Werewolf plant waits for the light of the full moon

It's the only known plant species that relies on the lunar cycle for survival – and we found out by complete accident.

At night, Ephedra foeminea, a non-flowering relative of conifers and cycads, secretes small translucent globules of sugary liquid to attract nocturnal pollinating insects. The globules are like tiny beads oozing out from cone-shaped female organs, where the seeds are produced. If a pollinator lands on a globule, any pollen it is carrying is absorbed via the liquid into the female cone, where it fertilises the seed.

It took a while for researchers to notice the plant was following the moon. While studying other Ephedra species, Catarina Rydin and Kristina Bolinder of Stockholm University in Sweden had found that pollinator-attracting globules appeared on these plants around the same time every year. But when they revisited Ephedra foeminea plants in Greece and Croatia in 2013 to observe their pollination, they were flummoxed to find no globules.

"After a useless week in Greece without any pollinators to observe, we were in a really bad mood, and decided to go for a dinner instead of visiting the field site again," says Rydin. "Then, all of a sudden, there was a eureka moment, perhaps from seeing the moon on photos from a previous year, and contrasting it with the darkness we'd experienced so far at the field site."

Although the idea of a link between Ephedra foeminea pollination and the lunar cycle started as a joke, they sifted through all their data in search of a pattern which they could follow up on during their next visit. "It all fitted, and all we had to do was wait for 2014's full moon in July to see if that was what the plants were waiting for, and it absolutely was," says Rydin.

Diamonds in moonlight

The globules appeared exactly when the moon was full, but a wind-pollinated relative showed no lunar correlation.

The activities of many animal species are known to be linked to the full moon, including various crabs, seabirds, dung beetles and corals. But in the plant world, Ephedra foeminea may be the first.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is a first," says Rydin. "At night, the many pollination drops glitter like diamonds in the full moonlight, a spectacular sight also for the human eye," she and Bolinder report.

Exactly how the plants know when the moon is full isn't yet clear. Perhaps they can sense the intensity of the moonlight or gravitational changes.

Rydin thinks the species might be vulnerable to human light pollution, although they have not investigated this yet. "Our feeling is that the insect-pollinated species is steadily growing further and further away from villages compared with wind-pollinated species," she says.

Journal reference: Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2014.0993

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AI interns: Software already taking jobs from humans

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People have talked about robots taking our jobs for ages. Problem is, they already have – we just didn't notice

FORGET Skynet. Hypothetical world-ending artificial intelligence makes headlines, but the hype ignores what's happening right under our noses. Cheap, fast AI is already taking our jobs, we just haven't noticed.

This isn't dumb automation that can rapidly repeat identical tasks. It's software that can learn about and adapt to its environment, allowing it to do work that used to be the exclusive domain of humans, from customer services to answering legal queries.

These systems don't threaten to enslave humanity, but they do pose a challenge: if software that does the work of humans exists, what work will we do?

In the last three years, UK telecoms firm O2 has replaced 150 workers with a single piece of software. A large portion of O2's customer service is now automatic, says Wayne Butterfield, who works on improving O2's operations. "Sim swaps, porting mobile numbers, migrating from prepaid onto a contract, unlocking a phone from O2" – all are now automated, he says.

Humans used to manually move data between the relevant systems to complete these tasks, copying a phone number from one database to another, for instance. The user still has to call up and speak to a human, but now an AI does the actual work.

To train the AI, it watches and learns while humans do simple, repetitive database tasks. With enough training data, the AIs can then go to work on their own. "They navigate a virtual environment," says Jason Kingdon, chairman of Blue Prism, the start-up which developed O2's artificial workers. "They mimic a human. They do exactly what a human does. If you watch one of these things working it looks a bit mad. You see it typing. Screens pop-up, you see it cutting and pasting."

One of the world's largest banks, Barclays, has also dipped a toe into this specialised AI. It used Blue Prism to deal with the torrent of demands that poured in from its customers after UK regulators demanded that it pay back billions of pounds of mis-sold insurance. It would have been expensive to rely entirely on human labour to field the sudden flood of requests. Having software agents that could take some of the simpler claims meant Barclays could employ fewer people.

The back office work that Blue Prism automates is undeniably dull, but it's not the limit for AI's foray into office space. In January, Canadian start-up ROSS started using IBM's Watson supercomputer to automate a whole chunk of the legal research normally carried out by entry-level paralegals.

Legal research tools already exist, but they don't offer much more than keyword searches. This returns a list of documents that may or may not be relevant. Combing through these for the argument a lawyer needs to make a case can take days.

ROSS returns precise answers to specific legal questions, along with a citation, just like a human researcher would. It also includes its level of confidence in its answer. For now, it is focused on questions about Canadian law, but CEO Andrew Aruda says he plans for ROSS to digest the law around the world.

Since its artificial intelligence is focused narrowly on the law, ROSS's answers can be a little dry. Asked whether it's OK for 20 per cent of the directors present at a directors' meeting to be Canadian, it responds that no, that's not enough. Under Canadian law, no directors' meeting may go ahead with less than 25 per cent of the directors present being Canadian. ROSS's source? The Canada Business Corporations Act, which it scanned and understood in an instant to find the answer.

By eliminating legal drudge work, Aruda says that ROSS's automation will open up the market for lawyers, reducing the time they need to spend on each case. People who need a lawyer but cannot afford one would suddenly find legal help within their means.

ROSS's searches are faster and broader than any human's. Arruda says this means it doesn't just get answers that a human would have had difficulty finding, it can search in places no human would have thought to look. "Lawyers can start crafting very insightful arguments that wouldn't have been achievable before," he says. Eventually, ROSS may become so good at answering specific kinds of legal question that it could handle simple cases on its own.

Where Blue Prism learns and adapts to the various software interfaces designed for humans working within large corporations, ROSS learns and adapts to the legal language that human lawyers use in courts and firms. It repurposes the natural language-processing abilities of IBM's Watson supercomputer to do this, scanning and analysing 10,000 pages of text every second before pulling out its best answers, ranked by confidence.

Lawyers are giving it feedback too, says Jimoh Ovbiagele, ROSS's chief technology officer. "ROSS is learning through experience."

Massachusetts-based Nuance Communications is building AIs that solve some of the same language problems as ROSS, but in a different part of the economy: medicine. In the US, after doctors and nurses type up case notes, another person uses those notes to try to match the description with one of thousands of billing codes for insurance purposes.

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Fire ants kill and eat baby caimans as they hatch

THIS puts the story of David and Goliath into perspective. Tiny red fire ants in Argentina target fearsome caimans, with as many as one in four of the crocodilian's babies falling prey to insect attackers.

The ants colonise more than half the broad-snouted caiman nests, where the fermenting bedding material provides the humidity and warmth the insects' eggs and larvae need.

They bite the caiman mum, forcing her to abandon the nest. Then, when the young start to hatch, the ants sneak inside the eggs to kill the babies and eat them. It seems that 26 per cent of broad-snouted caiman babies in a breeding season could die by red fire ant predation (Journal of Herpetology, doi.org/266).

The baby caimans are defenceless against an army of the little red monsters. "It is not one caiman against one red fire ant – it is one caiman against about 100,000 fire ants," says Carlos Ignacio Piña of the Laboratory of Applied Zoology in Santa Fe, Argentina, an author of the study. "There are so many fire ants that the baby caiman starts to shake like crazy, trying to get released."

The proportion of killed caimans is somewhat disturbing, but not crazily high, says Craig Allen from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It is of no immediate concern to caiman populations in South America because the ants and caimans co-evolved there, and natural red fire ant predators, such as the decapitating fly, help keep the ants in check.

Elsewhere though, these invasive ants could wreak havoc, partially because their natural predators are absent. Allen has previously found that they can kill 70 per cent of turtle hatchlings in Florida. In the US, they have also been caught munching on snakes, lizards, birds and even deer fawns, who freeze when in danger, giving ants time to attack.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Croc and awe: Fire ants eat quarter of baby caimans"

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I believe: Your personal guidebook to reality

A Balinese Hindu purification ceremony – beliefs are both fundamental and widespread (Image: Felix Hug/Corbis)

THE day I sat down to write this article the news was rather like any other day. A teenager had been found guilty of plotting to behead a British soldier. Fighting had broken out again in Ukraine. Greece was accusing its creditors of being motivated by ideology rather than economic reality. Some English football fans were filmed racially abusing a man on the Paris subway. Admittedly, all of that day's stories were unique in themselves. But at the root they were all about the same thing: the powerful and very human attribute we call belief.

Beliefs define how we see the world and act within it; without them, there would be no plots to behead soldiers, no war, no economic crises and no racism. There would also be no cathedrals, no nature reserves, ...

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The moon's got two tails - and its friends might too

The man in the moon must be wearing a tailcoat. Turns out, our satellite has two tails of particles streaming in its wake. If the same is true of other bodies in the solar system, it could give us a way to study their surfaces without having to land.

Data from NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which spent seven months orbiting the moon in 2013 and 2014, has revealed a tail of nanoscale dust particles.

The finding follows the discovery of the first lunar tail in 1999, when ground-based telescopes spotted a faint stream of sodium gas stretching out behind the moon for hundreds of thousands of kilometres.

Anthony Colaprete, who is in charge of LADEE's spectrometer instrument, wanted to get a closer look at the sodium tail, so positioned LADEE on the dark side of the moon and pointed it away from the sun. The spectrometer works by looking at the patterns of light wavelengths that different substances emit or reflect. In this position, the instrument picked up the sodium, but there also seemed to be something else, a brighter signal in the blue and ultraviolet wavelengths.

Telling tails

After eliminating other possibilities, the team found that the best explanation for their signal was a tail of dust grains, each around 10 nanometres in size, trailing away from the moon for thousands of kilometres. "We think it is a robust observation," says Colaprete, who presented the work at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The Woodlands, Texas, on 16 March.

These grains are too small to be seen by LADEE's Lunar Dust Experiment, which is designed to collect floating dust particles. There is also no chance of seeing the tail from Earth since the particles are very spread out, with less than a thousandth of a gram of material per square metre. But Jack Schmitt, who was an astronaut on the Apollo 17 mission, attended the LPSC session and said he thought the dust tail could explain a strange glow the crew observed from orbit at lunar sunrise.

But how is this dust getting so far away from the moon? Colaprete thinks asteroids crashing into the lunar surface are throwing up tiny particles, and then radiation pressure from the sun is pushing them further away, which is why the tail is in the opposite direction to the sun.

If the same process is at work elsewhere in the solar system, it could offer a new way to study the surfaces of other bodies: collect their tails rather than landing on them. "This is something that should be applicable to any airless bodies," says Colaprete. This includes asteroids, the moons of Mars and the dwarf planet Ceres. "If you could gather it over time, you could analyse it as a measure of the surface."

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Seahorse reveals secrets of paradoxical grasping tail

Video: Seahorse grasps object with paradoxical tail

There's more than a twist to this tail. One of the ocean's most strangely shaped creatures is even more special than we knew. Seahorses have tails that are paradoxically rigid and flexible at the same time. Now we have insight into how they have such contradictory characteristics.

(Image: Courtesy of Dominique Adriaens/Ghent University)

Dominique Adriaens of Ghent University in Belgium and his colleagues were fascinated by the way seahorses anchor themselves by wrapping their tails around vegetation, as shown in the image above. Despite being covered in armour, the tip of the seahorse tail remains flexible enough to unwind itself after grasping an object, as shown in the video (top).

The team created a 3D computer model to reconstruct seahorse tail movement so they could analyse how specific tisses and bones contribute to grasping and different degrees of bending.

A close-up from one of the simulations (shown below) depicts the backbone in purple and consecutive sheets of connective tissue, which supports and connects other tissues, in different colours on top. The model reveals that each sheet of tissue stretches across many vertebrae in the tail, something that has been seen only in seahorses. It is this support of several vertebrae without fixing them firmly together that might both allow flexibility and encourage rigidity.

(Image: Courtesy of Dominique Adriaens/Ghent University)

Surprisingly, the team says, tails of different species of seahorse show greater variation in anatomy than expected, despite having the same bones and muscles.

A better understanding of the appendage could help develop tough, flexible armour or slender grasping robots.

The work was presented today at the annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space

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Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message?

BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.

Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometres across at most – so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.

The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics.

To calculate how far the bursts have come, astronomers use a concept called the dispersion measure. Each burst covers a range of radio frequencies, as if the whole FM band were playing the same song. But electrons in space scatter and delay the radiation, so that higher frequency waves make it across space faster than lower frequency waves. The more space the signal crosses, the bigger the difference, or dispersion measure, between the arrival time of high and low frequencies – and the further the signal has travelled.

Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned at the University of Hawaii in Manoa found that all 10 bursts' dispersion measures are multiples of a single number: 187.5 (see chart). This neat line-up, if taken at face value, would imply five sources for the bursts all at regularly spaced distances from Earth, billions of light-years away. A more likely explanation, Hippke and Lerned say, is that the FRBs all come from somewhere much closer to home, from a group of objects within the Milky Way that naturally emit shorter-frequency radio waves after higher-frequency ones, with a delay that is a multiple of 187.5 (http://ift.tt/1MLwy8j).

They claim there is a 5 in 10,000 probability that the line-up is coincidence. "If the pattern is real," says Learned, "it is very, very hard to explain."

Cosmic objects might, by some natural but unknown process, produce dispersions in regular steps. Small, dense remnant stars called pulsars are known to emit bursts of radio waves, though not in regular arrangements or with as much power as FRBs. But maybe superdense stars are mathematical oddities because of underlying physics we don't understand.

It's also possible that the telescopes are picking up evidence of human technology, like an unmapped spy satellite, masquerading as signals from deep space.

The most tantalising possibility is that the source of the bursts might be a who, not a what. If none of the natural explanations pan out, their paper concludes, "An artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered."

"Beacon from extraterrestrials" has always been on the list of weird possible origins for these bursts. "These have been intriguing as an engineered signal, or evidence of extraterrestrial technology, since the first was discovered," says Jill Tarter, former director of the SETI Institute in California. "I'm intrigued. Stay tuned."

Astronomers have long speculated that a mathematically clever message – broadcasts encoded with pi, or flashes that count out prime numbers, as sent by aliens in the film Contact –could give away aliens' existence. Perhaps extraterrestrial civilisations are flagging us down with basic multiplication.

Power source

But a fast radio burst is definitely not the easiest message aliens could send. As Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University, who was part of the first FRB discovery points out, it takes a lot of energy to make a signal that spreads across lots of frequencies, instead of just a narrow one like a radio station. And if the bursts come from outside the galaxy, they would have to be incredibly energetic to get this far.

If the bursts actually come from inside the Milky Way, they need not be so energetic (just like a nearby flashlight can light up the ground but a distant light does not). Either way, though, it would require a lot of power. In fact, the aliens would have to be from what SETI scientists call a Kardashev Type II civilisation (see "Keeping up with the Kardashevs").

But maybe there's no pattern at all, let alone one that aliens embedded. There are only 10 bursts, and they fit into just five groups. "It's very easy to find patterns when you have small-number statistics," says McLaughlin. "On the other hand, I don't think you can argue with the statistics, so it is odd."

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Asian solar spending helps drive renewable energy boom

Almost half of global investment in new electricity generation last year was in renewables, thanks to a hike in investment by developing countries, says a UN report.

Global investment in green energy rose 17 per cent, but developing countries saw a surge of 36 per cent. The big spending was on solar power in Asia, as well as on wind turbines in the North Sea.

Chinese investment – up 37 per cent at $83 billion – again beat the US. But Brazil, India and South Africa were all in the top 10 investors, while Indonesia, Chile, Mexico, Kenya and Turkey all invested more than a billion dollars in green electricity in 2014.

Japan was third and, for the second year running, the UK beat Germany into fourth place, says the Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment report from the UN Environment Programme.

Europe, once the green pioneer, dominated only one sector: offshore wind, where it launched seven projects worth $1 billion or more. Among these was a $3.8 billion North Sea wind farm off the coast of the Netherlands – the largest non-hydro renewable energy plant to get the go-ahead anywhere in the world in 2014.

In the US, the 103 gigawatts of renewable electricity generating capacity that came on stream last year equalled that provided by the country's nuclear power plants.

Excluding large hydro-plants – which have environmental drawbacks – 9.1 per cent of the world's electricity was generated using renewable sources in 2014, up from 8.5 per cent the previous year. This rise cut carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 1.3 billion tonnes, says the report.

A key factor behind the boom in green electricity was the continuing fall in the price of renewables technology, said Udo Steffens of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Germany, who co-authored the report's foreword. The boom was unaffected by the falling price of oil, which is mostly used for transport rather than generating electricity. "Oil and renewables do not directly compete for power investment dollars."

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We must pull together to grasp consciousness

Are robots with human-like intelligence just around the corner? Are we close to understanding consciousness? In the run-up to the New Scientist Live Consciousness and the Extended Mind event at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on 7 April, Liz Else spoke to Margaret Boden, one of the participants, about the real state of the art

Big money is being spent on initiatives like the European Union's Human Brain Project. Will people hoping to learn about consciousness be disappointed?

Absolutely. From what I hear, some of that project's neuroscientists are disappointed because it isn't nearly strong enough in asking cognitive questions. It is asking the basic, materialistic questions – such as which cells connect with what, or which chemicals are diffusing – but these basic questions aren't the only important ones.

So are we much closer to grasping consciousness than when you started work on it, four decades ago?

Not very. I think the fundamental problems aren't just scientific – knowing what's going on in the brain when we're conscious and so forth – but philosophical questions, and in particular about the phenomenon of consciousness. This concerns the so-called hard problem of how conscious experience emerges from matter, and why we experience, say, the redness of red or feel pain. It isn't just that we're not sure what scientific questions to ask; it's that we don't know what questions to ask because we don't know what we're talking about.

What about brain imaging studies. Don't they help?

Most work going on in brain imaging is of no scientific value. It looks for correlations between behaviour or experience and activity in the brain, but it's rarely guided by theoretical questions. Maybe in 100 years, it will fit into a neuroscientific theory. Right now I regard it as natural history rather than science, in the sense that Darwin turned natural history into theoretical biology in On the Origin of Species. Most imaging work is at that natural-history stage.

So where have we seen progress?

One area is in understanding functional consciousness, such as decision-making. And we understand more about how systems in the brain cooperate and integrate to make conscious or unconscious decisions.

Would you ever expect to see the sort of human-like artificial consciousness of Ex Machina or Chappie?

I don't think it's impossible in principle, but if it does happen, it's going to be very far in the future. Apart from requiring very powerful computers – and soon some computers will match our brain's processing power – we have to understand the brain's information-processing well enough to make a system that can do it. We simply don't.

How does this limit research?

In terms of AI, it means you have to pose strictly specified problems before coming up with systems tailored to solve them. In many cases you can solve such problems far better than any human can, and your solution will have amazing applicability – but only in a very, very narrow sense.

How do you get round this narrowness?

The brain and consciousness, like climate change, is one of the few areas where people realise that different disciplines have things to contribute. This must be encouraged. The problem comes with publishing results – if you don't keep within recognised research boundaries, what you're doing is not recognised.

But you bucked that trend?

I had a very strange educational background and this is partly why I've been able to make a reasonably unique contribution. My first degree was in medical sciences, then I studied philosophy, and social and cognitive psychology, and picked up AI. These days people like me might not get a job.

Tickets to the New Scientist Live discussion event at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on 7 April are available here

Profile

Margaret Boden is a research professor of cognitive science at the University of Sussex, UK

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Eek! How your face reveals your body's real age

Think your looks belie your age? Soon there will be an app to tell you how old you really look, and whether your body's age is out of whack with your chronological age.

"Our study is the first to use 3D facial images to predict biological age in a human population to identify fast and slow agers," says Jing-Dong Han of the Shanghai Institutes of Biological Sciences in China.

The aim, says Han, is to enable family doctors to easily identify patients who are ageing prematurely. If the cause can be identified, such as smoking, overeating or lack of exercise, people can then take action.

Han and his colleagues analysed 3D facial images of 332 Chinese volunteers between the ages of 17 and 77. They identified several features that significantly change with age, such as the slope of the eye, the distance between the mouth and the nose, and the smoothness of skin.

They used this information to create a composite map of the human face as it ages and compared each participant's 3D image with the map. This revealed that on average, facial age differed by about six years either way of real age. The difference between real age and facial age increased after volunteers hit 40.

No need for blood

To check the accuracy of their predictions, the team also took blood samples. Biomarkers in the blood associated with biological ageing – such as levels of cholesterol or a blood protein called albumin – more closely reflected facial age than actual age. For example, someone who looked younger than his or her actual age, also had a cholesterol level expected of a younger person.

The team's "facial age predictor" provides the first non-invasive method for measuring disparities between biological and chronological age. At present, the only alternatives require a blood or tissue sample.

Other teams have demonstrated, for example, that the tips of chromosomes wear down faster in people who are ageing prematurely. Likewise, a chemical change to DNA called methylation, which switches genes on or off, is also more common in ageing tissues.

Han's system, by contrast, requires nothing more than a 3D image. "We will package our predictor into a downloadable app, and doctors will be able to use it provided they can upload a 3D image of their patient into it," says Han. At present, he says 3D cameras are relatively expensive, but is hopeful that the price will fall far enough for them to become commonplace in family clinics.

Stephen Harridge of King's College London, who studies the effect of exercise on ageing, says the latest work doesn't account for all factors that could affect facial appearance and biological fitness. "They used a series of blood markers, such as cholesterol and albumin as markers of health, but these are very basic markers and they can tell us nothing about the amount of physical activity the subjects do, which is likely to be a key measure of health status. This is a particularly interesting point in this study given that the more physically active people are more likely to spend time outside in conditions which might well cause more 'facial ageing' – wear and tear through exposure to the elements".

"It would be very exciting if somebody could develop a universal method that applies to most ethnic groups," says Steve Horvath of the University of California, Los Angeles, who developed the way to estimate biological age from methylation patterns. "The best thing would be a webpage where anybody can upload pictures of themselves to find out their ‘facial age'."

Horvath claims his methylation technique is more accurate, dating biological age to within four years, and applies to all races, ethnic groups and even chimpanzees. But he says he'd love to see whether his age prediction technique correlates with the facial method.

Journal reference: Cell Research, DOI: 10.1038/cr.2015.36

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Clone your tumour to fight your cancer

If you had cancer, would you want to make clones of your tumour? (Image: Tom Haugmat)

"The first doctor I saw told me I had six months to live," says Antonia Crawford. She was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer in August 2013, at the age of 43.

She went on to have the standard treatments but, aware that they might not be the most effective against her particular cancer, Crawford also did something quite extraordinary: she had bits of her tumour implanted into a group of mice. Once the tumours had grown in them, the mice were given a range of different treatments, in an effort to find the drug combination that would work best for her. "As a patient, I just didn't have the time, nor could my body have gone through trying all these different drugs on myself," Crawford says.

It's too early to say whether ...

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A big bank balance leads to big-brained babies

Have Mum and Dad got a few quid to spare? You'd better hope so, because the wealthier your parents are, the larger the surface area of your brain is likely to be – a structural feature known to be associated with greater intelligence in children.

This is according to the world's largest study of child brain structure and socioeconomic status. The results also reveal a link between brain surface area and the education levels of a child's parents.

Previous research has shown that factors such as a parent's job, education and income correlate with a child's intelligence, but determining the cause hasn't been easy.

"Children from lower income families have shown on average more difficulties with language functioning, school performance and other metrics of cognitive development," says Elizabeth Sowell at the Children's Hospital Los Angeles in California. "This is not to say that all economically disadvantaged children perform worse than all children with greater financial resources, but it is likely that resources afforded to the more affluent impact the way the brain develops."

Insulation boost

To better understand this relationship, Sowell and her colleagues used MRI scans to examine the brain structure of more than 1000 children between the ages of 3 and 20 living in the US.

Both parental education and income predicted the size of a child's brain surface area, and the effect was most noticeable in regions related to language, reading and spatial skills. Sowell says this may reflect greater insulation of the connections between different brain areas. Nerves transmit electrical impulses between brain cells and are insulated with a fatty layer called myelin – the better insulated a nerve, the faster it is able to transmit these impulses.

The children also completed four tests of cognitive ability and, as expected, on average those from wealthier backgrounds did better. When the data from the scans and tests were fed into a statistical model, it suggested that brain surface area partially accounts for the relationship between family income and a child's test performance.

Unlike previous, smaller studies, this research used DNA taken from saliva samples to control for genetic influences. This was important because ethnicity is related to socioeconomic status in the US, and a person's genetics can also lead to variation in the shape and size of different brain regions that was not relevant to this study.

But Franck Ramus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris says the researchers did not go far enough to account for the effect of genetic variation. "It leaves open the possibility that at least part of the associations observed might not be an environmental effect."

Stress or stimulation

Although the findings provide the strongest evidence yet of a relationship between brain surface area, cognitive ability and socioeconomic status, the mechanism that links them is unknown, and the results do not suggest that a child's development is cast in stone by their family circumstances.

"Experimental evidence in humans is lacking," says Ramus, adding that this would require randomly allocating young children to strictly controlled environments. "That's not possible for obvious reasons," he says. However, animal experiments have shown that stressful or stimulating early environments can affect brain growth and development. "There are good reasons to believe that at least some of the correlations reported in this study reflect a genuine causal relationship."

Two pathways might explain the relationship between socioeconomic status and brain structure, says Kimberly Noble of Columbia University in New York, who worked on the study.

More money may enable parents to better support their child's cognitive development, allowing them to buy more nutritious food, for example. It may also mean parents are less stressed and can devote more time to their children. "We believe these differences are likely to be most influential early in childhood, when the brain is most malleable to experience," says Noble.

While the relationship between parental education and child brain surface area was linear, there were much bigger differences between the brains of children from lower income families than wealthier ones. If the patterns observed do reflect a causal relationship, Noble says it suggests that interventions targeting the most disadvantaged families are likely to have the greatest impact.

"It's important to understand the relationship between socioeconomic status and intelligence because it plays a role in the persistence of poverty across generations," says Martha Farah at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, who describes the work as very thoughtfully and carefully done. "Escaping poverty is a challenge, but that challenge is all the more daunting if you're facing it with less than your full cognitive potential."

Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.3983

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UK to pioneer national meningitis B vaccination scheme

Starting in September, all babies in the UK will begin receiving vaccinations against meningitis B. That will make the UK the first country in the world to have a nationwide vaccine programme for the disease.

Meningitis B, caused by the "B" strain of the Neisseria meningitides bacterium, accounts for 60 to 80 per cent of all the UK's meningitis cases. On average there are 1200 cases of meningitis B each year in the UK, of which a tenth prove fatal. Another tenth result in serious impairments such as amputations, deafness, bone deformities and brain damage.

Vaccines are already available for other less common forms of the disease, such as meningitis C. "The meningitis C vaccine has been fantastic, and cases have dwindled away to just a handful since it was introduced in 1999," says Linda Glennie of the Meningitis Research Foundation charity in Bristol, UK, who hopes the same will now happen with meningitis B.

Undisclosed deal

Sold as Bexsero, the vaccine will be made available through a deal announced last week between the UK Department of Health and the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. A company spokesman said that details will not be disclosed to avoid compromising potential deals with other countries.

GSK acquired the vaccine from its developer, Novartis, when it bought its vaccine research arm for $5.25 billion. In return, GSK sold its oncology assets to Novartis for $16 billion.

Bexsero was approved two months ago in the US for people aged between 10 and 25. It has previously been used following meningitis outbreaks at universities, including one at Princeton in 2013, during which 17,000 students received it.

Progress against meningitis is also accelerating in Africa, where meningitis A is the dominant form of the disease, affecting around 20 countries in a belt stretching from east to west across central Africa. Since 2010, 153 million Africans have received a vaccine against it called MenAfriVac.

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David and Goliath: What do we do about surveillance?

From spyware designed to catch students misbehaving to police tracking rioters by phone, we are spied on as never before, reveals a book by Bruce Schneier

• Book information


• Data and Goliath: The hidden battles to collect your data and control your world by Bruce Schneier


• Published by: W. W. Norton


• Price: $27.95/£17.99

Police worldwide are trying to link specific phones to specific events (Image: Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

"DEAR subscriber, you have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance." This text was sent by the Ukrainian government last year to everyone with a cellphone known to have been near a protest in the capital, Kiev.

Just what you'd expect from an ex-Soviet country? Not so fast. In the US and Europe, police are also seeking information on phones linked to specific places and times – and always without a warrant. We're all spied on. Our phones are bugged, our laptops inveterate informants. Reports on activities that define you – where you go, who you meet, what you buy – are sold to the highest bidder. But do we notice? And do we care?

Bruce Schneier does his best to make us do both. But it's tough: as it fades into the background, surveillance gets easier to ignore. For Schneier, this is a unique time to take a good look at the leviathan before it submerges forever.

So what is surveillance? The US military defines it as "systematic observation". It controls "what we see, what we can do... ultimately, what we say", says Schneier. A director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, Schneier has been a go-to expert for years. He helped analyse some of the more technical documents leaked by Edward Snowden. But he wears his expertise lightly: the book moves fast and references are relegated to pages of notes.

There are brilliantly creepy examples. Take Cobham, a UK company that sells a system which allows "blind" calls to be sent to your phone. It won't ring, so you won't know you received it, but it makes your phone send a signal so callers can track it within a metre. Then there's Lower Merion School District in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, which installed spyware on laptops for its pupils. School administrators could secretly record chat logs, monitor web use and photograph the kids. This was exposed when a student was shown a picture of himself taking drugs. It turned out to be candy.

And image-based surveillance is poised to make things worse. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, set up a camera in a public space and identified people by combining face-recognition software with Facebook's publicly tagged database. By correlating names with other databases, they displayed data about individuals in the time it took them to pass by.

Many dismiss all this. Schneier cites a Google executive who told him that worrying about a computer reading your email was like worrying about your dog seeing you naked. It's not, Schneier rejoins: your dog won't base decisions on what they see, and will certainly never tell anyone.

Another common justification is that we're only giving up our metadata: the "to" and "from" of emails, not their contents; and the time and duration of calls, not what was said. It can still be highly revealing information and is the equivalent of someone tailing you and reporting who you spoke to and for how long, he says. And whatever's collected is stored indefinitely, often because it's cheaper and easier than filtering out the juicy bits.

Worse, what doesn't bubble to the surface today could do so tomorrow with new techniques. Take Alfred Kinsey's sex research subjects, who participated in the 1940s and 1950s only under the strictest anonymity. In 2013, a study showed that in principle it would be possible to identify 97 per cent of them.

Snooping that once required a warrant and was subject to tight regulations is now routine. At one time, recounts Schneier, an FBI agent listening to a mobster on a bugged phone was required to stop listening when a spouse or child came on the line – quaint niceties compared to the practices of the US National Security Agency and the UK's GCHQ.

How did we get here? Fear – of terrorism in particular, says Schneier. But anti-terrorism laws suffer from mission creep and create a culture that normalises surveillance. How to get out of this is one of the big questions of our time, he adds.

So what can we do? Here, the impish anarchist in Schneier gets loose. Use the anonymising, ad-blocking, cookie-munching solutions available, he says, but also mess with the system: put stickers over laptop cameras, add noise to the data by searching for random names on Facebook, wear masks or face paint to confuse CCTV. He's only half joking. If data is the pollution problem of the information age, then protecting privacy is the environmental challenge. Can we make a difference?

Schneier calls himself a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist. In 50 years, he says, people will look at today's data practices much as we now view practices like tenant farming or child labour. I'm not so sure. It may well be a generational issue, but not the way Schneier thinks. Few people under 30 worry where the data on their phone goes. Your feelings about Venmo, say – an app combining a digital-payment service with social-media updates on who you're paying – will also depend on age. And sexting is as common among teens as texting a decade ago. What if we look back at surveillance angst as a hang-up we had to overcome?

This article appeared in print under the headline "Got you in our sights"

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Reverse silhouettes capture the beauty of nature

(Image: György Kepes (1906-2001) © Estate of György Kepes)

THEY may look like conventional photographs, but no cameras were used in the making of György Kepes's "photograms". Instead, the artist arranged objects directly on top of light-sensitive paper, then illuminated them. Kepes showed just as much enthusiasm for scientific and mechanical subjects as for natural forms, and this is reflected in the 80 photographs, photomontages and photograms now on display in Liverpool, UK, where leaves, eyes and feathers rub up against cones and prisms.

(Image: György Kepes (1906-2001) © Estate of György Kepes)

Hungarian-born Kepes was a member of Germany's Bauhaus art movement, which between 1919 and 1933 combined craft, technological innovation and fine art in pioneering ways, to international acclaim. The Nazis hated the Bauhaus, and Kepes, like many of his peers, ended up in the US.

Kepes arrived in Chicago in 1937, where he worked for his old friend, the artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, at a new art school dubbed "the New Bauhaus", later the Institute of Design. The images here date from the years Kepes spent as head of the school's hugely influential Color and Light department. His pupils included Saul Bass, who designed posters and title credits for Alfred Hitchcock and many others.

Kepes's work is on show at Tate Liverpool until 31 May. Simon Ings

This article appeared in print under the headline "Silhouettes in reverse"

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Anglo Saxon remedy kills hospital superbug MRSA

Take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together… take wine and bullocks gall, mix with the leek… let it stand nine days in the brass vessel…

So goes a thousand-year-old Anglo Saxon recipe to vanquish a stye, an infected eyelash follicle.

The medieval medics might have been on to something. A modern-day recreation of this remedy seems to alleviate infections caused by the bacteria that are usually responsible for styes. The work might ultimately help create drugs for hard-to-treat skin infections.

The project was born when a microbiologist at the University of Nottingham, UK, got talking to an Anglo Saxon scholar. They decided to test a recipe from an Old English medical compendium called Bald's Leechbook, housed in the British Library.

Some of the ingredients, such as copper from the brass vessel, kill bacteria grown in a dish – but it was unknown if they would work on a real infection or how they would combine.

Careful collection

Sourcing authentic ingredients was a major challenge, says Freya Harrison, the microbiologist. They had to hope for the best with the leeks and garlic because modern crop varieties are likely to be quite different to ancient ones – even those branded as heritage. For the wine they used an organic vintage from a historic English vineyard.

As "brass vessels" would be hard to sterilise – and expensive – they used glass bottles with squares of brass sheet immersed in the mixture. Bullocks gall was easy, though, as cow's bile salts are sold as a supplement for people who have had their gall bladders removed.

After nine days of stewing, the potion had killed all the soil bacteria introduced by the leek and garlic. "It was self-sterilising," says microbiologist Freya Harrison. "That was the first inkling that this crazy idea just might have some use."

A side effect was that it made the lab smell of garlic. "It was not unpleasant," says Harrison. "It's all edible stuff. Everyone thought we were making lunch."

The potion was tested on scraps of skin taken from mice infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This is an antibiotic-resistant version of the bacteria that causes styes, more commonly known as the hospital superbug MRSA. The potion killed 90 per cent of the bacteria. Vancomycin, the antibiotic generally used for MRSA, killed about the same proportion when it was added to the skin scraps.

A loathsome slime

Unexpectedly, the ingredients had little effect unless they were all brought together. "The big challenge is trying to find out why that combination works," says Steve Diggle, another of the researchers. Do the components work in synergy or do they trigger the formation of new potent compounds?

Using exactly the right method also seems to be crucial, says Harrison, as another group tried to recreate the remedy in 2005 and found that their potion failed to kill bacteria grown in a dish. "With the nine-day waiting period, the preparation turned into a kind of loathsome, odorous slime," says Michael Drout of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

If the 9th Century recipe does lead to new drugs, they might be useful against MRSA skin infections such as those that cause foot ulcers in people with diabetes. "These are usually antibiotic-resistant," says Diggle. However, he doesn't recommend people try this at home.

It wouldn't be the first modern drug to be derived from ancient manuscripts – the widely used antimalarial drug artemisinin was discovered by scouring historical Chinese medical texts.

Harrison is due to present the research at the Society for General Microbiology conference in Birmingham, UK, this week.

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Battle-scarred Earth: How war reshapes the planet

Leaving an indelible mark (Image: David Kennerly/Corbis)

VERDUN, The Somme, Passchendaele, Gallipoli – the battles of the first world war have become bywords for death, destruction and human misery. Historically, they are just the tip of the iceberg. There have been countless thousands of battles, and still they go on: around 50 armed conflicts are raging right now. War shapes the past, destroys our present and will determine our future.

But could the scars run deeper? Does conflict leave a permanent mark within Earth itself? It turns out war isn't just for the history books – it can shape the geological strata in which Earth's narrative is written.

The earliest evidence of armed conflict dates back to around 13,000 BC and a mass grave in northern Sudan. Here 59 human skeletons were discovered, many bearing signs of violent death such as spear and arrowheads embedded in their bones. ...

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English speakers, you stink at identifying smells

Why do English speakers struggle to identify even common smells like cinnamon, asks linguist Asifa Majid. Is it down to language itself, or our environment?

Why study the language of olfaction?

There are centuries-old ideas that humans have evolved to be visual or auditory creatures, and that our senses of smell, taste and touch just aren't as important any more. We're looking to see whether that's reflected in different languages as well.

Are there languages which excel at describing smells?

Speakers of the Aslian languages – found throughout the Malay Peninsula – are particularly good at expressing olfactory experiences. For the Jahai group, for example, who live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we found that smell was as easy to talk about as colour – unlike in English.

How many smell words do the Jahai use?

They have about 12 that describe specific smell characteristics. These are words that can only be used for smells. For example, a term pronounced "pl'eng" is used for fresh blood, raw meat, mud, stagnant water, fresh fish, otters, some species of toad... These are different kinds of objects, but there seems to be a smell quality common to them.

What's a good smell-specific word in English?

A term in English that really picks up on a specific kind of smell quality is "musty" – something like when you open a door that's been closed for a long time, or maybe the smell of old books.

How good are English speakers at articulating what they smell?

We gave Jahai speakers and English speakers the same smell and asked them to describe it. Jahai speakers were quick and consistent. With English speakers, nearly everybody gave a different and lengthy description for the same smell. For the smell of cinnamon, for example, one participant went on and on, like "I don't know how to say it" and "I can't get the word" and "like that chewing gum smell" and finally "Big Red gum". It was hard for most English speakers to identify even the common smell of cinnamon.

Why do English speakers struggle when the Jahai don't?

Perhaps it's because the Jahai live in a tropical rainforest, where smells are simply more salient. But there seems to be something culturally different, too: people in the West seem to do everything they can to get rid of smells, and in many contexts odour is a taboo topic. This might be linked to changes in our smell environment since the industrial revolution. If you read stories from the UK or France from before the revolution, there's sewage in the streets and people are using perfume to cover up body odour. These days, we do everything we can to sanitise our environment.

What lessons do you draw from your cross-cultural studies of smell?

Our work with the Jahai is exciting because it shows us that we have the potential to experience our environment in so many different ways. It makes you rethink your way of being in the world.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Putting whiffs into words"

Profile

Asifa Majid is a professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen,the Netherlands, where she explores the nature of categories and concepts in language, including cross-cultural differences in odour perception

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Planet or not, Ceres rocks

WHAT makes a planet a planet? It's nearly 10 years since the International Astronomical Union created a stir by agreeing a new classification system that kicked Pluto out of the club, demoting it to dwarf planet status.

In the intervening years it has become abundantly clear that the solar system's smaller bodies are at least as interesting as those that still enjoy full planetary status. We already think that the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are among the best places to search for alien life. Now, as spacecraft begin to map Pluto and its smaller cousin Ceres, dwarf planets are entering the limelight.

Is another round of planetary hokey-cokey on the cards? The leader of the Dawn mission is on record as saying that Ceres will turn out to be "every bit a planet as its terrestrial neighbours Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury" (see "New dawn for Ceres"). If Ceres is a planet, so are Pluto, Eris and many others.

It doesn't really matter. In fact, reviving the debate will only detract from the excitement of exploration. Pluto's demotion was keenly felt by a generation of astronomers, both professional and amateur. Ceres has no comparable emotional pull, and nothing to gain from being promoted to planetary status.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Fifth rock from the sun?"

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