White holes: Hunting the other side of a black hole

Forget black holes, weirder stuff happens in white ones (Image: Jen Stark, photograph: Harlan Erskine)

Black holes suck – but do they have mirror twins that blow? A far-flung space telescope is peering into galactic nuclei to spot one for the first time

PHYSICS is full of opposites. For every action, there's a reaction; every positive charge has a negative; every magnetic north pole has a south pole. Matter's opposite number is antimatter. And for black holes, meet white holes.

Black holes are notorious objects that suck in everything around them. Famously, not even light can escape their awesome gravity. White holes, in contrast, blow out a constant stream of matter and light – so much so that nothing can enter them. So why have so few people heard of them?

One reason is that white holes are exotic creatures whose existence is speculated by theorists, but ...

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Books out, 3D printers in for reinvented US libraries

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Across the US, libraries are setting up maker labs as they turn themselves into hubs for high-tech innovation and training

IN THE small town of Fayetteville in northern New York, you'll find the local library in an old furniture factory dating from the turn of the 20th century. The refurbished building retains hints of its industrial past: wooden floors, exposed beams, walls lined with carefully labelled tools.

But instead of quietly perusing stacks of books, many of the patrons are crowded around a suite of 3D printers. One machine is midway through a pink mobile phone case; another is finishing up a toy sword.

This is Fayetteville's maker lab – and it may very well be the future of libraries.

In 2011, Fayetteville became the first public library in the US to set up a maker lab. Besides 3D printers, the space features a laser cutter, electronics kits, workshop tools, Raspberry Pi computers and an array of sewing machines. It functions somewhere between a classroom and a start-up incubator – a place where people from all over the region can get involved with state-of-the-art technology.

Since the lab opened, similar spaces have been popping up across the country, including in cities like Sacramento, Pittsburgh, Denver and Detroit. According to the American Library Association, about 1 in 6 libraries now dedicates some of its space to maker tools and activities. The New York Public Library – one of the largest in the country – is watching these developments to inform its upcoming renovation.

The image of a library as a building filled with books, quiet readers and shushing librarians is fading fast as we get ever more of our information through the internet. Websites like Wikipedia and vast online databases have largely replaced physical copies of reference books and back issues of journals. Other books can be offered in digital form, or physical copies stored out of sight and called up via an automated retrieval system.

It so happened that these changes unfolded in parallel with a profound and lasting economic recession. With jobs hard to come by, librarians began to notice that their visitors were looking for more from their library than just a peaceful place to read. Increasingly, people were coming in search of information on how to switch careers or start their own businesses.

"Since 2008, when the bubble burst and everything started to fall apart, we've never been busier," says Sue Considine, director of the Fayetteville Free Library. "It has snowballed into this really exciting rebirth for public libraries in many ways, as places where entrepreneurship and invention and discovery can happen."

To make room for labs, some libraries are clearing out their print inventory. In Tennessee, nearly a third of the Chattanooga Public Library's print collection – encyclopedias, reference articles, unpopular novels – was sold at a public auction to turn an entire floor into a maker lab. An academic library at the University of Nevada, Reno, put more than half of its inventory into storage, freeing up 1700 square metres for maker tools and working space.

Starting a maker space isn't cheap – a standard 3D printer that uses melted plastic, for example, can cost several thousand dollars. But the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a US government agency, is supporting the growing movement. It has given out $2.6 million in grants so far for maker-space projects.

Such investment makes sense if libraries are to fulfil their mission in society, which Corinne Hill, director at Chattanooga, says extends far beyond books. "We've always delivered information to the public; we have done this for 3000 years. We're just doing it differently," she says. "I think that libraries are starting to see the light."

Though only a couple of years old, library maker spaces have already spun out a host of entrepreneurial successes (See "Stacks to start-ups"). At the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, patrons have developed prototypes for satellite trackers, dental hygiene instruments and guitar parts. Two graduate students used the Fayetteville library to produced a novel model of the brainstem, which they then licensed to a medical equipment manufacturing firm. A Nevada patron is currently negotiating the sale of an original board game with 3D-printed pieces. Others use the space to enhance existing small businesses. For example, a cheesemaker used a Chattanooga 3D-printer to make a logo to stamp onto his wheels of cheese.

The maker spaces have even attracted the interest of major tech businesses. Chicago's "pop-up" maker lab was intended to last for only six months last year. But the site was so successful – with more than 30,000 visitors – that the Google-owned tech firm Motorola Mobility offered to fund the space for at least another year. And Google itself later provided 500 Finch Robots, cute-looking devices that can be used to teach basic programming skills. Inventables, a hardware company based in Chicago, was similarly inspired and has donated 3D-carving machines around the country.

Brian Bannon, who is the Chicago public libraries commissioner, says that maker space is now part of the city's goal to become a major hub for advanced manufacturing over the next couple of decades. "Exposing people in a more experiential way to this technology might help them identify advanced manufacturing as something that can be a good fit for them," he says. The Harold Washington Library is running a programme that aims to draw more women into the traditionally male-dominated field. So far, just over half of the students enrolled in its classes, which include training in how to use laser cutters and 3D printers, have been female.

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Fix farms in a few countries and feed 3 billion people

Give us the right levers and we shall feed the world. The lion's share of the world's food production problems stem from just a handful of countries. If we could concentrate on these problem areas, we could potentially feed 3 billion more people and massively reduce the environmental damage from farming.

"The way we're growing agriculture right now is totally not sustainable," says Paul West of the University of Minnesota in St Paul.

West and his colleagues looked for "leverage points": areas with the most potential to change how we grow food. They focused on the 17 crops that represent 86 per cent of the world's crop calories, and consume the most water and fertiliser.

"They're taking a high-altitude view of all the possible points that need to be made if we're going to feed a planet full of people," says Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. "It's incredibly valuable to have that all in one place."

Three-pronged solution

West's study suggests three fundamental areas where we can boost food production sustainably: increasing yields from unproductive farms, decreasing the waste of precious resources like water, and changing how we eat. He also identified the parts of the world where we could get the most bang for our buck (see map, below).

First, we need to get more food from existing farms. West identified regions where yields are far too low, mostly in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe. He estimates that boosting yields in those areas to just 50 per cent of the optimum could feed 850 million more people.

Next, crops need to be grown more in a more environmentally friendly way. That means cutting greenhouse gas emissions – variously from deforestation, livestock, rice paddies and fertiliser use – while also wasting less water on unnecessary irrigation, and stopping the overuse of fertilisers, which causes water pollution. The countries responsible for the most environmental damage in the way they farm are China, India, the US, Brazil, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

And finally, we need to waste less food. Nearly 30 to 50 per cent of food currently goes to waste. In theory, West says, eliminating all such waste in the US, India and China alone could provide enough food to feed 413 million more people per year.

The problem of food waste is made worse by our increasing consumption of meat. Only 51 per cent of crop production is used to feed people, and that figure is dropping. Most of the rest is used to feed animals, which wastes a proportion of calories in crops and so cuts the net amount of food available to people. As a result, letting a kilogram of beef go off, for example, squanders 24 times as many calories as wasting a kilogram of wheat. "Not all food waste is created equal," says West.

He says we should all eat less meat, pointing out that crops used for animal feed in the US, China, western Europe and Brazil could feed 2.4 billion people.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1246067

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Today on New Scientist

Waste paper turned into a super-spongy battery

Treat paper in the right way and it can become a form of porous carbon capable of sucking up charge – making it the perfect battery for storing wind energy

What will hypercomputers let us do? Good question

Machines that go beyond human logic could help us understand how we think – if we can only figure out what to ask them

Higgs boson glimpsed at work for first time

Rare particle scattering detected at CERN may help test how the Higgs boson imparts mass to other particles – and perhaps lead to new physics

Strange dark stuff is making the universe too bright

Sky surveys suggest that dark matter or some other mysterious dark material may be lighting up the universe with too much ultraviolet radiation

Spark of life revisited thanks to electric bacteria

The discovery and culturing of bacteria that eat and excrete electrons means we may soon find out just how little electricity fundamental life requires

Asthma drugs stunt growth – but only by a centimetre

The long-standing worry that steroid-based asthma drugs stunt children's growth is overblown, two reviews of clinical trials conclude

Turing's oracle: The computer that goes beyond logic

For 75 years, computers have worked within limits defined by Alan Turing. Now work has begun to fulfil his prophecy of a machine that can solve the unsolvable

Biological pacemaker keeps a beat without the hardware

Adult pigs have been cured of heart block by turning their own cells into a pacemaker using a gene involved in embryonic heat development

Watchdog must be tougher on climate sceptic 'charity'

Decisive action is needed to curb Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation, which lobbies against climate change mitigation, says policy expert Bob Ward

Arthritis drug shows potential to stall Alzheimer's

Etanercept might be able to reduce the cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer's disease, according to a small pilot safety study

Largest laser gives diamond a record-setting squeeze

A laser used to spark nuclear fusion has compressed diamond at unprecedented pressure, giving the first data on how carbon may behave inside giant planets

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Waste paper turned into a super-spongy battery

GOT an overflowing wastepaper basket? Now there's a way to use unwanted printouts to store energy.

Traditional batteries use chemical reactions to store large amounts of energy, but they take time to charge. Capacitors store it in an electric field, which means they can charge and release energy quickly. But they can only hold small amounts at a time.

To up capacity and maintain speed, scientists are building supercapacitors, often using forms of porous carbon that can suck up charge like a sponge. Many commercial supercapacitors use carbon derived from coconut shells, a relatively limited commodity. Graphene has also been proposed, but the thin sheets of carbon are expensive to make, so a cheaper option was needed.

"I thought about using waste office paper while cleaning my desk in the office," says Satishchandra Ogale at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, India.

His team cut paper into small strips and put them through a series of heating and cooling processes, including mixing the strips with sulphuric acid at 180 °C and carbonising them at 800 °C. The result was a form of carbon riddled with microscopic structures that give it a massive surface area for holding charge – more than 2300 square metres per gram.

The team then used this carbon and an electrolyte gel to create a supercapacitor (Small, doi.org/f2sxx4). The substance stores charge similarly to other advanced carbon materials for supercapacitors, but with the added benefit of recycling a common product, says George Chen at the University of Nottingham, UK, who was not involved in the work.

The process may not be as economical as recycling paper the traditional way, says Chen. But if the technology is viable, waste paper could one day be used to store energy generated by wind farms or to charge electric cars.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Build a better battery with waste paper"

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What will hypercomputers let us do? Good question

Machines that go beyond human logic could help us understand how we think – if we can only figure out what to ask them

WHAT is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything? In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, aliens build a city-sized computer to find out. They are dismayed when it turns out, bafflingly, to be 42. The problem, the unrepentant computer suggests, is that they never really knew the question... and to find it they will need an even bigger computer.

Like all the best comedy, Douglas Adams's absurdity has an element of truth to it – perhaps more than you might expect. We already have machines that answer our questions in ways we can't fully appreciate: from quantum computers, whose physics remains opaque, to data-crunching black boxes that translate languages and recognise faces despite knowing nothing of grammar or physiology (New Scientist, 10 August 2013, p 32).

But despite their complexity, these computers are all of the type conceived by Alan Turing in 1936 – and they all have the same limitations. Turing showed that any computer predicated on human logic alone will struggle with the same questions that we do. They will always find some questions undecidable: not so much "computer says 'no'" as "computer says 'can never know'".

But Turing also conceived of an "oracle" that might transcend those limitations. Most computer scientists don't think we can ever build one. But a few people are trying, using neural networks (see "Turing's oracle: The computer that goes beyond logic"). If they succeed, we will gain new insights into thought itself – and perhaps into the human brain, whose staggering computational prowess remains deeply mysterious (see "Defending the grand vision of the Human Brain Project").

Conventional computers give us the answers to questions that we can articulate, but don't have the time to calculate. Turing's oracle could address issues we can't even articulate: an echo of Adams's "even bigger computer". It might not provide answers to life, the universe and everything, but even futile attempts to make one could help explain how we think about them – and figure out the right questions to ask.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Deep thoughts"

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Asthma drugs stunt growth - but only by a centimetre

Parents of children with asthma can rest a little easier. The long-standing worry that some asthma drugs stunt children's growth looks to be overblown.

It seems that children who take inhaled steroids may be about 1 centimetre shorter on average than their peers who do not. "This is very reassuring," says Andrew Bush of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research.

Steroid drugs have long been used to combat asthma, which arises when people's airways become inflamed and constricted. High doses of oral steroids over long periods are known to stunt children's growth – as does leaving asthma untreated. What was unclear was whether inhaled steroids, which deliver a lower but more direct dose, would also affect height.

Various trials have explored the issue over the years. Now Francine Ducharme at the University of Montreal in Canada and colleagues have pulled the results together in a systematic review of 25 randomised trials, which tested six inhaled steroids against placebo treatments. The trials lasted from 3 months to 6 years, and the children involved were followed up for various lengths of time after the trials had ended.

Most of the studies they analysed looked at children's growth rates. On average, the steroids reduced the growth rate by about 0.5 centimetres in the first year of treatment, but this effect tailed off in subsequent years, and there was some catch-up in growth if the treatment ended or was wound down.

Only one study measured the participants' adult height: it found there was a 1.2-centimetre difference between people who had used inhaled steroids as a child and those who were given a placebo. A three-year study found a 0.7-centimetre disparity at the end of the trial.

Small price to pay

"That is a small price to pay for the benefits of the drugs," says Ducharme. About 20 children die from asthma attacks each year in the UK.

A separate review by Ducharme and a different group of colleagues looked at 22 studies that tested varying the dose of steroids, and found that lower doses had less of an effect on height. One less puff of the medicine per day translated into an additional height increase of 0.25 centimetres in the first year.

As well as making sure that steroid doses are as low as possible, we should show children how to use their inhalers properly, says Bush. If they do not, the medicine may be deposited in the mouth and absorbed into the bloodstream where it can more easily affect growth, instead of reaching the lungs as intended.

"But the first priority must be to treat and control the disease," says Bush. "Undertreated asthma creates a huge burden in terms of time off school and children not able to do sports."

Journal reference: Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews, DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD009471.pub and 10.1002/14651858.CD009878.pub

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US admits security breaches with deadly virus samples

Vials of smallpox in the back of a fridge; anthrax shipped to a low-security lab. A spate of biosafety breaches by US government labs can be blamed on lack of oversight and scientists failing to follow protocol, according to a report released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, on Monday.

Last week, workers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, found labelled vials of smallpox virus in an unguarded fridge. All such smallpox should have been destroyed when the disease was declared eradicated in 1980.

This follows an incident last month, when the CDC's Bioterrorism Rapid Response and Advanced Technology (BRRAT) lab found that anthrax samples sent to a low-security lab may not have been completely dead. None of the 84 people potentially exposed seem to have been infected. The particularly dangerous strain of anthrax was not even necessary for the research project being conducted by the team it was sent to, says CDC director Tom Frieden.

In the report, the CDC admits that similarly harmful bacteria were incorrectly shipped in 2006. In March, deadly bird flu virus was found in transported flu samples thought to be harmless.

The CDC has suspended pathogen shipments, closed the BRRAT lab, and will establish an advisory group for lab safety.

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Today on New Scientist

High-precision hydrogen clock to hunt for new physics

An ultra-precise clock that ticks to the rhythm of hydrogen molecules could offer a way to probe particle masses and look for signs of odd behaviour

Will UK reshuffle boost science and environment?

New environment secretary Liz Truss may prove more eco-friendly than her predecessor. Meanwhile Greg Clark is made minister for universities and science

Spaceport UK: Locations for launch sites unveiled

The UK Space Agency has announced the eight possible locations for a spaceport to be built in the UK before 2018 – and six of them are in Scotland

Amphibians' swim stroke has lasted 270 million years

A newly discovered set of fossilised tracks in the Italian Alps suggests modern salamanders swim and walk much as their ancient cousins did

Detroit water shut-offs condemned as threat to health

Health professionals are speaking out against Detroit's policy of cutting off water to people with unpaid bills – warning of a disaster in the making

The earth eaters mining 'Europe's biggest hole'

Giant excavators at Germany's Hambach mine are churning out eye-watering amounts of lignite – aka brown coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel out there

Fighting fear, denial and death on Ebola frontline

Emergency nurse Anja Wolz, who is tending to the sick in West Africa, says medical staff can beat Ebola with more drugs and better health education

Rogue elements: What's wrong with the periodic table

Weights gone awry, elements changing position, the ructions of relativity – chemistry's iconic chart is far from stable, and no one knows where it will end

Reaping the whirlwind of Nazi eugenics

In the 1960s, eugenics was reinvented as behaviour genetics, but soon went back off the rails. Aaron Panofsky's Misbehaving Science explores what happened

World's most endangered seal seen wrestling octopus

An incredibly rare sighting of a Mediterranean monk seal shows how it captures an eight-legged lunch

First boron buckyballs roll out of the lab

Cage-shaped molecules made of 40 boron atoms may lead to new "wonder" materials with unique properties

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High-precision hydrogen clock to hunt for new physics

An ultra-precise clock that ticks to the beat of hydrogen molecules could probe fundamental constants and maybe spot signs of new physics.

Atomic clocks are the world's most accurate timekeepers. They measure the frequency of radiation that makes an atom's electrons jump from one energy level to another. This never changes for a given element, so a number of cycles of this radiation can define the second.

The clocks don't just keep time. They have a range of applications from simulating quantum systems to measuring gravity. But current clocks are reaching limits when it comes to the precision needed to probe some mysteries.

Changing constants

One experiment uses atomic clocks to study the mass ratio between protons and electrons. The ratio seems constant, but it may be changing very slightly as the universe expands. Spotting even a small shift in the ratio could tell us whether this fundamental constant actually had different values in the past. This in turn might hint at what the cosmos was like in its earliest moments.

Stephan Schiller at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany and his colleagues think clocks using molecules rather than atoms offer a better way to test the idea. According to the team's calculations, a clock with a molecule of two hydrogen atoms at its centre could combine multiple frequencies at once, providing a more accurate probe of possible changes in the electron-proton mass ratio.

And because hydrogen molecules consist of just a handful of particles, compared with the larger caesium atoms used in atomic clocks, it would be easier to do theoretical calculations and compare them with real experiments, the team says.

Wim Ubachs at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands agrees that molecular clocks could be used as high-precision physics instruments. But he says there are still technical hurdles to overcome, such as tuning different lasers to vibrate the molecules at a variety of frequencies at the same time.

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.023004

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Will UK reshuffle boost science and environment?

Sometimes, better the devil you don't know than the one you do. In his cabinet reshuffle today, UK prime minister David Cameron ousted the man who had been his environment secretary since 2012, replacing him with relative newcomer to the field, Liz Truss, MP for South West Norfolk.

Owen Paterson's term as environment secretary was mired in controversy, involving public statements suggesting climate change could be a positive thing, and controversial policies on flood defences. Widely regarded as a climate sceptic, he slashed his department's spending on the issue. He oversaw a series of misguided badger culls conducted to stem the spread of bovine tuberculosis, commenting that when the culls didn't work as planned. "Almost anybody would be an improvement on Owen Paterson," was the judgement from Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, in London.

Truss won praise in her previous role as education minister where she fought to raise the profile of mathematics and science in schools, says Imran Khan, chief executive of the British Science Association. That could suggest she will have better understanding of climate change science than her predecessor. Having said that, some may be concerned that she worked for oil giant Shell before becoming an MP.

Top of her list of duties, according to Ward, should be working to reverse public misconceptions about climate change and preparing the nation for its impacts, particularly increased flood risk. He says that staff charged with climate change adaptation were slashed from 38 to a handful under Paterson. "Truss," he says, "will have to reverse that lack of focus."

Meanwhile, Greg Clark, MP for Tunbridge Wells, has been chosen to replace David Willetts as minister for universities and science. Clark will keep his role as minister for cities. Willetts, nicknamed "two brains" within the Conservative party for his intellectual approach, was generally liked by the science community during his time as minister, particularly for his success in shielding the science budget from government cuts.

In March 2007, Clark was one of more than 200 MPs who signed an Early Day Motion in support of homeopathy.

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Spaceport UK: Locations for launch sites unveiled

Your next flight to space will be departing from Glasgow. Or it might be. The city is on the list of possible "spaceport" locations announced today by the UK Space Agency. However, no commercial space company has yet demonstrated a spaceplane that is capable of carrying paying passengers.

The plan is to build a spaceport at a remote site where regular airline traffic is low. The location also has to have a longer-than usual runway or room to build one. This is because after a hypersonic re-entry, spaceplanes will still be travelling at far greater speeds than standard planes and will need more room to land.

Such requirements make either the north or north-east of Scotland a sensible location, away from the busy transatlantic air corridors. In all, eight sites have been shortlisted by the UK Space Agency and were announced at Farnborough Air Show today – six of which are in Scotland.

Aviation minister Robert Goodwill said the sites to be assessed will be: Campbelltown Airport, RAF Kinloss, RAF Leuchars, RAF Lossiemouth, Llanbedr Airfield, Newquay Cornwall Airport (formerly RAF St Mawgan), Glasgow Prestwick Airport and Stornoway Airport.

David Parker, head of the UK Space Agency said one aim is "to provide low-cost access to space and provide the person in the street with the chance to go to space".

The focus on Scotland as a site for a UK spaceport comes ahead of September's independence referendum. If Scotland votes for independence it would lose the chance to host these spaceports and would have to bid for its own.

The place for space

"The UK space industry is one of our great success stories and I am sure there will be a role for Scotland to play in the future," Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said.

The decision to build a spaceport follows a two-year government review looking at the job-creating potential of commercial spaceflight. It concluded that a spaceport would be an essential hub for a host of space-related markets, from tourism to satellite launches, offering many employment opportunities.

In a brief statement released ahead of tomorrow's announcement of potential sites, the UK Space Agency says: "A spaceport would open up the UK space tourism industry to specialist operators such as Virgin Galactic and XCor, but it also paves the way for future technologies that will help make Britain the place for space."

Virgin Galactic and XCor are working on spaceplanes – orbital vehicles that land like regular planes. Virgin's SpaceShipTwo is a "captive carry" design lofted to an altitude of 10 kilometres by a jet plane, from where it fires its rocket motor and heads for suborbit. Flight tests are ongoing. Xcor's Lynx is a rocket plane that flies from the runway to space with no carrier aircraft – but it has yet to fly.

Being able to service such spacecraft with a British spaceport is crucial, says the UK Space Agency. "It will be the first spaceport of its kind outside the United States."

Rocket science

Other companies in the industry are impressed. "It's great to see the UK establishing itself in the human spaceflight arena. Nations that ignore new opportunities developing in both suborbital and orbital space transportation run the risk of being left behind," says Mike Gold, head of operations at Bigelow Aerospace, a maker of expandable space habitats.

Moves in the US underscore the economic importance of spaceports: commercial rocket maker SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, has this week moved a step closer to getting permission to build its first all-commercial spaceport in Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX already launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, plus similar facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but it needs more launch capacity to service its bulging backlog of rocket launch orders.

On 9 July, the US Federal Aviation Administration completed an extensive environmental audit of the impact of the proposed launch complex – and gave SpaceX the go-ahead for it. Such audits are not trivial: they are a serious, gruelling business that can cause a proposal to be reject for a number of reasons. For instance, an airport's application to the FAA to host future Xcor launches has been stymied by worries that sonic booms from rocket motors might interfere with the mating rituals of prairie chickens.

So SpaceX is not counting its chickens yet. "Brownsville remains a finalist for SpaceX's development of a commercial orbital launch complex," says Hannah Post of SpaceX. "But there remain several criteria that will need to be met before SpaceX makes a decision. We are hopeful that these will be complete in the near future."

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Amphibians' swim stroke has lasted 270 million years

Amphibians have been using the same swimming technique for 270 million years, a set of ancient footprints reveals.

Massimo Bernardi at the Science Museum in Trento, Italy, and his colleagues recently found the fossilised tracks in the Italian Alps, in Permian rock deposits known to be between 270 and 283 million years old. The team reckon that the prints were made by an early amphibian around 10 centimetres long.

Impressions of entire feet can be seen in rock that was once under shallow water, but further into what was a lake only imprints of claw scratches and tail swishes are visible, suggesting the animal had launched into a swim.

The tracks are the first fossil record of an animal that old switching from walking to swimming, and reveal more about ancient animal movement than fossilised bones can, says Bernardi. "Tracks are very useful because they tell you about the life and activity of an animal," he says. "Instead of looking at a snapshot you see a movie."

The animal appears to have walked and swum just like modern salamanders, says team member Miriam Ashley-Ross at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. "Put newts down in the water, and they would make pretty much the same kind of trackway," she says.

Journal reference: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, DOI: 10.1016/j.palaeo.2014.05.032

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The earth eaters mining 'Europe's biggest hole'

(Image: Bernhard Lang/Gettty)

WHEN something is referred to as "Europe's biggest hole", it's not likely to be a pretty sight.

The Hambach opencast mine in Germany's Lower Rhine basin sprawls across 85 square kilometres. Giant excavators mine lignite – aka brown coal – at a rate of up to 240,000 tonnes a day. That's about equal to a football stadium piled 30 metres high with coal.

This effort might be considered incongruous in a country that aims to be a global leader in clean energy, but after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, Germany announced it would phase out nuclear power. As a result, the country's brown coal – considered the worst possible fuel choice in terms of its carbon dioxide emissions – was suddenly in demand. Germany now burns more lignite than any country in the world.

For photographer Bernhard Lang, who shot a series of aerial photos of the mine in May, capturing Hambach from above was the key to conveying its scale. "Watching these huge machines biting into the barren landscape reminded me of alien planets in science fiction movies," Lang says. "It's a really direct image of the human impact on Earth."

The Hambach mine is expected to have exhausted its lignite reserves by 2040, at which point it will be converted into an artificial lake, filled with 4 billion cubic metres of water from the Rhine.

This article appeared in print under the headline "The earth eaters"

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Detroit water shut-offs condemned as threat to health

The decision by the bankrupt city of Detroit to cut off the water supply to 80,000 homes with outstanding water bills is a public health disaster in the making, says the largest professional association of nurses in the US.

National Nurses United has called for an immediate moratorium on the shut-offs, and is leading a march in Detroit on Friday to make its demands clear.

The policy has been condemned by the United Nations as an international human rights violation.

"Nurses know the critical link between access to water and public health," said NNU co-president Jean Ross in a statement released by the organisation. "Lack of water, like unsafe sanitation, is a major health disaster that can lead to disease outbreaks and pandemics. The city must end this shut-off now."

In March, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) began quietly shutting off the supply to homes with bills either 60 days overdue or with more than $150 outstanding. "What we are providing is a service," says Curtrise Garner, a representative for the department. "People don't have to go without water, but somebody has to pay for it."

In June alone, 7210 homes had their water supply cut off, but 15,276 have lost access since the policy was implemented, says Garner. The department says it is unable to estimate how that figure translates to the number of people left without water overall.

Contagious disease

But health professionals in Detroit insist that the potential to trigger a large-scale public health disaster cannot be tolerated. "This is hands-down a very serious health issue," says Marcus Zervos, head of the department of infectious diseases at Henry Ford Hospital. "If someone can't take a shower or have a functioning toilet, they'll be at risk for skin infections like staph and impetigo, and gastrointestinal illnesses like diarrhoea - all of which are contagious."

Access to clean drinking water is most crucial. According to Mia Cupp of Wayne Metropolitan Community Action Agency, a non-profit that has been helping people pay their bills or obtain access to water, many affected residents have been collecting water at friends' houses, but others have been taking it from fire hydrants. Meanwhile, Detroit food banks have reportedly begun a "water bank" system across the city. So far it has distributed around 25,000 litres. The food giant Nestlé has donated 30,000 bottles of water.

Worryingly, the city's department of health, recently privatised because of the bankrupt government's inability to fund it, has no means of quantifying any impact on health as a result of the shut-offs. "The point is that this could be happening and there's no way to know it," says Zervos. "That's part of the problem."

While the DWSD emphasises that it has mechanisms in place to help families with outstanding bills, funds are limited, and the department says it has no intention of halting the shut-offs. "It's a new way of conducting business and we're going to continue to do it," Garner says. "We will shut off every single one."

Garner declined to comment on the potential health threat posed by the department's policy.

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Fighting fear, denial and death on Ebola frontline

Medical staff can beat Ebola with more drugs and better health education

I AM working with medical staff in the West African country of Sierra Leone, where the people have never experienced an outbreak of Ebola on this scale before. There are a lot of cases – we are really stretched – and my worry is that those we are seeing are the tip of the iceberg. To put things in perspective, in just one village between 40 and 50 cases have been reported. In neighbouring Guinea, where the outbreak began, we would see a similar number in an entire district.

Sadly, at the moment a lot of our work is dealing with dead bodies. But we are also training local healthcare workers and reaching out to communities to try to slow the spread of the virus.

Fear is a big problem. People are really afraid when they see us in our protective suits – who wouldn't be? The suits make it difficult to connect with our patients. Part of your training as a medical professional is to provide a sense of security to those you're trying to help, but the layers of plastic we have to wear make that difficult – only your eyes show. I'm at an extra disadvantage because I don't speak the local language, but I try to do all that I can to connect with patients by giving them a gentle touch or hug.

I try to show the local healthcare workers that it is safe for them to do the same, but many of them are very scared of getting Ebola, and understandably so – some have already died.

Denial is yet another barrier we are trying to tackle. There are still a lot of people in the region who don't believe that Ebola exists.

Even in the midst of so much sadness, there are positive moments. In Guinea, we had a patient in the isolation unit who was always trying to help us. He said he thought we were angels sent from heaven to save him – he was so appreciative of what we were doing. It is experiences like this that keep us going.

I think that, with more sick people coming to our treatment centres rather than staying in the community and risking spreading the virus, and with continued education, we will see a big change in the situation. With enough centres, medication, educated people and support, we can turn this epidemic around.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Healing touch"

Anja Wolz is an emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières, which now has 300 staff in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia

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Reaping the whirlwind of Nazi eugenics

• Book information


• Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the development of behavior genetics by Aaron Panofsky


• Published by: University of Chicago Press


• Price: $85

Even twin studies aren't reliable when it comes to heritability (Image: Maia Flore/Agence VU)

In the 1960s, eugenics was reinvented as behaviour genetics, but soon went back off the rails. Aaron Panofsky's Misbehaving Science explores what happened

ARE some fields of scientific exploration so incendiary they should be fenced off and labelled "Keep out"?

I'm inclined to think not, both from a commitment to intellectual freedom and for the practical reason that if you put up such notices, trespassers are guaranteed. Still, if any area of research might warrant prohibition it is eugenics – the branch of human genetics used to justify repugnant Nazi ideology and, before that, the enforced sterilisation of "degenerates" around the world.

Yet eugenics was not cordoned off. A mere two decades after the second world war, it was reinvented as behaviour genetics. The story of what happened next is both gripping and salutary – and it is told with wonderful insight by sociologist Aaron Panofsky from the Institute of Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

It is testament to human resilience and optimism that behaviour genetics was born into an atmosphere of academic excitement. Seen as an antidote to behaviourism – the idea that behaviour can be scientifically understood without recourse to anything beyond the observable – the pioneers believed that by turning the spotlight on heredity they could achieve their dream of "unlocking the secrets of human nature and solving social ills like crime, homelessness, and madness", as Panofsky puts it.

What's more, they were convinced they could do this without reviving the menacing spectre of eugenics, or its diabolical cousins, racism, social Darwinism and biological determinism. One volume of essays establishing the field reads: "The concept of race is likely to remain of small general interest for behavioral science [because research in this area is] procedurally difficult, politically dangerous, and personally repugnant." Behaviour geneticists were determined their discoveries would not be misused for social or political ends. As Theodosius Dobzhansky, a hugely respected population geneticist and founder of the field, often said: "Differences aren't deficits."

In hindsight it seems naive. But with an emphasis on academic inclusion and a remit to think broadly and creatively, the discipline flourished. This golden age lasted just a decade. Then came the fall.

In 1969, psychologist Arthur Jensen at the University of California, Berkeley, published an infamous article: "How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?" It drew heavily on behaviour genetics to argue that the IQ gap between black and white populations had genetic causes and, as a result, educators could do little to reduce it. Commentators were up in arms. Panofsky describes it as "perhaps the most widely covered academic controversy ever". And it was the public reaction, as much as Jensen's preposterous assertions, that changed the course of behaviour genetics.

With the entire discipline under attack, the field fragmented, and those who were left closed ranks. This had disastrous knock-on effects. "It became difficult for behavior geneticists to distinguish constructive criticism from destructive attacks, and this made them less willing to engage each other critically," writes Panofksy.

The founding principles of social responsibility suffered, usurped by a responsibility to the discipline itself and to scientific freedom. And controversy bred controversy as the prospect of achieving notoriety attracted new talent. In short, the field became weak and poorly integrated, with low status, limited funding, and publicity the main currency of academic reward. This, according to Panofsky, is why it is afflicted with "persistent, ungovernable controversy" – his definition of "misbehaving science".

It all seemed inevitable. Sooner or later, behaviour genetics would come up with something contentious – a gene "linked to" aggression or homosexuality, to name two examples that came later – a media frenzy would ensue, and the scientists would fight their corner. Misbehaviour was in its nature.

But, after Jensen, behaviour genetics changed in another way, which was more unexpected and, to my mind, more unforgivable. Panofsky recounts how, as the bunker mentality set in and some practitioners defected, channels of enquiry narrowed until research came to focus almost exclusively on the slippery concept of heritability.

Take a population of, say, tomato plants, and a trait, say, height. That trait will vary among members of the population, and the proportion of variance due to genes, rather than environment, is the heritability.

Behaviour geneticists came to see finding high heritability as a justification for their work. But heredity changes depending on the environment. Grow those tomatoes in a regulated greenhouse and almost all the difference in their height will be thanks to their genes; grow them on a sloping, partly shaded field and the effect of heritability is lower.

Nature and nurture are not distinct, and the complexity of their interactions is increasingly apparent in this genomic age. Heritability can't even be reliably estimated in humans using twin and adoption studies, the method of choice for behaviour geneticists.

All this undermines the supposition that heritability tells us about the cause of a behaviour. In fact, heritability is almost entirely meaningless. Forget "misbehaving science", for me the tragedy of behaviour genetics is that it has become bad science.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Reaping the whirlwind"

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World's most endangered seal seen wrestling octopus

(Image: Ionian Dolphin Project)

In the Odyssey, Homer tells of huge herds of monk seals on the beaches of ancient Greece. But these days they are hardly ever seen – their total population is less than 500, making them the world's most endangered seal.

So Joan Gonzalvo, of the Tethys Research Institute in Milan, Italy, was delighted to see a monk seal while on a dolphin survey in the Amvrakikos gulf in western Greece last week.

"We could hardly believe that what we had in front of us was a monk seal," he says. "Then we saw it voraciously preying on an octopus just a few metres away from our boat." From the estimated size of the animal, around 130 centimetres long, Gonzalvo says it was a pup or juvenile seal.

Gonzalvo says he was struck, while watching the seal happily eating near his boat, by the trusting nature that has long made it an easy target for hunters.

The area's octopuses don't seem to be having an easy ride either. Gonzalvo, who runs the Ionian Dolphin Project, has previously seen one stuck to the genitals of a dolphin.

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First boron buckyballs roll out of the lab

Score one for boron. For the first time, a version of the famous football-shaped buckyball has been created from boron.

Discovered in 1985, buckyballs are made from 60 carbon atoms linked together to form hollow spheres. The molecular cages are very stable and can withstand high temperatures and pressures, so researchers have suggested they might store hydrogen at high densities, perhaps making it a viable fuel source. At normal pressures, too much of the lightweight gas can escape from ordinary canisters, and compressing it requires bulky storage tanks.

Boron sits next to carbon in the periodic table, so a boron ball may also display useful properties. But it wasn't clear whether boron could form such structures.

Meet borospherene

Now Lai-Sheng Wang at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleagues have made a cage-like molecule with 40 boron atoms by vaporising a chunk of boron with a laser then freezing it with helium, creating boron clusters. The team analysed the energy spectra of these clusters and compared them with computer models of 10,000 possible arrangements of boron atoms. The matching configuration revealed they had created the boron ball.

Unlike carbon buckyballs, in which the faces are made of hexagons and pentagons, the boron buckyball is made from triangles, hexagons and heptagons. As a result, it is less spherical but still an enclosed structure. Wang has dubbed the molecule "borospherene". The team is now hunting for a boron analogue of graphene – a strong sheet of carbon just one atom thick that is often touted as a "wonder" material because of its unique electrical properties.

Mark Fox at Durham University, UK likes the name – and is excited at the prospect of finding a boron version of graphene. Buckyballs led to the discovery of graphene, he says, and history may repeat itself with boron.

Journal reference: Nature Chemistry, DOI: 10.1038/nchem.1999

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Spaceport UK: Government plan to launch spaceplanes

Build it and they will come. That was the message from the UK Space Agency today as it revealed ambitious plans to build a spaceport somewhere in the UK before 2018. However, no commercial space company has yet demonstrated a spaceplane that is capable of carrying paying passengers.

The plan is to build a spaceport at a remote site where regular airline traffic is low. The location also has to have a longer-than usual runway or room to build one. This is because after a hypersonic re-entry, spaceplanes will still be travelling at far greater speeds than standard planes and will need more room to land.

Such requirements make either the north or north-east of Scotland a sensible location, away from the busy transatlantic air corridors. Cornwall in the UK's deep south-west is also a possibility, where likely sites may include RAF St Mawgan, near Newquay, which is already used for rocket engine testing. In all, eight sites have been shortlisted by the UK Space Agency and will be announced at Farnborough Air Show by the science minister David Willets tomorrow.

The focus on Scotland as a site for a UK spaceport comes just weeks ahead of next month's independence referendum. If Scotland votes for independence it would lose the chance to host these spaceports and would have to bid for its own.

The place for space

"The UK space industry is one of our great success stories and I am sure there will be a role for Scotland to play in the future," Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said.

The decision to build a spaceport follows a two-year government review looking at the job-creating potential of commercial spaceflight. It concluded that a spaceport would be an essential hub for a host of space-related markets, from tourism to satellite launches, offering many employment opportunities.

In a brief statement released ahead of tomorrow's announcement of potential sites, the UK Space Agency says: "A spaceport would open up the UK space tourism industry to specialist operators such as Virgin Galactic and XCor, but it also paves the way for future technologies that will help make Britain the place for space."

Virgin Galactic and XCor are working on spaceplanes – orbital vehicles that land like regular planes. Virgin's SpaceShipTwo is a "captive carry" design lofted to an altitude of 10 kilometres by a jet plane, from where it fires its rocket motor and heads for suborbit. Flight tests are ongoing. Xcor's Lynx is a rocket plane that flies from the runway to space with no carrier aircraft – but it has yet to fly.

Being able to service such spacecraft with a British spaceport is crucial, says the UK Space Agency. "It will be the first spaceport of its kind outside the United States."

Rocket science

Other companies in the industry are impressed. "It's great to see the UK establishing itself in the human spaceflight arena. Nations that ignore new opportunities developing in both suborbital and orbital space transportation run the risk of being left behind," says Mike Gold, head of operations at Bigelow Aerospace, a maker of expandable space habitats.

Moves in the US underscore the economic importance of spaceports: commercial rocket maker SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, has this week moved a step closer to getting permission to build its first all-commercial spaceport in Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX already launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, plus similar facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but it needs more launch capacity to service its bulging backlog of rocket launch orders.

On 9 July, the US Federal Aviation Administration completed an extensive environmental audit of the impact of the proposed launch complex – and gave SpaceX the go-ahead for it. Such audits are not trivial: they are a serious, gruelling business that can cause a proposal to be reject for a number of reasons. For instance, an airport's application to the FAA to host future Xcor launches has been stymied by worries that sonic booms from rocket motors might interfere with the mating rituals of prairie chickens.

So SpaceX is not counting its chickens yet. "Brownsville remains a finalist for SpaceX's development of a commercial orbital launch complex," says Hannah Post of SpaceX. "But there remain several criteria that will need to be met before SpaceX makes a decision. We are hopeful that these will be complete in the near future."

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Phone invaders: The rise of mobile malware

(Image: Raymond Beisinger)

Your most intimate companion may be betraying you. Smartphones are lucrative targets for cybercriminals and keeping them true might not be as easy as we hoped

IT'S 2 am. Do you know what your smartphone is up to? It may not be sleeping faithfully beside you. Seduced by a server far away, it springs to life and betrays your trust, giving away your secrets and running up quite a tab.

For many, the nightmare is a reality. In 2011, for example, a cybercriminal in China gained control of hundreds of thousands of phones, remotely directing them to send premium-rate text messages, call premium toll numbers and play pay-per-view videos while their owners slept on obliviously.

Other phones develop late-night gambling habits. In 2012, journalist Elise Ackerman wrote about her friend, Mike, who caught his phone playing online poker. It then used his credit card ...

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Famine puts next two generations at risk of obesity

You are what your grandmother ate, potentially, but maybe not what your great grandmother consumed. A study in mice shows that undernourishment during pregnancy increases the chances that the next two generations will develop obesity and diabetes. But by then the slate is wiped clean.

If the same holds true for humans, it may mean that stressful events in our lives affect our grandchildren's health, but not great-grandchildren.

Environmental stresses cause chemical changes to DNA that turn genes on and off. Many researchers believe that these changes can be passed down through sperm and eggs – a mechanism known as epigenetic inheritance.

Low-calorie diet

For example, studies have linked pregnant mothers that were undernourished during the second world war with gene changes in their children that put them at higher risk of becoming obese or getting cancer. But what happens to later generations is not clear.

To model this effect, Anne Ferguson-Smith at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues fed pregnant mice a diet containing 50 per cent fewer calories than usual from the 12th day of gestation until the birth, which is normally after about 20 days. Offspring were smaller than average and developed diabetes when fed a healthy diet. When the male pups had offspring, they were also at higher risk of becoming diabetic.

The team analysed the sperm of the offspring from the undernourished mothers to see how many genes had had their expression altered by the addition or removal of a methyl group – an epigenetic change. The team found a decrease in methylation in 111 regions of the DNA compared with sperm from mice born to mothers fed a healthy diet.

Unknown mechanism

When these mice, which had normal diets, had pups, however, the methylation patterns disappeared from their offspring's DNA. This was surprising – because the grandpups still proved to be more likely to get diabetes. "It suggests that methylation is a marker but probably not the key mechanism causing the disease," says Ferguson-Smith. She says it is not yet clear what other mechanism might be at work.

She hypothesises that epigenetic inheritance is a short-term adaptation that allows the offspring to be programmed for a stressful environment, but one that can easily be erased if the stressor disappears. "It would make sense to have evolved mechanisms to sense short-term changes in the environment, such that when nutrition became normal again this adaptation wouldn't persist," says Ferguson-Smith.

The team is now investigating whether further generations have an increased risk of developing diabetes to shed some light on how many generations the impact of a parent's diet can last.

Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1255903

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Marine microbes march to the beat of the same drum

The ocean is known for its waves and rhythms, and so it turns out, are its microbes. Not only do photosynthetic species adopt a night and day cycle, as you might anticipate, but even their non-photosynthetic cousins dance to the same tune.

Cyanobacteria belonging to the Prochlorococcus genus dominate the surface of the open ocean far from land and are possibly the most abundant photosynthetic organisms on the planet. They are autotrophs, which means they produce organic compounds that serve as nutrients for many other marine microbes, known as heterotrophs.

While Prochlorococcus species predictably time gene expression to fit with a day and night cycle, a study shows non-photosynthetic microbes that don't usually do this join in.

Edward DeLong of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a robotic ocean sampler to examine communities of bacterioplankton that drift in the massive circular current of the North Pacific subtropical gyre. They noticed that all the species collected showed daily patterns of behaviour such as rising to the surface during the day and sinking at night.

To look deeper into the genetics behind such patterns, the team extracted RNA, a chemical present in the microbes that shows which genes were being expressed and when, says Elizabeth Ottesen, who was involved in the research. This allowed them to better understand how Prochlorococcus and other marine microbes change gene expression in response to light and time of day.

As expected, patterns of gene expression in Prochlorococcus and some other sun-dependent bacteria were highly tuned to the time of day. What was unusual, however, was that similar patterns were seen in all types of bacterioplankton in the community.

In isolation in the lab, the non-photosynthetic bacteria did not express day to night patterns, but in the ocean they did. To Ottensen, this indicated that the organisms within each population coordinate not just with the sun, but with one another in a sort of "genetic choreography". The researchers think this might be a result of the low nutrient levels in the open ocean, and the need for organisms to rely on one another for metabolic functions

"We usually think of the ocean as a big stew, but now we see a coordination that could involve 'talking' between microbes, timing with the day, and responding to the environment," says Ottesen.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1252476

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HIV 'cure' won't work until virus eliminated from body

A baby thought to have been "cured" of HIV last year has now been diagnosed with the virus.

After being born to a mother with HIV, a baby in Mississippi was pre-emptively treated with three antiretroviral drugs for 18 months. Doctors lost track of the infant until she was brought to a clinic for a routine appointment after 10 months of receiving no HIV medication, in March last year. The team involved found no evidence of the virus in her blood, and declared the girl "functionally cured".

Now, however, the virus has returned. The child, now nearly 4, was recently found to have high levels of HIV in her blood during a routine visit to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, where she was originally discovered to be HIV-negative. Decreased levels of CD4+ cells, the white blood cells targeted by HIV, along with the appearance of antibodies against the virus in her blood, suggest that her remission had come to an end, and that traces of virus remaining in her body had escaped from immune control.

Hiding virus

Most HIV patients need to take antiretroviral drugs daily over the course of their lives, because the virus can hide away in tissues such as lymphoid and gut cells. Medicines can only reach the virus in the blood, and if therapy is halted, the virus can emerge and relaunch its attack.

The secret to the baby's remission seemed to be starting antiretroviral therapy just 30 hours after her birth. In the weeks following the announcement of her "cure", reports emerged of adults who were also HIV-negative after having received rapid treatment following infection.

Although the news of the baby's reinfection is disappointing, it's not that surprising, says Asier Sáez-Cirión of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, who last year reported that a group of 14 men known as the Visconti cohort were in remission without needing antiretroviral drugs. "The baby was in remission of infection and was not cured, because traces of the virus were found several times in her cells," says Sáez-Cirión.

"Unfortunately, the equilibrium between the mechanisms controlling the infection and the virus tilted, and the baby could not control it anymore," says Sáez-Cirión. This shows us that even if reducing the amount of virus is important, he says, there are other factors that keep the virus controlled and we need to identify them.

Flush it out

"The case of the Mississippi child indicates that early antiretroviral treatment... did not completely eliminate the reservoir of HIV-infected cells, but may have considerably limited its development and averted the need for antiretroviral medication over a considerable period," says Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. "Now we must direct our attention to understanding why that is, and determining whether the period of sustained remission in the absence of therapy can be prolonged even further."

The report of the baby's relapse follows other similar news. Last March, two men in Boston were considered "cured", but were later found to have relapsed.

Research this year in monkeys showed that the earlier that drugs are given, the easier it is for the body to keep the virus in check. But the early treatment didn't completely eliminate the virus.

The biggest hope for tackling the problem is to find drugs that flush latent HIV out of its hiding places in the body, so all the virus can be eliminated, effectively curing the patient so they don't have to take more antiviral drugs.

Several such drugs are under development, including one called panobinostat, which has showed some promise in early trials.

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Dinosaurs are heading home after fossil poacher jailed

(Image: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

These oviraptors are about to go home. A huge collection of stolen dinosaur bones has been repatriated to its native Mongolia by the US Homeland Security Investigations agency.

The specimens include a nearly complete Tarbosaurus bataar tyrannosaur, two hadrosaurs and this "oviraptors' graveyard", containing at least five skeletons.

Undercover agents identified the fossils in the possession of commercial palaeontologist Eric Prokopi, who last month was sentenced to three months in jail for illegally smuggling dozens of dinosaur remains. Among the haul was a tyrannosaur that was auctioned in New York for over $1 million – although the sale didn't go through after the Mongolian government intervened. Personal ownership or export of dinosaur remains has been illegal in Mongolia since 1924.

"This is a historic event for the US Attorneys' office, in addition to being a prehistoric event," joked Preet Bharara, US attorney for southern New York, who handed over the fossils to Od Och, Mongolia's UN ambassador, in a ceremony on 10 July.

Mongolia is welcoming its lost legacy with a new home. The capital city, Ulan Bator, has just one museum building, which until 1990 was an homage to Lenin. It will now become the nation's first dinosaur museum.

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Food influences body clock and may ease jet lag

Food could be a new weapon in shaking off the effects of jet lag after research in mice showed that the insulin released as a result of eating can be a key factor in restoring a disrupted body clock.

Miho Sato and her colleagues at The Research Institute for Time Studies at Yamaguchi University in Japan did experiments in mice and tissue cultures to show, for the first time, that increases in insulin affect circadian rhythms. These daily rhythms affect alertness, sleep patterns, and mediate many other physiological processes.

Your biological clock is regulated by two broad factors: first, the central rhythm is reset daily by light, as sensory input from the eyes is processed by a small part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. The rise and fall of hormones linked to sleep, for example, match this rhythm. But circadian rhythms are also present in peripheral "clocks" in a wide range of cell types in the body. Some of these can be influenced by food.

Sato demonstrated the role of insulin by shifting the peripheral body clock in the livers of mice by feeding them only at night. They then split the mice into two groups, supressed insulin levels in one group, and returned all the mice to daytime feeding. Four days later, the livers of the non-supressed mice had readjusted to a normal daily rhythm, as revealed by the daily rise and fall of liver-gene expression. The livers of the insulin-suppressed mice had still not returned to normal.

Jet lag tip

If human body clocks are similar to mouse ones, Sato's study suggests that people suffering from jetlag could adjust their eating patterns to get their internal clocks back to normal more quickly. "During jet lag, our bodies on their own may adapt very slowly. But we can make use of the knowledge of our study. If you were flying from London to Japan, you'd have an eight-hour phase-advance. So from our study using mice, the correct time to eat more would be earlier in the day."

Biologist Urs Albrecht at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland welcomes the research. "In the orchestra of the human body – where every cell has a clock running – the conductor is the suprachiasmatic nucleus in your brain. But the environmental signal of food also has an impact on the circadian patterns scattered across the body. Somehow, no one had looked at it in this way before.

"We now have the detailed biological explanation for why our bad habits of sitting in front of the TV and eating something before we go to bed are pretty silly," Albrecht added. "Enjoy your restless sleep!"

Journal reference: Cell Reports, DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2014.06.015

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