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10.58

Virtual reality film revolution puts you in the scene

The virtual reality boom is about more than just gaming. Total immersion could radically change how we watch and interact with films

Weather forecast for early Earth involved iron rain

Put iron under pressure and it vaporises – much more readily than previously thought. This means meteorite impacts on early Earth could have created iron rain

Ultra-cold mirrors could reveal gravity's quantum side

The quantum Casimir effect is a slight attraction between two metal plates. Superconducting versions could finally show us quantum gravity at work

A travel guide to touch

Touching each other is an important part of social interaction around the world – but it's a case of different strokes for different folks

Germ-killing molecules identified in alligator blood

Over more than 37 million years, alligators have developed a formidable defence against infections that we might be able to harness

My drug-filled nanospheres heal at the speed of light

Our bodies have a habit of scattering medicine to the wrong places, so Adah Almutairi is targeting diseases with light-activated nanotechnology

Evolution's big bang: how life on Earth took off Movie Camera

Life was single-celled and boring for billions of years, then BOOM! the ancestors of most animals alive today appeared – thanks to a perfect storm of events

Volleyballene puts a new spin on buckyballs

The molecule is a super-stable mash-up of 60 carbon atoms and 20 scandium atoms, and it looks a lot like, yes, you've guessed it, a volleyball

Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

Being trustworthy and accurate could help a web page rise up Google rankings if the search engine giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links

To save the rainforest, let the locals take control

Global intervention in tropical forests to combat climate change could sideline their most effective guardians, warns Fred Pearce

Amazon deforestation soars after a decade of stability

Satellite images of the Amazon show that deforestation in Brazil has, at points, risen to levels 467 per cent of last year's

Why US law on guns and mental health needs to change

As eight die in shootings in Missouri, US organisations have banded together against a law compelling psychiatrists to report patients with mental illness

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Ancient customer-feedback technology lasts millennia

10.17

(Image: The Trustees of the British Museum)

Ever left an angry customer complaint? This 3750-year-old cuneiform tablet suggests you're part of a very long tradition.

The clay message was sent from someone called Nanni to an Ea-nasir in ancient Mesopotamia, protesting about the low quality of copper ingots offered during a trade with Nanni's messenger. Nanni demands that his money be returned post-haste.

"What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt?" writes a suitably enraged Nanni, according to Leo Oppenheim's translation in Letters from Mesopotamia. The tablet came to the attention of internet forum Reddit at the weekend, when someone described it as an early "customer service complaint email".

Copper was a commonly traded material in the Persian Gulf during this period, and there was a sizeable copper industry in the ancient civilisation of Dilmun in eastern Arabia. As many large firms today will know, the bigger the business, the harder it can be to keep up with customer expectations.

These kinds of humble clay tablet were among the treasures most mourned after the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in 2003. That museum has happily just reopened.

Virtual reality film revolution puts you in the scene

09.32

Continue reading page |1|2

I'm sat in a deckchair relaxing on the beach, watching the sun go down. I would happily have stayed there for a good while, but my time is up and I have to return to the real world. When I remove the Oculus Rift headset and headphones, the noisy conference room comes as a huge shock.

I had been experiencing Perfect Beach , a virtual reality (VR) experience created by developer nDreams in Farnborough, UK. The firm was showing off its creation at the SouthWest VR conference in Bristol last week, where game developers, film-makers and visual-effects artists came together to discuss how VR experiences could improve films and games.

The rise of VR headsets in recent years has been led by game developers seeking a way to immerse players even deeper in virtual worlds – just yesterday top developer Valve announced a new headset in partnership with HTC. But adding VR to a video game can actually hamper play, because the goggles stop you seeing the controller in your hands.

Yet the ability to put someone in a space and give them limited but meaningful interaction provides a new experience – one that could shake up the film industry.

"The thing I find really engaging about VR is the sense of presence," says Dave Ranyard of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, who is developing software for Sony's upcoming VR headset, Morpheus. "It feels like a step change in immersion."

Hollywood hits

One of the big hits at the Sundance film festival in Utah in January was Wild: The Experience, a 3-minute virtual reality version of the film Wild starring Reese Witherspoon, in which viewers can watch from all directions. VR firm Oculus has also set up a VR film division called Story Studio to produce short films for the latest version of its headset.

But VR film-making doesn't have to be a blow-out Hollywood extravaganza to work; even simple films, like my deckchair experience, can be surprisingly convincing. "In any other medium this would be boring, you wouldn't sit there for 10 minutes," says Nick Pittom of VR firm Fire Panda. But it's narrative experiences where VR will really shine, he says – if a static VR scene can be powerful, a story will be even more so.

As VR film is a new medium there are no set rules. Phil Harper of Alchemy VR, a UK firm working on immersive natural history films with veteran broadcaster David Attenborough, calls his nature documentaries 360° video, because they are made by arranging a number of cameras in a sphere and stitching the resulting videos together to create an all-encompassing film. Watching someone speak to you in VR is more intimate than on a TV screen, he says, because they appear to be the same size as a real human. "The brain begins to accept this as a social interaction, rather than something that's seen on a screen," Harper says.

Nowhere to hide

But this approach has its challenges. Because audiences can see all around them, it is impossible to hide equipment that would normally sit just out of shot. Even directors have to face their audience, or else hide. "Often I'm just stood in the background," says Harper. "You can't hide anything in 360° video."

In some situations that can free viewers of a framing camera's deception. "360° video is a truly honest format," says Harper, who thinks news broadcasts in particular could benefit. Earlier this year Vice News gave the first VR news report from a protest in New York.

For fictional stories, film-makers might want a different approach. One option used by Belgian VFX firm Nozon is to render high-quality 3D worlds on a computer and then "film" inside them, without having to worry about having equipment on show. This 360° CGI is convincing – Nozon's Matthieu Labeau showed me a short but incredibly lifelike clip in which a robot and a beaver hang out in an ornate ballroom.

Both 360° CGI and 360° video have the same problem, though: they can't react to the audience. Limited interaction, like selecting different scenes based on where you look, is possible, but that's about it. Viewers also tend to look straight ahead, so you have to cue them to look elsewhere with particular sounds or pointing characters. "I don't think a movie where things are happening all around you makes sense, because you will feel you missed half the movie," says Labeau.

That's where game engines, the software that powers gaming's 3D worlds, can help. Visual quality takes a hit because rendering happens in real time, but that also allows for a more interactive experience, heightening immersion. You can place a scene to the left of the viewer and encourage them to turn their head, but if they don't take the hint the characters can move directly into view, says Pittom.

Continue reading page |1|2

Weather forecast for early Earth involved iron rain

08.42

Early weather reports on Earth could have forecast iron rain. Our planet may have experienced such storms in its youth, which would help to explain the preponderance of precious metals in Earth's mantle and crust today.

In its formative years, Earth was probably hit by many iron-rich objects from space. Scientists previously thought that these mostly melted into the planet's core, save for a few enormous planetesimals that would have left behind iron and other elements that tend to bond with iron, like gold and platinum, near the surface.

But this model was based on estimates of what happens to iron when it slams into Earth. Richard Kraus at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, wanted to find a way to measure exactly how the element behaves under such extreme conditions, and what it takes for it to vaporise.

"We're never really going to be able to get a situation where we can simulate the actual planetary impact, with objects a thousand kilometres across. It would just be too destructive," he says. "We're taking a step back and saying, let's make a fundamental measure of the entropy of iron."

To investigate, the team used the Z machine at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a machine that can accelerate metals to extreme speeds using high magnetic fields.

They shot small iron samples with aluminium plates, less than a centimetre square and 1.2 millimetres thick. The plates were accelerated to between 50,000 and 60,000 kilometres an hour. The resulting collisions sent powerful shock waves through the iron, causing it to compress, heat up and eventually turn to vapour. The researchers could then figure out the properties of that lab-made iron rain that followed by watching it fall on a window made of quartz.

Heavy metal rain

They discovered that it took far less pressure to vaporise iron than previously thought – about 40 per cent below original estimates. This paints a new picture of early Earth, where incoming meteors were likely to have been vaporised on impact, sending up a boiling plume of iron and rock dust. This mixture would later rain down, mixing easily and thoroughly with Earth's mantle.

Iron's behaviour under pressure would also explain why the moon has much less metal in its surface, even though it is thought to have broken off from Earth after a powerful impact and so should have the same composition. Vaporised iron from meteor collisions would have been able to escape the moon's comparatively low levels of gravity.

This experiment better informs our understanding of how the planet came to be as we see it today, says James Day, a geoscientist at the University of California at San Diego. "It's a really ingenious way of looking at this problem," he says. "I think this paper will be very important for future studies of the geochemistry of Earth."

The iron rain may also have brought many iron-loving elements, like gold, platinum and palladium, into Earth's rocky shell of silicate minerals, explaining why they are common enough to be useful to humans.

"The reason we're able to mine gold and make jewellery out of it, and mine palladium and make catalytic converters, is because the silicates have much higher abundances of these elements than one might expect," says Richard Walker at the University of Maryland. "This is a pretty good way of explaining how they got here and why they're not located 2900 kilometres below your feet in the core."

Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO2369

Ultra-cold mirrors could reveal gravity's quantum side

07.56

An experiment not much bigger than a tabletop, using ultra-cold metal plates, could serve up a cosmic feast. It could give us a glimpse of quantum gravity Movie Camera and so lead to a "theory of everything": one that unites the laws of quantum mechanics, governing the very small, and those of general relativity, concerning the monstrously huge.

Such theories are difficult to test in the lab because they probe such extreme scales. But quantum effects have a way of showing up unexpectedly. In a strange quantum phenomenon known as the Casimir effect, two sheets of metal held very close together in a vacuum will attract each other.

The effect occurs because, even in empty space, there is an electromagnetic field that fluctuates slightly all the time. Placing two metal sheets very close to one another limits the fluctuations between them, because the sheets reflect electromagnetic waves. But elsewhere the fluctuations are unrestricted, and this pushes the plates together.

James Quach at the University of Tokyo suggests that we might be able to observe the equivalent effect for gravity. That would, in turn, be direct evidence of the quantum nature of gravity: the Casimir effect depends on vacuum fluctuations, which are only predicted by quantum physics.

But in order to detect it, you would need something that reflects gravitational waves – the ripples in space-time predicted by general relativity. Earlier research suggested that superconductors (for example, metals cooled to such low temperatures that they lose all electrical resistance) might do the trick.

"The quantum properties of superconductors may reflect gravitational waves. If this is correct, then the gravitational Casimir effect for superconductors should be large," says Quach. "The experiment I propose is feasible with current technology."

It's still unclear if superconductors actually reflect gravitational waves, however. "The exciting part of this paper has to do with a speculative idea about gravitational waves and superconductors," says Dimitra Karabali at Lehman College in New York. "But if it's right, it's wonderful."

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.081104

A travel guide to touch

06.15

We're a hands-on species. "We probably have as much physical contact within our core relationships as monkeys do within theirs," says Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford. Touching each other is pleasant, it builds trust and promotes cooperation. And touching others – a soft caress, a reassuring hand on the arm – may be far more critical to our development than we imagined.

That's not to say we all do it the same, however. Social touching is strictly governed by local conventions around the world. Here's a quick travel guide to get you up to speed.

UK

(Image: Keith Laflin/PYMCA /REX)

It's been called the . People in the UK have long had a reputation for being less willing to touch each other than people in other parts of the world, but a 1966 study revealed just how great the cultural divide can be. When researchers observed the behaviour of couples in coffee shops in London and San Juan, Puerto Rico, they found that couples in London barely touched each other. Puerto Ricans, by contrast, touched each other an average of 180 times per hour.

Things have changed since the 1960s, of course. In London it's now common to greet friends with a hug and kiss on the cheek – though uncertainty over the number of kisses can still provoke embarrassment.

Sierra Leone

(Image: AP Images/PA)

"Don't touch" has become a familiar greeting in Sierra Leone, a country with long traditions of interpersonal touch. Before the recent Ebola outbreak, the usual greeting was to shake hands, then touch your hand to your chest – as if drawing the other person to your heart. Now, people avoid body contact for fear of picking up the Ebola virus, which is carried in bodily fluids.

Thailand

(Image: REUTERS/Ryeshen Egagamao)

Patting children on the head, or ruffling their hair is viewed as an affectionate gesture in many Western countries. But in Thailand it is considered rude to touch someone's head because the head is viewed as a sacred part of the body.

The US

(Image:Martin Parr/Magnum)

American adolescents touch each other less frequently than their French counterparts. Could that explain why French teenagers seem to be less aggressive towards one another? That's the suggestion of Tiffany Field at the Touch Research Institute in Florida, who observed how adolescents at McDonalds restaurants in Miami and Paris interacted with one another. The American teens spent less time leaning against, stroking, kissing, and hugging their peers than did the French teenagers. Instead, they touched themselves more, and displayed more aggressive verbal and physical behaviour.

Papua New Guinea

(Image: Library of Congress)

Buggies might be the predominant mode of transport for babies in most parts of the world, but in Papua New Guinea some indigenous populations take a different approach. Arapesh mums traditionally carry their babies in a net bag, keeping them in constant skin-to-skin contact. The neighbouring Mundugumor, however, favour a basket suspended from the forehead, where the baby is out of contact with the mother's body.

In the 1930s, Margaret Mead, the first anthropologist to study these cultures in depth, noted a correlation between preferred mode of baby-carrying and a tribe's attitude to violence: the Arapesh were non-aggressive and gentle, the Mundugumor were an aggressive and warring people. Older Mundugumor children, however, were carried on their mothers' backs just by holding on to their mother's hair. Though animal studies have suggested a link between lack of handling in infanthood and adult aggression, the exact connection – especially in humans – is unclear.

The Middle-East

(Image: Marco Vacca/Getty)

Left-handed people take note: in Islamic countries it's best to avoid touching people with your left hand, which is reserved for toilet functions. Touching people of the opposite sex – no matter how innocently – is also discouraged, although hand-holding and hugs between members of the same sex are common.

Germ-killing molecules identified in alligator blood

05.30

Thick armour and jaws packed full of teeth aren't the only defences that alligators and crocodiles have. They also have formidable immune systems and some of the protective molecules that enable this have now been identified. Their discovery in the blood of the American alligator might even pave the way for a new generation of antibiotics.

Crocodilians have existed on Earth for at least 37 million years. Over the course of their evolution, they have developed a very strong defence against infection. "They inflict wounds on each other from which they frequently recover without complications from infection despite the fact that the environments in which they live are less than sterile," says Barney Bishop of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, co-author of the new study.

American alligators have an enviable innate immune system, the "primitive" first line of defence that is shared by all vertebrates. In 2008, chemists in Louisiana found that blood serum taken from the reptiles destroyed 23 strains of bacteria and depleted reserves of the HIV virus. The germ-killing molecules were identified as enzymes that break down a type of lipid.

Although their results have yet to lead to any new antibiotics, enzymes aren't the only pathogen-busting molecules that alligators have up their sleeve. Bishop's group has now identified and isolated peptides known as a CAMPs or cationic antimicrobial peptides.

Fishing with charges

These molecules are positively charged so the team developed nanoparticles to electrostatically pick them out of the complex mix of proteins in alligator blood plasma.

In total, the group fished out 45 peptides. Of these, they chemically synthesised eight and evaluated their antimicrobial properties. Five killed some of the E.coli bacteria they were presented with, while the other three destroyed most of the E.coli and also showed some activity against bacteria including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can cause inflammation and sepsis, and Staphylococcus aureus, which can trigger skin infections, sinusitis and food poisoning. So far, the strains have performed well, says Bishop.

The researchers are now extending their analysis to other members of the crocodilian family including gharials and Siamese crocodiles.

Identifying novel antimicrobial peptides is urgently needed because of the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, says Guangshun Wang at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. "Because of the novelty of the sequences," he says, "these peptides provide new templates for developing antimicrobials to combat superbugs."

Journal reference: PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0117394

My drug-filled nanospheres heal at the speed of light

04.44

Our bodies have a habit of scattering medicine to the wrong places, so Adah Almutairi is targeting diseases with light-activated nanoparticles

What medical challenge does your nano-engineering address?

Biology operates at the nanoscale, so materials designed at that size can respond better to disease. Right now, we have very little control of where, when and how drugs act in the body. We want these processes to work precisely, so that there are no off-target drug effects.

How are you improving drug targeting?

One way is by making materials that respond to inflammation, which underlies lots of major diseases. First we string together molecules called ketals to create polymers, which we build into nanoscale containers that resemble balls of tangled yarn. In trials with mice, we've filled these with drug molecules that the spheres release when inflammation flares up, and stop releasing when it subsides.

What size are these balls?

A blood vessel in your thumb is about 1 millimetre across. A single blood cell is about a thousand times thinner. And finally, our nanoparticle is one-thousandth the size of a blood cell.

How can inflammation trigger drug release?

The start of inflammation involves the build-up of reactive oxygen species and acidic by-products of metabolism. When there's no acid, the spheres are as stable as a rock, but when they encounter acid, the spheres release their contents.

Can you tell me about the nanospheres you made that open when hit with light?

For those we use a similar release mechanism to that of our inflammation model, but we harness near-infrared light rather than acidity to break open the spheres in exactly the right locations. Near-infrared has a useful mix of properties: it can penetrate tissue while keeping a straight path, so it can be precisely targeted.

Have you tried these on people yet?

Yes, we started with back-of-the-eye diseases. For these conditions you need regular drug injections into your eye. It's very invasive, and the more injections you have, the greater your risk of scarring and retinal damage. You also need a skilled surgeon: not just anyone can poke you in the eye. So there's a big need for a single injection that releases therapeutics over time. We began using our nanospheres to encapsulate a small molecule that treats age-related macular degeneration. When you shine light into the eye, you release a dose of the drug. The spheres can stay in place for a year before safely degrading.

How else could these nanospheres be used?

We want to do the same thing with diabetes. So instead of someone with the disease having to stab themselves with insulin when they finish a meal, we want them to be able to just shine light on their abdomen or arm. Another thing is light-activated sunscreen. It wouldn't do the chemistry to protect your skin when you apply it, but only when you go into the sun. That would be smarter than having to reapply sunscreen willy-nilly.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Nanohealing at light speed"

Profile

Materials chemist and engineer Adah Almutairi is director of the Center for Excellence in Nanomedicine and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where her team explores novel material properties

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Evolution's big bang: how life on Earth took off

12.25

Life was single-celled and boring for billions of years, then BOOM! the ancestors of most animals alive today appeared – thanks to a perfect storm of events

THE "tink, tink" of chisel on rock echoes across the valley. High up in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, half a dozen palaeontologists are patiently splitting chunks of shale. Sunburnt, covered in rock dust, with hands blistered from their labours, they have been living rough here near Marble Canyon for four weeks now. The season is short, and they spend almost every daylight hour at the quarry, a rock face about 4 metres deep. But their efforts are paying off.

Before long, a block falls open to reveal an almost perfectly preserved arthropod from half a billion years ago – a distant cousin of today's insects and crustaceans. Hour after hour, the finds continue – more than 3000 so far. And the richest ...

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Volleyballene puts a new spin on buckyballs

03.11

FORGET football, buckyballs are bouncing around the volleyball court these days. Volleyballene is the first buckyball to be spiked with scandium atoms.

Discovered in 1985, the original buckyball was a hollow, stable sphere of 60 carbon atoms. It takes high temperatures and pressures without complaint and helped earn its creators a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1996.

Volleyballene has 60 carbon atoms moulded into pentagons, plus 20 scandium atoms locked in octagons, an arrangement that resembles the panels of a volleyball (http://ift.tt/1AqSg8w).

Jing Wang at Hebei Normal University in China and colleagues tested five other configurations to see if a different mash-up proved easier to make, stronger, or more stable. Only volleyballene held its shape up to 727 °C, or 1000 kelvin.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Buckyballs play a different sport"

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Ancient customer-feedback technology lasts millennia