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Scotland: Four futures for an independent Scotland

00.39

On 18 September, the people of Scotland will vote on whether their country should become independent of the UK. This article is part of our "Four futures for an independent Scotland" special report, looking at the choices a newly independent Scotland could make

SMALL nations can shape their own destiny, and this can be both a blessing and a curse. If the Scots opt for independence, they would do well to heed other small nations before them.

Research by the innovation-fostering charity Nesta has looked at small countries that have prospered in the last few decades. Take tiny Estonia, with a population one-quarter the size of Scotland's. It is the poster child for newly independent states. Estonia's government took advantage of freedom from the USSR in 1991 to turn the country into a technology superpower in miniature. From the free public Wi-Fi in Tallinn to compulsory coding lessons in schools, Estonia bet big on IT. And it paid off: Estonians built the technology behind Skype and run a host of cool start-ups.

But for every Estonia there's an Iceland. Around the time the Estonians embarked on their technological adventure, the Icelanders set themselves up as the buccaneers of international capitalism. It ended badly, with the country's banks collapsing and the country facing years of painful austerity.

So an independent Scotland must choose its path carefully. There are a number of directions it could decide on: oil-investment paradise, renewable-energy Mecca, high-tech playground.

None of these three scenarios is a sure-fire hit. High-tech industries could always go the way of "Silicon Glen", a region in central Scotland where electronics manufacturers once flocked. In its heyday in the mid-1990s, it was claimed that Silicon Glen produced 35 per cent of PCs in western Europe. But this success vanished almost overnight when the dotcom bubble burst and companies headed east in search of lower costs.

Such scenarios are plausible futures for Scotland, and there is also a fourth future; one that is more troubling. Without a plan or a sense of where to take the nation, it is possible that an independent Scotland may drift into business-as-usual. Or perhaps from an economic point of view, it would be more accurate to call this business-and-financial-services-as-usual – the time-honoured British model of an economy run by bankers, built on debt and managed to the timetable of the quarterly financial results.

As the experience of Iceland and the Republic of Ireland shows, this is a perilous path, especially for a small country. It's partly about risk: as we have seen, the financial services sector can act as an engine for the economy, but it has a nasty habit of blowing up on the motorway.

There is also something deeper at stake: if Scotland makes the wrong decisions about its own economic future, it risks ending up as a backwater to the rest of the UK, with England – and London in particular – sucking away its brightest and best.

Independence offers a chance for Scotland to shape its destiny, but whatever future it aims for, it must avoid clinging to the old British habit of muddling through.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Take the high road?"

Leader: "Don't let new boundaries cut off UK science"

Stian Westlake is executive director of research at Nesta in London. Nesta's report, When Small is Beautiful: Successful innovation in smaller countries, will be published on 30 June

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Teen growth spurt left Richard III with crooked spine

14.52

Shakespeare famously labelled King Richard III a hunchback, but a new analysis suggests England's last Plantagenet king had a different spinal deformity – one with a cause that continues to elude modern medicine.

Richard is among the most controversial of English monarchs, accused by some of grabbing the throne by foul means. He held power for just two years before his defeat – and death – at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.

Perhaps the earliest description of Richard's unusual physique came from contemporary chronicler John Rous who wrote unflattering descriptions of the late king's physical stature. Until recently, with the exact whereabouts of Richard's body unclear, it was difficult to know whether Rous's description of Richard as stunted and with unequal shoulders was accurate or was merely Tudor propaganda designed to vilify him.

Killed in battle

The situation changed in September 2012. In a Leicester car park just miles from Bosworth Field, archaeologists discovered the 500-year-old skeleton of a young adult with a twisted spine. The skeleton's location, in the choir of an ancient church that once stood on the site, suggested that it belonged to an important individual, and injuries preserved in the bones are consistent with death during a fierce battle.

By February 2013, with preliminary genetic data suggesting that mitochondrial DNA from the skeleton matched that from two of Richard's living maternal descendants, the researchers felt confident in claiming they had discovered the remains of the missing king.

Initial analysis of the skeleton confirmed that Richard really did have a spinal deformity that would have made his right shoulder higher than his left. Now, the team has used 3D CT scans to study the spine in more detail, which has revealed more about the exact nature of Richard's condition and its effect on his physical movement.

Corkscrew twist

The mid-portion of Richard's spine twisted up like a corkscrew, but the individual vertebrae are relatively free from abnormalities – a pattern that the team says is seen in people who develop a spinal abnormality late in childhood. Until the age of 10, Richard probably had a perfectly straight spine.

This is consistent with a condition called adolescent onset idiopathic scoliosis, says Piers Mitchell at the University of Cambridge, a member of the team that carried out the latest analysis of the skeleton. "It tends to happen when people go through their adolescent growth spurt," says Mitchell – and it is more common in slim people who are going to be particularly tall. "It seems that their growth spurt is just faster than the controls around the spine can balance everything, so you get this corkscrew forming in the curve of the spine."

But, as the "idiopathic" label suggests, why some people develop scoliosis during adolescence is unclear. "It's slightly more common in certain families, and certain genes have been linked to it, but the vast majority of people with this form of scoliosis don't seem to have an obvious gene abnormality," says Mitchell. It's unlikely to have a common hormonal trigger either, or to be tied to nutritional deficiency. "We don't know exactly why it happens."

Richard's scoliosis was severe but, perhaps surprisingly, it is unlikely to have caused him much trouble, says Mitchell. Despite the curve in the mid-portion of his spine, Richard's straight lower back was aligned with his straight upper back. "The good bits of his back effectively corrected for the bad bits," says Mitchell, suggesting that Richard could have walked and exercised as effectively as his subjects.

Unproved identity

That's assuming – as the new paper does – that the skeleton is indeed that of Richard. Earlier this year, Michael Hicks at the University of Winchester, UK, called into question whether the remains truly are royal – particularly given that carbon dating can only place the skeleton's date of interment to somewhere within an 80-year window, and that others alive in the late medieval period would have had mitochondrial DNA matching Richard's.

Until the DNA evidence can be firmed up with information from the skeleton's nuclear DNA, the identity of the body should be treated as unproved, says Mark Horton at the University of Bristol, UK. "There's a real danger of circularity creeping in here before all the scientific evidence has been properly published," he says.

Mitchell says that extra evidence does strengthen the conclusion that the skeleton is Richard's, but he is unable to say more until the work is published. "Our research team does have that evidence, and would not be claiming this is Richard III unless we had strong reasons to do so."

Journal reference: The Lancet, vol 383, p 1944

Hidden paintings of Angkor Wat appear in digital images

14.08

(Image: Antiquity Publications)

Ghostly riders, temples, boats and palaces live again after lost paintings at the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia were resurrected using digital techniques.

During a 2010 visit, Noel Hidalgo Tan of the Australian National University in Canberra spotted faint traces of red paint on some walls of the temple. Using an algorithm originally developed by NASA, Tan took digital photographs of the decorations (upper image) and enhanced the colours to expose them in all their glory (lower image).

The paintings are particularly notable because they seem to date from a mysterious "middle period" of the temple's history, during the 16th century, when it was converted from Hindu to Buddhist use.

It is not the first time that modern imaging techniques have revealed Angkor Wat's secrets: ground-sensing radar and high-resolution aerial photographs revealed a huge urban sprawl that once surrounded the temple.

Journal reference: Antiquity, vol 88, p 549

Suicide watch prison sensor keeps an eye on inmates

12.58

A sensor that keeps tabs on inmates’ breathing rate and heartbeat could save lives in the slammer

US PRISONS could soon have their fingers on inmates' pulses. A new device that can detect a prisoner's vital signs from a wall or ceiling metres away could be used to tackle steep suicide rates in the penal system.

The sensor, which was funded by the US Department of Justice, monitors inmates' heartbeat, breathing and movements for signs of self-harm.

Suicide is a big problem among inmates in the US, accounting for 35 per cent of deaths in local jails and 5.5 per cent of deaths in state-run facilities in 2011. Inmates who appear to be at risk can be assigned extra personnel to check on them several times every hour, but this is expensive and invasive. Sensors would be cheaper and intrude less, while still alerting prison officers when they need to intervene.

Developed by General Electric, the devices can be mounted inside prison cells, where they keep track of inmates' movements and vital signs using Doppler radar. The company modified standard radar equipment to pick up the delicate movements of the chest caused by breathing and heartbeat. The system can penetrate non-metallic objects such as furniture, which could be useful if an inmate tries to hide under a bed.

The technology was trialled last year at the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. Ten members of the prison staff spent around 90 minutes locked in cells, moving around, breathing at different rates and holding their breath as if they had stopped breathing.

The device proved to be 86 per cent accurate at determining whether someone in a cell required assistance.

The technology could help alleviate what is a major issue for prisons, says Kevin Lockyer, a criminal justice consultant in Lincolnshire, UK. But he says it should be combined with preventative services such as therapy to tackle the underlying causes of suicide.

"It's got to be part of a holistic response to those individuals and the issues," he says. "Do you deal with the symptoms or do you deal with the disease?"

General Electric is exploring ways to commercialise the system – not just for prisons. It could be adapted to look after newborn babies or elderly people that require close monitoring, says company spokesman Todd Alhart.

However, Moeness Amin, an electrical engineer at Villanova University, Pennsylvania, says such applications would be difficult because the environment outside prisons is more chaotic and could trip up the system.

"You have many issues in a typical home that do not exist in a cell. An empty room with a person is much easier than a person in a typical bedroom," says Amin.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Information from the inside"

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Obsession engineers: Mind control the Candy Crush way

12.19

Why are we addicted to games? (Image: Patrick George)

How do you design a hit video game? Psychologists are diagnosing what gets us addicted – a recipe for obsession that could hurt or heal us

IN APRIL, a landfill in New Mexico disgorged proof of a decades-old rumour.

The story goes back to 1983, when James Heller was given an unusual job. His bosses at video-game maker Atari wanted him to drive out to the desert with 750,000 copies of their latest game, and bury them there. Over decades the story acquired the status of urban legend, an illustration of the quality of the game in question, ET: The Extraterrestrial. Despite a $21 million outlay, Atari's expected blockbuster was an unmitigated flop, and was later dubbed "The worst game of all time".

Now consider Flappy Bird, a game that, despite having been created by a single developer ...

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Europe's eagles under threat from vulture-killing drug

11.42

A drug that has already obliterated many of India's vultures is now threatening eagles and vultures in Europe and Africa. Golden eagles may be among the species at risk.

India's Gyps vultures began disappearing in the 1990s. They were succumbing to a painkiller called diclofenac, which was given to cattle. The drug lurked in the cattle carcasses that the vultures feasted on, got into the birds' bloodstream and destroyed their kidneys.

Now it seems diclofenac has the same effect on eagles, which also feed on cattle carcasses. Yet the drug has recently been approved for use in Spain and Italy, home to some of Europe's biggest populations of vultures and eagles.

Dying raptors

In February 2012, two dead steppe eagles (Aquila nipalensis ) turned up in a dump for cattle carcasses near Bikaner, in Rajasthan, India. Anil Sharma and his colleagues from the Indian Veterinary Research Institute in Izatnagar found telltale signs of kidney failure such as uric acid crystals.

Kidney failure is also typically seen in vultures that have died after eating cattle treated with diclofenac. Sharma also found traces of diclofenac in the eagles' tissues, at the same levels seen in killed vultures.

This does not prove that diclofenac killed the eagles, says Sharma, but this is how the drug kills vultures. If the drug is to blame, it is bad news for steppe eagles, many of which winter in India and rely on cattle carcasses.

Family affair

Steppe eagles may not be the only birds at risk. At least five of the eight species in the Gyps genus are susceptible to diclofenac. If the steppe eagle is susceptible, the rest of its genus Aquila could be too.

There are 14 Aquila species including several more in south Asia, a few in Africa, and Europe's golden and Spanish imperial eagles. All scavenge cattle carcasses.

And all are now exposed. Diclofenac was registered for use in cattle in Italy and Spain in November 2013. It has been sold in Africa for veterinary use since 2007, and conservation organisation BirdLife International says the drug is already affecting vulture populations there.

Diclofenac dieback

The Vulture Conservation Foundation (VCF) wants diclofenac banned in Europe and has set up a petition. But they say officials are only offering to change the drug's label, to recommend it not be given to cattle that are likely to be eaten by vultures.

Europe has spent millions of euros to bring back vultures and eagles, and in 2012 authorised farmers to leave dead animals out for the birds to eat. " We do not think that a warning will ensure the safety of vultures and eagles," says Sharma's colleague Toby Galligan of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Sandy, UK.

Such carcasses may pose a particular threat to eagles. They range widely, particularly golden eagles, whereas European Gyps vultures are restricted to limited feeding places. Toxicologists have calculated that the liver of one treated cow can kill 15 vultures, and eagles are smaller so probably need less to die.

Journal reference: Bird Conservation International, DOI: 10.1017/S0959270913000609

We are killing species at 1000 times the natural rate

11.42

First the bad news. Humans are driving species to extinction at around 1000 times the natural rate, at the top of the range of an earlier estimate. We also don't know how many species we can afford to lose.

Now the good news. Armed with your smartphone, you can help conservationists save them.

Interactive map:: Where the threatened wild things are

The new estimate of the global rate of extinction comes from Stuart Pimm of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues. It updates a calculation Pimm's team released in 1995, that human activities were driving species out of existence at 100 to 1000 times the background rate (Science, doi.org/fq2sfs).

It turns out that Pimm's earlier calculations both underestimated the rate at which species are now disappearing, and overestimated the background rate over the past 10 to 20 million years.

Gone gone gone

The Red List assessments of endangered species, conducted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), are key to Pimm's analysis. They have evolved from patchy lists of threatened species into comprehensive surveys of animal groups and regions.

"Twenty years ago we simply didn't have the breadth of underlying data with 70,000 species assessments in hand," says team member Thomas Brooks of the IUCN in Gland, Switzerland.

By studying animals' DNA, biologists have also created family trees for many groups of animals, allowing them to calculate when new species emerged. On average, it seems each vertebrate species gives rise to a new species once every 10 million years.

It's hard to measure the natural rate of extinction, but there is a workaround. Before we started destroying habitats, new species seem to have been appearing faster than old ones disappeared. That means the natural extinction rate cannot be higher than the rate at which they were forming, says Pimm.

For the most part, the higher estimate of the modern extinction rate is not caused by any acceleration in extinctions since 1995. One exception is an increase in threats to amphibians, partly due to the global spread of the killer chytrid fungus.

Save everything

The big unknown is what the high current extinction rate means for the health of entire ecosystems. Some researchers have suggested , but there's still no scientific way to predict at what point cumulative extinctions cause an ecosystem to collapse. "People who say that are pulling numbers out of the air," says Pimm.

Still, it seems unlikely that extinctions running at 1000 times the background rate can be sustained for long. "You can be sure that there will be a price to be paid," says Brooks.

Pimm's team has also compiled detailed global maps of biodiversity, showing the numbers of threatened species and total species richness in a global grid consisting of squares 10 kilometres across.

Such maps can help conservationists decide what to do.

For instance, Pimm and his colleague Clinton Jenkins of the Institute for Ecological Research in Nazaré Paulista, Brazil, noticed high numbers of threatened species on Brazil's Atlantic coast. Local forests were being cleared for cattle ranching. So they are working with a Brazilian group, the Golden Lion Tamarin Association, to buy land and reconnect isolated forest fragments.

But conservationists need more data, and you can help, through projects like iNaturalist. Users share photos of the creatures they see via iPhone and Android apps, and experts identify them. "Right now, someone is posting an observation about every 30 seconds," says co-director Scott Loarie of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Interactive map: Where the threatened wild things are

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1246752

Scotland: Oil and gas at heart of Scots' future wealth

11.05

AS DUSK falls, Grangemouth starts to glow. Cloaked in clouds of steam and lit by flares like giant candles, Scotland's biggest oil refinery has a strange beauty. Situated roughly halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow on the Firth of Forth, the 700-hectare petrochemical complex is a vital hub of UK oil production. Should Scotland vote for independence, it will be one of the new government's key assets.

According to the industry, there are between 15 and 24 billion barrels of recoverable oil and gas left under the North Sea. About 42bn barrels have been extracted since production began there in 1967. Because prices have risen, 24bn barrels could be worth £1.5 trillion – more than the value of all the oil and gas extracted so far. "That gives us one of the best financial safety nets of any country in the world," the Scottish government says. If the UK's Trident nuclear submarine base moves from the river Clyde after independence – as Scottish nationalists say it must – then prospecting off the west coast could begin too. It is currently banned in case it interferes with naval operations there.

There will be a few other tricky issues to resolve, like where the lines are drawn to demarcate which fields belong to an independent Scotland and which to the UK, and how the £35-£50bn cost of decommissioning old oil rigs would be divided up.

Ultimately the plan is to emulate Norway, and invest at least some of the created wealth for the future. Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, has promised to put aside about £1bn a year, with the aim of generating a £30bn oil fund over a generation.

Norway's equivalent, the Norwegian Pension Fund Global, has amassed over £500bn from oil and gas revenues since it was set up in 1990. It is the world's largest sovereign wealth fund and owns 1.3 per cent of all the world's listed companies.

According to Bjørn Vidar Lerøen, an adviser to Norway's industry body, Norwegian Oil and Gas Association, there was political consensus on the fund from the start. "The oil belongs to the people and revenues from oil production shall be used to build a better society," he says. The Norwegian fund has a wide-ranging ethical policy that forbids investments in more than 60 companies involved in tobacco, arms, environmental or human rights abuses. Ironically, it is now reviewing whether to disinvest from fossil fuel companies because of the damage they do to the climate.

But there is one way in which Scotland would probably not be able to copy Norway: the Norwegian government's 67 per cent ownership of the oil company Statoil. "To try to nationalise companies would not be politically possible either in Scotland or the UK," says Uisdean Vass, an oil specialist at legal firm Bond Dickinson in Aberdeen.

Perhaps the biggest conundrum, though, is the climate. According to WWF Scotland, burning 24bn barrels of oil and gas could put more then 10bn tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – more than 120 times Scotland's current annual emissions. "The science is clear," says the environmental group's director, Lang Banks. "The planet certainly can't afford to allow all the oil left in the North Sea to be burned."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Oil and gas is at heart of Scots' future wealth"

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Forget the dentist's drill, use lasers to heal teeth

11.05

Open wide, this won't hurt a bit. That might actually be true if the dentist's drill is replaced by a promising low-powered laser that can prompt stem cells to make damaged hard tissue in teeth grow back. Such minimally invasive treatment could one day offer an easy way to repair or regrow our pearly whites.

When a tooth is chipped or damaged, dentists replace it with ceramic or some other inert material, but these deteriorate over time.

To find something better, researchers have begun to look to regenerative medicine and in particular to stem cells to promote tissue repair. Most potential stem cell therapies require the addition of growth factors or chemicals to coax dormant stem cells to differentiate into the required cell type. These chemicals would be applied either directly to the recipient's body, or to stem cells that have been removed from the body and cultured in a dish for implantation.

But such treatments have yet to make it into the doctor's clinic because the approach needs to be precisely controlled so that the stem cells don't differentiate uncontrollably.

Let there be light

Praveen Arany at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues wondered whether they could use stem cells to heal teeth, but bypass the addition of chemicals by harnessing the body's existing mechanisms.

"Everything we need is in the existing tooth structure – the adult stem cells, the growth factors, and exactly the right conditions," says Arany.

So they tried laser light, because it can promote regeneration in heart, skin, lung, and nerve tissues.

To mimic an injury, Arany's team used a drill to remove a piece of dentin – the hard, calcified tissue beneath a tooth's enamel that doesn't normally regrow – from the tooth of a rat. They then shone a non-ionising, low-power laser on the exposed tooth structure and the soft tissue underneath it. This allowed the light to reach the dental stem cells deep inside the pulp of the tooth.

Twelve weeks after a single 5-minute treatment, new dentin had formed in the cavity. Similar dentin production was seen in mice and in cultured human dental stem cells.

It not quite the end of the dentist's intervention though, they would still need to cap the tooth to protect it, because the stem cells that produce enamel are not present in adults.

Sweet spot

The team found that the laser light indirectly activates growth factors called TGF-betas, which stimulate stem cells in teeth to regenerate dentin. These growth factors are present in many tissue types, and have key roles in many other biological processes including development, immune responses, inflammation and wound healing.

The laser essentially creates "micro-injuries" that free growth factor molecules, activate stem cells and promote regeneration, says stem cell biologist James Monaghan of Northeastern University in Boston. "As long as the stem cells are accessible, this may be a promising approach."

"There is a therapeutic sweet spot in this mechanism, between the low-powered laser applications, and the wide range of biological possibilities that TGF-beta offers," says Arany.

The simplicity and likely low cost of the procedure are also advantages, he says. "Patients may experience some discomfort following the procedure, as would be expected in all healing processes, but at the low power setting for stimulating dentin, the laser treatment itself is barely discernible," says Arany.

Journal reference: Science Translational Medicine, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3008234

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Scotland: Four futures for an independent Scotland