Today on New Scientist

2015 a watershed year for assisted suicide in the US

With bills introduced that could legalise the right to die in 20 more states, this year could be a turning point for the highly controversial practice

Tiny CubeSats could hitch a ride with ESA mission

The European Space Agency is calling for small, boxy spacecraft called CubeSats to hitch a ride with a mission in 2020 – perhaps the first CubeSat trip into deep space

Dawn spacecraft set for first visit to a dwarf planet

The asteroid-hopping spacecraft will arrive at Ceres on Friday, making it the first to visit a dwarf planet and the first to visit two different worlds

After handshakes, we sniff people's scent on our hand

People sniff their hands much of the time and especially after a handshake, suggesting the greeting might convey chemical signals

Victory declaration on net neutrality may be premature

The US Federal Communication Commission has taken an important step to ensure net neutrality – but dangers remain

I've found the real reason so many children are obese

Don't blame gluttony or genes for the obesity epidemic – it's our sedentary habits echoing down the generations, says obesity theorist Edward Archer

Giant robot eyes scan stars for dust

The huge eyes of the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona are staring across vast cosmic distances in the hope of finding signs of alien life

Suez superhighway: Stopping the tide of alien invaders

We're creating a thoroughfare for invasive species to pour into the Mediterranean from the Red Sea – but for once there is a way to stem the flow

Droughts in Syria and California linked to climate change

The two regions have recently suffered their worst droughts on record. And Syria's may have helped to trigger its civil war

Zombie simulator lets you plan your own apocalypse

The first model of a zombie epidemic to use real US census data lets you choose where the plague begins and how fast it spreads

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2015 a watershed year for assisted suicide in the US

THE fight to legalise doctor-assisted suicide for people who are terminally ill will take centre stage in the US this year, with bills filed in 20 states plus the District of Columbia.

"I think it's a watershed year," says Peg Sandeen, head of the non-profit Death with Dignity, based in Portland, Oregon, which campaigns for doctors to be able to prescribe lethal doses of barbiturates to terminally ill people. The practice is already legal or has been decriminalised in five states.

Sandeen says public opinion may have shifted significantly after Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old with terminal brain cancer, moved to Oregon last year, where doctor-assisted suicide is legal. A video by Maynard in which she explained her reasons for choosing assisted suicide has been watched over 11 million times.

Maynard ended her life in November, but her story has given the existing death-with-dignity movement new momentum. Bills were recently filed in New York and California, two of the country's most politically influential states. Assisted suicide has just been legalised in Canada, after similar lawsuits there, although it will be a year before the law takes effect.

The outcome of the legal battles that are likely to ensue in the US are hard to predict. Assisted suicide faces opposition from religious groups as well as disability activists, who say it implies that those who are disabled, old or ill have lives that aren't worth living – and that people could be pressured into it.

Diane Coleman, head of advocacy group Not Dead Yet, which opposes assisted suicide, says the Oregon Health Authority's annual reports on the practice show the law there isn't working as intended. She points to the motives people gave for choosing this option. According to the latest figures, released on 12 February, only a third of people who took a prescribed lethal dose of medication in 2014 cited pain or fear of pain as one of the reasons for doing so.

Supporters of assisted suicide often cite pain as a primary reason why people should have the legal right to die. But the state's report showed that people's concerns tended toward loss of autonomy (91 per cent), loss of dignity (71 per cent) or being a burden on their family (40 per cent). Coleman is particularly concerned that people are choosing assisted suicide because they feel they are a burden. "To me that feels more like a duty to die than a choice to die," she says.

What's more, according to the data available for Oregon, some people waited longer than six months between asking for the overdose and taking it. It isn't stated how many times this happened, but at least some people lived a few years after obtaining the drugs. Coleman is concerned that this means people are being accepted for assisted suicide who don't meet the criteria of having less than six months to live. "Those people were not actually terminally ill," she says.

Sandeen, however, says that while doctors sometimes underestimate how long people have to live, this is rare. She adds that the small number of people choosing assisted suicide – 105 in Oregon last year out of a population of around 4 million – is reassuring. "That should give other states solace that they will have the same experience – that it will be a rarely used option."

In the UK, the Supreme Court ruled last year that parliament should re-examine the issue as there is a "real prospect" of a future legal challenge succeeding. "There's an appetite for this now," says Jacky Davis, chair of Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying.

This article appeared in print under the headline "US states grapple with the right to die"

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Tiny CubeSats could hitch a ride with ESA mission

Calling all galactic hitchhikers: the European Space Agency is offering a ride. In 2020, ESA plans to launch a spacecraft to an asteroid, and will have room for up to six mini-spacecraft called CubeSats onboard.

These 10-centimetre-wide vessels are cheap to build, but no CubeSat has ever flown beyond Earth's orbit, so it could be a chance to grab a slice of history.

ESA is inviting applications from research teams and companies across Europe. Although even hobbyist teams can build CubeSats, James DiCorcia of Deep Space Industries, a firm planning to mine asteroids that is also working on a CubeSat mother ship, thinks ESA will be looking for experienced launchers.

"Likely it will be spacecraft teams that have flown hardware before," he says. "A university with a top-notch CubeSat programme is a very likely candidate for this mission."

But even simple spacecraft will come in handy. "At this early stage in asteroid-proximity operations, almost any data acquired is useful," he says.

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Dawn spacecraft set for first visit to a dwarf planet

Cross dwarf planets off the bucket list. NASA's Dawn spacecraft is on track to arrive at Ceres, which will become the first dwarf planet to get a spacecraft visitor, early on 6 March. The icy world may hold clues as to how our solar system came together.

Dawn previously orbited the asteroid Vesta, and took off in 2012 to chase Ceres, a 950-kilometre-wide object in the asteroid belt. The arrival will set a personal record for Dawn, making it the first spacecraft to visit two different worlds.

The spacecraft should swing into orbit around Ceres at 4.20 am Pacific time, but NASA scientists won't be able to confirm success until the afternoon, when the spacecraft will be in the right spot to send signals back to mission control. Dawn will orbit the dwarf planet for a year. During this time, the craft will gather information about Ceres's unique features, particularly subsurface geological processes, in an effort to learn more about it and about the role that similar objects had in the formation of the solar system.

The mission will also provide a closer look at a strange sight in one of Ceres's craters: two bright spots, recently imaged by Dawn on its approach. The spots have puzzled NASA scientists, who believe they may be ice or salts, or perhaps related to the faint plumes of water vapour detected by the European Space Agency's Herschel spacecraft early last year. Although Dawn's instruments are not designed to confirm the vapour finding, they may be able to observe it indirectly.

"The mystery will be solved, but it's one that's really got us on the edge of our seats," said Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator, at a press conference on Monday.

The more famous dwarf planet Pluto will have to wait for its time in the spotlight: the New Horizons spacecraft will arrive there in July.

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After handshakes, we sniff peoples' scent on our hand

Video: Sniffing hands, post-handshake

You won't believe you do it, but you do. After shaking hands with someone, you'll ift your hands to your face and take a deep sniff. This newly discovered behaviour – revealed by covert filming – suggests that much like other mammals, humans use bodily smells to convey information.

We know that women's tears transmit chemosensory signals - their scent lowers testosterone levels and dampens arousal in men - and that human sweat can transmit fear. But unlike other mammals, humans don't tend to go around sniffing each other.

Wondering how these kinds of signals might be exchanged, Noam Sobel and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel turned to one of the most common ways in which people touch each other - shaking hands. "We started looking at people and noticed that afterwards, the hand somehow inadvertently reached the face," says Sobel.

To find out if people really were smelling their hands, as opposed to scratching their nose, for example, his team surreptitiously filmed 153 volunteers. Some were wired up to a variety of physiological instruments so that airflow to the nose could be measured without them realising this was the intention.

Take a good sniff

The volunteers were filmed as they greeted a member of the team, either with or without a handshake. The researchers recorded how often the volunteers lifted their hands close to their nose, and how long they kept them there, the minute before and after the greeting.

Before the greeting, both men and women had their hand near their nose 22 per cent of the time, on average. Airflow in the nose more than doubled at the same time, suggesting they were smelling their hands.

After shaking hands with someone of the same sex, on average volunteers sniffed their shaking hand more than twice as much as they did before the handshake. If the person was of the opposite sex, they smelled their shaking hand twice as much as before the handshake. This usually happened once the experimenter had left the room.

The team also carried out the experiment with people wearing sterile gloves. The chemicals the gloves picked up from the experimenter's hand included squalene and hexadecanoic acid, both of which are involved in social signalling among dogs and rats.

"People constantly have a hand at their face, they are sniffing it, and they modify that behaviour after shaking hands. That demonstrates that the handshaking is a chemosignalling behaviour," says Sobel.

Just like rats

It may seem counter-intuitive that the volunteers smelled their shaking hand more when they encountered someone of the same sex than the opposite sex, but that's the wrong way to think about it, says Sobel. "We tend to think of social chemosignalling as a cross-gender story but it's not." There are plenty of instances where signalling happens within the same sex, he says, such as women synchronising their menstrual cycles or rodents sniffing out dominance. The behaviour could also be context-specific, he suggests. In a bar, for example, the pattern might be reversed.

"I am convinced that this is just the tip of the iceberg," says Sobel. "This is just one more instance where chemosignalling is a driving force in human behaviour." One surprise was just how much the volunteers were smelling their hands. "When we were coding the videos we would see people sniffing themselves just like rats. It's like blindsight – you see it all the time but you just don't think of it."

Charles Wysocki at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia agrees. "It fits with the general idea that there is a lot more chemical communication going on that we are unaware of".

As well as trying to work out exactly what sort of information might be transmitted, Sobel's team is now looking at how chemosensory signalling through handshaking might be affected in behavioural conditions such as autism spectrum disorders.

Journal reference: eLife, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.05154

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Giant robot eyes scan stars for dust

(Image: Enrico Sacchetti)

SORRY to break it to you, but this isn't the head of a giant robot being built in a secret military base somewhere – we don't get pictures of those. Rather, it's a giant pair of eyes staring across vast cosmic distances in an attempt to find aliens. So that's nearly as exciting.

The eyes belong to the recently upgraded Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), which sits on top of Mount Graham in Arizona. Its two 8.4-metre-wide mirrors can collect and combine light as if they were a single 11.8-metre mirror, technically making it the largest operating telescope in the world.

(Image: Enrico Sacchetti)

Astronomers are currently using the LBT to study the dust around distant stars, with the hope of understanding how it might obscure light reflected by Earth-like planets in orbit.

Analysing this light could reveal the chemicals present in these planets' atmospheres, potentially hinting at the presence of alien life – but only if we can filter out the effects of the surrounding dust.

It's going to be a good few years before we're able to study these Earth-like planets in such detail. But if hostile aliens happen to come a-knockin' before then, maybe our giant robot head will scare them away. I won't tell them the truth if you don't.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Robot eyes scan for dust"

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Droughts in Syria and California linked to climate change

Syria and California have both recently suffered their worst-ever droughts, exacerbated by global warming. Syria's may have helped trigger its bloody civil war, but not California's, which instead brought vermin invasions and wildfire. The difference points to the resilience that will be needed in a warming world.

Colin Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues analysed Syrian weather data since 1931, and found steadily less winter rainfall, which is crucial for crops, and higher temperatures, which dry soils faster. The only explanation for such a change over that timescale lies in man-made greenhouse emissions, says Kelley. Climate models, his team found, consistently predict such changes for the Fertile Crescent, the Middle Eastern area that includes Syria and Iraq .

The researchers used a statistical technique to separate the long-term drying that appeared linked to climbing CO2 emissions from yearly, natural ups and downs in precipitation. Those natural variations led to the occasional drought by themselves, says Kelley. But, he adds, "the long-term drying trends exacerbated the recent drought, making it the most severe in the observed record." Crops failed from 2006 to 2009 in Syria's northeastern region that is its breadbasket – then when rains returned, they triggered an explosion of yellow rust, a wheat fungus, that killed up to half the crop.

Since 2011, California has also been suffering its worst drought on record Climate models do not predict less rainfall for the state, but do forecast that years of naturally low rainfall will be more likely to be unusually warm, say Noah Diffenbaugh and colleagues at Stanford University. They report that, as in Syria, higher temperatures in recent times have exacerbated the impact of naturally dry years, making them more deadly to crops.

Unlike California, however, Syria tipped into civil war in 2011, which has been partly blamed on the drought.

Using satellite images, Kelley's team confirms that over-pumping of ground water in north-eastern Syria because of government subsidies for wheat production depleted a source of irrigation that farmers could otherwise have used when rains failed. Meanwhile, the Syrian government slashed food and fuel subsidies. "This resulted in agricultural collapse and mass migration," says Kelley.

When relief failed to arrive over the next two years – partly, say analysts, because the local mostly Kurdish population opposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad – up to 1.3 million destitute people fled the north-east and into Syria's urban slums, which already hosted a million refugees from Iraq.

Civil unrest

As a result of the drought, grain prices rose 27 per cent between 2008 and 2010, and mass migration into slums with few job opportunities meant that unemployment soared in a mostly young population – a recipe for unrest. Cities affected included Homs and Hama, where protests began in 2011.

Other investigators have linked climate stress and civil unrest . "This is plausible," says Andrew Solow of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "Placing stress on a society tends to make violence more likely." But he has questioned whether that means such links are always important. The existing political unrest in the Middle East, he observes, might have led to violence in Syria even without a drought .

Kelley agrees there is no one cause for the violence – but cites interviews with Syrian refugees who blamed the drought for "pushing people toward revolution".

Drought-stricken California, meanwhile, has been hit by vermin and wildfire, but no mass migration or violence. The difference, says Kelley, is resilience, the ability of a social system to absorb shocks and still function. "Syria's vulnerability was very high before the drought," he says. "California has much higher resilience." Many societies at risk of climate shocks might benefit from understanding that resilience – and how to bolster it.

Journal references: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1421533112; PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1422385112

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Suez superhighway: Stopping the tide of alien invaders

(Image: Dale Edwin Murray)

With the expansion of the Suez Canal, the relentless stream of invaders from the Red Sea will turn into a raging torrent - but there is a way to stop them

IN 2011, workers struggled to unclog the cooling system of a power plant in Hadera, Israel. Thousands of what looked like wet plastic bags were desperately scraped out of the plant's water intake. But still they kept pouring in – breaking up into gelatinous slime and threatening to cut off the electricity supply of millions of people.

The culprit was a large stinging jellyfish called Rhopilema nomadica. It often forms massive swarms, some as much as 100 kilometres long. "When these blooms appear, tourists have to stay on the beach, and fishermen have to stay on the shore," says marine biologist Bella Galil of the National Institute of Oceanography in Israel.

Yet until ...

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Zombie simulator lets you plan your own apocalypse

It began in Chicago. One by one, other cities fell. As the dead began to sweep across the nation, only those in the most remote locations remained safe. Soon, just a few desperate souls would remain alive.

That's what happened when I started my very own zombie outbreak, thanks to a model examining how an undead plague might ravage the United States. You can try it for yourself here.

Alexi Alemi of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his colleagues began developing the model, which uses tools from disease modelling, as a class project after reading the novel World War Z. They aren't the first researchers to turn their hand to zombie maths – there's even a whole book on the subject – but Alemi wanted to up the challenge by using US census population data. "It felt like a natural challenge to simulate a 'realistic' zombie outbreak," he says.

The team took a classic epidemic model called SIR, in which people are either susceptible to, infected by or recovering from a disease – then they added a zombie twist. "For normal diseases you either get better on your own, or you might die," says Alemi. "Zombies don't get better, nor do they die, so the only way you can get rid of a zombie is for a human to actively kill it."

28 Days Later

This change meant the outcome of the model depended on a single parameter: the ratio between bites and kills. This is a measure of how effective humans are at fighting off zombie attacks. From studying films like Shaun of the Dead, they decided the most realistic bite-to-kill value was 0.8 – in other words, zombies are around 25 per cent more likely to bite humans than humans are to kill zombies – but in the online simulator you can tweak that value.

With the basic model in hand, the team turned to how the infection might spread geographically. They created a grid over a map of the US and populated each cell in the grid with a certain number of humans, taken from the population of the 2010 census.

Running the simulation, they found that it didn't seem to matter where the outbreak started. From most locations it took around a month – or 28 Days Later – for most of the US to succumb to the plague, but some remote areas of Montana and Nevada remained zombie free even four months later . Alemi will present the results at the American Physical Society meeting in San Antonio, Texas, on Thursday.

Fortunately, zombies are fictional, but the research could also help people modelling real diseases. It turns out the equations in the zombie version of SIR are actually easier to solve than the real thing, so lessons learned from creating the model may translate back to real-world research, says Alemi.

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