School food fight rages on in the US

In the blue corner: US first lady Michelle Obama, champion of healthy eating. In the red: Congressional Republicans, who want to roll back federal standards for healthy school meals.

It's a partisan food fight, over the meals served daily to more than 30 million schoolchildren. And Obama is taking heavy flak, with a barrage of media reports last week suggesting that kids are rejecting their new-look healthy lunches, leading to massive waste.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 was intended to improve school meals across the nation, requiring the US Department of Agriculture to draw up national standards that upped fruits and vegetables, while cutting sugar and fat. These were introduced in 2012, but now Congressional Republicans want to let schools that are struggling to implement the standards opt out. The main complaints: healthy meals are too costly, and children aren't eating the fruit and veg they are being served, so food is ending up in the trash.

Few people question the wisdom of improving school nutrition: according to an analysis of the World Health Organization's Global Burden of Disease Study published last week, around 13 per cent of US children and adolescents are clinically obese – a rate that could reduce the nation's average life expectancy.

There is evidence that stricter standards for school lunches can help. Obesity and poverty go hand-in-hand, so kids who qualify for free or subsidised meals are more likely to be obese than those who don't. But a 2013 study from the University of Illinois in Chicago found that the difference was smaller in states that have adopted stricter nutritional standards for school meals.

Waste woes

On the contentious issue of waste, two studies have produced conflicting results – although both suggest that the rules are increasing the amount of fruit and veg eaten.

A team led by Juliana Cohen at the Harvard School of Public Health studied four schools in low income urban areas of Massachusetts. In April, they reported that kids at these schools consumed more fruit and vegetables, after the new nutritional standards were introduced. Children were leaving food on their plates – but that was an existing problem, and didn't get worse after the new rules were introduced. "We do need to deal with waste, but rolling back the school nutrition standards won't help that," Cohen says.

A study of schools in Utah by Joseph Price of Brigham Young University in Provo and David Just of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, found that requiring children to put fruit and vegetables on their lunch trays increased the fraction of kids who ate a serving of fruit of vegetables, but led to an extra 0.7 servings being thrown away per lunch served.

But the researchers agree that it is possible to reduce food wastage. Just has found that subtle changes, such as adding labels giving vegetable dishes attractive-sounding names, can help. Marion Nestle, a specialist in nutrition and public health at New York University, suggests that interaction between staff and children is key. She says she can tell whether kids will eat what they are served just by listening to the servers: "Do they call the kids by name? Do they say, 'I made these peas just for you because I know you like them'?"

"We can find ways to get kids to eat fruit and vegetables," says Just. "I'd like to see us try that before we abandon this effort."

Journal references: Cohen's paper: American Journal of Preventative Medicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2013.11.013; Price and Just's paper: Public Health Nutrition, DOI: 10.1017/S1368980013001468

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High-tech origami folds itself when heat is on

Tray bakes will never be the same again. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created flat cut-outs that fold themselves into robot-like shapes when heated up. With this new method they have produced high-tech origami structures including a bunny, an egg, a house and a human figure. The unusual method could one day be part of a bigger system that cooks up robots made to order.

"What we would like is to provide design tools that allow people who are not experts to create their own machines," says lead researcher Daniela Rus. "My own dream is to make it easy and inexpensive to create robots."

Each starts out as a flat sheet of plastic sandwiched between layers of either paper or Mylar, a type of plastic film. Creases are either printed or laser-cut into the sheet, based on calculations made by a computer program based on the shape the researchers want to produce.

Then it goes into an oven preheated anywhere from 55 to 120 ºC. The heat causes the middle layer of plastic to contract, forcing the sheet to bend at different angles depending upon the width of the crease. Though producing the sheets takes time, the folding itself is pretty quick. For all four shapes, the final product was ready in a matter of minutes.

The work and its robot-like products will be presented this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Hong Kong. The team will also share ways to create self-folding electrical components such as sensors, actuators, and resistors to help bring such machines to life.

Their next step is to figure out how to get these tools inside the robots, says Rus, "to add the brains to the body".

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Today on New Scientist

See the Minecraft nebula that Twitter found

NASA invited Twitter to roam an ultra-high-resolution panorama of the Milky Way – and Kevin Gill found this deep-space Minecraft creeper staring down at him

3000-year-old trousers were cut like Justin Bieber's

The oldest known trousers were straight legged and had a wide crotch, were probably designed for riding, and wouldn't have looked out of place on a modern teenybopper

Prosecuting mothers-to-be won't help disabled babies

Tennessee is to prosecute some mothers of disabled children for "risky prenatal behaviour". Don't let it happen in the UK, says legal expert Nicky Priaulx

Don't let new boundaries cut off UK science

Many scientists in the UK could soon find themselves isolated from their colleagues in Europe and Scotland. That must not happen

People of secrets: The slave sanctuary anti-language

A remote village in Mali speaks a language that hides as much as it communicates. Did this unique tongue evolve to shield escaped slaves?

Smart collar brings poorly pooches to heal

A sensor-studded collar monitors your dog's vital signs and activity patterns, letting you know when it is feeling poorly

Global warming may quintuple summer downpours in UK

By 2100 southern England is predicted to be hit by five times as many sudden summer deluges as now, probably causing more flash floods

App takes the strain out of tricky moral dilemmas

If you're facing a quandary, an iPhone app can help you make choices by getting you to evaluate each of your options from a set of ethical standpoints

Scotland: What if independence goes horribly wrong?

A perfect storm of shifting demographics, dwindling oil and poor health could ultimately leave an independent Scotland worse off than the rest of the UK

The US is right to indict China's state hacker unit

The US is hoping to shock China into talks over its industrial cyber espionage programme, says foreign relations expert Fred Kaplan

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See the Minecraft nebula that Twitter found

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

"CAPTURE & name your own NASA Spitzer space image! It's easier than you might think." With this tweet, the operators of the Spitzer Space Telescope invited people to roam around a gigantic mosaic of the Milky Way.

Composed of more than 2 million infrared images taken by the telescope over the last decade, the complete panoramic image can be viewed online using NASA's GLIMPSE360 tool. Released in March, it allows people to explore more than half of our galaxy's stars.

Twitter user Kevin Gill (@kevinmgill) discovered the nebula pictured and tweeted it. "I was interested in the awesomeness of the data and the high-resolution views into the depths of space that no one has ever seen before," says Gill. "I had found two other interesting things, but this one struck me as the funniest, looking like a Minecraft creeper just staring us down."

The image has been likened to a fish, a raccoon and most notably a "cute coyote's head". This has landed the once-unknown region a nickname: the Coyote Head Nebula. It's like a Rorschach ink-blot test, say the team. What do you see?

This article appeared in print under the headline "Spot the galactic coyote"

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Prosecuting mothers-to-be won't help disabled babies

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Tennessee is to prosecute some mothers of disabled children for "risky prenatal behaviour". Don't let it happen in the UK, says a legal expert

In the US, some states prosecute women for committing crimes against their fetuses. The latest example is Tennessee, which is poised to pass a law allowing assault charges to be filed against women whose fetus or newborn is harmed as a result of illegal drug use during pregnancy.

Such behaviour has long been a popular target in other states. In 2001, a South Carolina jury convicted Regina McKnight of homicide by child abuse. Receiving a jail sentence of 20 years, it was deemed the 24-year-old, homeless, mother-of-three had a stillbirth because she'd used crack cocaine.

Although McKnight's case was finally overturned by the South Carolina Supreme Court in 2008, it illustrates the lengths to which some states will go to protect a fetus, even if it means imprisoning or confining women, sometimes during pregnancy. Such steps are made possible by passing legislation that declares the fetus to be a legal person, affording it a right to life from the moment of fertilisation.

In other instances, existing laws have simply been stretched. In a 1997 case, the South Carolina Supreme Court extended a child neglect statute to "viable fetuses". More creatively still, a Florida court prosecuted Jennifer Johnson under drug trafficking laws, determining that she had passed drugs to her child during the brief gap between birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord.

All this stands in stark contrast to the situation in the UK. But for how much longer? An unusual case is waiting in the wings. At its heart is this question: are women who drink heavily during pregnancy committing an offence against their fetus?

This came about as a result of a council seeking a pay-out from what was the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board in 2010 on behalf of a girl now aged 6 and in foster care. She was diagnosed at birth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, allegedly because her mother drank excessively during pregnancy.

The council claims, as was accepted by an initial tribunal, that this meant the child had been a "victim of violence" because the mother had maliciously administered poison so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm.

A higher tribunal, however, found that the girl was not a victim of violence because, at the time, she was "not a person" in legal terms, but a fetus. As such, no crime had been committed, so no criminal injuries compensation was possible. The council has now taken its case to the Court of Appeal.

At face value, its objective looks pragmatic. It is not seeking the prosecution or conviction of the mother but an indemnity for costs as a result of caring for a disabled child. If successful, the case would open up a fairly wide net for similar claims.

But to tap into the criminal injuries compensation scheme in the absence of a conviction, it is necessary to determine whether a crime has been committed. And it is on this point that the case raises broader issues. Though only involving a theoretical assessment of criminality to be successful, there could be very real ramifications for pregnant women, inviting a whole host of reproductive crimes with extensive fetal protection measures at their heart.

Repeated judicial pronouncements in the UK make clear that the fetus lacks legal personhood until born and existing separately from its mother. In light of this, as well as a pretty liberal human rights track record on reproductive rights, it seems unlikely that the Court of Appeal would risk suggesting that a woman could even theoretically have committed an act of violence against her fetus. A great deal would be at risk if it did. Waiting in the wings will be anti-abortionists hoping for a "rebalancing" (or upheaval) of interests so as to undermine the coherence of abortion legislation.

By contrast with the US, the UK has largely relied upon a public health approach to address the minority of individuals who confront such crises during pregnancy. Involving the criminal law in such matters will not reinforce existing public health approaches but probably undermine them – for fear of criminalisation.

In addition, the site of the alleged crime – in utero – is a potential causal mess, constituting a complex process of fetal development that is sensitive to many factors, from genetic make-up to maternal stress, diet and nutrition, exercise levels as well as teratogens – chemicals that affect the unborn child, for example, nicotine, caffeine, pollution, alcohol, cleaning products and drugs, prescription and illegal. Some have a bigger impact earlier in the pregnancy, others later – so that plausibly some women will be engaging in "prenatally risky" practices before realising they are pregnant.

Such factors, and the absence of definitive tests for even well-established conditions like fetal alcohol syndrome, the most serious expression of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, mean that diagnosis will pivot upon a known history or suspicion of, for example, drinking during pregnancy, alongside the presentation of particular clinical markers, such as a characteristic pattern of facial anomalies in the child. Given significant room for error and the inability to safely rule out innocent causes of developmental conditions, the amount of speculation surrounding prenatal developmental injuries makes them entirely unsuitable for the criminal law.

Continue reading page |1|2

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Don't let new boundaries cut off UK science

Many scientists in the UK could soon find themselves isolated from their colleagues in Europe and Scotland. That must not happen

WHEN Louis Pasteur remarked that science knows no country, he clearly wasn't thinking of research funding. In principle, scientists don't pay much attention to the nationality of their collaborators: they simply seek out people who can help advance their studies. In practice, the choice of research partners is constrained by migration policies, funding regimes and political will. Today, the potential choices are greater than ever – which is why it is frustrating that the constraints may now be tightened.

Ungainly though it is, the European Union is on balance good for science, and particularly for science in the UK. That is now threatened by the surge in support for Eurosceptic parties in last week's elections (see "What the data says about Europe's lurch to the right"). If the UK Independence Party (UKIP) gets its way, and the UK steps away from the European Union, the country's researchers may find themselves cut off from their former collaborators (see "Vote UKIP and risk the future of British science"). There is no sign that UKIP is bothered about this: it has failed to respond to New Scientist's repeated requests for comment.

That is not the only question mark over the future of UK science. In September, the Scots will vote on whether they want their country to secede from the UK. As we report (see "Four futures for an independent Scotland") science and technology would play important parts in shaping an independent Scotland's future, just as they have shaped its history: think of Alexander Graham Bell, James Clerk Maxwell, James Watt and Lord Kelvin, among others.

But today's Scottish science is rarely done by lone geniuses. Rather, it is conducted at world-leading research institutes, such as the Roslin Institute, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre and the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, where researchers from around the globe can come together to collaborate. Again, it is unclear how cross-border access to funding and facilities will be arranged if Scotland goes it alone.

This is worth thinking about, particularly because UK leaders have recently been vocal in their support of a resurgence in science and technology in pursuit of a more balanced economy. Last month, chancellor George Osborne outlined a plan to encourage the development of research clusters – including one stretching across southern Scotland – and pledged to invest £7 billion in science infrastructure over the next parliamentary term.

This avowed enthusiasm for science, from so close to the top of government, is encouraging, even if the details remain to be thrashed out and opinions differ on how big an economic benefit such a strategy might yield. But if UK science is to succeed, Osborne, his colleagues and his successors must address its international dimensions too. So far, science has gone unmentioned in both the Scottish and European debates. That needs to change.

Once, nations guarded the prowess and achievements of their researchers jealously. But forgoing narrow definitions of national interest in favour of collaboration has proved hugely productive. It would be a setback if scientists found themselves facing those barriers again, when their ideas so clearly benefit from being taken up by anyone, anywhere in the world. As Pasteur also said, knowledge belongs to humanity.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Science sans frontières"

Scottish science

Where would an independent Scotland fit in with the rest of the science world? Could Scottish researchers lose access to other international facilities, including ones in the rest of the UK? Will researchers south of the border still be able to do science in Scotland?

The Scottish government says it will be business as usual. It plans to reach an agreement with the rest of the UK and will continue funding science through the research councils.

But as with most of the debates over independence, there are claims and counterclaims. Scottish science receives a disproportionately high share of the UK's research council funds: Scotland is home to 8 per cent of the UK population but receives over 13 per cent of that cash. In 2012-13, it amounted to £257 million in grants.

The UK government says that an independent Scotland would have to supply its own funding, and that to maintain the status quo would cost 0.23 per cent of Scotland's 2012 GDP. It also warns that Scots would lose out on other funding from UK government departments, such as the Ministry of Defence.

In truth, nobody knows. In the case of a vote for independence, research funding is one of many details that would need to be hammered out. There would be a negotiation and transition period between the vote on 18 September and the proposed Independence Day of 24 March 2016.

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People of secrets: The slave sanctuary anti-language

Villagers in Bounou are nominally Muslim and celebrate some Islamic festivals (Image: Abbie Hantgan)

A remote village in Mali speaks a language that hides as much as it communicates. Did this unique tongue evolve to shield escaped slaves?

WHEN Westerners say "Timbuktu", it is as if we are talking about the ends of the earth. But the city's remoteness is nothing compared to the small village of Bounou, tucked inside a rugged cul-de-sac valley 250 kilometres to the south. No European had ever visited the surrounding Bandiagara region until French colonial officer Louis Desplagnes reached it in 1904 – and even he didn't get as far as Bounou.

Abbie Hantgan is one of the few Westerners to have reached the village in recent years. She can still recall the last leg of her journey, after an arduous two-day bus trip to the small market town of ...

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Smart collar brings poorly pooches to heal

YOUR dog can't tell you when it's sick, but maybe this gadget can. A smart collar studded with wireless sensors can now monitor the vital signs of man's best friend and alert the owner as soon as it starts feeling under the weather.

The device, developed by PetPace in Burlington, Massachusetts, keeps track of temperature, pulse and respiration, as well as activity patterns and the number of calories burned. While the dog plays, eats and sleeps, software compares this information with other breed-specific data. If an animal's statistics deviate in a way that indicates a possible problem, an alert is sent to the owner's smartphone and to the vet.

Many pets instinctively hide their symptoms when they are sick, so the collar could help detect health issues early on, says Asaf Dagan, chief veterinary scientist at PetPace. The smart collar ensures that "your pet's disease, pain or discomfort will not go unnoticed", he says.

Because the device works in real time, vets have more information on which to base their diagnoses. They can also keep track of how the animal responds to treatment, Dagan says.

The collar costs $150 plus $15 per month for the monitoring service.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Smart collar brings poorly pooches to heal"

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Global warming may quintuple summer downpours in UK

By 2100 southern England will be drenched by five times as many sudden summer deluges as it is today, probably causing more flash floods, according to an advanced climate model. Other parts of the world are likely to experience similar increases in downpours, and global warming will be to blame.

Sudden heavy downpours cause many floods, such as the flooding of Boscastle in Cornwall in 2004 (see picture, above right). The new finding comes just months after some of the worst recorded floods in the UK.

The new research uses a climate model that has been run at a far higher resolution than previously attempted. Whereas previous models divided the world into squares 12 kilometres to a side, the new analysis goes down to 1.5-kilometre squares.

"That increases precision by 64 times," says Lizzie Kendon of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter. "It's the first time anywhere in the world at this scale and resolution."

Downpours going up

Kendon and her colleagues simulated the climate of the south of England, comparing real weather between 1996 and 2009 with those predicted for a random 13-year period around 2100, assuming that humans keep burning lots of fossil fuels.

The model predicts a fivefold increase in severe bursts of summer rainfall, defined as 2.8 centimetres of rain falling within 1 hour. The Met Office classes showers of 3 centimetres per hour as likely to cause flash floods. Kendon says such dangerous downpours will probably become four times as common.

The new model was detailed enough to forecast rainfall events called convective storms, which coarser simulations have missed and which explained much of the increase in downpours. In these storms, warm moist air rises through convection, until it is cool enough for the water to condense to form rain. When the rain falls, it releases heat and warms the lower air, allowing more moisture to be carried upwards. This creates a self-sustaining cycle of heavy rainfall.

"It is the first time convective clouds are represented explicitly in climate projections," says Robert Vautard of the Laboratory of Science of the Climate and Environment in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

Under water

Global warming intensifies these convective storms by warming the air so it can carry even more moisture. "This nicely shows an increase in some extreme events possibly leading to flash floods," says Vautard.

Climate change is expected to increase extreme weather events that include downpours, suggesting that floods will also become more common or severe. But it is unclear if this is starting to happen yet. In its most recent report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said there was "a lack of evidence and thus low confidence" that floods are on the rise.

The Met Office study suggests that lower-resolution models have underestimated how many more extreme rainfall events, and thus flash floods, will be caused by climate change. The higher-resolution model makes a significant difference, says Paul O'Gorman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

O'Gorman says that the new model would be especially useful to study rainfall in the tropics. "Tropical rainfall extremes are expected to intensify with warming, but the rate at which they will do so is very uncertain," he says.

Journal reference: Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2258

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App takes the strain out of tricky moral dilemmas

FACING a moral quandary and want to do the right thing? Well, there's now an app for that.

Ethical Decision Making, as the iPhone app is helpfully named, doesn't need the details of your problem or the options you're considering. It simply asks you to consider each solution and rate it from five standpoints: utility, virtue, rights, justice and the common good. Each is actually shorthand for a framework developed by moral philosophers over the centuries. After that, you assign a weighting to each of these factors. You could, for example, give justice more emphasis than the rest. The app then scores the solution according to the customised moral framework you have just set up.

Distilling ethics down into an app might be problematic for some philosophers, but not for Miriam Schulman, associate director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California, where the app was developed.

"How do we use these very ancient traditions to help people who are making these really difficult decisions?" she asks. She says people could use the app for anything from weighing up whether to put their parents in a nursing home to choosing ethical investments.

The app has been tested with a group of school principals and in a communications class focused on ethical issues. One student said the tool changed her mind about how to handle an issue with her boyfriend.

Apps like these aren't a one-stop solution but can help initiate discussion, says Evan Selinger, a philosopher at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

"If you come to this hoping it's going work out your ethics for you, you're up the creek," he says. "But if you see this as a tool to be used for conversation with other people, thinking out loud and expanding your mental models, it might make sense."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Let your phone help you tell right from wrong"

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