third-generation cephalosporins, making it virtually untreatable, was reported in 10 developed countries including the UK.

National authorities and researchers may see different bacterial worlds. Countries in the European and western Pacific regions reported that a quarter or more of all Shigella dysentery cases resisted fluoroquinolone antibiotics. Research reports found up to 82 per cent of such infections were also resistant in South-East Asia – yet no national medical authorities in that region made any such report.

Tackling the problem will require new antibiotics, but few are being developed, because there is little profit in drugs that must be used briefly and sparingly. "In the past we thought of antibiotics as commercial goods to be sold," says Fukuda. "Now we have to think of them as global public goods," which are usually supported by governments. How to do that, he says, is now a "vigorous area of discussion".

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Execution botched despite lethal-injection warnings

A death penalty execution in Oklahoma has gone horribly wrong. And it has happened despite warnings that as states tinker with the drugs used in lethal injections, they are in uncharted territory and risk violating the US Constitution's provision against "cruel and unusual punishment".

Yesterday, two inmates, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, were scheduled to be killed using an untested drug cocktail. This included the sedative midazolam, which was first used in an execution in January, where an inmate reportedly gasped for air for more than 10 minutes after it was administered. Shortly after the state gave Lockett the drug, in what should have been a lethal dose, it was clear something was not right.

Lockett raised his head and spoke several minutes after he should have been unconscious, according to a local news report. After the other drugs, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride, were administered, a prison official reported that his vein had ruptured and they were not properly delivered. The execution was stopped, and Lockett died of a heart attack a few minutes later.

The episode, which prompted Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin to order an investigation and postpone Warner's execution, is the latest in a series of fresh concerns over how death sentences are meted out in the US.

As we reported yesterday, a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that more than 300 inmates now on death row may be innocent. And in a study due to be published in the Georgetown Law Journal next month, Deborah Denno of Fordham University in New York shows that over the last six years, states have modified their drug protocols for lethal injection more than 300 times. That is in response to long-running shortages caused by European manufacturers refusing to sell lethal injection drugs to prisons.

In her study, Denno concluded that these changes are often implemented haphazardly, and without sufficient oversight. "Lethal injection is worse than it ever has been," she told New Scientist.

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Astrophile: Dizzy exoplanet has a compact 8-hour day

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

Object: Young gas giant

Rotation rate: 25 kilometres a second

Do you feel there is never enough time in a day? Then don't move to Beta Pictoris b. A day on this fast-paced exoplanet lasts just 8 hours, making it a poor choice for the temporally challenged. You would also be battling a dusty atmosphere, searing temperatures and a total lack of solid ground on this Jupiter-like gas giant.

Beta Pictoris b was discovered in 2008 orbiting a young star about 63 light years away. Astronomers think the planet is about 7 times as massive as Jupiter and is still glowing with the heat of its own formation, at a temperature of roughly 1600 kelvin.

The planet was found in a picture taken by the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Ignas Snellen of Leiden University in the Netherlands and his colleagues used the same telescope to study the motion of gases in the planet's dusty atmosphere. They were then able to calculate how fast Beta Pictoris b is spinning on its axis: around 25 kilometres a second.

Because the planet is slightly bigger than Jupiter at about 236,000 kilometres wide, it completes a full revolution – or in other words, a day – roughly every 8 hours.

Exoplanet dance

The measurement is a first for any exoplanet, and it means that days on Beta Pictoris b are shorter than on any planet in our solar system. Jupiter's day lasts for 10 hours, for instance, while a day on Venus lasts for 243 Earth days.

The work supports a close relationship observed in our solar system between the mass of a planet and its rotation speed – in general, the heftier the world, the shorter the day. This might be due to the way planets are born. Gravity causes leftover material around stars to clump together, swirling in to form a world around a central point. To conserve its rotational energy, a planet will rotate faster as it increases its mass, just as twirling ballet dancers can spin faster by drawing in their arms, says Snellen.

Beta Pictoris b is not a perfect match to the rule, but that could be because the planet is still quite young. As it cools during the next hundreds of millions of years, it should shrink to Jupiter's size and speed up to 40 kilometres a second, making it an ever closer fit. This would also reduce the length of its day to just 3 hours.

Beta testing

Snellen is hoping to use the same technique to measure the length of days on other exoplanets. This will show whether the relationship between rotation and mass holds outside the solar system. If it does, it could provide a way to distinguish between really massive planets and objects known as brown dwarfs, which are thought to be stars that failed to ignite nuclear fusion.

At the moment the dividing line between these objects is fuzzy. But because previous observations suggest brown dwarfs of the same mass can have a variety of rotation rates, they don't obey the rotation rule seen so far in planets.

"This is an intriguing suggestion of a difference between planets and brown dwarfs, but we will need more such measurements before we can be certain," agrees David Spiegel at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. Such data would also teach us more about how planets can form and evolve, he says. "The rotation rates of planets encode a lot of information."

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature13253

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Today on New Scientist

Cyborg angst: 5 ways computers will perplex us in 2039

What is the ideal number of fingers? Do plants need Facebook? All this and more is on the agenda of a fictional conference set 25 years in the future

Fibre sends appetite-suppressing molecule to the brain

Mice on a high-fat diet gain less weight if fibre is added to their food, thanks to a fibre-related fatty acid that makes a surprise beeline for the brain

The bacteria that chat back and tell you how they are

The first conversations with bacteria, based on light signals, could lead to speech-based communication and food that warns you when it has gone off

Pfizer's AstraZeneca bid: bitter pill or welcome tonic?

What's in store for UK research if US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer buys UK-based rival AstraZeneca, wonders science campaigner Sarah Main

One rule of life: Are we poised on the border of order?

There are signs that all living things sit on the knife-edge of criticality – something that could help them adapt to complex and unpredictable events

Avoid camels to escape MERS, warns Saudi minister

Saudi authorities have warned against close contact with camels, and some camel products, after evidence that the animals are the source of the MERS virus

Epic Mars flooding triggered by collapsed crater lake

Lakes that gushed up through collapsed sediment can explain bumpy landscapes on Mars and perhaps sheltered microbes that may now lie dormant in ice

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Cyborg angst: 5 ways computers will perplex us in 2039

Continue reading page |1|2

Brain chips mean we are struggling to distinguish our own thoughts from ideas implanted by advertisers. Self-driving cars restrict old-school human drivers to special recreation parks. And the optimal number of fingers is 12.5.

Confused? It's a vision of the world in 25 years, as dreamed up by today's researchers in computer-human interaction (CHI).

CHI normally means investigating better ways for people to interact with devices we have now, but last week attendees at the annual conference in Toronto, Canada, got ahead of themselves. They created an imaginary conference agenda for 2039 that predicts the kinds of challenges we will face with future computers – many of which will be implanted.

"It's meant to be sort of the fringes of human-computer interaction research, what's really edgy or provocative,"says Eric Baumer of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who dreamed up the idea of the conference. "There's a lot of retrospective thinking about the past, but there's not as much thinking about what are the futures toward which we think we're working."

We used the abstracts to create a list of the questions we - or more accurately, our cyborg descendants - might have about computers in 2039.

Is it weird when my organs talk to each other?

In an abstract entitled "My liver and my kidney compared notes", IBM researcher Michael Muller, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looks at what happens when the implanted monitors on people's internal organs – a network he calls Arterionet – are able to share data and pool knowledge to offer enhanced health tips.

His conclusion: "While most users were sceptical, many users proposed additional features that could lead to greater acceptance and compliance with such recommendations."

It's worth thinking about how people might deal with health tips from organ monitors. Wearable technology that tracks your activity or your health stats is slowly gaining popularity while researchers earlier this year implanted power-generating silicone strips on the hearts, lungs and diaphragms of live cows, pigs and sheep. Muller says the biggest challenge to creating Arterionet will be figuring out how to fit the artificial intelligence in a sufficiently small and safe package.

Why do plants need their own Facebook, again?

To understand this question, you need to know about Plantastic, the brainchild of Bill Tomlinson at the University of California at Irvine and colleagues.

In their abstract, they reason that to make our food supply more sustainable, it may make sense to grow more fruits and vegetables close to home. But certain crops thrive when they're grown in large quantities or alongside certain other plants – too tall an order for the average farmer.

Enter Plantastic, which would advise what plants would work best for your area and tell you what people in the neighbourhood are growing. Nanochips on plants would feed data back to the site. That information in turn could be used to learn more about what grows best in which environment.

Assuming people will want to know whether this adds anything, Tomlinson's team created a fictional study that looks at 10 backyard gardens over two growing seasons. It suggests that using Plantastic will increase yields by 4 to 12 per cent.

Tomlinson's graduate student Juliet Norton is working on an early version of what the online system might look like.

Autonomous cars have made driving so boring – what shall I do instead?

Andreas Riener at the Institute for Pervasive Computing in Linz, Austria, has written an abstract that starts with a bold view of the future: "The first self-driving car cruised on our roads in 2019. Now, 20 years after, it is time to review how this innovation has changed our mobility behaviour."

This vision is rooted in a real trend. Self-driving cars have been making headlines for several years now. They are legal to drive in the state of Nevada, and Google's driverless car has already racked up hundreds of thousands of practice miles.

Reiner's contribution is to explore how this will change us. He predicts that once the robots take the wheel everywhere, many of us will lose interest in driving altogether. Fewer of us will own our own cars. Those who do won't waste as much time pimping them out or driving around just for fun. People who still love cars might have to seek their thrills in special "recreation parks", where they can drive manually in an artificial environment. "If the vehicles of the future are only a means to get from A to B, this car culture would get lost," he says.

Did I just think up that idea or did an advertiser implant it?

Multiple contributors to CHI 2039 ponder the future of brain implants. Whether it involves capturing input from each of our senses or recording neurons directly in the brain , they assume that this one is a question not of if but when. And that could bring opportunities – and challenges.

Continue reading page |1|2

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Fibre sends appetite-suppressing molecule to the brain

It seems fibre really does go a long way. One of its breakdown products can ride through the blood stream of mice before settling in the brain, where it helps control hunger.

Much research into appetite has focused on the role that hormones play, but in the last few years researchers have found that mice can lose their appetite even if gut hormone levels remain unchanged. The latest work, by Gary Frost at Imperial College London and his colleagues, might help explain why.

The team found that mice on a high-fat diet gained weight less rapidly if fibre was added to their food. Next, they used scanners to track what happens to acetate – the most abundant fatty acid produced in the gut – when that fibre is broken down.

Traditional consensus is that such fatty acids make it as far as the liver, where they are metabolised. But to the researchers' surprise, they found that some of the acetate travelled all the way to the brain, where it settled in the hypothalamus – a region that helps control hunger. Injecting acetate into the brain also curbed the rodents' appetites.

If acetate does the same in humans, dietary fibre may hold the key to curbing appetites and perhaps help battle obesity – although boosting our intake might not be the best way to see an effect.

"The amount of fibre you need to eat to see consistent appetite suppression in humans is large – it's not just the amount you might eat in a bowl of bran flakes," says Frost. It might be more efficient to develop an acetate-based appetite-suppressing drug, or find a way to manipulate fibre so that more acetate is released in the gut, he says.

Journal reference: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4611

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The bacteria that chat back and tell you how they are

Do you speak bacteria? The first conversations with microbes are already under way.

Manuel Porcar at the University of Valencia in Spain and his colleagues are developing a way for bacteria and humans to talk to each other, by converting light waves into speech. So far the bacteria have told the team how suitable their surroundings are.

Porcar's team engineered gene switches in Escherichia coli to produce proteins that emit different coloured fluorescent light when factors such as heat, acidity and oxygen levels change. This meant the microbes would glow in different colours when they were, say, too hot. When the team tweaked the environment the E. coli were growing in, the amount of light emitted by the bacteria went up or down according to how well their needs were being served.

The next step is to use a microprocessor to convert the light waves into speech.

Do as I say

"The strategy of encoding questions and answers in 'light language' is feasible, and a first step towards true dialogue with bacteria," says Porcar.

Swapping banter with bacteria might be useful. We could, for example, put microbes in packaging so they can emit audible warnings if food goes off. The technology could also lead to better control of the microorganisms in industrial fermenters that make medicines.

The team even hopes to give orders to the microbes. The bacteria could be given a gene switch that was sensitive to specific light signals, and which would activate the gene to which it was linked.

"We plan to engineer one strain that responds to an order by encoding a voice message, such as 'activate your gene', into a light wavelength," says Porcar.

Journal reference: Letters in Applied Microbiology, DOI: 10.1111/LAM.12255

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Pfizer's AstraZeneca bid: bitter pill or welcome tonic?

News that US pharmaceutical powerhouse Pfizer wants to buy UK-based rival AstraZeneca for £60 billion has got the business world buzzing. If it happens, it would be the biggest takeover by a foreign company the UK has seen. But what would it mean for UK science?

AstraZeneca is one of the two giants of UK pharmaceuticals. The other is GlaxoSmithKline. Both have innovative research programmes, often working with universities and smaller companies in the biotech sector. Both play a vital part in the ecosystem of life sciences in the UK. AstraZeneca employs 7000 people directly and supports 30,000 jobs.

That's why there is concern, with speculation over possible job losses in the wake of the suggested deal. Anything that harms UK big pharma could hit the wider life sciences community. In part there is concern because Pfizer, best known for making Viagra, used to have a research base in Sandwich in Kent, UK. But it decided to close the site in 2011 as part of a wider plan to pull back from attempts to develop drugs in some therapeutic areas, including allergies and respiratory diseases.

So, this recent approach by Pfizer to buy AstraZeneca raises the questions: if it took over, would AstraZeneca's research programme continue, and would it remain in the UK?

Companies often cite the UK's excellent scientists and research base as a reason to locate here. They want to be in the place where the best science is done. The pay-off for UK research is that companies play an important role in providing opportunities for translation of academic discoveries into practical uses. This interplay is vital to deliver health benefits and to maintain the strength of the sector.

The British government will certainly want the economic benefits of the country's world-leading life sciences sector to remain in the UK. Foreign ownership of AstraZeneca is probably not part of plan A. But the government does have a number of incentives to attract research-intensive companies to the UK. One of these, the , gives tax relief on profits made from R&D and has been cited by other companies as making the UK an economically attractive base to do research.

So, could the UK's attractive commercial environment and vibrant life sciences sector be enough to persuade Pfizer to retain AstraZeneca's research in the UK if this deal were to go ahead? The combination of tax breaks for research, our elite scientists, world-leading universities and the unique health-research asset of the National Health Service should prove tempting.

My hope remains that the UK will emerge from these business developments recognised as the global destination for academic and commercial research.

Profile: Sarah Main is director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, which aims to raise the profile of science in the UK. Its members include AstraZeneca

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One rule of life: Are we poised on the border of order?

There are signs that all living things sit on the knife-edge of criticality – something that could help them adapt to complex and unpredictable events

WHEN physicists take an interest in the living world, some biologists fear the worst. After all, goes the bad joke, there's only so much you can gain by modelling a cow as a sphere. But one crucial idea from physics may hold valuable insights into complex biological behaviour in everything from birds to gene networks. There is increasing evidence that many systems we observe in living things are close to what's called a critical point – they sit on a knife-edge, precariously poised between order and disorder. Odd as it may sound, this strategy could confer a variety of benefits, in particular the flexibility to deal with a complex and unpredictable environment.

Some of the most convincing evidence comes from neuroscience. For a decade now, ...

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Avoid camels to escape MERS, warns Saudi minister

Saudi Arabia's health minister today warned Saudis on national television to avoid close contact with camels, and not to consume raw camel meat or camel milk, after a report that dromedaries are the "plausible" source of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus. The warning came as a team from the World Health Organization (WHO) arrived in the kingdom to investigate an accelerating outbreak.

Saudi authorities announced 32 new cases of the virus between 26 and 28 April. That makes a total of 345 cases in the country, more than double the 163 reported there between when the virus emerged in Saudi in 2012 and 1 April this year. So far 105 people have died.

Almost all of the worldwide cases have been in the Arabian peninsula, or in people who had just returned from visiting it. Three cases were detected in Malaysia, Philippines and Greece last week, and now Egypt has announced its first two suspected cases, both in people recently back from visiting Saudi.

Where's the host?

Scattered cases that could not be traced to infection by other people have suggested that the virus is jumping sporadically from an animal host. Some infected people had had contact with camels before falling ill, but virologists had been unable to isolate a whole MERS virus from the few camel samples analysed until now.

Ian Lipkin at Columbia University in New York, Saudi scientists and wildlife disease experts at the EcoHealth Alliance also in New York, have now reported MERS viruses in nasal swabs from Saudi camels, whose complete genetic sequence they describe as identical to viruses from human cases.

"Together with data indicating widespread dromedary infection in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, these findings support the plausibility of a role for dromedaries in human infection," they conclude. As well as solving a puzzle, the work suggests a way to stop MERS in its tracks: a good MERS vaccine for the many domesticated camels in the region.

The team found several varieties of the virus in camels, and only one in humans. This may be good news. If only one of the camel viruses can jump into humans, the team says, it may not have the genetic diversity it needs to evolve into a more threatening human epidemic.

Human to human

As with many viruses that jump to people from animals, MERS seems to spread from human to human with difficulty. The real fear is that it will evolve that ability.

According to the WHO, 75 per cent of recent cases have been caught from another human, many in healthcare facilities. Some 29 per cent of all cases have been in healthcare workers.

The upsurge does not seem to be due to mutations that have made MERS more transmissible, however. Christian Drosten of the University of Bonn, Germany, reported this week that the full sequences of MERS viruses from early April in Jeddah – the epicentre of the upsurge – had no obvious differences from other MERS samples. The sequences do not suggest that "viruses from Jeddah have acquired changes increasing their pandemic potential", he concludes.

The real reason for the upsurge may be poor infection control in hospitals. In an outburst rare among Saudi commentators, Khaled Almaeena of the Saudi Gazette , a leading English-language daily, wrote on Sunday that "the outbreak of this virus, the rising number of infected people, the increasing death toll and above all the mishandling in communicating what has been happening have caused a panic". He blames poor conditions in hospitals, especially in Jeddah, for the ongoing epidemic.

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Epic Mars flooding triggered by collapsed crater lake

Noah would have loved this. Mars probably had its own colossal flood millions of years ago, when an ice-covered lake cracked open and gushed to the surface. The scenario hints that buried lakes sheltered microbes that may even now lie dormant in subsurface ice.

On Mars, several huge channels seem to originate in the boulder-strewn floors of deep chasms and impact craters.

"Huge amounts of water had to flow through these channels," says Victor Baker at the University of Arizona in Tucson. But the terrain dates from a time when Mars was evolving into the cold desert we see today. Where did the water come from?

Manuel Roda at Utrecht University in the Netherlands took a closer look at a crater called Aram Chaos. It has a channel 10 kilometres wide and 2 kilometres deep leading away from it. To carve such a channel, Roda and his team calculate that almost 90,000 cubic kilometres of water must have flowed through it for perhaps a month.

Wake up, Martians

The team thinks that a lake filled the crater when Mars was warmer. As the planet cooled, the lake froze solid and was covered with an insulating layer of sediment. At the same time, geothermal energy warmed the ice from below, creating a liquid layer. Thousands of years later, the weakened sediment layer suddenly collapsed, breaking the ice and letting water rush to the surface.

Until now, this scenario has only been theoretical, says Roda. "Now we have geological and hydrological evidence that this process could have occurred on Mars during its early history."

The notion may also bode well in the hunt for signs of past life on Mars. Extreme environments on Earth can host microbes that revert to a dormant, frozen state for thousands of years only to revive when the climate warms up again. On Mars, until the ice cracked, the liquid part of the lake may have played host to hardy microbial life, which may have become dormant as the escaping water refroze in the soil.

"Maybe these outflow channels are places where these dormant organisms came into a living state and would then have gone dormant again," says Baker. "Microbes could be waiting for us to drill a hole and sample ice and bring them back to life."

Journal reference: Icarus, DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2014.03.023

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Today on New Scientist

Pharma megadeals do nothing for neglected medicines

Drug giants are busy gobbling each other up to consolidate their strengths. What does this mean for the health challenges already on their fringes?

US death penalty practices raise disturbing questions

A botched execution, drawn-out court battles and fresh concerns over the innocence of those on death row are plaguing the nation's capital punishment programmes

Scent of a man: Male sweat stresses out lab mice

Mice and rats get more stressed by male experimenters than females – which may explain why it is hard to replicate biomedical animal studies

Tilting smartwatch cuts need for fiddly screen-jabbing

Tapping and swiping on smartwatch apps obstructs the little screen – a watch that detects tilts like a games controller might make them easier to use

Nested interests: A bespoke farm for edible bird nests

With the market for bird's nest soup at $5 billion a year, the natural supply is not meeting demand, so farmers are offering swiftlets good nesting spots

Weird thought-generator: How society's fears shape OCD

From ideas of murder to irrational fears, intrusive thoughts afflict most people. But when David Adam's fear of catching HIV persisted, he developed OCD

Safety fears spook New Zealand's drug reform pioneers

A radical new approach to recreational drugs pursued by New Zealand may be stumbling at the first hurdle, as politicians cancel the first phase of the programme

Watson in your pocket: Supercomputer gets own apps

Watson, the cognitive computer that can be an expert in any subject is moving to the cloud, and will soon be accessible via smartphone app

Insulin-making cells created by Dolly-cloning method

Skin cells from a woman with diabetes have been turned into insulin-producing cells, via a cloning technique similar to the one that made Dolly the sheep

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Pharma megadeals do nothing for neglected medicines

Big may not necessarily mean better if Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, buys UK giant AstraZeneca.

The announcement that the company is to pursue AstraZeneca, despite being rebuffed in January, comes a week after Swiss firm Novartis and GSK of the UK, swapped assets. The deal strengthened Novartis's already pre-eminent position in cancer drug development, and reinforced GSK's dominance in vaccines. "By doing that, they both played to their strengths," says John Carroll from the online industry bulletin, FierceBiotech.

Frank Orthbandt of FitchRatings in London, a global agency assessing the value of deals, says that this kind of asset swapping is now the industry norm. "It's too capital intensive to invest across many areas, so it's better to be a leader in a specific area, but you need to be sure you're going to be world class if you're going to swap or buy major assets," he says.

By contrast, there seems to be less scope for Pfizer to improve its standing by gobbling up AstraZeneca, says Carroll, because neither is dominant in fields where they overlap.

No love for antibiotics

There is little hope that pharma megadeals will do much for neglected medicines, such as new antibiotics and drugs for tropical diseases such as malaria. "Companies don't make much money from antibiotics, although some smaller biotechnology companies are developing them," says Carroll.

Disease-wise, cancer is definitely the hottest area of investment, and this is one area where Pfizer hopes to boost its prospects by buying AstraZeneca. "Cancer is the big one, as people understand the biology much better and there are startling new drugs coming through," says Carroll.

At the other end of the spectrum, companies are shying away from areas like depression. "People don't fully understand the biology, it's very hard to tackle in the clinic with high failure rates, and there are large placebo effects," he says.

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US death penalty practices raise disturbing questions

The crisis facing the death penalty in the US is worsening. A long-running shortage of the drugs that are typically used for capital punishment has sparked a desperate search for alternatives, even as fresh concerns emerged on Monday about the number of people on death row who have been wrongly convicted.

In Oklahoma last week, two men on death row, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, lost their bid to compel the state to name the manufacturer that is supplying the drugs that will kill them. Both men are scheduled to be executed tonight. And in January, a man executed in Ohio using a new blend of drugs reportedly gasped for air for more than 10 minutes after they were administered and took nearly half an hour to die.

The guilt of the above-mentioned men is not in question, but a new study casts doubt on the process by which people end up on death row, suggesting that at least one in 25 of the people who are sentenced to death in the US is innocent.

Errors in justice

The figure comes from an examination of 7482 inmates on death row between 1973 and 2004. In 1972, capital punishment was briefly put on hold by a Supreme Court ruling that declared it unconstitutional. The practice was restored by another ruling in 1976.

Of the inmates studied, 116 were exonerated, thanks in large part to the efforts of several non-governmental organisations that examine death row convictions for evidence that the condemned may in fact be innocent. In those cases, the reasons why the convictions were overturned ranged from eyewitness misidentification to false confessions and poorly preserved physical evidence. However, that rate of innocence, 1.6 per cent, does not represent the true level of wrongful convictions, says Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the study.

Just over a third of the inmates studied had their sentences commuted to life in prison or other, lesser sentences. In the US justice system, this is often done when some doubt about a prisoner's guilt has been introduced, but not enough to overturn a conviction. Because of this and other factors, the team say that the true number of inmates wrongfully sentenced to death is likely to be 307, or 4.1 per cent.

"I think this is a surprisingly high number," says Gross. "False convictions happen often enough that we should take them seriously as a danger."

Drug problems

The study comes as lethal injection, the preferred method of execution in the 32 states where capital punishment is legal, is facing strong headwinds.

Prisons in the US have typically relied on European drug manufacturers to supply the compounds that are used in lethal injection. The manufacturers now refuse to sell their products to states that practise capital punishment, forcing authorities to scramble for new drug cocktails that do not run afoul of the US Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In a study due to be published in the Georgetown Law Journal next month, Deborah Denno of Fordham University in New York examined more than 300 cases from the past six years in which states modified the drugs used for lethal injection. She found that these changes are often implemented haphazardly, and without sufficient oversight.

Developments such as Gross's finding and Denno's work are "snowballing together" to change public opinion, Denno says. A Gallup poll conducted last year found that American support for the death penalty has dropped to its lowest level since 1972.

"Lethal injection is worse than it ever has been," says Denno.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1306417111

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Scent of a man: Male sweat stresses out lab mice

Uh-oh. Lab rats and mice get more stressed out by male researchers than by females. The finding could mean that thousands of behavioural experiments have overlooked an important factor affecting their results.

More than a decade ago, researchers found that identical strains of mice behaved differently in one lab than in another, and several researchers have since suspected that mice react differently to different experimenters. Among them was Jeffrey Mogil, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who noticed that mice seemed to respond to pain differently in his experiments than in those by a female colleague.

Mogil decided to look more closely. He and his team gave pain-inducing injections to anaesthetised mice and rats. When the animals awoke, the team recorded their facial grimaces, a measure of pain intensity.

When a male investigator sat in the room with the rodents, they grimaced 35 per cent less, on average, than when no one was in the room. There was no significant grimace difference when a female investigator sat in the room than when it was empty. The reduced sensitivity to pain shown when the men were present is a common side effect of stress, as it allows for the preparation of the fight or flight response.

The animals also showed reduced pain responses when T-shirts worn by men were placed near their cages, but not when those worn by women were. They showed the same behaviour when exposed to bedding used by uncastrated male cats and dogs, and when they were exposed to any of three chemical odorants found in male underarm perspiration.

A strange male

Mice exposed to the male T-shirts also stayed closer to the walls – a sign of fear – when placed in a new environment.

The animals are probably reacting to odours that could signal the presence of a strange male of their own species. Male humans activate the response because they produce the same mammalian scent molecules.

The additional stress caused by a male researcher is likely to affect any experiment where stress plays a role. "The problem is that almost every phenomenon is affected by stress," says Mogil. These experimenter effects could be one reason researchers often find it difficult to replicate biomedical studies, he says.

If so, researchers should pay much closer attention to how they carry out their experiments, says Elissa Chesler, a behavioural geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. "It's already caused me to ensure that one, and only one, person is doing each test," she says. However, "this will come as news to many people", she adds.

Journal reference: Nature Methods, DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.2935

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Tilting smartwatch cuts need for fiddly screen-jabbing

Video: Smartwatch lets you control apps with a twist

Tapping and swiping on smartwatch apps is fiddly – and your fingers get in the way of what's on the screen, too. To the rescue comes Gierad Laput of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a tiltable watch face that could save you a whole lot of screen jabbing.

At the computer-human interaction conference in Toronto, Canada, this week, Laput revealed how he and his Carnegie Mellon colleagues attached a pair of gamepad motion sensors to a smartwatch-style LCD display so that it can detect when a user pans, twists or tilts the screen. The sensed motions are used to navigate around content such as a map, or play games, saving the user the need to poke at the screen to accomplish such tasks.

Pushing down on the screen activates all the sensors at once and is recognised as an option-choosing "click" of the cursor. The motion-detection worked fine when they tried using it to play a version of Doom, a first-person shooter video game. "Smartwatches – and wearables in general – are really exciting, but interacting with them is terrible. It's a hard problem, and we have to keep chipping away at it," Laput says.

"Since our fingers are large, and people want smartwatches to be small, we have to go beyond traditional input techniques. Digitising the mechanical movements of a watch face in this way offers interaction without occluding the screen. It is easy to implement and we'd love to see the research go into future products."

Apple watch

David Harold, a director of Imagination Technologies, based in Hertfordshire, UK, which develops graphics systems for mobile devices, says the motion-sensitive screen could complement existing watch and phone-control methods such as voice-recognition and icon pressing. "It's an interesting idea but my absolute gut feeling is that this would best be used in gaming, where you definitely don't want your fingers covering the screen. There's a trend towards improving wearable interfaces for different applications and this is very much part of that."

The idea comes as fresh rumours surfaced about a possible Apple smartwatch. On 19 April, Nike decided to focus on fitness monitoring software and abandon manufacture of the iOS-based Fuel Band hardware that currently runs it.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is on Nike's board, and so there has been some speculation that Nike – a long-term Apple partner since the early iPod days – may be moving aside to give Apple a clearer run in the wearables market with a watch that will runs the Nike Fuel Band software. Speaking on CNBC this week, Nike CEO Mark Parker guardedly said that he is "excited about what's to come" from a continuing Apple and Nike partnership. There have been rumours for some time that Apple is planning to launch an iWatch this year.

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Nested interests: A bespoke farm for edible bird nests

(Image: Ian Teh/Panos)

A BOWL of soup made with animal saliva? Yours for $100. What's that, you want some of the raw ingredients so that you can make your own? That'll be $2000 per kilogram, please.

Bird's nest soup is one of the most expensive foods in the world. Its production is a mega-industry, worth an incredible $5 billion a year. The nests were traditionally harvested from caves in South-East Asia where the birds – the edible-nest swiftlet, Aerodramus fuciphagus, and the black-nest swiftlet, Aerodramus maximus – make their nests. The natural supply is no longer enough to keep up with demand, however.

One business solution is to build concrete bird houses (pictured). These, in a cornfield in Selangor, Malaysia, are fitted with electronic tweeters playing swiftlet calls to attract the birds. Inside the structures, male swiftlets meticulously build their nests over 35 days, coughing up thick phlegmy strands of spit to bind it. The nests are often harvested before eggs are laid, so the birds build more.

(Image: Xiaofei Wang/Corbis)

Dissolved in water to produce a glutinous mixture containing, apparently, magnesium, calcium, iron and potassium, the soup (pictured below) is claimed to keep you young, improve your focus, and – as these things always do – boost your libido. "It's often served cold, and the liquid is clear with slightly fibrous strands that are an opaque white colour," says photographer Ian Teh. "I had it when I was a kid and rather liked it."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Nested interests"

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Weird thought-generator: How society's fears shape OCD

Caught up in your own thoughts (Image: Daniel Stolle)

From ideas of murder to irrational fears, intrusive thoughts afflict most people. But when David Adam's fear of catching HIV persisted, he developed OCD

FOR Winston Churchill, it was an urge to leap from balconies and into the path of oncoming trains. For 20th-century mathematician Kurt Godel, his bête noire was random food poisoning, from his fridge or in general – he eventually starved himself to death. And Alfred Nobel was so terrified of being buried alive that the last words of his will state: "It is my express wish that following my death my veins shall be opened, and when this has been done and competent doctors have confirmed clear signs of death, my remains shall be cremated."

Most people don't talk about strange thoughts like these, at least until psychologists take the trouble to ask. A ...

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Safety fears spook New Zealand's drug reform pioneers

New Zealand's radical new approach to drugs may be stumbling at the first hurdle. Politicians have cancelled the first phase of a programme to legalise many recreational drugs, by banning all "legal highs" currently sold in the country until they have been proven to be low risk.

The plan is still to legalise drugs that are shown to be safe – but some are worried that the government has been spooked by a flurry of media reports about addiction and drug harm.

Designer drugs, also known as legal highs, have been a headache for policy-makers around the world as new drugs are invented faster than they can be banned.

Last year, New Zealand introduced pioneering legislation that would legalise the sale of any new drugs that could be proven to carry a low risk of harm. The move away from simple prohibition is being watched around the world because it could provide answers to long-running arguments about whether banning drugs makes things better or worse.

However, because the legislation would take a year or more to be fully operational, an expert committee recommended that in the interim, rather than banning all the legal highs currently being sold, the ministry ought to give temporary approval to those that appeared to be the least harmful. Of the hundreds previously available, 41 were given temporary approval.

Poisons hotline

Then, on Sunday night, the government announced that it would amend the legislation to end the interim period, and ban all legal highs until they are proven to be low risk.

"Reports of severe adverse reactions continue to be received by the National Poisons Centre and Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring," said New Zealand's associate health minister Peter Dunne. "It has been impossible to attribute these adverse effects to any particular products and, in the absence of that, ministers accepted my recommendation at Cabinet last Tuesday to end the transitional period, taking all products with interim approval off the market." He said the plan is to pass the amendment through Parliament on 8 May.

Leo Schep from the National Poisons Centre in Dunedin supports the move, and confirmed that there have been more calls relating to adverse reactions since the drugs were approved. But Schep said it was impossible to tell whether that was a result of the poisons hotline number being put on all the packets, or because there were actually more adverse reactions as a result of the temporary approval of some of the drugs.

Science fail?

But the interim period was put in place to avoid forcing products onto the black market where consumers would have no idea what they were taking.

"There's been no thought of what the consequence of this is," says Ross Bell from the New Zealand Drug Foundation, which aims to minimise harm from drugs. "I thought that New Zealand was at a point where we were able to talk about drug policy in a different way – a more scientific, measured way. But that's obviously not the case."

The government's announcement comes in an election year, and follows a slew of media reports of problems related to harms from legal highs, such as addiction. Bell suspects that the decision to introduce new legislation is about looking tough on drugs, because the existing legislation already gave the government the power to ban any specific drug that causes problems.

Bell also points out that media reports about harms from legal highs are inevitable when a government is pushing through such radical legislation – and that politicians will need to keep cool heads as the reforms are rolled out. The new amendment to the original legislation casts doubt on their ability to do this: "This could potentially be a big setback to good progress of drug law reform," he says.

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Watson in your pocket: Supercomputer gets own apps

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If you could quiz Watson, IBM's all-knowing supercomputer, from an app on your phone, what would you ask it?

That is the question facing app developers now that IBM has shrunk its cognitive computer from the bedroom-sized monster that won the TV quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011 to the size of just three stacked pizza boxes. Mini Watsons can now easily be installed in data centres worldwide and made available as a cloud service to cellphone users.

Until now it has been unclear what type of apps would make best use of Watson's capabilities. It is no ordinary computer, answering complex questions using data mining and machine learning. On 28 April, IBM unveiled the 25 best app ideas in response to the challenge it issued at February's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Three of the ideas will be developed, making them among the first apps powered by Watson-in-the-cloud. IBM has set aside $100 million for Watson apps and has already invested in Fluid of San Francisco. Fluid is writing an app for outdoor clothing firm The North Face to advise hikers on the right gear for the conditions, based on product data, user reviews and expert websites.

Watson's ability to learn is what sets it apart from conventional supercomputers that only carry out superfast number crunching. Instead, Watson's role is to learn all it can about different subjects using data gleaned from a wide range of sources, including databases, encyclopedias, news stories, reviews, dictionaries, peer-reviewed research papers and textbooks. Watson's wealth of knowledge means that it will be able to answer questions beyond the scope of mere web searches.

For example, one of the shortlisted apps could be great news for any worried new parents, if it makes the final three. Developer Biovideo of San Antonio, Texas, wants to train Watson on neonatal and infant medical data from sources such as medical journals, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the UK National Health Service. "So a mother with a sick child at 4 am will be able to use Watson to ask what is wrong with her baby and get a 100 per cent accurate response using data from these trusted sources," the firm claims in its proposal.

Crucially, Watson's source data can be "unstructured" and so does not need converting and organising into narrow database-field categories. When a question is posed in natural language – currently English though more languages are planned – Watson's linguistic processor examines it in 120 different ways to work out what is being asked.

Reasoning algorithms begin to find hypothetical answers in the data, scoring them with ever greater confidence levels and ultimately returning its best possible answer. Watson has already put that capability to good use at a number of cancer hospitals in the US (see "Dr Watson will see you now").

But it is changes to Watson's hardware that make it ready to hit our smartphones. To play Jeopardy!, in which contestants are given an answer and have to work out the question, Watson was trained on 200 million pages of data. That machine comprised 10 server racks containing 2880 processor cores and 15 terabytes of RAM. Now, says Rob High, chief technology officer of the IBM Watson Group in New York, the latest version of Watson performs even better than the original with just 32 processor cores and 256 gigabytes of RAM.

This is made possible because Watson's processors run in parallel, while its operating system runs concurrent software routines, known as threads, within each of the parallel-processing cores, which lets it learn much faster and more efficiently than before.

The new mini Watson, being no bigger than three pizza boxes, can easily be slotted into racks in a cloud data centre. The idea is that every developer will give Watson a mountain of data from their chosen area for the computer to learn from. Once trained, the apps let users ask Watson questions from their phone, says High. Watson can adapt to demand too. "We can expand the Watson resource elastically depending on the number of people asking it questions," he says. This is done by making more processors and memory available at the data centre if an app proves surprisingly popular.

One app that might do well is an ultimate guide to New York City. Proposed by Ontodia, a developer there, it aims to vastly improve on the disconnected and unimpressive hits Siri and Google offer up. Training Watson on municipal, state, federal, tourist and commercial databases will provide answers to complex, natural language searches like "what is the average income of this apartment block, correlated with property taxes and construction activity over the last ten years?". The firm's aim is to give New Yorkers a detailed profile of any neighbourhood.

Azoft of Novosibirsk, Russia, meanwhile, wants to provide phone users with an animated, intelligent avatar they can ask for advice – with Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein cited as examples. Watson, Azoft says, would be trained with all Freud's and Einstein's books, articles, speeches, letters and interviews and would answer questions just as they might – perhaps with accurate speech synthesis, too.

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Insulin-making cells created by Dolly-cloning method

The dream of generating a bank of stem cells to treat injury and illness is a step closer. Embryonic stem cells have been custom-made from adult cells without manipulating the cell's genes, a process that could trigger cancer.

Using a similar cloning technique to the one that created Dolly the sheep, two teams have independently shown that it is possible to turn an adult cell into an embryonic stem cell, which can then become any cell in the body.

One team used the technique, called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), to transform skin cells from a woman with diabetes into insulin-producing beta cells that could replace those destroyed by the disease. The approach has the potential to replace many other types of tissue including heart cells, neurons and cartilage. This could spur on treatments for Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and liver disease, and repair damaged bones.

"Cell replacement therapies could dramatically change treatments and even cure debilitating diseases and injuries," says Susan Solomon, co-founder of the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF), where one of the studies was carried out.

To achieve the feat, the teams – one led by Young Gie Chung at the CHA University in Seoul, South Korea, and the other by Dieter Egli at the NYSCF – first removed the nucleus of a donated human egg and replaced it with the nucleus from an adult skin cell. Caffeine was added to stop the cell dividing too quickly, buying time for the genes in the egg's new nucleus to revert to an embryonic state. Electrical pulses and chemicals fooled the cell into thinking it was fertilised, prompting it to divide and multiply.

The result was a bundle of 60 to 200 cells – the first time an adult cell has been used to make a cloned human embryo. In the centre of the bundle were embryonic stem cells that can differentiate into any cell in the body given the right environment.

No extra genes required

In 2013, a similar procedure was used to convert cells from a fetus and a baby into embryonic stem cells. A fetus's cells are already essentially embryonic but the baby's cells needed to be rewound. Since the incidence of stem cell-treatable disease increases with age, researchers needed to figure out how to rewind adult cells, says Robert Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, co-author of the study led by the South Korean group (Cell Stem Cell, doi.org/sh2). "So we used cells from a middle-aged man and a 75-year-old man."

The approach offers an alternative to another method used to dial back the clock on adult cells. Induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells are adult cells that have been coaxed into behaving like embryonic cells by adding four extra genes. There was a lot of excitement when IPS cells were first created in 2006, but since then serious problems have emerged, involving incomplete reprogramming of the cells and the worry that the extra genes might trigger cancer. "We've overcome a lot of these problems," says Lanza, "but SCNT might turn out to be the only way to fully reprogram cells."

To prove the potential of the technique, Egli's group went one step further. They took skin cells from a woman with type 1 diabetes and turned them into stem cells. These were then made into beta cells that could theoretically replace those lost to the disease (Nature, doi.org/sjn).

However, this personalised approach is unlikely to be the way forward. If the treatment was tailor-made for each patient, an embryo would have to be discarded every time. As well as the ethical objections this would raise, the procedure would be time-consuming, costly and would be limited by the small number of eggs donated. It's also unnecessary, says Lanza.

Stem cell bank

Donor cells are sometimes rejected because of our body's human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system. This produces proteins that are recognised by immune cells. If the proteins aren't recognised, rejection occurs. Luckily, most people share one of a handful of HLA systems. That means you should only need to create stem cells specific to each HLA system, rather than each individual, says Lanza. Personalised stem cells would only be needed for people with uncommon HLA proteins.

Banks of stem cells could be created from just a handful of eggs. To make the process even more efficient, the embryonic-like stem cells could be transformed into the final product in advance so heart cells or neurons, say, could be picked "off the shelf" as needed, says Lanza.

Ian Wilmut of the University of Edinburgh, UK, who created Dolly the sheep, describes the new work as very encouraging. He says that SCNT stem cells should now be compared with IPS cells to see which is the closest match to true embryonic stem cells created from fertilised embryos. "By contrasting these two approaches we may be able to optimise both procedures and produce the best possible cells for use in research and therapy," he says.

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