Security savvy services beat online cyber spies

Popular chat service WhatsApp has built end-to-end encryption into the latest Android version of its app. It's part of a growing trend to toughen up web security

THE internet is wising up. Companies and consumers are turning to encryption to boost levels of privacy and security on the web.

On Tuesday, WhatsApp, the world's most popular mobile chat service, announced that it has built end-to-end encryption into the latest Android version of its app. Previously, all messages sent via the app were decrypted on a server before being re-encrypted and sent to their destination. At this intermediate stage they were vulnerable to surveillance from the likes of the US National SecurityAgency.

Now, the billions of messages sent through the app every day make the whole journey in total privacy, readable only by the sender and the recipient.

The update is based on an encryption system designed for a messaging app called TextSecure, created by security researcher Moxie Marlinspike. Many privacy-conscious people have chosen to download TextSecure, but the WhatsApp update brings private communication to hundreds of millions without them needing to lift a finger.

It's not before time. Whether we realise it or not, we all leave trails of personal information when using the internet – and without encryption, it could easily fall into the wrong hands. "The amount of info you are inadvertently sending in plain text would horrify most people," says Alex Halderman, a security researcher at the University of Michigan.

Another big step to improve internet security was launched on the same day as WhatsApp's update. Let's Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority – an organisation that hands out digital certificates that verify websites are who they say they are. If you access a site that doesn't have a valid certificate, a red padlock and warning sign are displayed in your browser. Other certificate authorities make websites pay for verification, but Let's Encrypt is giving it away for free, backed by a consortium of technology companies.

Verification and encryption are most powerful when used together – encryption makes sure data can only be seen by the sender and recipient, while verification stops the data being sent to someone fraudulently posing as the intended recipient.

Encrypted connections are great, but a whole swathe of the internet is still unprotected. That's changing too. Last week, the Internet Architecture Board recommended that every new protocol built for the web, whether designed to pull data from smart fridges or to handle payments, should use encryption by default.

Smartphone payment systems like Apple Pay and Google Wallet Credit are ahead of the times, protecting credit card numbers with encryption. These apps use cryptography to generate a unique payment token every time you use your card through them, keeping your number private.

With wide enough adoption, this would mean retailers would not have a large database of credit card numbers that could be stolen, as they were recently at Target and Home Depot.

Halderman says there's a clear trend. "The technology is evolving so that encryption is becoming much easier to use," he says. "More and more the typical user is recognising the importance of privacy and security."

This article appeared in print under the headline "A little privacy, please"

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Us vs universe: Seeing smaller than the limit of light

(Image: Stefan W Hell/Division of Optical Nanoscopy/German Cancer Research Center)

Stefan Hell's microscope sees things that light waves should be too clumsy to reveal – and it won him this year's chemistry Nobel

TALK about microscopes and you bump up against the diffraction limit. Traditional microscopes cannot see objects smaller than about half the wavelength of light, because of how light bends and scatters at the edges of lenses. The limit equates to about 200 nanometres for visible light. "This has been impeding light microscopy throughout the 20th century," says Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany.

Hell won this year's Nobel prize in chemistry for his part in overcoming this problem. He pioneered an ingenious technique called stimulated emission depletion microscopy, whose basis is shining a beam of light at stained biological tissue so that the illuminated part fluoresces. Because ...

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Total white out: Snowshoe hares vs global warming

(Image: Norbert Rosing /National Geographic Creative)

Removing their white winter coat once kept snowshoe hares hidden in spring, but as the snows melt earlier, they are increasingly exposed. Can they fight back?

IT IS midsummer in Montana. Traipsing through the lush, dewy forest undergrowth, the morning mist is lifting and shafts of orange sunlight beam through the trees. To nature's soundtrack of a gurgling stream and birdsong, we check for quarry in live traps near Seeley Lake in the Rocky mountains. From the third one we visit, a young snowshoe hare stares up at us, silent, its whiskered nose twitching. This juvenile has unwittingly signed itself up for a cross-continental journey for science.

The snowshoe hare is one of 11 species worldwide that turns pure white in winter. The regrowth of its brown summer pelt has evolved to synchronise with average snowmelt times – dates that have been ...

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Radar net protects tigers and keeps them neighbourly

THE tigers in India's Panna National Park will soon live in a forest that watches out for them. A wireless network of low-power radars is being developed to track everything that moves in or out of the forest. This helps keep the tigers safe from poachers, and villagers' cattle safe from the big cats.

Built by Anish Arora at Ohio State University in Columbus, the work was originally designed as a way for the US government to monitor the flow of people across the country's borders. Had the US border patrol not opted to build a 1100-kilometre-long fence instead, the system could have alerted officers to people trying to cross the border with Mexico anywhere other than at official points.

Arora's system is the first wildlife-tracking technology that detects and reports on a specific animal in real time. It works by looking for the patterns created as radar reflects off different objects, and then comparing these to recorded signatures. When the system spots a human entering the tiger's reserve, or a tiger leaving, it alerts the wardens.

"It is as simple as that. The alarm goes off and poachers get caught," says Arora. Or guards posted inside the 400-square-kilometre park can move to cut off a tiger that is advancing towards a farm. When the system is fully up and running, Arora says, it will cover all the most tiger-trafficked parts of the forest.

It's not the only technology on the lookout in Panna. P. Vijay Kumar of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore is working on an infrared system that ignores swaying trees and shrubs, and sounds the alarm only when it detects an intruder. M. Radhakrishna at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Allahabad is burying fibre-optic cables that detect slight changes of pressure at the surface. The step of a human or tiger makes the fibre bend slightly, changing the way light moves through it.

When it comes to imaging, Arora's radar system has a big advantage over cameras. Gathering and processing radar data takes less computer power than visual images do, allowing the network to keep running day and night for long periods of time. "It can survive on very little power, a couple of AA batteries," Arora says. He plans to put an updated version of the network live for several months starting in December (SenSys 2014, doi.org/w5b).

This article appeared in print under the headline "Radar network makes tigers good neighbours"

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Challenges for US-Iran nuclear talks

IRAN may be on the brink of a historic deal. The country is entering the final stage of nuclear negotiations with the US and five other countries.

In 2002, Iran began escalating its uranium enrichment efforts, a necessary process for operating nuclear power plants, but also a step towards the production of nuclear warheads. Since then, sanctions and talks – between Iran, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China – have built to a 24 November deadline set last year for a long-term agreement on what Iran will be able to do.

The US wants Iran to agree to a reduced capacity of enriching centrifuges, but Iran doesn't want to do this, and wants reassurance that it will be able to continue with its plans for nuclear power. Analysts suggest that sanctions against Iran will have to be lifted if a deal is to be struck.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Enriching Iran"

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Gay gene discovery has good and bad implications

The finding that male homosexuality is has a strong genetic component should be a boon for gay rights – but it could backfire

FOR gay rights activists, it's a dilemma. Does it help or hinder their cause if science shows that homosexuality is partly or largely biologically determined, rather than a lifestyle choice?

On the one hand, if sexual orientation is something people are born with, and cannot change even if they want to – akin to skin colour or handedness – this should overturn the notion that people choose to be gay and could equally well choose not to be. That knowledge would help rebut those who suggest that gayness is the result of a morally unacceptable decision, or a psychological disorder. It might also help people who struggle to understand or declare their own homosexuality.

On the other, some could try to redefine homosexuality as a biological abnormality. There is no way to change people's sexuality, but if key genes are found, it might be possible to detect homosexuality before birth, or to "cure" people by altering those genes. Even the threat of this could be used to persecute: consider the ugly histories of prenatal sex selection and of coerced and ineffectual "therapies" for homosexuals. It is no wonder that some activists see in such research the "seeds of genocide".

This debate has rumbled on for years. But as we report this week, there is growing evidence that male homosexuality has a strong genetic contribution (see "Largest study of gay brothers homes in on 'gay genes'"). Other biological components of homosexual behaviour have also been found: brain structures that differ with sexual orientation, for example, and robust theories for how genes survive in the population despite rarely being passed on by homosexual people.

To socially liberal and tolerant people, this new knowledge will be entirely unchallenging. It is in circles where homosexuality is still considered problematic – of which there are many – that it could have implications.

There is some evidence that people who see homosexuality as biologically determined are more tolerant than those who see it as a lifestyle choice. But it is not clear which way the arrow of causation points: it may be that tolerant people are more inclined to believe in biological determinism. And there is also a growing understanding that simply presenting people with evidence that contradicts their world views does not change their minds: rather than assimilate the information, they just intensify their efforts to reject it.

This seems a likely response among those who object to homosexuality. Homophobia has deep and complex causes. It may itself be partly biological in origin: for example, straight people with a stronger innate disgust response are also more likely to oppose gay marriage. You might as well ask: why not search for genes that make some people virulently homophobic?

Science cannot overturn such prejudice on its own, particularly when it clashes with world views that stipulate how society should be ordered. From these spring the urge to show that homosexuality is "unnatural", which the genetic evidence disputes. But human sexuality is in any case flexible and creative. Deeming certain behaviours unnatural is absurd: most of us have desires that could be labelled thus, and the natural world abounds with practices no human would attempt.

Ultimately, what causes homosexuality doesn't matter as much as the fact that homosexual people exist, and have always existed, in every society on earth. In the words of the activists: some people are gay. Get over it.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Get over it"

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What it's like to have Parkinson's for 15 minutes

Video: Body illusion lets you experience Parkinson's

I'm at a close friend's wedding, waiting to give a speech. Public speaking always makes me anxious, but today it's worse than usual: my hand is shaking noticeably and I can't seem to make it stop. The loss of control is unnerving.

When I try to speak to a neighbour, my voice comes out in a whisper, even though it seems to take more effort. Soon, my upper arm feels tired. I tell myself I just need to relax and snap out of it. I pick up my spoon and fill it with soup, but this only makes the tremors more obvious, as the metal beats against the bowl.

For a moment, I have forgotten that I'm immersed in an interactive installation called Transports , created by Liam Jarvis and his team from the Analogue theatre company.

It aims to simulate the physical and psychological effects of the early stages of Parkinson's disease by taking inspiration from body illusions, like the rubber hand trick, in which the brain accepts a fake limb as its own.

In another's arm

To create the sensations, you wear a glove fitted with a motorised device, while looking at a screen you hold in the other hand (see video). The device recreates tremors running at 6 hertz, which is the upper limit of those experienced by people with Parkinson's disease.

You follow instructions fed through headphones, and use your kitted-up arm to mimic the movements of a man on the screen, manipulating real cutlery as he does. This creates the illusion that the virtual limb is your own.

The "story" unfolds through the eyes of Andrew, a man in his thirties with symptoms of Parkinson's. While the disease is more common in older people, younger adults are also susceptible.

"If someone is in their thirties, the symptoms may be interpreted in a different way in a public context," says Jarvis. In the installation, for example, a waiter thinks the character is drunk. "We're hoping to challenge these expectations," adds Jarvis.

Physically drained

Most people are familiar with Parkinson's tremors, but there are other less obvious symptoms. After the 15-minute simulation, my upper arm feels tired, which I didn't expect, and I feel physically drained.

And motor conditions can affect your voice, so it takes more effort for you to speak. Struggling to communicate can affect how you are seen, and psychological effects, such as anxiety, can lead to depression.

Andrew, who is soon to become a father, imagines being an embarrassment to his child and worries that his tremors will restrict his ability to play with him.

Analogue's idea was inspired by the work of neuroscientists like Oliver Sacks, who are interested in the subjective experiences of patients. "A disease is a lens allowing a person to experience the world slightly differently," says Jarvis. "As an artist, I see potential for learning about a condition using our craft."

Increasing empathy

To accurately simulate Parkinson's symptoms, Jarvis and his colleagues worked closely with neuroscientist Narender Ramnani at Royal Holloway, University of London, as well as with the charity, Parkinson's UK. The script was based on real accounts from blogs and patients.

"Healthcare professionals could use it to feel what their patients are experiencing and how it impacts on everyday tasks," says Jarvis.

Jarvis's main aim is to create empathy, rather than to entertain. The prototype has been shown to carers and nurses, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to psychology students as a learning tool, and at the Science Museum's Dana Centre in London.

Goggle-eyed future

The Analogue team is exploring different ways of reaching a larger audience. "We could potentially develop an app that allows people to run it themselves at home," says Jarvis.

The system was developed using low-cost technology, and its components are controlled by a credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi computer. The team is now focusing on making the motorised glove less bulky, and replacing the screen with virtual reality goggles, like the Oculus Rift to make it more immersive.

The team has also reconstructed the experience of someone with amnesia and wants to create similar experiences for other conditions, such as tinnitus or auditory hallucinations. The feedback they are getting indicates that simulating a first-hand experience is a powerful tool for understanding someone else.

As I leave the mock dinner table after trying for several minutes to handle a bowl of soup, my stomach starts to grumble and I realise that it is lunchtime. As I effortlessly shovel in my lunch, I am reminded of the extreme effort and frustration that people with Parkinson's have to deal with to complete simple, everyday tasks.

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Green fund pledges at G20 may herald climate consensus

Two weeks in a row. Last week the US and China agreed to cut their emissions. This week the world's big economies have thrown their weight behind the Green Climate Fund – another shot in the arm for a world consensus on climate change action.

The fund is aimed at helping developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. It is seen as essential for getting such countries behind any agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris next year.

At the G20 meeting in Brisbane, Australia, this week, the 20 big economies affirmed their support for the fund and the US and Japan together pledged a game-changing $4.5 billion, all in spite of the host country's attempts to keep climate change off the agenda.

The fund was established at COP16 in Cancun in 2010, in response to on-going demands from developing countries that wealthy countries help them decarbonise their economies and adapt to climate change.

An informal starting aim is to reach $10 billion before an official pledging ceremony in Berlin later this week, with an overall aim to raise $100 billion every year from 2020. Once up and running, the fund will help pay for sustainable development, mitigation and adaptation projects in the developing world.

Building trust

The final communiqué from the G20 reaffirmed the group's support for the Green Climate Fund. But more significantly, the US promised a huge $3 billion and Japan quickly followed, offering $1.5 billion, taking the total funds promised to $7.5 billion. In addition, the UK is expected to pledge $1 billion.

In a statement, Héla Cheikhrouhou, Executive Director of the fund, said she expects that the support from the G20 will lead to countries that have not yet promised money to pledge contributions in Berlin.

"Funding is not only essential to help poorer countries build cleaner, climate-resilient economies," says Jonathan Pickering from the Australian National University in Canberra, "substantial pledges are also symbolically important for building trust between wealthy and poor countries."

"The Green Fund is very important because lower-income developing countries insist that rich countries make a financial contribution toward their climate change action," says Frank Jotzo, also from the Australian National University. "Without it, success at the UN negotiations would be in danger."

Pickering says it is likely that the $10 billion target will be met this week since there are a number of smaller countries that haven't yet pledged but are likely to do so. In addition, countries like Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands may top up their pledges.

But Australia looks like it will not be contributing. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has claimed the fund is "socialism masquerading as environmentalism" and says the country has contributed enough to climate financing funds.

Jotzo says Australia's attitude could be damaging, with disunity possibly sending a negative signal.

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Seastar ripper prime suspect pinned down

Guilty as charged? A mysterious epidemic ravaging sea stars on North America's Pacific coast has had scientists scratching their heads over the cause. Now they have a prime suspect. The discovery is the first step in helping researchers learn what triggered the outbreak, and whether it is likely to happen again.

When sea stars began dying in great numbers last year, all the way from Mexico to Alaska, some researchers called it the biggest marine disease outbreak ever recorded. Sea stars are important predators, and their loss means big changes to marine ecosystems.

Now a team led by Ian Hewson at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is building a case against type of parvovirus called a densovirus.

First, their experiments in aquaria showed that infection was transmitted by virus-sized particles, and that heat sterilisation of those particles – which kills viruses – prevented infection. Second, the team sequenced viral DNA and RNA from infected and healthy sea stars. Only one virus, which they call sea star-associated densovirus, or SSaDV, turned up much more frequently in diseased sea stars than in healthy ones. Third, lab experiments showed that the amount of SSaDV in sea stars increased as individuals became more diseased.

Reasonable doubt?

Other experts are cautiously optimistic that Hewson's team has found the culprit.

"The evidence is pretty conclusive that it's viral," says Curtis Suttle, a marine virologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "It's a little less convincing that this densovirus is actually the cause of the disease, but this is the one that stands out."

One reason for Suttle's concern is that Hewson's team did not find SSaDV in every infected sea star. Hewson thinks this is perhaps because some tissue samples they analysed happened not to contain infected tissues. He is now developing sea star cell cultures in which to grow the virus for direct-infection studies, which would provide conclusive proof.

Hewson's team also found SSaDV in museum specimens dating back more than 70 years, which suggests that the virus is normally present in the environment. If so, then some other factor must have triggered the present outbreak. Hewson suspects one factor might be unusually high sea star populations just prior to the outbreak, which could have increased viral transmission rates.

Climate change or ocean acidification could also be impairing the sea stars' immune systems or stressing them in other ways, says marine ecologist Carol Blanchette at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Knowing which virus to look for may help biologists find the trigger and possibly predict or prevent future epidemics. "Having something to look for is pretty helpful," she says.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1416625111

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World War R: Rise of the killer robots

(Image: Renaud Vigourt)

When robots fight in place of soldiers, will wars have fewer casualties? Or will the world slide into non-stop conflict?

QANDI AGHA used to be a cashier in Afghanistan's Ministry of Culture. But he claims that in 2012 he was arrested by an elite US Special Forces unit and tortured for six and a half weeks. He was held under water until he felt like he was dying, says Joanne Mariner, an expert in humanitarian law for Amnesty International. "They also tied a cord around his penis so he couldn't urinate," she says. "They left it on for four days."

Agha's torture is one of many such cases recorded by Mariner for a recent report on civilian casualties of war. Demonstrations of inhumanity by trained soldiers are not uncommon, from the infamous abuse of prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib to the British Royal ...

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Are we ready for quantum biology?

• Book information


• Life on the Edge: The coming of age of quantum biology by Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden


• Published by: Bantam Press


• Price: £20

Stomata: does entanglement play a part in plant biology? (Image: Power And Syred/Science Photo Library)

In Life on the Edge, Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden argue quantum effects are decisive in biology – but this challenging idea needs more proof

FOR 15 years, theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili and molecular geneticist Johnjoe McFadden have been discussing how quantum physics, the science of the incredibly small, might affect biology.

This energetic but frustrating book is the outcome of their many discussions. By explaining the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, and exploring recent theories and findings, they aim to convince the reader that quantum effects are more than simply the deep substrate on which biology exists – without recourse to a single equation.

They open with the example of the European robin, Erithacus rubecula. Every autumn the birds migrate from Sweden to the Mediterranean, using magneto-reception to navigate. This extraordinary sense involves a chemical called cryptochrome, which is found in many birds and insects. It even exists in maggots.

Al-Khalili and McFadden argue that this remarkable ability is based on quantum entanglement, and much evidence points this way. But we have yet to identify the underlying mechanism, or mechanisms, and the science is less settled than readers may think as they are transported by the authors' enthusiasm.

Similarly, Al-Khalili and McFadden devote a chapter to what they admit is a controversial quantum theory of olfaction. The vast majority of smell scientists consider that our olfactory receptors detect aspects of the molecular shape of an odour – its size, functional group and so on. The problem is that no one has been able to show how this works, nor are we even sure exactly what is detected: is it the smell itself, or smell plus molecular chaperone?

In contrast to this dominant view, there have been suggestions over the years that "quantum tunnelling" in our noses is responsible, and there has been an occasionally acrimonious debate over the validity of these theories. As Al-Khalili and McFadden acknowledge, resolving this issue will involve studying the crystal structure of the receptors (this is very difficult), but they emphasise that the only theoretical explanation for our sense of smell is the quantum one.

As an experimentalist, I am less impressed by the power of theory and would have preferred to see the authors revelling in our current ignorance. After all, the most important words in science are "we don't know".

Some of quantum mechanics' apparently successful forays into biology described in the book are those focusing on how enzymes work and on photosynthesis. Even here, however, the significance of these interpretations is still debated – in particular, it remains unclear how decisive a part quantum entanglement plays in plant biology.

One of the most influential people to link quantum physics and biology was Erwin Schrödinger himself, whose book What is Life? inspired, among others, DNA pioneers James Watson and Francis Crick. Al-Khalili and McFadden discuss Schrödinger's ideas on mutation in some detail, but do not get to their origin.

In fact, Schrödinger's view was based on biophysicist Max Delbrück's theory, put forward in the so-called Three Man Paper, written with geneticist Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky and biophysicist Karl Zimmer in 1935.

Schrödinger argued that if Delbrück's view of mutation was wrong, then "we should have to give up further attempts", meaning we would have to give up on using physics to explain genes. Delbrück's approach was correct only at the most general level, and the discovery of the nature of mutations did not refer to his ideas at all.

Quantum letters

In their chapter on genes, Al-Khalili and McFadden boldly argue that genes "are written in quantum letters" because quantum effects underlie the hydrogen bonds that hold the DNA double helix together.

This is an example of the kind of trivial involvement quantum physics has in biology which most of the book avoids: quantum effects lie beneath all molecular structures, but that does not mean that we can explain all phenomena in terms of quantum equations. Quantum physics played no part in cracking the genetic code, nor is it necessary to understand how it functions.

The great virtue of this book is its thesis – it sets out a clear and enthusiastic argument for the importance of quantum biology. The subtitle proclaims that quantum biology is coming of age. It can equally be argued that it is still taking its first steps.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Q-biology, or not"

Matthew Cobb is professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, UK

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Optical trickery brings Rothko's paintings back to life

(Image: 2014 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Peter Vanderwarker, © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

Bespoke lighting effects are returning the original colours to five faded masterpieces by artist Mark Rothko at Harvard Art Museums

LIGHT and art have an uneasy relationship. Good lighting makes art come alive, but too much light can damage or destroy pigments, degrading vital colours.

Harvard University thought a lot about lighting during its six-year, $350-million renovation of its landmark art museums. Italian architect Renzo Piano, famed for his use of light, was hired to install a glass "lantern" above the museums' central courtyard, effectively providing a ceiling. Layers of glass and shades adjust and direct the light, maintaining temperature and humidity.

The glass panels are a work of art in themselves, hovering above the courtyard's classic columns. For artificial lighting throughout the museum, conservators chose novel bulbs that use ultraviolet LEDs rather than the standard blue ones, and different blends of light-emitting phosphors that better approximate natural light when operated at the low intensity needed to avoid damaging fragile pigments.

The interaction of light with art is central to a special exhibition to mark the museum's reopening on 16 November. It features five large murals that abstract expressionist Mark Rothko painted for Harvard in the early 1960s. The artist installed them in a 10th-floor penthouse dining room on campus in January 1964, and had curtains installed to cover the floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides of the room to produce the low-level uniform lighting needed for the effect he sought.

But people using the dining room pulled the curtains back to enjoy the view, and the paintings went downhill fast. By 1967, the rich purplish crimson that originally dominated the panels was visibly fading where it was exposed to the sun, and in 1979 the murals were put into storage.

Rothko mixed his own paints. Later researchers traced the fading to the instability of lithol red, the key component of Rothko's crimson. Repainting wasn't an option: it is contrary to current art conservation practice.

However, a team from Harvard and the MIT Media Lab realised that light could be used to restore the appearance of the lost colours without touching the canvas. The idea was to illuminate each mural with a pattern of light that would project the missing aspects of the lost colours onto the original canvases, returning them to their original hues without disturbing the paintings' textures.

But measuring the change was challenging. The only photos showing the original colours were taken with Ektachrome film that had itself changed colour over time, so the team had to correct for that first. Optical and computer techniques were then used to compare the restored photos with the faded paintings to produce patterns of light that compensated for the damage, returning the original colours to the murals without further harm.

The results are impressive. The five Rothko murals are big, each 2.7 metres high and of different widths. The varied shades of red that run through the set dominate the large windowless room where they are installed. Wide, dark vertical and horizontal stripes create frames within the murals. The double-width fourth panel particularly caught my eye: a gateway to another world.

When I blocked light from the overhead projector with my notebook, the shadow showed how much the original colour had faded. Then my host, conservation specialist Jens Stenger, now at Yale University, turned off the projectors so I could appreciate the full transformation.

Where the projector had shown the shade of crimson Rothko had made by blending ultramarine blue with lithol red, only the blue remained. Where Rothko had made pink by painting red onto titanium dioxide white, only white remained. Those projected colours turn the sadly discoloured murals into a tribute to Rothko's talent that can't be seen in ordinary light.

Mark Rothko's Harvard Murals: A special exhibition , from 16 November to 26 July 2015, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

This article appeared in print under the headline "How light saved art"

Jeff Hecht is a consultant for New Scientist

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Dark matter could be seen in GPS time glitches

GPS has a new job. It does a great job of telling us our location, but the network of hyper-accurate clocks in space could get a fix on something far more elusive: dark matter.

Dark matter makes up 80 per cent of the universe's matter but scarcely interacts with ordinary matter. A novel particle is the most popular candidate, but Andrei Derevianko at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada propose that kinks or cracks in the quantum fields that permeate the universe could be the culprit.

If they are right, fundamental properties such as the mass of an electron or the strength of electromagnetic fields would change at the kinks. "The effect is essentially locally modifying fundamental constants," Derevianko says. Clocks would be affected too, measuring time slightly differently as a result.

Unique signature

That's where GPS comes in. The network of satellites is about 50,000 kilometres in diameter, and is travelling through space – along with the entire solar system – at about 300 kilometres a second. So any time shift when the solar system passes through a cosmic kink will take a maximum of 170 seconds to move across network.

Other things could perturb GPS timekeeping, but only a signal from dark matter would have that signature, say Derevianko and Pospelov.

Derevianko is already mining 15 years' worth of GPS timing data for dark matter's fingerprints. If he doesn't find anything, he plans to continue the search using the Network for European Accurate Time and Frequency Transfer (NEAT-FT), a network of ground-based atomic clocks that is under construction in Europe. Each of these clocks is far more sensitive than a satellite clock.

If the cosmic kink idea is right, we could also search for dark matter using pulsars, the rapidly spinning corpses of stars that exploded as supernovae. Pulsars emit beams of electromagnetic radiation that hit Earth with periods that can be more precise than our best clocks. "There's a tantalising hint from pulsar data," says Derevianko. "These are like atomic clocks, highly regular."

Pulsar quakes

Sometimes pulsars shiver in "star quakes", the causes of which are unknown. Earlier this year, Victor Flambaum at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, suggested that kinks of dark matter could be responsible. "When a topological defect passes through a pulsar, its mass, radius and internal structure may be altered, resulting in a pulsar 'quake'," Flambaum wrote.

If dark matter is nothing more than cosmic kinks, it could give some people a new thing to grumble about. "I hear these stories about people getting lost using GPS," Derevianko says. "Now they could have another excuse: maybe it was dark matter that caused them to lose their way."

Journal reference: Nature Physics, DOI: 10.1038/nphys3137

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Surveillance box alerts you to break-in noise at home

If a window breaks in your home while you are out, will anyone hear it? A sensor that analyses the ambient noise in your house promises to provide a watchful ear.

Developed by Form Devices in Malmö, Sweden, the internet-connected device, called Point, looks like a wall-mounted smoke alarm but packs an acoustic sensor that measures background noise.

"We live in apartments and don't need full-blown security systems. The only real options were cameras and surveillance tools and we didn't want that," says Nils Mattisson of Form Devices. "All you need to know is that everything is fine and no accidents have happened. You can pick that up using sound alone."

Point listens for specific sounds in frequency ranges that it has been programmed to recognise, such as breaking glass. When it notices something, it alerts the homeowner via a smartphone app. Form Devices claims it can detect whether people are present in your home when you aren't there, which could indicate a burglary in process. The firm hopes to add the ability to recognise other sounds as well, such as doors being opened and closed.

Point also includes temperature and humidity sensors as well as a system for analysing airborne particles. Mattisson claims this can differentiate between smoke from a smouldering source like overcooked food and smoke from an actual fire.

On 4 November the team launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and has more than tripled its $50,000 goal. The device is due to ship to consumers in mid-2015.

Analysing sound to detect problems isn't new – various researchers have explored the potential for analysing internal combustion engine noises to diagnose mechanical problems automatically, for example. Applying a similar process to the domestic environment could give homeowners peace of mind.

David Bryan at security firm Trustwave says using sound to detect break-ins isn't a new approach, but bringing it to the average consumer is.

There is a huge market among people who let their homes out to strangers for short periods of time, Bryan says, such as through services like AirBnB. The device can be set to glow yellow when it detects loud music or someone smoking a cigarette. The feature could be used as a warning to guests who are ignoring house rules that if they keep it up, the owner will soon be notified.

But it would be important to ensure the device couldn't be hacked over the internet, says Bryan. "You would want to make sure that a malicious hacker couldn't turn the audio sensors into a makeshift microphone or irritating device with a constantly activated alarm."

This article will appear in print under the headline "The walls have ears"

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Generally, the opposite is true: the larger you are, the more calories you need to burn each day just to keep your body going. But there may be some exceptions. Mutations in a gene called KRS2 , which reduce the ability of cells to metabolise glucose and fatty acids to provide energy, are twice as common in obese people as slender ones. But they are still rare.

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Habitable exomoons born in cosmic collisions

From Endor in Star Wars to Pandora in Avatar, habitable moons are science fiction staples. Trouble is, they appear hard to make in the real world. But hit-and-run accidents involving planets could create moons able to hold on to an atmosphere.

Previous studies suggested that a world must be at least 0.2 times Earth's mass to sustain an atmosphere. If moons form out of the dust disc surrounding a planet left over from the planet's formation, then it seems only planets 10 times the mass of Jupiter will end up with moons heavy enough to have air.

But large objects crashing into rocky, larger-than-Earth planets can form more massive moons by blasting mantle material into space. This forms a disc that later condenses into a satellite. Our own moon famously formed that way, although it is not a heavyweight.

At the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Tucson, Arizona this week, Miki Nakajima of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena presented simulations of Earth-mass planets colliding with objects a tenth of their mass. For rocky planets up to five Earth masses, the impacts formed silicate-rich moons of up to 0.2 Earth masses. "This is small, but actually we might be able to observe these moons," she says.

Too much vapour

It doesn't always work, though. Impacts on rocky planets bigger than five Earth masses yield enough vapour to generate strong shock waves that prevent the disc from condensing into a moon. Vapour production was highest for impacts on Neptune-like planets with a mantle of ice rather than rock. In this scenario, the debris disc cannot condense into a moon if the planet is heavier than the Earth.

In the same conference session, Keegan Ryan at Caltech showed that two Earth-sized planets could become a binary pair if they barely miss colliding into each other. They do eventually collide, but not for at least another billion years &nash; possibly long enough for life to develop.

"I'm fond of this idea," says Darren Williams of Penn State University in Erie, who was not involved in either study. He adds that if a Jupiter-size planet encountered the binary, it could capture one planet, turning it into an Earth-sized exomoon.

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Frigid matter powers first quantum circuits

Move over, electrons – circuits could one day be powered by frigid quantum matter.

Ultra-cold clouds of atoms called Bose-Einstein condensates act as a single quantum object, and the goal has been to build "atomtronic" circuits with them. But the condensate's delicate quantum state can easily fall apart.

Now Changhyun Ryu and Malcolm Boshier of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have found a way to do it. Their circuits are built from two laser beams, one that creates a horizontal sheet of light to act as a circuit board, and another vertical laser that traces out the path of the circuit. The condensate, which is made from around 4000 cooled rubidium atoms, is trapped inside the beams by the same forces used to create optical tweezers, which can manipulate particles on a small scale.

The condensate is set in motion by creating a slightly sloped path. The team ran the condensate along straight lines, in a circle and through a Y junction – all essential components of a circuit. Since the circuits are just made from light, they can be reconfigured as the atoms are moving, letting you squeeze a complex circuit into a small space, says Boshier.

The advance could one day be used to build a navigation system that can tell where you are by using the rotation and acceleration of the condensate to track movements from a previous known location. This could be used as a backup for a device that loses contact with GPS satellites. The UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory is also looking at using condensates to create such a quantum GPS for submarines, but it needs to shrink the technology down first.

Thorsten Schumm of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria says previous experiments using circuits etched on physical chips show more general promise, but he thinks the laser circuits could have their uses. "They can change the circuit easily, whereas we would have to produce a new atom chip every time," he says. "What they have demonstrated so far with it is not really spectacular but the potential is there."

Reference: ArXiv: http://ift.tt/116Fxhy

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Philae drills comet, but may not survive the night

The Philae spacecraft has attempted to drill into the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, but may not have enough battery left to beam the results back to Earth. The European Space Agency's probe, which made its historic landing on the comet on Wednesday, 12 November, has not moved from its landing spot and so its solar panels are not getting enough sunlight.

Mission managers at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, made contact with Philae at around 0930 GMT this morning, downloading data from experiments conducted overnight and uploading new commands, including starting the lander's drill.

"It started to drill but then we lost contact again," said Philae manager Stephan Ulamec during a press conference this afternoon. This was expected, as the data link goes down as the mother ship Rosetta moves behind the comet. The link should be working again by 2100 GMT this evening, but it will take two more hours to actually download the data.

Flat battery

Philae may not be able to make contact at all. The team estimates that the lander needs 80 watt-hours of energy in its battery to complete its operations and upload the results. Simulations suggest Philae has around 100 watt-hours left – a tight margin. The team tried to switch the spacecraft to a low-power mode, but the command did not upload before they lost contact. "If we do not receive an update it is probably because the battery is flat," said Ulamec – or an asteroid fell on Philae, he joked.

Even if Philae survives to report back, its drill might fail. Data received before the cut-off suggests the drill had reached 25 centimetres below the spacecraft, but with Philae standing in a precarious position, with one leg in the air, the drill may not make it to the surface to take a sample.

Since there will probably only be one chance to dig into the surface, the team had to decide which instrument on board Philae would get the sample. The pristine cometary material will be heated in an oven and passed to Philae's Cometary Sampling and Composition Experiment (COSAC), which can analyse organic molecules and identify whether they are left or right-handed. Life on Earth contains only left-handed molecules, so the results could tell us more about our origins. Another instrument called Ptolemy, which was designed to sniff the gases trapped in the comet, will miss out on a sample, because it uses more energy and Rosetta can conduct similar experiments from orbit.

If ESA does make contact with Philae again and it has some juice left, the agency might make a last-ditch attempt to move the craft to a better location, perhaps by rotating its body, re-triggering its landing gear or spinning up an internal fly wheel. They still don't know exactly where the probe is on the comet's surface, but Holger Sierks, who is in charge of the OSIRIS camera on Rosetta, said they should have a picture of Philae's 1 kilometre-high bounce after landing, which will help pinpoint its final resting spot.

There is also a small chance Philae could wake up as comet 67P nears the sun, but the spacecraft needs energy to heat up its batteries before they can start charging, so that may not be possible. Even if we never hear from Philae again, the team are very happy with the mission and say they have achieved 80 per cent of their initial science goals. "Let's stop looking at things we could have done if everything had worked properly," said Rosetta flight director Andrea Accomazzo. "This is unique and will be unique forever."

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Zoologger: Stingless suicidal bees bite until they die

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

Species: Trigona hyalinata, a stingless bee

Habitat: Across the tropics of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay

You're a bee without a sting whose home is under attack. What can you do to drive off the enemy? Bite, and never let go.

Meet Trigona hyalinata, an aggressive, 10-toothed, highly suicidal bee. Its stinger is vestigial and has lost its defensive function, but this angry and altruistic bee doesn't let that hold it back.

Stingless bees are closely related to their better-known cousins, the honeybees, which sacrifice their lives when they sting animals that pose a threat to the hive. When a honeybee deploys its sting, it self-amputates, causing lethal injury. Although stingless bees have lost this heroic ability, they still suffer predation and attack from animals ranging from anteaters to other bees – and have taken to biting instead.

"Bees are at their most aggressive when defending their colony," says Kyle Shackleton of the University of Sussex, in Brighton, UK. The nest takes months to make, contains all the colony's food stores, the queen, and all of an individual bee's siblings. "If their colony dies, they have nothing."

Defensive behaviours are well known in social insects, which share a high degree of genetic relatedness and act altruistically for the good of the hive or colony.

Now Shackleton, working with Francis Ratnieks, also of the University of Sussex, and colleagues, have identified a new self-sacrificial behaviour in these stingless bees – biting to the point of suicide.

Monstrous mandibles

Ratnieks was inspired to study aggression in stingless bees by a casual but painful encounter in 2012. "Trigona bees have painful bites and are very persistent," says Ratnieks. "I allowed a worker to bite me for as long as it wanted to. It persisted in its biting for 30 minutes and left a large red mark on my arm."

They decided to investigate this behaviour in 12 stingless bee species in Brazil. They waved small flags close to the entrance to a colony to provoke the bees, and then measured how long each bee spent attacking the flag. To gauge the level of pain inflicted by each species, the researchers offered their own forearms, and scored each bite according to a five-point scale, ranging from "could not pinch skin", to "sharper unpleasant pain and capable of breaking skin if persistent".

They found that the more aggressive a species was, the more painful its bite.

Worst of all were the three Trigona species they studied, which included an individual that attacked a flag for over an hour. Individuals from these species all scored five on the pain scale.

A closer look revealed the reason: these species have five "teeth" on their mandibles. And with tens of thousands of bees per nest, this makes for a powerful deterrent.

"I have been stung by honeybees over 10,000 times, so am pretty hardened to the pain," says Ratnieks. But he says that even though a Trigona bite is much less painful than a honeybee sting, "when dozens of them start biting you, you have to retreat. It's not nice at all."

Suicidal tendencies

To see just how far the bees were prepared to go, the team devised a test that offered the bees a choice: stop biting and survive, or stay and suffer lethal damage.

The researchers first brushed a biting bee with a paintbrush, causing no harm. They then stepped things up by gripping its wings with forceps. Lastly, they started to tug on the forceps, attempting to pull the bee away by its wings, and putting the bee in danger of losing them if it didn't loosen its bite.

"When bees were pulled by the wings, large segments of the wing membrane would tear off or the wing would separate at the joint, such that the bee could no longer fly," says Shackleton. "In this state, the bee can no longer return to the nest or function in any of its duties, and has functionally sacrificed itself."

Many species had individuals that were willing to die, but the highest proportion was seen in the super-aggressive species Trigona hyalinata, where 83 per cent of individuals would keep biting until they suffered irreparable harm.

Biting behaviour may have evolved as an adaptation to the bees' particular enemies."Stinging causes greater pain, but venom is metabolically expensive to produce," says Shackleton. While stinging is a great way to defend against larger vertebrate predators, the main threats to stingless bees are ants and other bees.

"Biting is likely more effective against these more numerous foes where the objective is not to drive off a single enemy through pain, but fight off hundreds through killing them," says Shackleton.

He admits though that from his own personal experience, biting is still a powerful deterrent to larger intruders.

But like the bees, Shackleton and the rest of the team show a persistently high level of self-sacrifice and daring.

"Despite being bitten hundreds of times and chased away on more than one occasion, I think we all thoroughly enjoyed the work," he says, adding that they intend to return to Brazil next year to find out more.

Journal reference: Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, DOI: 10.1007/s00265-014-1840-6

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Feedback: Very traditional error messages

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

FEEDBACK was mildly puzzled that online and email error messages failed to feature among the 10 milestone achievements of our species (25 October). This prompted a colleague to report how the grand traditions of the analogue equivalent are being maintained and upheld.

The colleague emailed a document to members of the UK's House of Lords. One member asked for a paper copy. Our colleague thought he'd just drop one off at the Lords' entrance to their House. The white-tied (and likely special-forces-trained) guardian there gravely informed him that if his Lordship were not to collect the envelope by 5pm, it would have to be destroyed. Therefore it could not be accepted. No, Sir, not even if you give us signed permission to destroy it. Error 001: potentially undeliverable mail refused.

Why not, the ...

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