Baboons with pig hearts pave way for human transplants

The unprecedented survival of pig hearts in four baboons for almost 600 days has revived hopes that animal organs could help alleviate the global shortage of organs for transplant.

Huge strides have been made in recent years creating and successfully transplanting human organs using stem cell technology. Despite this, the potential for using animal organs in humans – xenotransplantation – remains attractive because the supply is theoretically limitless, and could supply organs of any size.

However, the technology has taken decades to get off the ground, because of safety fears and problems with organ rejection.

"We're confident we've tackled most of the immunological barriers, and although it would be very premature to speculate on a timeline to the first transplant in humans, I would say we are much closer to clinical reality," says Muhammad Mohiuddin of the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who lead the latest baboon trial.

Designer piglets

Until now, pig hearts have survived for up to six months in monkeys, so the latest results treble the survival time. The piglets from which the hearts were taken were genetically engineered to disguise their hearts from the baboons' immune systems and to prevent blood clots from forming in the organ.

Four genetic tweaks were made. The first eliminated the gene that makes alpha 1,3 galactosyltransferase. This enzyme makes a carbohydrate on the surface of pig cells that gets recognised and attacked by the immune system of the other animal. Knocking out the gene effectively makes the pig organs immunologically invisible.

The second alteration is an added gene, called hCD46, which produces a protein that prevents the baboon – or theoretically, human – immune system from attacking the organ. Another added gene, called THBD, makes a human anti-clotting substance called thrombomodulin, may be the most crucial improvement.

"That may be the key here, as the major problem for organs has been [blood clots]. The problem is most dramatic in kidneys but also problematic in hearts," says Anthony d'Apice, an honorary professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia and a global authority on xenotransplantation.

Another change is adding an antibody drug to the cocktail of immunosuppressant drugs given to the baboon after transplant. The antibody blocks the CD40 receptor on immune cells. "This could be a critical drug," says d'Apice.

Beating abdomen

Because the experiments were designed to check for rejection rather than function, the hearts were plumbed into blood vessels in the baboons' abdomens, enabling the baboons to rely on their native hearts to circulate their blood.

Mohiuddin says that the triple gene change plus the upgraded immunosuppression regime should work with other organs, but additional gene tweaks may sometimes be needed. The regime is also likely to need to be tweaked before the organs could be transplanted into humans, but the basics would be the same.

"The key to success is a combination of transplantation skill, the use of the right genetics and immunosuppresion," says Mohiuddin, who presented the results at the annual meeting of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery in Toronto, Canada, this week.

Now the immunotherapy step has been solved, Mohiuddin's next move is to see if the pig organs work as a replacement for the baboons' natural hearts.

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Blue-footed boogie isn't enough for booby babies

(Image: Tui De Roy/ Minden Pictures)

Perfectly in step, this blue-footed booby (Sula nebouxii) couple on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos appear to be on the right track with their graceful, elaborate mating dance.

But fancy footwork isn't enough to maintain the Ecuadorian booby populace. Recent research has shown that these majestic birds aren't making enough baby boobies, and population is shrinking.

The dance, which involves whistling, flapping and both birds marching around on their brilliantly blue feet, can impressively last for several hours. But they should be focusing on dinner, not dancing: the decline is probably due to lack of sardines, the birds' favourite food. Without them, they may have the energy to boogie, but not to breed.

Journal reference: Avian Conservation and Ecology, DOI: 10.5751/ace-00650-090106

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Sun's fractal surprise could help fusion on Earth

THE sun has thrown us a fractal surprise. An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind, the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors on Earth.

Composed of charged particles such as protons and electrons, the solar wind streams from the sun and pervades the solar system. Its flow is turbulent, containing eddies and moving at different speeds in different directions. It was thought that this turbulence was similar to that in a fluid, behaving like mixing ocean currents or the air flows that make aeroplane flights bumpy.

Now, Sandra Chapman of the University of Warwick, UK, and her colleagues have examined the solar wind's behaviour using NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft. One flies just within Earth's orbit around the sun, the other just outside it, allowing the pair to obtain unique measurements of solar wind behaviour.

STEREO revealed that when the movement of the wind's particles is perpendicular to the sun's magnetic field, they resemble a fluid, with sections that are smooth, interrupted by bursts of violence. "If you look out of a plane window you see mountain ranges and then long rolling plains. This is what the perpendicular fluid turbulence is like," says Chapman.

But when the particles move in parallel with the field lines, they behave very differently, with the turbulence evenly spread, like crinkly mountains that extend as far as the eye can see (see diagram). "It's a different kind of physics," says Chapman.

What's more, that crinkliness is constant, no matter how much you zoom in or out on a patch of wind, making its behaviour fractal (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, doi.org/skf). Snowflakes, shorelines and most recently black holes (see "Turbulent black holes grow fractal skins as they feed") also exhibit such fractal behaviour.

The result may help to control nuclear fusion reactors. These create energy in the same way as the sun, by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.

One problem with optimising their energy output is deducing what is going on inside them – inserting a probe isn't an option as it would melt. Enter the solar wind. Though less dense and cooler than the hydrogen of a fusion reactor, the wind is a plasma – and can be probed thanks to STEREO. "The great thing about solar wind turbulence is that the satellites sit right inside, so it can be observed in exquisite detail," says Steve Cowley of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, UK.

By adding the fractal behaviour to their plasma models, fusion scientists may be able to control turbulence, which can cause plasma to escape the magnetic field containing it in the reactor. They may also be able to use turbulence to disrupt high energy plasma blobs that can rip holes in the reactor. "These results look very promising," says Todd Evans of nuclear energy firm General Atomics in San Diego, California.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Sunny surprise for fusion reactors"

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Pluto may be wearing a dark belt of moon dust

On far-flung Pluto, it may be raining moon dust. Models suggest that Pluto's small moons are even now sprinkling dust on its equator, which could explain why Pluto's middle is darker than its poles. A NASA spacecraft headed for Pluto's neighbourhood should be able to check out the claim when it arrives next year.

Pluto and its moons lie in the Kuiper belt, a region beyond the orbit of Neptune filled with mostly small, icy worlds. While Pluto is only about half the size of Mercury, it boasts five known moons. The largest, Charon, is half Pluto's size. The other four – Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx – are much smaller. All five appear so similar that astronomers think a large object smashed into Pluto early in its history, ejecting debris that coalesced into moons.

The system is often bombarded by rocks flying through space, which would kick up dust. Since the smaller moons have low gravity, much of their dust should fly off into space, says Simon Porter at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Dust ferry

Porter and William Grundy at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, ran computer models that showed ejected dust moving at speeds of between 50 and 250 metres per second can get snared by the gravity of Pluto and Charon.

Charon receives more material per square centimetre because it is closer to the other moons. But Charon also lies in Pluto's equatorial plane, so its gravity ferries some dust towards the larger world's midsection. Over the past 3.5 billion years, the scientists calculate, Pluto's equator may have built up several centimetres of dust.

Intriguingly, Pluto's equator is darker than its poles, probably because it has bright polar ice caps. But Porter and Grundy suggest that moon dust may play a role as well. For instance, Saturn's moon Iapetus is half dark and half white, and it owes its darker hemisphere to dust from another Saturnian satellite, Phoebe.

Active frosts

But William McKinnon at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, doubts that such a small amount of moon dust affects Pluto much. "I think Pluto is a very active place, with an atmosphere and frosts that come and go," he says. "You have to weigh this dust against every other geological process that happens on Pluto." By contrast, Iapetus is smaller and inactive – perfect for collecting dust, which becomes more concentrated as sunlight vaporises its surface ice.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will reach the Pluto system in July 2015. It will be able to test the idea by seeing whether the chemical composition of Pluto's equator matches that of its small moons. That's just one of many mysteries about Pluto waiting to be resolved during the close encounter, says McKinnon: "It's not going to be a dull place."

Reference: http://ift.tt/1nF1j5D, accepted for publication in Icarus

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Today on New Scientist

Soil samples don't prove who's behind Syria gas attack

Syria's chemical weapons are supposed to be almost gone, yet weapons inspectors are en route to investigate new reports of gas attacks. What is going on?

Jurassic predator had surprisingly sensitive snout

A CT scan of an exceptionally preserved pliosaur skull suggests the extinct marine predator may have used its sensitive snout to hunt its prey

Smartphone sensors could give aircraft accident clues

They measure speed, direction, orientation, position and air pressure: can smartphones help find out what happened to crashed planes like flight MH370?

Why did evolution stall during the 'boring billion'?

About 1.7 billion years ago, evolution seemed to grind to a halt, but a long time later it kicked in with a vengeance – plate tectonics may explain why

God not-botherers: Religious apathy reigns

Across the developed world, people are losing interest in god without becoming atheists. That's a good thing

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

Faced with sub-zero temperatures, maggots of the goldenrod gall fly allow their bodies to freeze solid and sustain themselves with a unique fat

Extreme hygiene: Cleaning a hippo's mighty molars

Open wide, please. Keeping a safe distance, this man is brushing the teeth of a hippopotamus at a wildlife reserve in China

Losing our religion: Your guide to a godless future

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

A visual time machine into US history

From a turn-of-the-century eclipse to a 100-year-old glimpse of the Seminole people of Florida, a new digital collection reveals the history of a nation

Stem cell revival: The 1990s are back

The technique used to create Dolly the sheep is again the front runner, with ethical baggage in tow

Neanderthals may have been our intellectual equals

There's no evidence that our extinct cousins were less intelligent than modern humans, finds a review of archaeological evidence

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs now a global epidemic

The first global review of antibiotic resistance is devastating – and we may run out of antibiotics before we can measure the full scope of the problem

Execution botched despite lethal-injection warnings

Gruesome reports from the execution of Clayton Lockett add further evidence that the death penalty in the US risks violating the country's constitution

Astrophile: Dizzy exoplanet has a compact 8-hour day

In a first for any world outside the solar system, analysis shows that Beta Pictoris b has the shortest known day – and it is going to get shorter

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Soil samples don't prove who's behind Syria gas attack

Syria's chemical weapons are supposed to be well on their way to destruction, yet several times in the last month, most recently on 30 April, the Bashar al-Assad regime has been accused of turning chemical weapons on civilians. This time it's chlorine gas.

In response, Ahmet Üzümcü, head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, announced on 29 April that OPCW inspectors would again go to Syria to investigate the charges.

What is supposed to have happened?

On 11 April and three more times in the following week, residents of the besieged rebel-held town of Kafr Zita reported that barrels containing cylinders of chlorine gas equipped with small explosive charges were dropped on the town from helicopters. Around a dozen such attacks have now been reported in rebel-held towns, with several deaths and dozens injured. The charges are supported by videos of victims and bomb remnants.

This week UK newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, reported that it had sponsored a Syrian doctor to collect soil samples from alleged attack sites. An industrial gas detector picked up the signal of both chlorine and ammonia in the samples. They reported this as .

Does this count as proof?

Not quite. Charges that the chemicals were launched by Assad, and not a rival rebel faction, rely on the assumption that only Assad's forces have helicopters. Eliott Higgins, whose Brown Moses blog is a respected source of military analysis on Syria, says this is probably the case. X-rays of people killed in the attacks, brought back by the Syrian doctor, are also consistent with a chlorine gas attack.

As for the soil samples, however, Ralf Trapp, a former OPCW inspector, says their origin is "well documented" with photos, videos and GPS, but there is no way to "ascertain that the soil samples taken had a direct link to the pictures of the helicopter drops of gas cylinders". Assertions that the sample's chain of custody ensured no tampering are also not verifiable. "Samples with no chain of custody have no value whatsoever," says chemical weapons consultant Jean Pascal Zanders.

Meanwhile, he says, ammonia and chlorine are volatile and reactive, and should have disappeared quickly. "Two weeks after a release I would expect no traces of chlorine or ammonia to be present in a soil sample," says Trapp. There are other common industrial sources for each gas. Zanders wants to see evidence of corroded metals near the attack – the hallmark of a chlorine release.

It is also not clear why a bomb should have included both ammonia and chlorine: they react with each other to produce chloramine, which is noxious, but not a potential chemical weapon like chlorine gas.

Trapp says The Daily Telegraph's published analysis of the soil provides "circumstantial evidence at best" of ammonia and chlorine. It was done with simple litmus paper to detect pH, and a hand-held device usually used to test for gas build-up in mines or factories. "These devices have significant false-alarm rates and should really only be used to state that these samples are worth investigating further," says Trapp. "They don't identify any chemical. The same applies to the pH test."

"I am not saying that it wasn't the Syrian regime," he says, "just that there is not sufficient evidence at the moment to be certain what happened and who was responsible for what appear to be incidents related to the use of a gas that could have been chlorine."

What can the OPCW inspectors do now?

They'll use the same approach they took to investigate the sarin attacks near Damascus last August. This will involve using more sophisticated gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy to analyse soil and ordnance from the attacks, taking medical samples from victims and carrying out detailed interviews of witnesses.

Why would chlorine be used?

After the OPCW linked last August's attacks to Assad, Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons. The OPCW says all its declared chemical weapons delivery systems have now been destroyed. As of this week, 92 per cent of the most dangerous declared chemicals have arrived at the port of Latakia, where they will be shipped to a US vessel to be destroyed.

So it seems surprising that after all that, Assad would still be launching chemical attacks. Chlorine is also an odd choice if the goal is to kill large numbers of people as it must be inhaled in high concentrations to kill, and dissipates quickly.

However, chlorine is readily available: it is used for water purification, and did not have to be declared by Syria as a chemical weapon. Iraqi insurgents have been using it in truck bombs for years, to sow panic among civilians, which may have been the goal in Syria.

It has also been deployed as a weapon of war. Üzümcü announced the latest Syrian inspections in the Ypres room of the OPCW headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands, named after the first gas attack on the Western Front in the first world war, 99 years earlier almost to the day. That attack was with chlorine gas.

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Jurassic predator had surprisingly sensitive snout

Pliosaurs had massive jaws, crushing teeth – and sensitive snouts. That is the conclusion of a study on an exceptionally preserved 2-metre-long fossil skull.

Pliosaurs were the top marine predators of the Jurassic, growing up to 12 metres long, but their biology is poorly understood because nothing quite like them is alive today.

Davide Foffa at the University of Bristol, UK, may now have added an important piece to the puzzle of how they detected prey. He has found channels in a pliosaur skull that probably contained nerves and blood vessels, suggesting that it had a well-developed sensory system extending to the tip of the snout.

Palaeontologists have long recognised that pliosaur skulls, like those of many other vertebrates, have small holes called foramina leading into the interior. In living species these connect to nerves. However, this is the first time anyone has been able to trace the networks inside a fossil.

Crocodile-like senses?

Using a custom-built CT scanner, Foffa traced channels filled with sediment and pyrite in a pliosaur skull unearthed in Dorset, UK. From the shape of the channels inside the skull, Foffa identified them as containing both the maxillary artery and the trigeminal nerve. These carry signals to and from the upper jaw and snout – including the skin and face.

It's unclear what the nerves sensed, but they may have responded to pressure like crocodile snouts, or to electrical fields, like sharks, says Foffa. "This kind of sensing system would have complemented the animals' vision in turbid water," he adds.

The most conservative interpretation is that the channels supplied blood and nerve connections to skin and soft tissue in the snout, says Adam Smith of the Nottingham Natural History Museum, UK, who wasn't involved in the research.

"It is quite likely the skull had sensitive and somewhat fleshy lip-like structures," he says, so pliosaur snouts had a sense of touch, and might also have responded to pressure or chemicals in the water. "Pliosaurs didn't have any other appendages to manipulate food or other items in their environment," he says, so a sensitive snout could help them hunt prey and manipulate food in the water.

"To get this much resolution out of the data is incredible," says Gareth Dyke of the University of Southampton, UK, who wasn't involved in the study but is using the scanner to study the shape of the pliosaur's brain.

Journal reference: Naturwissenschaften, DOI: 10.1007/s00114-014-1173-3

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Smartphone sensors could give aircraft accident clues

The smartphones carried by passengers on board a Malaysia Airlines flight could yield vital information about what happened to the missing plane.

Almost nine weeks on, the search for flight MH370 has come up with nothing. A robotic sonar-carrying submarine is now searching the seabed 2000 kilometres off Perth, Australia, but after scanning 314 square kilometres, there is still no sign of the jet.

The only hope investigators have of finding out what happened is to find the flight data recorders – often called the black boxes. But what if they have been destroyed or sunk to depths of the southern Indian Ocean that rescue teams cannot reach?

There may be an alternative. If the wreckage is found, sensors and apps running on passengers' smartphones could help work out what happened to the flight.

While lithium batteries wouldn't survive being under water, forensics experts can tease apart microchips and, if necessary, use scanning electron microscopes to probe the data stored in components like solid state memory chips. Indeed, some groups, such as the French air accident investigator BEA, already employ this technology.

For example, earlier this month digital forensics firm 4Discovery of Chicago, Illinois placed a smartphone in a high pressure saltwater chamber at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. After a week of immersion, memory chips recovered from the ruined phone by Gillware Data Recovery of Madison, Wisconsin, revealed email, texts, photos and video data hadn't been lost.

So many sensors

Even the more ordinary functions of phones – audio, picture and video capture – can reveal key accident information. An example was tragically witnessed this week when rescuers retrieved a smartphone from the body of a student who drowned in the 16 April ferry sinking off Jindo, South Korea. A video file on the phone's memory card could potentially prove what the authorities told the passengers to do as the ship began to sink.

But it is the increasingly sophisticated array of sensors appearing on phones that may make them ever more useful in accident analysis. If a plane's black boxes are lost or destroyed, the data found in crew or passenger phones might give investigators clues about the history of its airspeed, its direction of flight, its orientation in space and even its cabin air pressure.

That is because smartphones contain accelerometers that sense motion, gyroscopes that detect orientation, GPS position receivers, and some phones – currently only the Samsung S4 and S5 – even have air pressure sensors, intended to measure altitude for climbers and skydivers.

Magnetometers – which provide positioning information by measuring Earth's local magnetic field – plus temperature and humidity sensors are beginning to appear in them, too.

'appening in the background

Sampo Karjalainen, CEO of the Finnish firm Protogeo that created an activity tracking app called Moves, bought by Facebook last week, says the way apps log data could be useful in this regard. For example, acceleration and gyroscope data is collected by the iPhone 5s even when the main processor is asleep. "That data is then available when an app wants it," he says.

"So sensing turns of an aircraft, or changes in g-forces, might be doable as these sensors start to collect continuous data. Wearables like wristbands and Google Glass are perfect for this continuous analysis, too," says Karjalainen.

Chris Hargreaves of the Centre for Forensic Computing and Security in Bedfordshire, UK, thinks using phones in air crash forensics sounds feasible

"I can certainly imagine that some data from mobile and wearable devices could be relevant to an aircraft investigation," he says. "Digital forensics is not just for cybercrimes but murders, kidnappings and burglaries too – so why not as part of aircraft investigations?"

Go with what you've got

Simon Steggles, a director of cellphone forensics firm Disklabs in Tamworth, UK, analyses cellphones for the police. He agrees there is a chance that some useful data may be left in a phone's memory if a passenger on a downed aircraft had been using an app. "If so, there is a good chance we could get something out of it, but we wouldn't know until it is actually here in our labs as all apps behave differently," he says.

In-flight gadgets are already used as forensic tools for light aircraft says Matthew Greaves, head of safety and accident investigation at one of the UK's major aeronautics schools, Cranfield University near Bedford. "Investigators regularly extract what they can from iPads, helmet cams and even GPS units that weren't being used. These often record data in the background that is never displayed to the user and can be recovered after an accident."

One problem he foresees is that smartphones are not certified for the accuracy required in aviation. "With any sensor, its accuracy and how its measurements drift and cope with interference are the issues," he says. He suspects phones are not up to scratch in that regard, and useful data may be minimal.

However, Greaves says there is a salutary lesson in the way London-based Inmarsat's engineers traced the route of the stricken flight MH370 by analysing just seven empty data packets the plane sent to a satellite.

"The Inmarsat work has shown that, when the need is there, investigators can make a great deal of very little."

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Why did evolution stall during the 'boring billion'?

LONG before evolution on Earth kicked in with a vengeance, it seemed to stall completely.

From 1.7 billion years ago, for a billion boring years, Earth remained a slimy, near-static world of algae and microbes. The pace picked up 750 million years ago: glaciers spread, complex animals appeared, and by 520 million years ago the Cambrian revolution – an explosion of varied life – was under way. The reason for that long stasis has been a mystery.

We may now have the answer: the gradual cooling of the planet's interior. Just as turning down a stove burner slows the boiling of a stew pot, cooling of the mantle allowed the "scum" on top to thicken, says Peter Cawood at the University of St Andrews, UK. The resulting surface stability slowed geological change, seemingly stalling evolution for a billion years, until the planet was cool enough for tectonic activity to shift up a gear.

Cawood and Chris Hawkesworth, also at St Andrews, analysed studies of continental motions and geologic processes to see how they lined up with the boring period.

About 1.8 billion years ago, the cores of modern North America, Baltic Europe and Siberia collided and went on to form part of a supercontinent called Rodinia, which accounted for most of the planet's land mass. They found that Rodinia was surprisingly stable, and that it stayed largely in tropical and temperate zones before breaking up 750 million years ago (Geology, doi.org/sj7).

What caused such a long period of tectonic stability? Taras Gerya at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reviewed studies that modelled Earth's early formation and found that the process changed as the mantle cooled.

On the hot young Earth, the outer layer was too weak and soft for plate tectonics to operate until the upper mantle cooled enough to allow sections of crust to slip under each other, or subduct, at collision zones some 3.2 to 2.5 billion years ago. However, the mantle remained so hot that it softened the subducting oceanic crust too much for it to pull large areas of continental crust down behind it, as it does today. Only when the mantle cooled further did that modern-style subduction start, about 750 million years ago. Rodinia was duly ripped apart and the boring billion ended (Geology, doi.org/sjq).

Cawood and Hawkesworth also found more big differences between the boring billion and other times. Major ice ages occurred before and after but not during the boring billion. Oxygen levels were also stable during, but varied widely before and after.

Cawood says all these systems are linked. "The atmosphere, the oceans, and the crust of the Earth were acting as a stable, interlinked system." The start of modern-style plate tectonics that tore up Rodinia also brought other changes, and complex life evolved to meet the new challenges.

Martin Brasier at the University of Oxford says the stable period may also have been vital for the evolution of eukaryotic cells – cells with a nucleus of genetic material. "I argue that the boring billion was the anvil on which the eukaryote cell was forged. If so, then modern eukaryote cells could be the product of geologically rare conditions."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Patient evolution's billion-year wait"

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God not-botherers: Religious apathy reigns

Across the developed world, people are losing interest in God without becoming atheists. That’s a good thing

RELIGIOUS belief is usually a no-go area for British prime ministers. As Tony Blair's media advisor Alastair Campbell once put it: "we don't do God".

The current occupant of No. 10 seems to have decided otherwise. In widely reported comments made over Easter, David Cameron said that people in the UK should be "more evangelical" and "more confident about our status as a Christian country".

That provoked a chorus of dissent – some of it, rather unexpectedly, from the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Describing the UK as a "post-Christian country", Rowan Williams said that the era of widespread worship was over.

Williams is right. It is clear that the UK's past was dominated by Christianity – with a strong streak of paganism – but its present is non-religious. Just under half of British adults profess no religious affiliation; Christians of all denominations are in a minority.

That drift away from religion is an interesting phenomenon. The UK isn't becoming a country of committed atheists. Most of the unaffiliated neither accept nor reject religion: they simply don't care about it. In that respect, the UK looks a lot like much of the developed world. Even the US is heading that way (see "Losing our religion: Your guide to a godless future").

So inasmuch as there ever was a contest between strident religion and militant atheism, it seems there was no winner. In practice, however, indifference to religion looks very much like atheism, and even more like secularism.

That may alarm those who fear that the decline of state-endorsed religion will lead to social decay – a fear Cameron invoked when he said secularists "fail to grasp... the role that faith can play in helping people have a moral code".

But that fear is groundless. As the prime minister said in his next breath: "faith is neither necessary nor sufficient for morality" – a position many biologists would agree with. Morality arises from the workings of our social brains. And our exploration of the world around us helps us frame moral codes that reflect the world as it is, not as we imagine it to be.

Personal faith remains a private matter. But those passionate about religion's role in public life – whether to elevate or expunge it – should recognise they are in the minority. Increasingly, none of us "do God".

This article appeared in print under the headline "God not-botherers"

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