High and dry? Party drug could target excess drinking

A patent has been filed for a drug that produces some of ecstasy’s euphoric effects – and seems to put the brakes on boozing

THINKING of taking a break from the booze? Many of us drink more than we probably should and wish we were better able to control our intake. Several drugs now in development could help us do just that.

In 2012, alcohol played a part in 3.3 million deaths worldwide. Awareness campaigns and prevention services have done little to reduce the amount that people drink overall, and consumption has remained steady or increased around the world. The scale of the problem has led people, including David Nutt, a psychopharmacologist at Imperial College London, to want to try a different approach.

Last month, a patent application was filed for a drug that is supposed to give people a pleasant intoxication as well as limit the amount they drink.

In an unlikely marriage, the compound was created by the drug designer behind mephedrone, a now widely banned substance that has caused at least one death and been implicated in 13 others in the UK. The man, who has asked to be referred to by his pseudonym, Dr Z, initially intended his creation to be sold as a legal high. But after having discussions with Nutt and trying it on himself, he now plans to gift the patent to Nutt's charitable research group DrugScience, in the hope it will be used as a "binge mitigation agent".

How it might finally be used will depend on the results of detailed testing – including how quickly it is absorbed and how it mixes with alcohol. But it might become something you'd take at the start of a night out, or perhaps even add to each drink.

Nutt and Dr Z have called the new drug "chaperon". Its less catchy name is MEAI or 5-methoxy-2-aminoindane. Structurally, it is closely related to two drugs you can buy as a legal high in some places – MDAI and MMAI. Both were invented by David Nichols from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and have some of ecstasy's euphoric effects.

Unpredictable effects

Nichols says chaperon also looks a bit like another drug, PMA, which is known to be highly toxic. And therein lies the risk: "There really is no good way to predict biological activity in a completely novel structure," he says. What it does to the brain is also hard to predict because small tweaks to a molecule can result in big changes to the neurotransmitters and pathways it acts on.

So far no lab tests have been done on the substance, but Dr Z and about 40 other people have tried it. One of those people was me (see "A night on chaperon"). According to Dr Z, there have been no serious problems, although one person didn't enjoy the experience. Several others said it made them feel euphoric.

The effects varied, but some of the experimenters reportedly lost the desire to drink. The effect didn't kick in immediately. The longest delay was 2 hours, and it took 5 hours before I felt like holding back on the booze – although this may have been because I took a very small dose to start with. This isn't necessarily a problem, says Dr Z, as long as people know that in advance so they don't keep taking it while waiting for it to work. However, he is concerned that the effect is so much like ecstasy: "Maybe the drug is too good?"

Nutt doesn't think chaperon's ability to induce euphoria is necessarily an obstacle. There are other drugs that help people with alcohol problems to drink less or that act as a less harmful substitute – including some that Nutt is involved with (see "The alcohol fighters"). But most cultures around the world use drugs for pleasure, so a drug like chaperon could be a "win-win" situation, he says, acting both as a binge mitigator and providing some of its desirable effects.

But "you need scientific tests", says Nutt. "Anecdotal evidence isn't enough." These would involve finding out what receptors it binds to, how it affects rats and working out a safe dosage profile, before raising funding to conduct clinical trials to see whether it really does reduce alcohol intake.

David Caldicott from the Australian National University College of Medicine says the safety bar for new medicines is high – and even higher for recreational products.

Caldicott is enthusiastic about the potential of a substance like chaperon, that has some of alcohol's desirable qualities, but he is worried about mixing drugs and alcohol: "From a harm minimisation perspective, mixing drugs and alcohol is never a good idea. It's one of the basic premises."

Alex Wodak of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation says it is hard to predict what a drug will do when widely released. Its success will depend on whether it lowers people's intake of alcohol or simply adds another dimension to a night out.

Of course, there's every chance the drug will simply be banned, like so many of Dr Z's creations. Nutt is philosophical. "Let's just hope they don't," he says. "We have to see this as an opportunity to reduce harms rather than a new drug that has hit the market."

This article appeared in print under the headline "A not-so-bitter pill"

Leader: "Raise a toast to drugs that could replace alcohol"

The alcohol fighters

Many drugs already exist that are intended to limit or replace alcohol use.

David Nutt from Imperial College London has been working on alcohol substitutes for years and says he now has five at various stages of development. While chaperon might limit the amount that people want to drink (see main article), the other drugs mimic the neurological effects of alcohol by tinkering with receptors that bind to GABA, the neurotransmitter that alcohol acts on in the brain. Nutt won't reveal what the drugs are, but he has tried some of them himself and finds them enjoyable. What's more, for some, there's an antidote so you can drive home after a night out.

In the 1980s, after seeing the way the mildly intoxicating drug kava was used in Fiji without the kind of violence associated with alcohol, some Indigenous Australian communities introduced it in the hope of replacing alcohol. Whether it reduced overall harm is a matter of debate, but it came with downsides including skin irritation and liver toxicity. In 2007, Australia banned imports of kava.

Drugs like naltrexone and nalmefene block dopamine receptors in the brain, which alcohol acts on to make you feel good. Alcoholics are prescribed naltrexone and those who drink half a bottle of wine a night were recently advised to take nalmefene by the UK health advisory body.

A test of chaperon

How do you safely try a brand new drug? The bottom line is, you can't. But I still wanted to put chaperon, the "binge-drinking mitigation agent", to the test. So to reassure myself that I wasn't taking an excessive health risk I asked some scientists working in the field to carry out a few tests.

Their investigation was far from comprehensive, but it found that the drug doesn't seem to be toxic to kidney cells or to a type of neuron. NMR spectroscopy showed that the sample was pure chaperon, scientifically known as 5-methoxy-2-aminoindane or MEAI.

Having decided that the risk is acceptable, I try it on a night out drinking with friends. The first dose brings on a feeling of, well, nothing. After waiting 2 hours, I start to drink, slowly upping my dose of chaperon. Four hours after my first dose, I begin to feel a focused, relaxed high. But this feeling doesn't make me want to moderate my drinking. And more chaperon seems like a fun idea too.

By about midnight, more than 5 hours after the first dose, I feel intense but controlled euphoria. Now the idea of drinking alcohol seems repulsive – as does eating bar food. My friends are still ordering drinks and if I hadn't taken chaperon, I'm sure I would be too.

My friends later described my behaviour as rational, if a little tense. The drug didn't stop me from sleeping and I had no anxiety or depression in the following days. So it seems like a party drug without some of the side effects.

My experience is not a scientific study. It's a sample of one, and not even a carefully monitored and measured one. But for what it's worth, it took a lot of the drug to make me want to stop drinking and by then I felt both drunk and high. I enjoyed it, and I did not suffer any acute health problems, though the long term risks are unknown. My verdict? Much more research and development needed.

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Alcohol archaeology: I recreate beverages with heritage

Resurrecting ancient beers and wines is a subtle alchemy, but Patrick McGovern knows all the tricks. Who's for an Etruscan ale?

How did you start making ancient drinks?

One of the first we made was the Midas beverage, based on residues in bronze vessels recovered from the Midas tomb in Turkey, which dates from 700 BC. These pointed to an unusual drink combining wine, barley beer and mead. There were also food remains in the tomb that suggested a barbecued lamb or goat stew with lentils and spices. We tried to recreate the funerary feast as a way of bringing the past to life.

How do you go about recreating a drink?

People give me either samples of pottery or residues from ancient vessels possibly used for making, storing or drinking a fermented beverage. I identify the markers of specific natural products: tartaric acid is a fingerprint compound for grapes in the Middle East, for example, while calcium oxalate points to the presence of barley beer.

What did the Midas beverage taste like?

We knew the three basic components – grapes, barley and honey – but we didn't know what the bittering agent was. It couldn't be hops, as they only became available in Europe around AD 700, so we looked at the eastern Mediterranean spices that would have been available: saffron, cardamom, bitter vetch, cumin. In a competition among microbreweries to recreate the beverage, Delaware-based Dogfish Head used the best-quality saffron as their bittering agent, as well as Greek honey made from thyme blossom. Their winning beverage was on the sweet side, but the saffron gave it aromatic properties.

How does ancient booze compare with the modern stuff?

Ancient beverages tended to be much more multidimensional. People didn't necessarily specialise in one beverage; the wine industry was inseparable from the beer and mead industry in the earliest periods. Also, they wanted to be sure they had enough sugar to get the fermentation going, so they took whatever they had that contained sugar and mixed them together.

Which of your recreations would you pair with a traditional turkey roast?

The turkey is an American bird, so I'd propose having your English Christmas dinner with our American ancient ale, Theobroma, which was recreated by chemical analysis of pottery fragments from Honduras, dated to 1400 BC. Its cacao aroma will go nicely with the bird, a bit like a chocolate mole over chicken – a Mexican favourite.

What about for a beach barbecue?

If you were barbecuing fish or shrimp, I'd go for Midas Touch. It's a little like white wine, and it has delicious, piquant qualities which I think would go well with fish. For barbecued steak, I'd go for our early Etruscan ale, Etrusca, whose recreation is based on evidence from 2800-year-old tombs in central Italy. Its backbone is malted heirloom barley and wheat, but it also has hazelnut flour and pomegranate, which would be a good match for the beef. It even contains myrrh, for an added Christmas motif.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Beverage with heritage"

Profile

Patrick McGovern directs the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages and Health, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Many of his ancient brews are sold by Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware

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Masculine-sounding lawyers less likely to win in court

In the adversarial, macho environment of the courtroom, a booming voice might seem like a good trait for a lawyer to cultivate. Not so - men who sound very masculine are actually less likely to win a US Supreme Court case than their more gentle-sounding peers.

It's well known that the sound of our voice shapes how people perceive us, which in turn may affect how successful we are in various walks of life. Men, for example, are more likely to vote for men with deeper, masculine voices in leadership contests, and both men and women prefer women with a more masculine tone as leaders. CEOs with deeper voices tend to manage larger companies and earn more money.

To explore whether the vocal characteristics of male lawyers affect trial outcomes, a team led by linguist Alan Yu of the University of Chicago and legal theorist Daniel Chen of ETH Zurich in Switzerland collected 60 recordings of male lawyers in the Supreme Court making the traditional opening statement: "Mister Chief Justice, may it please the court". Then 200 volunteers rated these clips for how masculine they thought the speaker was, as well as how attractive, confident, intelligent, trustworthy and educated they perceived the voice to be.

Bias in the court

After accounting for the age and experience of the lawyers, statistical analysis showed that only one of the traits could predict the court outcome. Lawyers rated as speaking with less-masculine voices were more likely to win. "It was a surprise to all of us," says Yu, whose results will be presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Portland, Oregon, in January.

Although legal systems are based on the principle of fair, objective trials, we know that obscure factors, such as whether the judge has eaten recently, can bias a case. Yu's results suggest that the masculinity of the voice is another source of bias, but why remains a mystery.

Yu now wants to explore whether the perceived likelihood of winning affects how lawyers speak. "Lawyers who think they're going to lose may project a different kind of voice, perhaps overcompensating by sounding more masculine" says Yu, who is keen to stress that the findings are just the beginning of wider project looking at the impact of voice and gender in the courts.

If there is a genuine bias, it could be hard to overcome. "You could have legal writings without oral arguments, but that's not a feasible change," says Casey Klofstad, a political scientist at the University of Miami who carried out the studies on how voice affects voting preference. "The only way around it is to make people aware of the bias, and hope they are mindful of it when listening".

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Loneliness is a modern epidemic in need of treatment

In recent decades, social isolation has been recognised as a major risk to our health and longevity. It's twice as bad for you as being obese and nearly as bad as smoking. The rising number of people who say they are affected, across a wide range of ages, is startling. Yet obvious mechanisms – such as self-neglect – do not explain the full health toll. So what else is going on?

To answer this question it is worth noting that you can suffer the ill effects of loneliness even if you are not socially isolated. It is essentially an emotional state, and recognising the brain's role is vital to understanding much of the harm that can be caused.

Comedian Robin Williams made a salient observation in 2009: "I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone." Tracking large groups over time indicates that perceived social isolation carries its own risk for morbidity and mortality, independent of actual social isolation. What could drive this surprising effect?

Safety in numbers

The perception of isolation from others – of being on the social perimeter – is not only a cause of unhappiness, it also signals danger. Fish have evolved to swim to the middle of their group when predators approach, mice housed in social isolation show sleep disruptions and reduced slow-wave sleep and prairie voles isolated from their partners then placed in an open field explore their surroundings less and concentrate on predator evasion.

These behaviours reflect an increased emphasis on self-preservation when on the social perimeter. For instance, fish on the edge of a school are more likely to be attacked by predators because they are easier to isolate and prey upon. Such observations reflect a more general principle, that perceived social isolation in social animals activates neural, neuroendocrine and behavioural responses that promote short-term self-preservation. However, these responses bring a cost for long-term health and well-being.

The range of harmful neural and behavioural effects of perceived isolation documented in adults include increased anxiety, hostility and social withdrawal; fragmented sleep and daytime fatigue; increased vascular resistance and altered gene expression and immunity; decreased impulse control; increased negativity and depressive symptoms; and increased age-related cognitive decline and risk of dementia.

A little less lonesome

Sadly, to date, attempts to reduce loneliness have met with limited success. A meta-analysis of different strategies studied in randomised controlled trials, showed they had only a small effect. Among the four types of interventions examined, talking therapy that focused on inappropriate thought processes – a lack of self-worth, a lack of perspective and a skewed idea of how trustworthy others are and how they perceive you - had the largest impact. Social skills training, social support and increased opportunities for social contact were much less effective.

This finding is consistent with the idea that perceived social isolation can still put us in self-preservation mode – a hangover from ancient times when isolation would have left us very vulnerable to attack – which can lead to harmful thought processes and behaviour that is at odds with thriving in a modern society.

There is no pharmacological treatment for loneliness, although animal research is shedding light on this possibility. Given the scale of the problem today, the hunt for better treatments of all types deserves high priority.

John Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the University of Chicago's Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience

Stephanie Cacioppo is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience and director of the High-Performance Electrical Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine

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2014 review: The most awesome stories of the year

STORY OF THE YEAR: COMET LANDING

Philae landed on a comet that from some angles looks like a rubber duck (Image: ESA/Rosetta/Navcam)

SPACE & PHYSICS

The Philae landing

"We are there and Philae is talking to us. We are on the comet!" These words marked the high point of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, which arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko after a decade-long journey. Besides the dramatic touchdown of Philae in November, Rosetta's tense wake-up in January and the close-up photos of the comet in August meant the mission made headlines all year.

Earth's backup

Think of Earth as a giant supercomputer, with the moon as our backup hard drive. That's the vision behind plans announced in May to use the moon as off-planet storage for the religious, cultural and genetic trappings of humanity. Sending a sacred Jewish scroll to the moon could be just the beginning of an apocalypse-proof backup of all culture and life on Earth.

How it all began

The universe was born in an unimaginably fast expansion, and we have proof! And then we didn't. In March we seemed to have evidence for inflation – the dizzying growth of the universe after the big bang – but the results were soon thrown into doubt. We'll have to wait to see what the space-based Planck telescope can tell us – its results are due in early 2015.

HEALTH

Ultimate rejuvenation

It's like the dark plot of a vampire movie. Starting in October, people with Alzheimer's disease in California were given transfusions of young blood to see if it improves their cognition. Young mouse blood has been shown to improve the brain power and health of older mice and could even make them look younger. If it works in humans, the implications could be huge, not least for big pharma. Watch this space.

Master on-off switch

One moment you're conscious, the next you're not. For the first time, researchers switched off consciousness by electrically stimulating a single part of the brain. The discovery, reported in June, suggests that the area – the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions.

Lab-grown vagina

(Image: Wake Forest Institute)

"It was incredible how my body accepted it. Now it works as if it were not made in a lab =)." So said a Mexican woman who was one of the first to receive a lab-grown vagina made from her own cells (see above). After six months, the women could menstruate and have sex, and should now be able to have children. The surgeon behind the breakthrough is now developing lab-grown penises.

TECHNOLOGY

Cyborg drummer

(Image: Georgia Tech)

Jason Barnes had wanted to be a drummer since he was a teenager. When he lost his arm he thought his dream was over. Now he has a second chance, thanks to a robotic arm (see above) that should allow him to play just as well as anyone – or perhaps better. He played his first concert with the prosthesis in March.

First family robot

It doesn't just recognise you, it can field your phone calls and chat to you at dinner. Jibo, unveiled in July, is the first robot designed to be used by the whole family and will be available to buy in 2015.

Bitcoin revolution

It has been called many things, from the future of money to a drug dealer's dream. But beyond being the web's first native currency, it became clear this year that Bitcoin's true innovation is its underlying technology, the "block chain". That concept is being used to transform Bitcoin – and money online.

The sound of Wi-Fi

"I can hear birds tweeting in the trees, traffic prowling the back roads, children playing in gardens and Wi-Fi leaching from their homes." We met the man who has hacked his hearing so he can listen in to the data that surrounds us.

LIVING PLANET

Electric life forms

Bacteria can survive on a variety of energy sources, but living on electricity is particularly weird. Think of Frankenstein's monster, brought to life by galvanic energy, except "electric bacteria" turn out to be very real, and this year they started popping up all over the place. Unlike any other life on Earth, these extraordinary microbes use energy in its purest form – they eat and breathe electrons harvested from rocks and metals.

The first American

A boy who died 12,600 years ago had his genome sequenced, it was announced in February. We may never know who the Anzick child was, why he died aged 3 in the foothills of the American Rockies or why he was buried beneath a cache of flints. But incredibly, his family turns out to be the direct ancestors of most tribes in Central and South America – and probably the US too.

Water world

How did we miss it? In June, we found out that a reservoir of water three times the volume of all the oceans sits deep beneath Earth's surface. It is hidden in a blue rock called ringwoodite that lies 700 kilometres beneath our feet, in the hot rock of the mantle between us and Earth's core. It could help explain where Earth's seas came from.

Leader: "'This is our policy': New Scientist after 3000 issues"

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Man vs sherry trifle: Can I eat myself drunk?

What happens if you try to get mashed on potatoes and sauced on sauce? It's a sobering insight into what really happens to the booze we cook with

I LOVE cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Ah, the old ones are the best. But here's an oldie that is well past its sell-by date: if you cook with wine, all the alcohol is "burned off" by the heat.

When I started telling people about my plan to see if I could eat myself drunk, I heard this piece of kitchen folklore again and again. And no wonder: it seems so plausible. The boiling point of ethanol is about 78.5 °C, significantly lower than the boiling point of, say, a casserole. So if you add wine to a hot pan, the alcohol evaporates.

Not so. In 1992, a team of food scientists at the University of ...

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Russia boasts best mental agility at World Mind Games

The summer Olympics may be a distant memory, but the World Mind Games are something altogether different, seeing international memory athletes flock to China to compete with brain instead of brawn.

This extravaganza of mental muscle finished in Beijing, China on 17 December, with Russia emerging as the big winner. The event saw 150 athletes from 27 countries competing in 14 variations of five sports, including chess, go, draughts, bridge and xiangqi – a Chinese game that resembles chess.

Russia topped the medal table with six golds, five silvers and one bronze, with the Chinese team coming in a close second. England improved upon last year's tenth place, moving up to seventh with two golds and one bronze medal. The US fell from sixth in 2013 to 13th position this year.

Highlights of the games included a close battle in the women's individual bridge title, as England's own grandmaster Nicola Smith fought tough Dutch opposition to win on the final deal. China also managed to make an impressive clean sweep across all categories of go – an ancient board game that involves placing black and white stones on a grid with the aim of surrounding a larger portion of the board than your opponent.

Ilan Herbst from Israel was the most successful male in the competition, winning 2 gold medals in the bridge pairs and team events, and silver in the men's individual bridge event.

Grandmaster Hou Yifan from China topped the female leader board. She won two gold medals and one silver in three disciplines of chess, including gold in the "Basque system" event, where competitors have to play on two boards simultaneously with a time limit of 20 minutes. The 20-year-old says she has been playing chess since the age of five and a half, and is currently number two in the World Chess Federation rankings of female players.

As with all professional sporting events, all athletes had to abide by the World Anti-Doping Agency's rules and prove they were not using any cognitive-enhancing drugs to improve their memory or concentration. Spot checks were conducted throughout the games.

If you fancy your chances at some mind games, beginners and advanced mental manipulators alike can enter next year's online World Mind Games tournament, which runs alongside the main event each year.

This story will appear in print under the headline 'Mega minds clash'

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Split-colour bird is half male, half female

(Image: Brian D. Peer and Robert W. Motz)

No, this bird didn't dye its feathers. The half-red, half-white plumage of this northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) is the result of gynandromorphy. In other words its sex chromosomes did not segregate properly after fertilisation, so the bird is half-male, half-female. Males are usually bright red all over while females are a more subdued white, but due to the developmental quirk, the bird's colours are split down the middle.

Cardinals with such plumage are rare so Brian Peer from Western Illinois University in Macomb and colleague Robert Motz observed it for over a year. They found that although the bird never found a mate and never belted out its characteristic trilling song, at least other birds didn't target it for its unusual looks.

Journal reference: The Wilson Journal of Ornithology DOI: 10.1676/14-025.1

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Reverb: Why we dig messy sound

From concert-hall designers to pop record producers, everyone in the music industry knows we love reverb. But why?

THE TALL, arched, windowless space has just enough light for me to make out the explicit frescoes of naked bodies and skeletons adorning its walls. But I'm not here in the suburbs of Oslo for the visuals. For people in my line of work, the mausoleum of the Norwegian artist Emanuel Vigeland (photo below) is most famous for its stunning acoustics.

I burst a balloon, and the bang takes 15 seconds to die away. I sing a note, and another and another, and they hang in the air together as a chord. The effect is spine-tingling. And although this is an extreme example, it illustrates a near-universal truth: we love our sounds with a bit of reverb.

This is, on the face of it, rather odd. Reverberation replaces the clear, unadulterated ...

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Fancy naming a world after someone this Christmas?

WHAT'S in a name? A chance of cosmic immortality, if you get it right. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is asking "public and astronomy-interested organisations" to officially name 305 planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy.

While pondering ideas, history offers us a few lessons. Flash back to 1781: musician and amateur astronomer William Herschel was peering through a telescope in his garden in Bath, UK, when he spotted a curious object "either nebulous star, or perhaps a comet". It turned out Herschel's discovery was rather more significant – it was a new planet.

But what to call it? Herschel named it after the ruling King George III, one of the few British monarchs to have a deep interest in science. But he was swiftly overruled by the astronomical community. Planets had been traditionally named after mythological deities. Imagine: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George, Neptune... it doesn't bear thinking about. Uranus – in mythology the father of Saturn – won. Sorry, George.

By the start of the 19th century, astronomers were uncovering dozens of asteroids and minor planets in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. For a while, tradition held – Ceres, Vesta, Pallas – but as the asteroid count grew, the myths ran out. They started calling the cosmic runts after mistresses and pets. Asteroid 2309 is named Mr Spock, not after the Star Trek character but the discoverer's cat. Horrified, the IAU banned names of pets and mistresses.

But strict rules still leave room for creative manoeuvres. In 1978, astronomer Jim Christy discovered a moon orbiting Pluto. His instinct was to name it after his wife Charlene (nicknamed Shar). But mythology had to prevail. He chose Charon ("Shar-on" in some astronomer circles), the ferryman who transported souls across the river Styx to Pluto's underworld.

Now groups keen on astronomy – clubs, planetariums, schools – have a chance to join the name game and christen a new world. The rules: 16 characters or fewer; inoffensive; pronounceable (in some language); and no names of living individuals or pets!

Good luck. It's a real gift of a chance. Just don't suggest Fido.

This article appeared in print under the headline "A gift from above"

Heather Couper is a UK astronomer and science populariser. Asteroid 3922 was named Heather after her in 1999

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The piste at the end of the universe

(Image: Neil Stevens)

Weary of Whistler? Find Davos dull? For a vacation with a difference, blast off with our winter sports guide to the best off-earthly snow and ice

Few things spell the holiday season like a sprinkling of snow. It may not always be the cold white stuff we're accustomed to on Earth, but there's plenty of opportunity for future space explorers to have winter fun in the solar system ... and beyond.

As the solar system's innermost planet, Mercury is generally much too hot for a white Christmas. In some spots, however, natural freezers have harboured ice for billions of years. In a single polar crater on Mercury, daytime temperatures can soar above 250 °C, yet patches in shadow stay cold enough to preserve water ice. There is plenty of it, too – in some craters the ice is tens of centimetres thick, with even ...

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Y(ou)r q(ua)ntifi(e)d s(el)f, a short story

Continue reading page |1|2 |3

(Image: Kyle Thompson/Agence VU/Camera Press)

YOU want to be healthy. You want to know about yourself. You want to be happy. You need to know about yourself. You want to live a long, productive life. It starts and ends with yourself.

How long does it take to get going on an average day? What's your boot-up time? The norm is a bell-shaped curve, much broader than you, personally, would like to see. You'll want to narrow your own curve down. You'll observe what effect this has, right on down the line.

Take your heart, for example. How many times does it beat in a day? Depends on the day. Depends on the heart. But on average, 86,400. That's 8.64 × 104. For each chamber of your heart (four in all), it's the same number. But for all four chambers combined it's four times as many beats a day. That's 34.4 × 104 (or 3.44 × 105), a substantially higher number. If you narrow your curve, that number might climb as high as 4.2 × 105. That's a lot of beats. Not too many, mind you. Your heart is built to beat. You'll race out the door. Good job!

Your body is a temple. You have a duty to know how it stands. Your friends who visit the temple, who hang around on the steps – and the lucky ones invited inside – have a right to know the roof won't collapse and the walls won't crumble. They have a vested interest in knowing the building is sound.

How much have you eaten today? How many calories? How many servings? When you stood on the scale this morning, what did it say? Tip of the week: use the metric system. Kilograms melt away so much faster than pounds. How much faster? More than twice as fast (2.2 times, to be precise). You'll have already knocked off a full kilogram before you've shed even half a pound.

Not trying to lose? Trying to bulk up instead? Same deal: quicker results with the metric system. Even quicker (by a factor of 103) if in place of kilograms, you use grams. Good for the forces of change. Good for your head.

How many steps, on average, do you take per day? You know the length of your stride. You know the number of strides between bedroom and kitchen, kitchen and bathroom, bathroom and bed. You know the number of stairs you go up and down each day. You know how many times you shift on your feet while standing at work. How many times you walk down the hall. Your wristband monitors the distance you travel. It measures how many calories you burn. It counts the steps between here and there.

Thirty-six per cent of you are stepping right now. Two out of three will be reading this as you do: reading while exercising is a time-honoured way to maximise your daily throughput score. Sixty-eight per cent of you readers will be riveted by the material. Eighteen per cent will be nodding off. Be sure to keep your wrist monitor on when your eyes drift closed, whether you're at the desk, on the bus, on the couch or in bed. You'll want to keep track of the distance you log during sleep: during visits to the kitchen, for example, to the bathroom or to check the front door.

If you're a sleepwalker – and a lucky 13 per cent of you are – you'll want to know the duration of your travels, and the average length of your stride. A shuffling walk, you'll note, burns fewer calories than a steady march; a steady march, less than a taut, suspenseful pacing. But all add to the daily count, and when you wake and see what you've unknowingly accomplished, you'll feel as if it's Christmas Day.

No need to dwell on this. You're already counting your steps. You're keeping track of everything you put into your body. You're watching your weight like a hawk. But are you also watching your height?

What shoes are you wearing? Are you tracking their effect on your heart rate, your blood pressure, your mood? How do flats compare to pumps? Shit-kickers to stilettos? Sandals to sneakers?

Seventy-one per cent of you raise your height with footwear between 2.6 and 4.7 centimetres on 76 per cent of days. (Female to male discordance is less than you might think.) Among the artificially elevated, 62 per cent will volunteer an opinion without being prompted. Below 1 cm and above 7 cm of additional height (or lift), meekness and faux-meekness predominate by a two to one margin.

Height affects your mood, and it affects your world-view. You know this. Eighty-two per cent of you average lifters have experienced a more positive outlook, as measured by a shift in the power axis of the Myers-Briggs test. Sixty-eight per cent have noted an increase in appetite, 77 per cent of you have craved to do something you've never done before.

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Try the hardest crossword ever set by a computer

Down. 1: Silicon word whizz was Oprah guru, by the sound of it

Silicon-chip logic is remorseless, but it can think laterally enough to flummox human minds. Up for the challenge? There's a prize to be won if you are

MATTHEW GINSBERG can't help feeling a little sorry for his crossword-solving computer program. He points to a recent New York Times clue: "Food or drink dispensers". The answer? "MachinesV". "How is a computer meant to figure that out?" Ginsberg asks. "It's not fair."

If you're stuck: it's "v ending machines", or vending machines. Plenty of people struggle with this more whimsical sort of crossword clue, which can combine general knowledge, word play and cultural references with a generous dose of lateral thinking. A silicon processor, armed only with remorseless logic, seems even less well equipped. It's all the more surprising, then, that Dr Fill, Ginsberg's baby, is now ...

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Pitch us a movie and win an invite to our writing room

No game: Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Alan Turing (Image: Rex Features)

Send us an elevator pitch and you could find yourself developing your best screenplay idea in the company of a hand-picked crew of writing professionals

SCIENCE has been swallowing the film world of late. No sooner did Alfonso Cuarón's 2013 thriller Gravity strip space flight back to its heroic basics, than the British Film Institute launched a major national celebration of science fiction, Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder , reminding us of the genre's manifold possibilities and styles. And 2014 ends with the release of two films, that each take a wildly different approach to scientific storytelling. Interstellar's myth of the near future puts our current climate challenges into cosmic context, while The Imitation Game is an intimate and gripping portrait, based in truth, of a remarkable mathematical mind.

Now it's your turn. Whether you want to explore the world through fantastical thought experiments or delve into the day-to-day business of real science, we're offering you the chance to develop your best screenplay idea in the company of a hand-picked crew of writing professionals.

Send us an "elevator pitch" – describing your film idea in no more than 250 words. Multi-award-winning science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will pick the six best entries we receive by Wednesday 14 January 2015.

Five runners-up will win Flicker: Your brain on movies , an insightful new book in which psychologist Jeffrey Zacks describes what happens in your brain when the lights go out in the cinema and the movie begins.

Our first prize is an invitation (by Skype or in person) into New Scientist's first ever "writing room", to discuss, develop and hone your winning idea into a film pitch.

Visit http://newscientist.submittable.com/submit for further details, instructions on how to submit your competition entry, and our full terms and conditions.

We will announce our competition winners on 31 January 2015.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Pitch us a movie"

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The mystery of yawning: We all do it, but why?

WHEN I give talks about my work, I know that before too long the audience will start to yawn. Just thinking about yawning makes us do it, but the mechanisms behind this everyday behaviour are a mystery.

Yawning is often the first thing we do when we wake up, but we also do it when we are bored, tired or anxious. It is a primitive reflex that we share with other animals, from fish to mammals. We first start yawning in the womb, at around 20 weeks gestation, and as we age, we yawn less frequently. It happens most in the morning, but despite yawning being universal, the reason we do it is still unclear.

Boredom leads to yawning, so it has long been assumed that the action is an arousal reflex that makes us feel more awake by stretching the muscles surrounding the lungs, or by bringing more oxygen ...

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QI elves: Our magpie minds and favourite facts

Tell us a bit about your TV programme, QI

James Harkin: It's based on the idea that everything is interesting if you look at it in the right way. We find interesting things then ask comedians to answer impossible questions about them.

How did the show first come to be made?

James: The story goes that when John Lloyd [the show's creator] had kids, he realised that he didn't know the first thing about anything. So he started reading encyclopaedias. He decided to make an encyclopaedia without the dull bits.

Anna Ptaszynski: His son Harry was a massive inspiration. When he was 4 or 5 he would ask John weird questions: Why are we here? What is the sun? It made John realise that, as soon as we finish formal education, we suddenly stop asking those kinds of questions. I suppose that's what we are trying to do.

Your job is to ...

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How to make an origami universe

Click on the image to find out what it all means (Image: Dave Stock)

The rules by which gravity sculpts the cosmos are mirrored in the Japanese art of paper folding – we show you how to do it yourself

OUR universe was shaped by origami. Gravity took a primordial paper sheet and folded it to form galaxies, thus bringing light and life to the cosmos.

This original take on the creation myth is more than just empty metaphor. One astrophysicist is discovering how origami can tell us a few things about how galaxies are created, why they tend to spin in unison – and how in their early days they may have been nested within vast, dark polygons.

Mark Neyrinck of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, studies how galaxies and other structures form. Specifically, he looks at how dense spots of invisible dark matter ...

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New Scientist 2014 holiday quiz

See question 10 (below) (Image: Keystone/Getty)

For this year's quiz, New Scientist has teamed up with the QI Elves, the researchers behind the brilliant BBC panel show QI and its many spin-offs (see "QI elves: Our magpie minds and favourite facts"). The Elves read New Scientist every week, plucking out the juiciest and most surprising facts to use in their TV shows, radio shows, podcasts and books. Here is a quiz based on their 10 favourite things they learned from New Scientist this year.

1. Which of the following is untrue of Neanderthals?

a) They looked after disabled individuals

b) They hunted and ate pigeons

c) They could hear sounds that no known animal can make

2. How does your brain compare with that of a Homo sapiens living 10,000 years ago?

a) 5 per cent bigger

b) 15 per cent smaller

c) 50 per cent wrinklier

3. Which of the following describes raindrops on the sun?

a) They are the size of Ireland

b) They are the shape of doughnuts

c) They smell of geraniums

4. Cars on motorways are noisy, but where does that noise mostly come from?

a) The engine

b) The wheels

c) The air rushing past

5. What were the dominant animals on the Hawaiian islands (though not Hawaii itself) before humans arrived?

a) Giant ducks

b) Flying snakes

c) Carnivorous slugs

6. Which of the following is of particular importance to car manufacturers?

a) A pleasant-sounding dashboard

b) Windscreens containing the golden ratio

c) Cup holders manufactured in the country of sale

7. What is the only computer to win a quiz show doing these days?

a) It has its own chat show on the American Heroes Channel

b) It predicts the path of hurricanes in the Caribbean

c) It is saving lives in the medical sector

8. When is the best time for hand-eye coordination?

a) 6 am

b) 8 pm

c) 1 am

9. Approximately how much does it cost to sequence a human genome?

a) $25

b) $1000

c) $2.5 million

10. Which of the following is true of Agatha Christie? (see photo, top)

a) She had an imaginary friend into her 70s

b) She distilled her own whisky

c) She worked as an astronomer's assistant

This article appeared in print under the headline "Paying attention?"

Answers

1 c Our understanding of Neanderthals is changing all the time. We now know that they looked after their old and disabled and that they hunted and ate pigeons. There's no evidence that they heard sounds that no known animal can make: that is a skill of the greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella

2 b Humans 10,000 years ago had brains that were about 15 per cent larger than ours. Nobody knows if that change means we are less intelligent, or if it's simply that our brains have become more efficient

3 a It does rain on the sun, but the rain comes in the form of "droplets" of plasma the size of Ireland, falling from the height of 63,000 kilometres at 200,000 kilometres per hour

4 b Contrary to popular belief, at 100 km/hour, 90 per cent of the noise a car makes comes from the interaction with the road, not from the engine

5 a The dominant animals on the islands before humans arrived were giant flightless ducks called moa-nalo. They thrived for 3 million years before being hunted to extinction

6 a One in four people tap the dashboard when inspecting a new car. Manufacturers know this, so deliberately make the sound pleasing

7 c After winning $1 million on Jeopardy! in 2011, the computer Watson has been working to assess humans' genetic risk of cardiac arrest as well as recommending treatment for lung cancer

8 b The best time of the day for hand-eye coordination is 8 pm and the best time to do anything involving thinking is between 4 pm and 10 pm.

The absolute worst time for the brain to try doing stuff is, unsurprisingly, between midnight and 6 am

9 b In 2000 it cost $3 billion to sequence a human genome. In 2014 the price fell below $1000 for the first time

10 a Agatha Christie still spoke to her imaginary friend into her 70s. Studies suggest that having imaginary friends is perfectly normal and can help children cope with real-life difficulties

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